"Come down into Florence's, then, and let me hear about it. Hang me if I ever expected to see you again. I shouldn't like to have met you alone, at night, any where near a graveyard. At our last class meeting, we were all talking about you, and saying you were a deused good fellow, and what a pity it was. And here you are alive; it was all for nothing!" "That's very unlucky," said Morton, as they descended into the restaurant. "By Jove," exclaimed Shingles, whose amazement was still strong upon him, "I was never so much astonished in my life as when I saw you just now. I was coming out of a shop, as you passed along the sidewalk. I felt as if I had seen a spirit. I followed behind you, and wasn't quite sure it was you, till I saw your trick of rapping your cane against the bricks as you walked along. Then I said to myself, it's he, or else old Beelzebub, in his likeness. But come, tell us how it was. How did you get off alive?" Morton briefly recounted his imprisonment and escape, interrupted by the wondering ejaculations of his auditor. "Who would have thought," exclaimed Shingles, "when you and I used to go up to Elk Pond, on Saturdays, to catch perch and pickerel, that you would ever have been shut up in the dungeon of an Austrian castle? You remember those old times--don't you?" "That I do," said Morton. "Do you remember the old tavern, where we used to lunch, and the pretty girl that waited on the table?" "The girl that you raved about all the way home? Yes, I remember." "By Jove, to think you've been shut up in a dungeon! Well, I haven't any very brilliant account to give of _my_self. I began to practise law, but I was never meant for a lawyer; so I gave it up, and have been ever since at my father's old place, just pottering about, you know. I was born in the country, and brought up there, and I mean to live there, only now and then I come down to New York, on a bend,--just for a change." "I suppose you can tell me the news. How are all the fellows? How is Meredith?" "Very well, I believe. He is living in Boston." "Married, or single?" "Single. We are not much of a marrying class. Wren was the first. Was that before you went away, or after? We voted to send him a cradle; but he did not know how to take it. He thought we were fooling him, and got quite angry. No, we are not at all a marrying class, nor a dying class either, for that matter. There are not more than five or six dead, and twelve or fourteen married; we reckoned them up last class meeting." "Vinal--what of him?" "O, he's alive, and married, too." Morton turned pale. "Married!--to whom?" "Well, they say he's made a first-rate match. I don't know her myself. I'm not a party-going man; I never was, you know. I haven't been thrown in much with that kind of people. But they tell me he couldn't have done better." "What's her name?" demanded Morton. "Miss Leslie--Colonel Leslie's daughter. But what's the matter? Are you ill?"