entance, in the home of his
ancestors; and one Colonel Jack Lamson, also considered somewhat of a
rake, who had possibly tendered his resignation rather than his
reformation, and that perforce. Colonel Lamson also hailed originally
from a good old stock of this village and county. He had gone to the
wars for his country, and retired at fifty-eight with a limp in his
right leg and a cane. Colonel Lamson, being a much-removed cousin of
the lawyer's, kept bachelors' hall with him in a comfortable and
untidy old mansion at the other end of the town, across the brook.

Many nights of a week these four met for an evening of whist or
bezique, to the scandal of the steady-going folk of the town, who
approved not of cards, and opined that the Squire's poor wife must
feel bad enough to have such carousings at her house. But the
Squire's wife, who had in herself a rare understanding among women of
masculine good-fellowship, had sometimes, if the truth had been told,
taken an ailing member's hand at cards when their orgies convened at
the Squire's. John Jennings, being somewhat afflicted with rheumatic
gout, was occasionally missing. Then did Abigail Merritt take his
place, and play with the sober concentration of a man and the quick
wit of a woman. Colonel Jack Lamson, whose partner she was, privately
preferred her to John Jennings, whose overtaxed mental powers
sometimes failed him in the memory of the cards; but being as
intensely loyal to his friends as to his country, he never spoke to
that effect. He only, when the little, trim, black-haired woman made
a brilliant stroke of _finesse_, with a quick flash of her bright
eyes and wise compression of lips, smiled privately, as if to
himself, with face bent upon his hand.

Whether Abigail Merritt played cards or not, she always brewed a
great bowl of punch, as no one but she knew how to do, and set it out
for the delectation of her husband and his friends. The receipt for
this punch--one which had been long stored in the culinary archives
of the Merritt family, with the poundcake and other rich and
toothsome compounds--had often, upon entreaty, been confided to other
ambitious matrons, but to no purpose. Let them spice and flavor and
add measures of fine strong liquors as they would, their punch had
not that perfect harmony of results, which effaces detail, of Abigail
Merritt's.

"By George!" Colonel Jack Lamson was wont to say, when his first
jorum had trickled down his experi