"You must stop with me. Rachel, dear, will you have the spare room made ready for Mr. Maverick?" "My dear Madam, don't give yourself the least trouble; I am an old traveller, and can make myself quite comfortable at the tavern yonder; but if it's altogether convenient, I shall be delighted to pass the night under the roof of my old friend. I shall be off to-morrow noon," continued he, turning to the parson, "and until then I want you to put off your sermons and make me one of your parishioners." So they all went into the parsonage together. Frank Maverick, as he had said, had shared the same bench with Johns in college; and between them, unlike as they were in character, there had grown up a strong friendship,--one of those singular intimacies which bind the gravest men to the most cheery and reckless. Maverick was forever running into scrapes and consulting the cool head of Johns to help him out of them. There was never a tutor's windows to be broken in, or a callithumpian frolic, (which were in vogue in those days,) but Maverick bore a hand in both; and somehow, by a marvellous address that belonged to him, always managed to escape, or at most to receive only some grave admonition from the academic authorities. Johns advised with him, (giving as serious advice then as he could give now,) and added from time to time such assistance in his studies as a plodding man can always lend to one of quick brain, who makes no reckoning of time. Upon a certain occasion Maverick had gone over with Johns to his home, and the Major had taken an immense fancy to the buoyant young fellow, so full of spirits, and so charmingly frank. "If your characters could only be welded together," he used to say to his son, "you would both be the better for it; he a little of your gravity, and you something of his rollicking carelessness." This bound Johns to his friend more closely than ever. There was, moreover, great honesty and conscientiousness in the lad's composition: he could beat in a tutor's window for the frolic of the thing, and by way of paying off some old grudge for a black mark; but there was a strong spice of humanity at the bottom even of his frolics. It happened one day, that his friend Ben Johns told him that one of the bats which had done terrible execution on the tutor's windows had also played havoc on his table, breaking a bottle of ink, and deluging some half-dozen of the tutor's books; "and do you know," said Johns, "the poor man who has made such a loss is saving up all his pay here for a mother and two or three fatherless children?" "The Deuse he is!" said Maverick, and his hand went to his pocket, which was always pretty full. "I say, Johns, don't peach on me, but I think I must have thrown that bat, (which Johns knew to be hardly possible, for he had only come up at the end of the row,) and I want you to get this money to him, to make those books good again. Will you do it, old fellow?"