"Do you think that opening you spoke of would hold for a day or two
longer?"

"I reckon."

"Well, then, I think I can settle up matters here my own way, and go
with you, Bill."

He had risen, and yet hesitatingly kept his hand on the back of his
chair. "Bill!"

"Jeff!"

"I want to ask you a question; speak up, and don't mind me, but say the
truth."

Our crafty Ulysses, believing that he was about to be entrapped,
ensconced himself in his pockets, cocked one eye, and said: "Go on,
Jeff."

"Was my father VERY bad?"

Bill took his hands from his pockets. "Thar isn't a man ez crawls above
his grave ez is worthy to lie in the same ground with him!"

"Thank you, Bill. Good night; I'm going to turn in!"

"Look yar, boy! G-d d--n it all, Jeff! what do ye mean?"

There were two tears--twin sisters of those in his sweetheart's eyes
that afternoon--now standing in Jeff's!

Bill caught both his hands in his own. Had they been of the Latin race
they would have, right honestly, taken each other in their arms, and
perhaps kissed! Being Anglo-Saxons, they gripped each other's hands
hard, and one, as above stated, swore!

When Jeff ascended to his room that night he went directly to his trunk
and took out Miss Mayfield's slipper. Alack! during the day Aunt Sally
had "put things to rights" in his room, and the trunk had been moved.
This had somewhat disordered its contents, and Miss Mayfield's slipper
contained a dozen shot from a broken Eley's cartridge, a few quinine
pills, four postage stamps, part of a coral earring which Jeff--on the
most apocryphal authority--fondly believed belonged to his mother, whom
he had never seen, and a small silver school medal which Jeff had once
received for "good conduct," much to his own surprise, but which he
still religiously kept as evidence of former conventional character. He
colored a little, rubbed the medal and earring ruefully on his sleeve,
replaced them in his trunk, and then hastily emptied the rest of the
slipper's contents on the floor. This done, he drew off his boots, and,
gliding noiselessly down the stair, hung the slipper on the knob of Miss
Mayfield's door, and glided back again without detection.

Rolling himself in his blankets, he lay down on his bed. But not to
sleep! Staringly wide awake, he at last felt the lulling of the wind
that nightly shook his casement, and listened while the great, rambling,
creaking, disjointed "Half-way House" slowly settled its