given,--not that the pastor was given.
Further, he must be cautious in the uses of "who" and "whom," and try to
break himself of the "a good time was enjoyed by all present" habit.

"And she always says 'diddy-you' instead of 'dij-you,'" broke in my
namesake, who, loitering near us, had overheard the name of Mrs. Potts.

"That will _do_, Calvin!" said his father, shortly. It seemed to me that
the still young life of Solon was fast being blighted.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SPECTRE OF SCANDAL IS RAISED

A graver charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow
of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale. Not with her antiquated gown, her
assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers
and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her years did scandal engage
itself; but rather with the circumstance that she drank.

To "drink" meant in Little Arcady to get drunk, as "Big Joe" Kestril did
every pay-day. Clarence Stull, polishing a stove in the rear of Pierce's
hardware store, was swift to divulge that Mrs. Lansdale had "asked Chet
Pierce to have a glass of wine,--and him a-bowin' and a-scrapin' like
you'd think he was goin' to fly off the handle!"

It was enough for the town. The unfortunate woman had not yet reeled
through its streets, but Little Arcady would give her time, and it knew
there could be but one result. That sort of thing might be done in tales
of vicious high life to point a moral, but in the real world it could
not compatibly exist with good conduct. Even Aunt Delia McCormick, good
Methodist as she was, who "put up" a little elderberry wine each year
for communion purposes, was thought by more than one to strain near to
the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to "Touch
not, taste not, handle not!"

The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia
herself, to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her
dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,--"The lips
that touch wine shall never touch mine." It is true that this legend
appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to
lips _not_ touched by wine. It had, indeed, first been hung in the
parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon
Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed
with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips.
Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he