The next Friday evening Grayson and Lockwood were again brought together; this time in the miscellaneous store of Wooden & Snyder, in which George Lockwood was the only clerk. Here after closing-time the young men of the village were accustomed to gratify their gregarious propensities; this was a club-room, where, amid characteristic odors of brown sugar, plug tobacco, new calico, vinegar, whisky, molasses, and the dressed leather of boots and shoes, social intercourse was carried on by a group seated on the top of nail-kegs, the protruding ends of shoe-boxes, and the counters that stretched around three sides of the room. Here were related again all those stock anecdotes which have come down from an antiquity inconceivably remote, but which in every village are yet told as having happened three or four miles away, and three or four years ago, to the intimate friend of the narrator's uncle. The frequency of such assemblies takes off something of their zest; where everybody knows all his neighbor's history and has heard everybody else's favorite story, a condition of mental equilibrium ensues, and there is no exchange of electricities. The new-comer, or the man who has been away, is a heaven-send in a village; he stirs its stagnant intellect as a fresh breeze, and is for the time the hero of every congregation of idlers. Such a man on this evening was Dave Sovine, the son of a settler from one of the Channel Islands. Four years ago, when but sixteen years old, Dave had unluckily waked up one summer morning at daybreak. Looking out of the little window in the end of the loft of his father's house, he had contemplated with disgust a large field of Indian corn to be "plowed out" that day under a June sun. So repulsive to his nature was the landscape of young maize and the prospect of toil, that he dressed himself, tied up his spare clothes in a handkerchief, and, taking his boots in his hand, descended noiselessly the stairway which was in the outside porch of the house. Once on the ground, he drew on his boots and got away toward the Wabash, where he shipped as cook on a flat-boat bound for New Orleans. No pursuit or inquiry was made by his family, and the neighbors suspected that his departure was not a source of regret. At Shawneetown the flat-boat was suddenly left without a cook. Dave had been sent up in the town with a little money to lay in supplies of coffee and sugar; instead of coming back, he surreptitiously shipped as cabin-boy on the steamboat _Queen of the West_, which was just leaving the landing, bound also for the "lower country." Sovine had afterward been in the Gulf, he had had adventures in Mexico, and he had contrived to pick up whatever of evil was to be learned in every place he visited. He had now come home ostensibly "to see the folks," but really to gratify his vanity in astonishing his old acquaintances by an admirable proficiency in deviltry. His tales of adventure were strange and