finest turnout in town, with his two blooded horses, Paul and Virginia. “You’ve got to keep a sharp lookout or they’ll take the bits in their teeth and run away with you,” he said to Craig, who had expressed a wish to drive. “Mebby I’d better take the lines. Them white hands don’t look strong enough to hold such bloods as Paul and Virginny.” Craig thought he could manage them, and wondered what Uncle Zach would say to Dido if he could once see her carry herself up hill and down with no sign of fatigue or need of a whip, while these plugs, as he mentally designated Uncle Zach’s bloods, had to be urged after the second long hill and stopped of their own accord to rest after the third, while at the fourth Uncle Zach suggested that they get out and walk “to rest the critters.” Craig took no more drives after Uncle Zach’s blooded horses, but he went rowing with him on the river once or twice and always treated him with a deference which was not lost on the little man. “He’s a gentleman, every inch of him,” Mr. Taylor often said of him, and nothing could have pleased him better than his wife’s permission to join him on the north piazza. Craig was glad to see him. He had given up Browning for the time being,—had nearly finished his lemonade, and was quite ready for a chat with his loquacious landlord, who, after inveighing against the propensity of women to clean house when there was nothing to clean, and inquiring after Craig’s health and declaring himself comfortable two or three times, commenced a eulogy on Ridgefield. “The greatest town in the county, with the finest views and most notorious people and places. See that hill over there?” he asked, pointing to the west. “Wall, there’s the suller hole where the Injuns pushed their wagons of blazin’ hemp, and the garrison would have been burnt to the ground and the people scalped, if the Lord hadn’t done a miracle and sent a thunder shower in the nick of time. One of Dot’s ancestors was there shut up, so it’s true. Dot’s great on ancestory; goes back to the flood, I do b’lieve. She’s got the door latch of that old house. I’ll show it to you if you don’t b’lieve it. Yes, ’twas a miracle, that shower, like the sun standin’ still in one of our battles, I don’t remember which. In the Revolution, wa’n’t it, when Washington licked the British?” Craig smiled and answered that he believed it was in the old testament times when Joshua was the general. “Good land, I or’to know that, though I ain’t up in scripter as I should be, seein’ I’m a member in good standin’, though I hain’t always been,” Uncle Zach replied, and continued: “You know the meetin’ house across the street,—the Methodis’, I mean,—not the ’Piscopal, where you go.”