“And you’ll never do so, any more; will you, Cliff?”
Clifton laughed.
“But, Cliff, you are almost a man now, you are a man, and it don’t pay in the long run to drink and have a good time. It didn’t pay in my father’s case, and Aunt Betsey says—”
“There, that will do. I would rather hear Aunt Betsey’s sermons from her own lips, and I am going up to the Hill some time soon.”
There was silence between them for a little while, then Ben said:
“There’s a meeting up in the Scott school-house ’most every Sunday afternoon, Cliff; suppose we go up there, and then I can tell Aunt Betsey all about it.”
Clifton had no objections to this plan; so pushing the boat in among the bushes that hung low over the water, they left it there and took their way by the side of Ythan Burn. But he would not be hurried. As a boy he had liked more than anything else in the world, loitering through the fields and woods with Ben, and it gave him great satisfaction to discover that he had not outgrown this liking. He forgot his fine manners and fine clothes, his college friends and pleasures and troubles; and Ben forgot Aunt Betsey, and that he was doing wrong, and they wandered on as they had done hundreds of times before.
For though no one, not even his Aunt Betsey, thought Ben very bright, Clifton would have taken his word about beast and bird and creeping thing, and about all the growing life in the woods, rather than the word of any other ten in Gershom. They made no haste, there fore, in the direction of the Scott school-house, but wound in and out among the wood paths, using eyes and ears in the midst of the rejoicing life of which the forest was so full at that June season.
They kept along the side of the brook, and by and by came out of the woods on the edge of the fine strip of land which old Mr Fleming had made foot by foot from the swamp. There was no finer land in the township, none that had been more faithfully dealt with than this. Ben uttered an exclamation of admiration as he looked over it to the hill beyond. Even Clifton, who knew less and cared less about land than he did, sympathised with his admiration.
“He might mow it now, and have a second crop before fall,” said Ben, with enthusiasm. “It would be a shame to spoil so fine a meadow by building a factory on it, wouldn’t it?”