my word! Ah! Mr. Morton was a friend to me, sir—a very kind friend."
And, in the simplicity of his heart, Mr. Jacobs glided up to the student, and blandly accosted him.
"How do you do, young gentleman? I knew your worthy father. I knew him well. I have often sat at his hospitable board on anniversary week."
Thus addressed, Vassall Morton looked up from his book—it was Froissart's Chronicle—inclined his head in acknowledgment, and waited to hear more.
"Ahem!" coughed Mr. Jacobs, a little embarrassed: "your father was a most worthy and estimable gentleman: a true friend of the feeble and destitute. Ahem!—what class are you in, Mr. Morton?"
"The junior class," said the young man, a suppressed smile flickering at the corner of his mouth.
"Ahem! I hope, sir, that, like your father, you will long live to be an honor to your native town."
"Thank you, sir."
"I wish you good morning."
"Good morning, sir," said Morton, divided between an inclination to smile at the odd, humble little figure before him, and an unwillingness to wound the other's feelings.
"Are you ready to go, Mr. Jacobs?" said Dr. Steele.
"If you please, sir, we will now take our departure;"—gathering the four volumes of Macknight on the Epistles under his arm;—"Good morning, Mr. Stillingfleet; good morning, Mr. Rubens. I am indebted to your kindness, gentlemen—ahem!"
"This is the way out, Mr. Jacobs," said Steele to his diffident friend from West Weathersfield, who, in his embarrassment, was going out at the wrong door.
"I beg your pardon, sir—ahem!" replied Mr. Jacobs, with a bashful smile. And Dr. Steele, pointing to the true exit, ushered his rustic and reverend protégé from the sacred precinct of learning.
CHAPTER II.
Richt hardie baith in ernist and play.—Sir David Lyndsay.
"Morton, what was the little old fogy in the white cravat saying to you just now in the library?"
"Telling me that my father was a worthy man, and that he hoped I should make just such another."
"Ah, that was kind of him."
"What a pile of books you are lugging! Here, let me take half a dozen of them for you. You look as if you were training to be a hotel porter."
"I am laying in for vacation."
"What sense is there in that? Let alone your Latin, Greek, and mathematics; what the deuse is vacation made for? Take to the woods, as I do, breathe the fresh air, and see the world at large."
"Do you call it seeing the world at large, to go off into some barbarous, uninhabitable place, among mosquitoes, snakes, wolves, bears, and catamounts? What sense is there in that? What can you do when you get there?"
"Shoot muskrats, and fish for mudpouts. Will you go with me?"
"Thank you, no. There's no one in the class featherwitted enough to go with you, except Meredith, and he ought to know better."
"Stay at home, then, and improve your mind. I shall be off to-morrow."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
Mr. Horace Vinal shrugged his shoulders, a movement which caused Sophocles and Seneca to escape from under his arm. Morton gathered them out of the mud, and thrusting them back again into their place, left his burdened fellow-student to make the best of his way towards his den in Stoughton Hall.
CHAPTER III.
O, love, in such a wilderness as this!—Gertrude of Wyoming.
Morton, en route for the barbarous districts of which Vinal had expressed his disapproval, stopped by the way at a spot which, though wild enough at that time, had ceased to be a wilderness. This was the Notch of the White Mountains, perverted, since, into a resort of quasi fashion. Here, arriving late at the lonely hostelry of one Tom Crawford, he learned from that worthy person, to whom his face was well known, that other guests, from Boston, like himself, were seated at the tea table. Accordingly, descending thither, he saw four persons. The first was a quiet-looking man, with the air of a gentleman, and something in his appearance which seemed to indicate military habits and training. Morton remembered to have seen him before. At his side, and under his tutelary care, sat two personages, who, from their dimensions, must have been boys of some seven years old, but from the solemnity of their countenances, might have passed for a brace of ancient philosophers. They looked so much alike that Morton thought he saw double. Each was seated on a volume of Clark's Commentaries, to raise his chin to the needful height above the table cloth. Both were encased in tunics, strapped about them with shining morocco belts. Their small persons were terminated at one end by morocco shoes of somewhat infantile pattern, and at the other by enormous heads, with chalky complexions, pale, dilated eyes, wrinkled foreheads, and mouths pursed up with an expression of anxious care, abstruse meditation, and the most experienced wisdom.
In amazement at these phenomena, Morton turned next towards the fourth member of the party; and here he encountered a new emotion, of a kind quite different. Hitherto, in his college seclusion, he had not very often met, except in imagination, with that union of beauty, breeding, and refinement which belongs to the best life of cities, and which he now saw in the person of a young lady, a year or two his junior. He longed for a pretext to address her, but found none; when her father—for such he seemed—broke silence, and accosted him.
"I beg your pardon; is it possible that you are the son of John Morton?"
"Yes."
"He was my father's old friend. I thought I could scarcely mistake your likeness to your mother."
"I believe I have the pleasure of speaking to Colonel Leslie."
Leslie inclined his head.
"My title clings to me, I find, though I have no right to it now."
He had left the army long before, exchanging the rough frontier service for pursuits more to his taste.
"Upon my word," pursued Leslie, after conversing for some time with the new comer on the scenery and game of the mountains, "you seem to be au fait at this sort of thing."
"At least I ought to be; I have spent half my college vacations here."
"It is unlucky for us that we must set out for home in the morning. You might have given us good advice in our sightseeing."
"Crawford will tell you that I am tolerably
