uch beyond Ashfield, this, isn't it? How do
you think Old Boody's tavern and sign-board would look along here?"

And Phil laughed, quietly.

"I should like to see old Deacon Tourtelot," continued Reuben, "with
Huldy on his arm, sloping down Broadway. Wouldn't the old people stare?"

"I guess they would," Phil said, demurely.

"I wonder if they'd knock off at sundown Saturday night," continued
Reuben, mockingly.

And his tone somehow hurt Phil, who had the memories of the old home--a
very dear one to him--fresh upon him.

"And I suppose Miss Almiry keeps at her singing?"

"Yes," said Phil, straining a point in favor of his townswoman; "and I
think she sings pretty well."

"Pretty well! By Jove, Phil, you should have been at the Old Park night
before last; you would have heard what _I_ call singing. It would have
stirred up the old folks of Ashfield."

And Phil met it all very seriously. It seemed to him, in his honesty,
that Reuben was wantonly cutting asunder all the ties that once bound
him to the old home. It pained him, moreover, to think--as he did, with
a good deal of restiveness--that his blessed mother, and Rose perhaps,
and the old Squire, his father, were among the Ashfield people at whom
Reuben sneered so glibly. And when he parted with him upon the
dock,--for Reuben had gone down to see him off,--it was with a secret
conviction that their old friendship had come to an end, and that
thenceforth they two could have no sympathies in common.

But in this Phil was by no means wholly right. The talk of Reuben was,
after all, but the ebullition of a city conceit,--a conceit which is apt
to belong to all young men at some period of their novitiate in city
life. He was mainly anxious to impress upon Phil the great gain which he
had made in knowledge of the world in the last few years, and to astound
him with the great difference between his present standpoint and the old
one, when they were boys together on the benches of the Ashfield
meeting-house. We never make such gains, or apparent gains, at any
period of life, it is to be feared, without wishing to demonstrate their
magnitude to the slow coaches we have left behind.

And on the very night after Reuben had parted from Phil, when he came
late to his chamber, dazed with some new scene at the theatre, and his
brain flighty with a cup too much, it may well have happened, that, in
his fevered restlessness, as the clock near by chimed midnight, his
thought