d call me a scamp with
your Puritanical notions? Not so fast, old fellow. You have chosen to
earn your living delving at the law. I earn mine by being so useful to
my uncle that he will not part with me. He has already made me a kind of
agent to attend to his business, so that I look upon myself as
permanently fixed at Crompton House for as long as I choose to stay. It
is a grand old place, with an income of I do not know how many
thousands, and if I should ever be fortunate enough to be master, I
shall say that for once in his life Howard Crompton was in luck. I want
you to come here, Jack, when you have finished visiting your sister. I
asked my uncle if I could invite you, and he said, 'Certainly; I like to
have young people in the house. It pleases Amy.'

"This is wonderful, as they say he used to keep young people away,
almost with lock and key, when she was young. But now anything which
pleases Amy pleases him.

"And now for another matter which involves a girl, Eloise Smith. Who is
she, you ask? Well, she is neither high born, I fancy, nor city bred;
nor much like the girls from Wellesley and Lasell, with whom we used to
flirt. She is a country school-ma'am, and is to be graduated this month
in the Normal School in Mayville, where you are visiting. What is she to
me? Nothing, except this: She has haunted me ever since I heard of her,
and I can't get rid of an idea that in some way she is to influence my
life. You know I was always given to presentiments and vagaries, and she
is the last one. I might not have thought much of her if my uncle were
not in a great way on her account. Long ago when they changed the name
of the town from Troutburg to Crompton in his honor, he built a
school-house on his premises, and gave it to the town. Since then he has
felt that he had a right to control it, and say who should teach, and
who shouldn't. For a long time the people humored him, and made him
school inspector, whose business it was to examine the teachers with
regard to their qualifications. With his old time notions, he had some
very old-time questions, which with others, he always propounded. As a
test of scholarship they were ridiculous; but he was Col. Crompton, and
the people shrugged their shoulders and laughed at what they called the
Crompton formula. Here are a few of the questions: First, What is logic?
Second, Why does the wind usually stop blowing when the sun goes down? I
don't know; do you? and we are both Ha