“Did she?” asked Crayme. “Well, I guess I _was_ a good-looking fellow in those days: I know Pike came up to me once, with a glass in his hand, and said that he ought to drink to _me_, for I was the finest-looking groom he’d ever seen. He was so tight, though, that he couldn’t hold his glass steady; and though you know I never had a drop of stingy blood in me, it _did_ go to my heart to see him spill that gorgeous sherry.” “She looked very proud of _you_,” Fred repeated; “but I can’t see why, for I’ve never seen her do it since.” “You _will_, though, hang you!” exclaimed the captain. “Get out of here! I can think about her _now_, and I don’t want anybody else around. No rudeness meant, you know, Fred.” Fred Macdonald retired quietly, taking with him the keys of both doors, and feeling more exhausted than he had been on any Saturday night since the building of the mill. CHAPTER XV. A FIRST INWARD PEEP. Among the Barton people who had actually made any effort for the sake of temperance, no one found greater comfort in contemplative retrospects of his own work than Deacon Jones. True, his contributions to the various funds which Crupp, Tomple, Wedgewell, and Brown devised had not been as great as had been expected of him; nor had such moneys as he finally gave been obtained from him without an amount of effort which Crupp declared sufficient to effect the extraction, from the soil, of the stump of a centenarian oak; but when the money had left his pocket, and was absolutely beyond recall, the deacon made the most he could out of it by the only method which remained. His contributions gave him an excuse for talk and exhortation, and, next to money-making, there was no operation which the deacon enjoyed as much as that of exhorting others to good deeds. Until there broke out in Barton the temperance excitement alluded to in our first chapter, Deacon Jones’s hortatory efforts had been principally of a religious nature; he believed in religion, and he occasionally extracted enjoyment from it; besides, his thrifty soul had always been profoundly moved by the business-like nature of the Scripture passage, “Whoso shall convert a sinner from the error of his ways, shall save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.” Many had been the unregenerate in Barton with whom the deacon had labored, generally with considerable tact, as to occasion and language, and sometimes with success. His orthodoxy was acceptable to every pastor in the village, for he was an extreme believer in every religious tenet which either pastor declared necessary to salvation; and his frequent inability to reconcile such of these ideas as conflicted with each other only led the ministers to accord new admiration to a faith which was appalled by nothing. Up to the time when he took active part in the temperance movement, one of his favorite injunctions had been, “Lay up your treasure in heaven;” when, however, he found himself suddenly and frequently called upon