This was the sort of character to win upon the quiet son of the Major. "If he were only more earnest," he used to say,--"if he could give up his trifling,--if he would only buckle down to serious study, as some of us do, what great things he might accomplish!" A common enough fancy among those of riper years,--as if all the outlets of a man's nerve-power could be dammed into what shape the possessor would! Maverick was altogether his old self this night at the parsonage. Rachel listened admiringly, as he told of his travel and of his foreign experiences. He was the son of a merchant of an Eastern seaport who had been long engaged in the Mediterranean trade with a branch house at Marseilles; and thither Frank had gone two or three years after leaving college, to fill some subordinate post, and finally to work his way into a partnership, which he now held. Of course he had not lived there those seven or eight years last past without his visit to Paris; and his easy, careless way of describing what he had seen there in Napoleon's day--the fêtes, the processions, the display--was a kind of talk not often heard in a New England village, and which took a strong hold upon the imagination of Rachel. "And to think," says the parson, "that such a people are wholly infidel!" "Well, well, I don't know," says Maverick; "I think I have seen a good deal of faith in the Popish churches." "Faith in images; faith in the Virgin; faith in mummery," says Johns, with a sigh. "'Tis always the scarlet woman of Babylon!" "I know," says Maverick, smiling, "these things are not much to your taste; but we have our Protestant chapels, too." "Not much better, I fear," says Johns. "They are sadly impregnated with the Genevese Socinianism."