But was it the joy and pride of his heart that often sent him out in an evening amongst his jolly companions, and sent him home late, sometimes not very good-tempered? True it was that though Thorsby was one of the best of husbands, tender, kind, anxious, solicitous that his wife should have everything to make her happy, yet his ways of making himself happy caused, by degrees, serious inroads into Letty’s happiness. Often he not only came home late, but in a condition that he called prime and gay as a lord, but which created very serious fears in his wife’s mind. When he was in a less lordlike mood she continued to intreat him to stay with her and read to her at her needlework, or to go and see some of his more domestic friends. What must become of her, she asked, if he contracted an unconquerable habit of taking too much wine? “Too much wine!” he would reply. “What are you talking about, my dear child? Too much wine! Why, I tell you, we are all as sober as judges. It is not wine, it is only a little hilarity that we like at the club. When a man has been fagging all day in the counting-house, why, dear me, one must have a little talk and laughter to brighten one up. But never do you fear. I know what I am about. I am not going to make an ass of myself.” Letty thought that he used to find her society refreshing and enlivening once. “And so I do now,” he would say; “but one cannot always be tied to one’s wife’s apron-strings. But I know what it is, Letty: it is these old fogies and Quakers that you have got acquainted with; they make you think all mirth is a sin, and they go about saying I am a wild young man. That’s it, Letty dear, that’s it. Now I am not going to be a wild young man; in fact, I think I am getting rather old and serious; but I’ll ‘wild-young-man’ those frouzy Quakers—mark me, if I don’t.” With these ideas rankling in his mind, Thorsby one day riding from Woodburn where his wife was staying a few days, saw coming on the road towards him Mr. Jasper Heritage, a tall man, on his tall horse, and little squabby David Qualm on his stout and squably Welsh pony. Thorsby well knew that all Welsh ponies are, more or less, skittish, and that Taffy, Qualm’s pony, was excessively so. As the two Friends drew near, therefore, Thorsby took off his hat as if in compliment to them. The moment he lifted it from his head Mr. Heritage shouted, “Keep on thy hat, Henry Thorsby! keep on thy hat!” But Thorsby not only did not put it on again, but he gave it a great flourish as if in extreme politeness; and, it was the work of a moment,—David Qualm’s pony started sideways to the farther side of the road, and left him lying on his back in the middle of it.