"As for yourself," continued Maverick, "they'll give you the title of Doctor after a few years!"—The parson raised his hand, as if to put away the thought.—"I know," continued his friend, "you don't seek worldly honors: but they will drift upon you; they'll all love you hereabout, in spite of your seriousness (the parson smiled); you'll have your house full of children; you'll be putting a wing here and a wing there; and when I come back, twenty years hence, if I live, I shall find you comfortably gray, and your pretty wife in spectacles, knitting mittens for the youngest boy, and the oldest at college, and your girls grown into tall village belles;—but, Johns, don't, I beg, be too strict with them; you can't make a merry young creature the better by insisting upon seriousness; you can't crowd goodness into a body by pounding upon it. What are you thinking of, Johns?"
The parson was sitting with his eyes bent upon a certain figure in the green and red Scotch carpet.
"Thinking, Maverick, that in twenty years' time, if alive, we may be less fit for heaven than we are to-day."
There was a pitying kindliness in the tone of the minister, as he said this, which touched Maverick.
"There's no doubt on your score, Johns, God bless you! But we must paddle our own boats: I dare say you'll come out a long way before me; you always did, you know. Every man to his path."
"There's but one," said Johns, solemnly, "that leadeth to eternal rest."
"Yes, I know," says Maverick, with a gay smile upon his face, which the parson remembered long after, "we are the goats; but you must have a little pity on us, for all that."
With these words they parted for the night.
Next morning, before the minister was astir, Maverick was strolling about the garden and the village street, and at breakfast appeared with a little bunch of violets he had gathered from Rachel's flower-patch, and laid them by her plate. (It was a graceful attention, that not even the clergyman had ever paid to her.) And he further delighted her with a description of some floral fête which he had witnessed at Marseilles, in the year of the Restoration.
"They welcomed their old masters, then?" said the parson.