the house banked, and sundry other duties attended to.

Ches Maybin had been up that afternoon to negotiate for the vacant
place, and had offered to give satisfaction for smaller wages than
Miss Calista had ever paid. But he had met with a brusque refusal,
scarcely as civil as Miss Calista had bestowed on drunken Jake Stinson
from the Morrisvale Road.

Not that Miss Calista had any particular prejudice against Ches
Maybin, or knew anything positively to his discredit. She was simply
unconsciously following the example of a world that exerts itself to
keep a man down when he is down and prevent all chance of his rising.
Nothing succeeds like success, and the converse of this is likewise
true--that nothing fails like failure. There was not a person in
Cooperstown who would not have heartily endorsed Miss Calista's
refusal.

Ches Maybin was only eighteen, although he looked several years older,
and although no flagrant misdoing had ever been proved against him,
suspicion of such was not wanting. He came of a bad stock, people said
sagely, adding that what was bred in the bone was bound to come out
in the flesh. His father, old Sam Maybin, had been a shiftless and
tricky rascal, as everybody knew, and had ended his days in the
poorhouse. Ches's mother had died when he was a baby, and he had come
up somehow, in a hand-to-mouth fashion, with all the cloud of heredity
hanging over him. He was always looked at askance, and when any
mischief came to light in the village, it was generally fastened on
him as a convenient and handy scapegoat. He was considered sulky and
lazy, and the local prophets united in predicting a bad end for him
sooner or later; and, moreover, diligently endeavoured by their
general treatment of him to put him in a fair way to fulfil their
predictions. Miss Calista, when she had shut Chester Maybin out into
the chill gloom of the November dusk, dismissed him from her thoughts.
There were other things of more moment to her just then than old Sam
Maybin's hopeful son.

There was nobody in the house but herself, and although this was
neither alarming nor unusual, it was unusual--and Miss Calista
considered it alarming--that the sum of five hundred dollars should at
that very moment be in the upper right-hand drawer of the sideboard,
which sum had been up to the previous day safe in the coffers of the
Millageville bank. But certain unfavourable rumours were in course of
circulation about that same institut