"As for yourself," continued Maverick, "they'll give you the title of Doctor after a few years!"--The parson raised his hand, as if to put away the thought.--"I know," continued his friend, "you don't seek worldly honors: but they will drift upon you; they'll all love you hereabout, in spite of your seriousness (the parson smiled); you'll have your house full of children; you'll be putting a wing here and a wing there; and when I come back, twenty years hence, if I live, I shall find you comfortably gray, and your pretty wife in spectacles, knitting mittens for the youngest boy, and the oldest at college, and your girls grown into tall village belles;--but, Johns, don't, I beg, be too strict with them; you can't make a merry young creature the better by insisting upon seriousness; you can't crowd goodness into a body by pounding upon it. What are you thinking of, Johns?" The parson was sitting with his eyes bent upon a certain figure in the green and red Scotch carpet. "Thinking, Maverick, that in twenty years' time, if alive, we may be less fit for heaven than we are to-day." There was a pitying kindliness in the tone of the minister, as he said this, which touched Maverick. "There's no doubt on your score, Johns, God bless you! But we must paddle our own boats: I dare say you'll come out a long way before me; you always did, you know. Every man to his path." "There's but _one_," said Johns, solemnly, "that leadeth to eternal rest." "Yes, I know," says Maverick, with a gay smile upon his face, which the parson remembered long after, "we are the goats; but you must have a little pity on us, for all that." With these words they parted for the night. Next morning, before the minister was astir, Maverick was strolling about the garden and the village street, and at breakfast appeared with a little bunch of violets he had gathered from Rachel's flower-patch, and laid them by her plate. (It was a graceful attention, that not even the clergyman had ever paid to her.) And he further delighted her with a description of some floral fête which he had witnessed at Marseilles, in the year of the Restoration. "They welcomed their old masters, then?" said the parson. "Perhaps so; one can never say. The French express their joy with flowers, and they bury their grief with flowers. I like them for it; I think there's a ripe philosophy in it." "A heathen philosophy," said the minister. At noon Maverick left upon the old swaying stage-coach,--looking out, as he passed, upon the parsonage, with its quaintly panelled door, and its diamond lights, of which he long kept the image in his mind. That brazen knocker he seemed to hear in later years, beating,--beating as if his brain lay under it. "I think Mr. Frank Maverick is a most charming man," said the pretty Mrs. Johns to her husband. "He is, Rachel, and generous and open-hearted,--and yet, in the sight of Heaven, I fear, a miserable sinner." "But, Benjamin, my dear, we are all sinners."