"Bladensburg, sah!" The gin-drinking, cock-fighting, sporting element
of the town was aroused, and Utie and Tiltock were invited on all
sides to imbibe to the significant toast of "The Field." Very noisy,
very insolent, nuisances indeed, these two mere lads--the offspring of
a vain and ignorant social period of which some elements yet
remain--borrowed the money to hire a carriage, and at midnight they
set out with some associates by the old, rutty, clay road for the
Maryland village of Bladensburg. That night they caroused until
Nature, despite her revolt, put them to bed. In the morning, with a
swollen and sallow face, dry hair, unsteady hands, aching eyes and
dim vision, Robert Utie awoke to the recollection of his folly and his
rashness, and he realized the critical period which he had provoked.
His clerkship lost, his self-pride poignant, his pockets nearly empty,
his respectable career irretrievably terminated, his sweetheart
insulted, and his life in danger! There was no escape either from
despair or fate. Tiltock was strutting about below stairs with a
drunken old doctor, misnamed a surgeon, who deposited behind the bar a
rusty case of surgical instruments, and who took a deep potation to
the toast of "The fawchuns of waw." The Bladensburg people were well
aware of the occasion, and the old tavern was surrounded by loafers
and gossips, many of whom were boys who had walked out from the city
as we go to prize-fights in our day. To fill up the time a dog-fight
and a chicken-fight were improvised by the enterprising stable-boys in
the back yard, on the green slopes of the running Branch. While
Tiltock strutted out of town at an imposing pace to examine "The
Field," Robert Utie retired to his room, sought with an emetic to
relieve his stomach, and then sat down to write some letters and an
epitaph. The paper was thin, and the pen and ink matched it, but the
drunken boy's eyes marred more than all; for suddenly the secret
fountains of his lost youth were touched as by the prick of his pen,
and the drops gushed out upon the two words he had written:

"Dear mother--"

Not his sweetheart, who was nothing to him now; not his "honor," which
had been only vain-glory and deceit; not any thing but this earliest,
everlasting faith which is ours forever, whether we be steadfast or go
astray: the tie of home, of childhood, and of our mother's prayer and
kiss--this was the soft reproach which glided between a wasted youth
and t