pon seriousness; you can't crowd goodness into a body by pounding upon
it. What are you thinking of, Johns?"

The parson was sitting with his eyes bent upon a certain figure in the
green and red Scotch carpet.

"Thinking, Maverick, that in twenty years' time, if alive, we may be
less fit for heaven than we are to-day."

There was a pitying kindliness in the tone of the minister, as he said
this, which touched Maverick.

"There's no doubt on your score, Johns, God bless you! But we must
paddle our own boats: I dare say you'll come out a long way before me;
you always did, you know. Every man to his path."

"There's but _one_," said Johns, solemnly, "that leadeth to eternal
rest."

"Yes, I know," says Maverick, with a gay smile upon his face, which the
parson remembered long after, "we are the goats; but you must have a
little pity on us, for all that."

With these words they parted for the night.

Next morning, before the minister was astir, Maverick was strolling
about the garden and the village street, and at breakfast appeared with
a little bunch of violets he had gathered from Rachel's flower-patch,
and laid them by her plate. (It was a graceful attention, that not even
the clergyman had ever paid to her.) And he further delighted her with a
description of some floral fete which he had witnessed at Marseilles, in
the year of the Restoration.

"They welcomed their old masters, then?" said the parson.

"Perhaps so; one can never say. The French express their joy with
flowers, and they bury their grief with flowers. I like them for it; I
think there's a ripe philosophy in it."

"A heathen philosophy," said the minister.

At noon Maverick left upon the old swaying stage-coach,--looking out, as
he passed, upon the parsonage, with its quaintly panelled door, and its
diamond lights, of which he long kept the image in his mind. That brazen
knocker he seemed to hear in later years, beating,--beating as if his
brain lay under it.

"I think Mr. Frank Maverick is a most charming man," said the pretty
Mrs. Johns to her husband.

"He is, Rachel, and generous and open-hearted,--and yet, in the sight
of Heaven, I fear, a miserable sinner."

"But, Benjamin, my dear, we are all sinners."

"All,--all, Rachel, God help us!"

IX.

In December of the year 1820 came about a certain event of which hint
has been already given by the party chiefly concerned; and Mrs. Johns
presented her husband with a fine boy, who w