"Well, you see I was detailed to attend to the calf, and I carried the calf up stairs, assisted by Bill Smith--who is preaching in Chicago; got a soft thing--five thousand a year, and a parsonage furnished, and keeps a team, and if one of those horses is not a trotter then I am no judge of horseflesh or of Bill, and if he don't put on an old driving coat and go out on the road occasionally and catch on for a race with some wordly-minded man, then I am another. You hear me--well, I never knew a calf was so heavy, and had so many hind legs. Kick! Why, bless your old alabaster heart, that calf walked all over me, from Genesis to Revelations. And say, we didn't get much of a breeze the next morning, did we, when we had to clean out the recitation room?" [Illustration: SACRED MEMORIES] A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and whose eyes twinkled some through the smoke, said to another: "Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor's niece who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie? What become of her." Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and said: "Well, I wasn't gone on her, as you say, but just liked her. Not too well, you know, but just well enough. She had a color of hair that I could never stand--just the color of yours, Hank--and when she got to going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married. I understand he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich. It was better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board around like a country school ma'am, as she would if she had married me." A dark haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon, and said: "Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went out across the marsh to Kingsley's farm, after watermelons?" Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip. "Why," said he, "before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had stung me a dozen times. And do you remember how we played it on the professor, and made him believe that I had the chicken pox? O, gentlemen, a glorious immortality awaits you beyond the grave for lying me out of that scrape."