dies." Captain Carroll had further mercy. He
allowed the ladies to leave the house unattended and to dive
desperately into the waiting coach.

"Home at once," Mrs. Van Dorn cried, hoarsely, to Samson Rawdy,
waking from his nap in some bewilderment.

Captain Carroll was standing on the porch with a compound look of
kindest pity and mirth on his face when the Carroll ladies came
strolling round that way from the pond. He kissed them all, as was
his wont; then he laughed out inconsequently.

"What are you laughing at, dear?" asked Amy.

"At my thoughts, sweetheart."

"What are your thoughts, daddy?" asked Charlotte.

"Thoughts I shall never tell anybody, honey," he replied, with
another laugh. And Captain Arthur Carroll never did tell.

Chapter III

History often repeats itself where one would least expect it, and the
world-old tide of human nature has a way of finding world-old
channels. Therefore it happened in Banbridge, as in ancient times,
that there was a learned barber, or perhaps, to be more strictly
accurate, a barber who thought that he was learned. He would have
been entirely ready, had his customers coincided with his views, to
have given his striped pole its old signification of the ribbon
bandage which bound the arm of a patient after bleeding, and added
surgery to his hair-cutting and his beard-shaving. John Flynn had the
courage of utter conviction as to his own ability to master all
undertakings at which he chose to tilt. An aspiration once conceived,
he never parted with, but held to it as a part of his life.
Non-realization made not the slightest difference. His sense of time
as a portion of eternity never left him, and therefore his patience
under tardy fulfilment of his desires never faltered. Some ten years
before, he decided that he would at some earlier or later date become
mayor of Banbridge, and his decision was still impregnable. After
every new election of another candidate, he begged his patrons for
their votes another time, and was not in the least disturbed nor
daunted that they had failed in their former promises. Flynn's
good-nature was as unfaltering as his self-esteem, perhaps because of
his self-esteem. He only smiled with fatuous superiority when from
time to time, after the elections, his patrons would chaff him about
his failure to secure the mayoralty. They did so with more effect
since there were always among the horse-players on such occasions a
few who would cast