hen followed
the delight of going home with them in their antique and precarious
buggy, and of a day-break ride back to Rosemont with his
father--sweetest of all accessible company. Accessible, for his mother
had forbidden him to visit Fannie Halliday, her father being a traitor.
He could only pass by her gate--she was keeping house now--and sometimes
have the ecstasy of lingeringly greeting her there.

"Oh, my deah, she's his teacheh, you know. But now, suppose that next
Sunday----"

"Please call it the sabbath, Powhatan."

"Yes, deah, the sabbath. If it should chance to rain----"

"Oh, Judge March, do you believe rain comes by chance?"

"Oh, no, Daphne, dear. But--if it should be raining hard----"

"It will still be the Lord's day. Your son can read and meditate."

"But if it should be fair, and something else should keep us fum church,
and he couldn't come up here, and should feel his loneliness----"

"Can't he visit some of our Suez friends--Mary and Martha Salter, Doctor
Coffin, or Parson Tombs, the Sextons, or Clay Mattox? I'm not
puritanical, nor are they. He's sure of a welcome from either Cousin
Hamlet Graves or his brother Lazarus. Heaven has spared us a few friends
still."

"Oh, yes, indeed. Dead loads of them; if son would only take to them.
And, Daphne, deah,"--the husband brightened--"I hope, yet, he will."

School terms came and went. Mrs. March attributed her son's failure to
inherit literary talent to his too long association with his father. He
stood neither first, second, nor last in anything. In spiritual
conditions he was not always sure that he stood at all. At times he was
shaken even in the belief that the love of fun is the root of all
virtue, and although he called many a droll doing a prank which the
law's dark lexicon terms a misdemeanor, for weeks afterward there would
be a sound in his father's gentle speech as of that voice from which
Adam once, in the cool of the day, hid himself. In church the sermons he
sat under dwelt mainly on the technical difficulties involved in a
sinner's salvation, and neither helped nor harmed him; he never heard
them. One clear voice in the midst of the singing was all that engaged
his ear, and when it carolled, "He shall come down like rain upon the
mown grass," the notes themselves were to him the cooling shower.

One Sabbath afternoon, after a specially indigestible sermon which
Sister Usher said enthusiastically to Major Garnet ought to be follo