oward the broad and
easy path that lay around the tavern-pump, ("Scamp" lying there biting
at the flies,) and toward the barroom, with its flaming pictures of some
past menagerie-show, and big tumblers with lemons atop, rather than to
the strait and narrow path in which his Aunt Eliza and Miss Almira would
guide him with sharp voices, thin faces, and decoy of dyspeptic
doughnuts?

Phil and he sauntering by one day, Phil says,--

"Darst you go in, Reub?"

Phil was under no law of prohibition. And Reuben, glancing around the
Common, says,--

"Yes, _I_'ll go."

"Then," says Phil, "we'll call for a glass of lemonade. Fellows 'most
always order somethin', when they go in."

So Phil, swelling with his ten years, and tall of his age, walks to the
bar and calls for two tumblers of lemonade, which Old Boody stirs with
an appetizing rattle of the toddy-stick,--dropping, meantime, a query or
two about the Squire, and a look askance at the parson's boy, who is
trying very hard to wear an air as if _he_, too, were ten, and knew the
ropes.

"It's good, a'n't it?" says Phil, putting down his money, of which he
always had a good stock.

"Prime!" says Reuben, with a smack of the lips.

And then Suke comes in, hunting over the room for last week's "Courant";
and the boys, with furtive glances at those pink cheeks and brown
ringlets, go down, the steps.

"A'n't she handsome?" says Phil.

Reuben is on the growth. And when he eats dinner that day, with the
grave Doctor carving the rib-roast and the prim aunt ladling out the
sauces, he is elated with the vague, but not unpleasant consciousness,
that he is beginning to be familiar with the world.

XVIII.

It was some four or five months after the despatch of the Doctor's
letter to Maverick before the reply came. His friend expressed the
utmost gratitude for the Doctor's prompt and hearty acceptance of his
proposal. With his little Adele frolicking by him, and fastening more
tenderly upon his heart every year, he was sometimes half-disposed to
regret the scheme; but, believing it to be for her good, and confident
of the integrity of those to whom he intrusted her, he reconciled
himself to the long separation.

It does not come within the limits of this simple New England narrative
to enter upon any extended review of the family relations or the life of
Maverick abroad. Whatever details may appear incidentally, as the story
progresses, the reader will please to regard as t