"We heard you come down stairs," explained Minnie when she could speak again, the rest were too much overcome with amusement to offer any observations whatever. "But we thought you had changed your mind and gone back when you didn't make your appearance." And she went off into another fit of merriment.
"Well, now that I am here at last—my dangers and perils at an end—won't any of you show your charity to a poor shipwrecked and tempest-tossed mariner, by pitching over half-a-dozen of those apples? Remarkably snug quarters these, to be sure! Quite worth the trouble I had in finding them."
"No doubt," returned Ned, finding himself deprived of his comfortable position, "when you manage to usurp another fellow's place. Remarkably snug, indeed!"
"Glad to find you're of the same opinion, old fellow, I rather imagined you wouldn't be so enthusiastic for a minute or so," and he settled himself down in a still more comfortable position yet, and seemed to enjoy himself greatly.
Ned, seeing that remonstrance was altogether useless, was forced to hold his tongue, and hunt up another chair with the best grace he could assume, after which Charlie gave an interesting account of his adventures.
Then they conversed on different subjects, and soon their conversation turned on the miner's dispute, and the scene their father had described to them on the preceding evening.
"I'm sure I said Min was a brick all along. I said they were all bricks, didn't I?" exclaimed Archie, appealing to Minnie.
"To be sure you did," she corroborated. "But I don't know that they would have regarded it as any great compliment, if indeed they would have understood it as such at all, so I didn't apprise them of your delicate attention—the girls, I mean." Archie pondered over this for several minutes, and seemed to come to the conclusion that perhaps it was better as it was, at any rate, he did not pursue the subject further.
"Well, I must confess," remarked Ned, "that I never half believed there was any practical use in Christianity till now."
"Practical use of Christianity," repeated Seymour, disdainfully, "the commonest charity would have had the same result."