“That’s so. I imagine he jest felt like bilin’ over; but he didn’t show it more than the outside of an iron pot, where the bilin’ is. I think he did well. He jest conquered that Joe, and he conquered himself; and I think I could more easily give ten lickin’s of the fust sort, to one of the second.”
As for Walter, he had entered the station, gone upstairs, and was looking out of a window that faced the west, where the sun was frescoing the misty walls of the sky with daintiest shades. He was in no quiet mood. He was sorry that he had consented to any trial of strength ending so unpleasantly. He was sorry to find out that under the roof with him, was an avowed enemy. The world looks friendly to the young, and it is a bitter discovery to hear lions roaring about our path. Walter resolved, though, he would try the harder to do only the thing that was right; and as he stood with his face to the flaming sky, he asked God to help him.
CHAPTER XIV.
TWO BAD CASES.
Old Capt. Elliott, so the people called him, could not climb a certain stairway. That was not so strange, for it was the stairway of a new life, and amendment is sometimes the hardest thing one can attempt. And yet it does not seem as if a little piece of paper, would have so hindered Capt. Elliott—a little piece of paper in his pocket—for it bore him down as if it had been a mill–stone round his neck, and climb, he could not. Say rather, climb he would not. The facts were these. He had been very much agitated by the services at the Hall. They were a glass to his soul, in which he had looked, and had seen what a needy, miserable being he was. He resolved he would begin a new life, and he climbed one step in that stairway—the step of prayer. He thought he had climbed another step, which is just as important, repentance; that he had begun to leave behind him old sins and was on the way to speedy improvement. But a call one evening from Miss P. Green led him to think otherwise. She suddenly appeared at his door, interrupting him while he was praying, her bright eyes flashing and her little curls dancing, and handing him a letter, remarked, “I found this in the mail, Cap’n, and none of your folks were down, and as I was over this way, I thought I would bring it along.”
“Thank ye,” he replied gruffly, and taking the proffered note, he turned away, leaving Miss P. Green on the broad stone steps before his door.
She withdrew her bright eyes and her dancing little curls, saying, “There, I should have thought he might have said, ‘It’s from so–and–so.’ That would have been some pay; but I know! It’s from Boardman Blake. I can tell his handwriting a mile off. I wonder what he is writing for, when he might come himself.”
Capt. Elliott also wondered; but some things we can say better with our pens than we can with our tongues, and this was Boardman’s situation.