when he would want to go somewhere on a train—­and go.  He did not smoke, but he chewed tobacco; and Wilbur, the apprentice, desiring to do all things that printers did, strove to emulate him in this interesting vice; but it proved to offer only the weakest of appeals, so he presently abandoned the effort—­especially after Winona had detected him with the stuff in his mouth, striving to spit like an elderly printer.  Winona was horrified.  Smoking was bad enough!

Winona was even opposed to his becoming a printer.  Those advantages of the craft extolled by Dave Cowan were precisely what Winona deemed undesirable.  A boy should rather be studious and of good habits and learn to write a good hand so that he could become a bookkeeper, perhaps even in the First National Bank itself—­and always stay in one place.  Winona disapproved of gypsies and all their ways.  Gypsies were rolling stones.  She strove to entice the better nature of Wilbur with moral placards bearing printed bits from the best authors.  She gave him an entire calendar with an uplifting sentiment on each leaf.  One paying proper attention could scarcely have lived the year of that calendar without being improved.  Unfortunately, Wilbur Cowan never in the least cared to know what day in the month it was, and whole weeks of these homilies went unread.  Winona was watchful, however, and fertile of resource.  Aforetime she had devoted her efforts chiefly to Merle as being the better worth saving.  Now that she had indeed saved him, made and uplifted him beyond human expectation, she redoubled her attentions to his less responsive, less plastic brother.  Almost fiercely she was bent upon making him the moral perfectionist she had made Merle.

As one of the means to this end she regaled him often with tales of his brother’s social and moral refulgence under his new name.  The severance of Merle from his former environment had been complete.  Not yet had he come back to see them.  But Winona from church and Sunday-school brought weekly reports of his progress in the esteem of the family which he now adorned.  Harvey D. Whipple was proud of his new son; had already come to feel a real fatherhood for him, and could deny him nothing.  He was such a son as Harvey D. had hoped to have.  Old Gideon Whipple, too, was proud of his new grandson.  The stepmother, for whom Fate had been circumvented by this device of adoption, looked up to the boy and rejoiced in her roundabout motherhood, and Miss Murtree declared that he was a perfect little gentleman.  Also, by her account, he was studious, with a natural fondness for the best in literature, and betrayed signs of an intellect such as, in her confidentially imparted opinion, the Whipple family, neither in root nor branch, had yet revealed.  Patricia, the sister, had abandoned all intention of running away from home to obtain the right sort of companionship.