and "Three cheers
for Bachelder! ye can't git ahead of Bachelder!" sprang delightedly from
lip to lip.

Aunt Sibylla had scented from within this buoyant resumption of the
Wallencamp mirth, and now appeared on the scene, bearing a burning
lantern in her hand. She first turned the glare of its full orb on the
late sin-convicted Captain, who stood revealed with a guilty grin frozen
helplessly on his alarmed features, and next directed the beams of
disclosing justice towards the form of the little bachelor, who, with
too pronounced meekness, was engaged in readjusting the collar of his
coat.

"At it ag'in!" Aunt Sibylla exclaimed, with slow and cutting emphasis.
"At it ag'in! I do believe you're all possessed of the devil!"

Then, with one sweep of the lantern, she took a comprehensive survey of
the shivering group, and passed on without another word, while in the
breast of every guilty Wallencamper then present there rested a deep
sense of merited condemnation.

Aunt Sibylla was soon followed by the other lantern-bearers, who
dispersed homeward, along the four roads diverging from the school-house,
and, the night being starless, the children of the darkness followed
meekly in their wake.

The longest route lay before those who took the River Road leading to
the Indian Encampment. Bachelor Lot was the hindmost in this receding
column. Bachelor Lot, though too withered and brown of visage to afford
immediate enlightenment as to his species, was held to be of
unquestionable white descent. Yet he kept house, alone, at the Indian
Encampment.

Then there was the Stony Hill Road, up which a few pilgrims toiled; and
the Cross Lot Road to the beach--thither went the Barlows. Last of all,
there was the Lane, and it was somewhat in the rear of the lane
procession that I musingly wended my way, led by the beams of Grandma
Keeler's slowly swaying lantern.

I was the Wallencamp school-teacher. I had come to "this rock-bound
coast," imagining myself impelled by much the same necessity as that
which fired the bosoms of the earlier pilgrims. Not that I had been
restricted in respect to religious privileges, but I sought for a true
independence of life and aim; and furthermore, it should be said, I had
come to Wallencamp on a mission. "On a mission!" how the thought had
tickled my fancy and roused my warmest enthusiasm but a few short days
before! Indeed, I had not been yet a week in Wallencamp, and now, as I
walked up the lane i