r, seemingly.

Dakie Thayne flushed up, hot, without a word, when he came out, an
instant after.

"I'm _so_ sorry!" said Leslie, with real regret, accented with honest
indignation.

"It's your place," called out a rough man, who made the third upon the
coach-box. "Why don't you stick up for it?"

The color went down slowly in the boy's face, and a pride came up in his
eye. He put his hand to his cap, with a little irony of deference, and
lifted it off with the grace of a grown man. "I know it's my place. But
the young lady may keep it--now. _I'd_ rather be a gentleman!" said
Dakie Thayne.

"You've got the best of it!" This came from Marmaduke Wharne, as the
door closed upon the boy, and the stage rolled down the road toward
Cherry Mountain.

There is a "best" to be got out of everything; but it is neither the
best of place or possession, nor the chuckle of the last word.

CHAPTER VII.

DOWN AT OUTLEDGE.

Among the mountains, somewhere between the Androscoggin and the Saco,--I
don't feel bound to tell you precisely where, and I have only a
story-teller's word to give you for it at all,--lies the little
neighborhood of Outledge. An odd corner of a great township such as they
measure off in these wilds; where they take in, with some eligible
"locations" of intervale land, miles also of pathless forest where the
bear and the moose are wandering still, a pond, perhaps, filling up a
basin of acres and acres in extent, and a good-sized mountain or two,
thrown in to keep off the north wind; a corner cut off, as its name
indicates, by the outrunning of a precipitous ridge of granite, round
which a handful of population had crept and built itself a group of
dwellings,--this was the spot discovered and seized to themselves some
four or five years since by certain migratory pioneers of fashion.

An old two-story farmhouse, with four plain rooms of generous dimensions
on each floor, in which the first delighted summer party had divided
itself, glad and grateful to occupy them double and even treble bedded,
had become the "hotel," with a name up across the gable of the new
wing,--"Giant's Cairn House,"--and the eight original rooms made into
fourteen. The wing was clapped on by its middle; rushing out at the
front toward the road to meet the summer tide of travel as it should
surge by, and hold up to it, arrestively, its titular sign-board; the
other half as expressively making its bee-line toward the river and t