“Wasn’t I good?” said I, drowsily. But the old boy, turning his back upon me and settling his head upon his pillow, took in a long breath of air; and, breathing it out with a kind of snort, was silent. CHAPTER XXIV. “How well the Parson is looking, Mary,” said Alice, as she stood before the glass that night, unpinning her collar. Mary, tired and sleepy as she was, dropped into a chair and shook with half-unwilling laughter. “What is the Little Thing laughing at?” “Alice, you are the hardest case I ever knew. Why do you persist in turning the man into ridicule?” “Who, the Pass’n?” for thus she pronounced the word,—and her merry eyes twinkled. I doubt whether the reader can guess who the “Pass’n” is. I must explain, therefore, that when I mentioned to the girls, in Richmond, that I had found the Don reading the New Testament, Alice had immediately cried out that now she had it. “He is a Methodist parson in disguise.” And upon this theme she had ever since been playing inimitably grotesque variations. Coming down on the boat, notably, she had surpassed herself; and I hear our party disgraced themselves by their hilarity. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she had cried out, when first we had come in view of Elmington,—“ladies and gentlemen,” said she, leaning out of the carriage window, and declaiming solemnly to the passengers in the rear vehicle, “in yonder mansion sits meditating, at this moment, Pass’n Smith, the disguised Methodist divine. He is the Whitefield of our day. For generations, no exhorter of such power—especially with sentimental young girls and lonesome widows— Will some one be so good as to administer restoratives to the Fat Lady? She seems on the verge of— Where was I?” And so she went on, her young heart ceaselessly bubbling over with freshness and high spirits. “Ridicule the Pass’n!” said Alice, dropping into her friend’s lap. “Far from me the profane idea.” And she smoothed back from Mary’s brow her loosened hair.