Under ordinary circumstances that early ride would have been vastly exhilarating to Hugh, who enjoyed the bracing air, but there was too much now upon his mind to admit of his enjoying any thing. Thoughts of Adah, and the increased expense her presence would necessarily bring, flitted across his mind, while Harney’s bill, put over once, and due again ere long, sat like a nightmare on him, for he saw no way in which to meet it. No way save one, and Rocket surely must have felt the throbbing of Hugh’s heart as that one way flashed upon him, for he gave a kind of coaxing whine, and dashed on over the billowy drifts faster than before. “No, Rocket, no,” and Hugh patted his neck. He’d never part with Rocket, He’d sell Spring Bank first with all its incumbrances. The cornfield was reached by this time, and with a single bound Rocket cleared the gate at the entrance. A six-rail fence was nothing for him to leap, and like a deer he sped across the field, and ere long stood before Aunt Eunice’s door. It was now three days since Hugh had gladdened Aunt Eunice’s cottage with the sunshine of his presence, and when she awoke that morning, and saw how high the snow was piled around her door, she said to herself, “The boy’ll be here directly to know if I’m alive,” and this accounted for the round deal table drawn before the blazing fire, and looking so inviting with its two plates and cups, one a fanciful china affair, sacredly kept for Hugh, whose coffee always tasted better when sipped from its gilded side. The lightest of egg bread was steaming on the hearth, the tenderest of steak was broiling on the griddle, while the odor of the coffee boiling on the coals came tantalizingly to Hugh’s olfactories as Aunt Eunice opened the door, saying pleasantly, “I told ’em so. I felt it in my bones, and the breakfast is all but ready. Put Rocket up directly, and come in to the fire.” Fastening Rocket in his accustomed place in the outer shed, Hugh stamped the snow from his heavy boots, and then went in to Aunt Eunice’s kitchen-parlor, as she called it, where the tempting breakfast stood upon the table. Nimble as a girl Aunt Eunice brought his chair, and placing it in the warmest part of the room, the one next to the wall and farthest from the door where the wind and snow crept in. But Hugh was not selfish enough to keep it, and he made Aunt Eunice change, for he knew the blood moved more slowly through her veins than his. “No coffee! What new freak is that?” and Aunt Eunice gazed at him in astonishment as he declined the cup she had prepared with so much care, dropping in the whitest lumps of sugar, and stirring in the thickest cream. It cost Hugh a terrible struggle to refuse that cup of coffee, but if he would retrench, he must begin at once and determining to meet it unflinchingly he replied that “he had concluded to drink water for a while, and see what that would do; much was said nowadays about coffee’s being injurious, and he presumed it was.”