RoBards expected to find the usurper in a delirium. But Chalender was out of the cloud for the moment. With a singularly fresh and boyish cheer, he sang out: “Hello, David! How’s my old crony? Don’t let me keep you out of your shop. Go ahead and work and don’t mind me. I’m pretty sick, I suppose, or I’d take myself out of your way. Forgive me, won’t you?” He asked forgiveness for a possible inconvenience, but kept in his black heart the supposed secret of his treachery! Yet something compelled RoBards to laugh and say that he was to make himself at home and feel right welcome. The dishonest glance he cast toward Chalender was met with a look of smiling honesty that reminded David of some lines he had heard the English actor Kean deliver at the theatre: “My tables—meet it is I set it down, That one may smile and smile and be a villain.” Yet he smiled himself, and felt that many a villain was more the hero than he. He hurried out of the room, fleeing from the helpless sick man who smiled and had no conscience to trouble him. He found that his horse had gone lame and could not take him all the way to New York. He drove the limping nag only so far as White Plains, and sent Cuff back with him. He waited in front of Purdy’s Store until the Red Bird coach was ready to start. He saw Dr. Chirnside waiting for the same stage, and he dreaded the ordeal of the old preacher’s garrulity. But there was no escape. The parson had come up to look over the churches in the Bedford Circuit and he was pretty sure to indulge in one of his long tirades against the evils of the times—especially the appalling atheism of the country, an inheritance from the Revolutionary sentiments. The colleges were full of it—of atheism, drunkenness, gambling—but Dr. Chirnside seemed to dread atheism far less than he dreaded the other sects of his own faith. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians were gaining a foothold in the countryside and he almost choked when he referred to the Catholics. All the way down to New York Dr. Chirnside’s tongue kept pace with the galloping horses. He began with the stage itself. He remembered when even carriages were almost unknown in the rural districts. Gentlemen rode horses and carried their necessaries in valises swung from the saddle; ladies rode on pillions. Then light wagons came in, and carioles next, gigs, chaises, and chairs. And now stages with their luxury and their speed of nearly ten miles an hour! As if that were not enough, a steam railroad was to ruin the peace of the country. Had Mr. RoBards ridden behind one of the engines that now drew the railway cars from the City Hall all the way to Harlem? No? He had been fortunate in his abstemiousness. “The speed of these trains is only another instance of our mad passion for hurry. After a time people will return to their sanity, and the stage coaches will drive the fire-breathing monsters back to the oblivion they came from.