Just then we were stopped by two middle-aged Friends in drab of orthodox tint, from which now-a-days Friends have much fallen away into gay browns and blacks. They asked a question or two about an insurance on one of our ships; and then the elder said, "Thee hand seems bleeding, friend Richard;" which was true: he had cut his knuckles on his opponent's teeth, and around them had wrapped hastily a handkerchief which showed stains of blood here and there. "Ach!" said Schmidt, hastening to save his friend annoyance. "He ran against something.--And how late is it! Let us go." But Wholesome, who would have no man lie ever so little for his benefit, said quietly, "I hurt it knocking a man down;" and now for the first time to-day I observed the old amused look steal over his handsome face and set it a-twitching with some sense of humor as he saw the shock which went over the faces of the two elders when we bade them good-morning and turned away. Wholesome walked on ahead quickly, and as it seemed plain that he would be alone, we dropped behind. "What is all this?" said I. "Does a man grieve thus because he chastises a scoundrel?" "No," said Schmidt. "The Friend Wholesome was, as you may never yet know, an officer of the navy, and when your war being done he comes here. There is a beautiful woman whom he must fall to loving, and this with some men being a grave disorder, he must go and spoil a good natural man with the clothes of a Quaker, seeing that what the woman did was good in his sight." "But," said I, "I don't understand." "No," said he; "yet you have read of Eve and Adam. Sometimes they give us good apples and sometimes bad. This was a russet, as it were, and at times the apple disagrees with him for that with the new apple he got not a new stomach." I laughed a little, but said, "This is not all. There was something between him and the man he struck which we do not yet know. Did you see him?" "Yes, and before this--last week some time in the market-place. He was looking at old Dinah's tub of white lilies when I noticed him, and to me came a curious thinking of how he was so unlike them, many people having for me flower-likeness, and this man, being of a yellow swarthiness and squat-browed, 'minded me soon of the toadstool you call a corpse-light." "Perhaps we shall know some time; but here is home, and will he speak of it to Mistress White, do you think?" "Not ever, I suppose," said Schmidt; and we went in.