known to either of the
women who adored him, was ingenious in expedients, and had applied the
knowledge gleaned from his wife's reminiscences of her home, her father,
and her brothers to more accurately aim his darts. Sometimes old Quimbey
would fairly flee the town, and betake himself in a towering rage to his
deserted hearth, to brood futilely over the ashes, and devise impotent
schemes of vengeance.

He often wondered afterward in dreary retrospection how he had survived
that first troublous year after his daughter's elopement, when he was
so lonely, so heavy-hearted at home, so harried and angered abroad. His
comforts, it is true, were amply insured: a widowed sister had come
to preside over his household--a deaf old woman, who had much to be
thankful for in her infirmity, for Joel Quimbey in his youth, before he
acquired religion, had been known as a singularly profane man--"a mos'
survigrus cusser"--and something of his old proficiency had returned to
him. Perhaps public sympathy for his troubles strengthened his hold upon
the regard of the community. For it was in the second year of Evelina's
marriage, in the splendid midsummer, when all the gifts of nature climax
to a gorgeous perfection, and candidates become incumbents, that he
unexpectedly attained the great ambition of his life. He was said to
have made the race for justice of the peace from sheer force of habit,
but by some unexplained freak of popularity the oft-defeated candidate
was successful by a large majority at the August election.

"Laws-a-massy, boys," he said, tremulously, to his triumphant sons,
when the result was announced, the excited flush on his thin old face
suffusing his hollow veinous temples, and rising into his fine white
hair, "how glad Eveliny would hev been ef--ef--" He was about to say if
she had lived, for he often spoke of her as if she were dead. He turned
suddenly back, and began to eagerly absorb the details of the race, as
if he had often before been elected, with calm superiority canvassing
the relative strength, or rather the relative weakness, of the defeated
aspirants.

He could scarcely have measured the joy which the news gave to Evelina.
She was eminently susceptible of the elation of pride, the fervid glow
of success; but her tender heart melted in sympathetic divination of
all that this was to him who had sought it so long, and so unabashed
by defeat. She pined to see his triumph in his eyes, to hear it in his
voi