rom time to time such assistance in his studies as a plodding man can
always lend to one of quick brain, who makes no reckoning of time.

Upon a certain occasion Maverick had gone over with Johns to his home,
and the Major had taken an immense fancy to the buoyant young fellow, so
full of spirits, and so charmingly frank. "If your characters could only
be welded together," he used to say to his son, "you would both be the
better for it; he a little of your gravity, and you something of his
rollicking carelessness." This bound Johns to his friend more closely
than ever. There was, moreover, great honesty and conscientiousness in
the lad's composition: he could beat in a tutor's window for the frolic
of the thing, and by way of paying off some old grudge for a black mark;
but there was a strong spice of humanity at the bottom even of his
frolics. It happened one day, that his friend Ben Johns told him that
one of the bats which had done terrible execution on the tutor's windows
had also played havoc on his table, breaking a bottle of ink, and
deluging some half-dozen of the tutor's books; "and do you know," said
Johns, "the poor man who has made such a loss is saving up all his pay
here for a mother and two or three fatherless children?"

"The Deuse he is!" said Maverick, and his hand went to his pocket, which
was always pretty full. "I say, Johns, don't peach on me, but I think I
must have thrown that bat, (which Johns knew to be hardly possible, for
he had only come up at the end of the row,) and I want you to get this
money to him, to make those books good again. Will you do it, old
fellow?"

This was the sort of character to win upon the quiet son of the Major.
"If he were only more earnest," he used to say,--"if he could give up
his trifling,--if he would only buckle down to serious study, as some of
us do, what great things he might accomplish!" A common enough fancy
among those of riper years,--as if all the outlets of a man's
nerve-power could be dammed into what shape the possessor would!

Maverick was altogether his old self this night at the parsonage. Rachel
listened admiringly, as he told of his travel and of his foreign
experiences. He was the son of a merchant of an Eastern seaport who had
been long engaged in the Mediterranean trade with a branch house at
Marseilles; and thither Frank had gone two or three years after leaving
college, to fill some subordinate post, and finally to work his way into
a par