Wade’s last turn brought him to the very spot of his tumble.

“Ah!” said he.  “Here is the oar that tripped me, with ’Wade, his mark,’ gashed into it.  If I had not this”—­he touched Miss Damer’s handkerchief—­“for a souvenir, I think I would dig up the oar and carry it home.”

“Let it melt out and float away in the spring,” Mary said.  “It may be a perch for a sea-gull or a buoy for a drowning man.”

Here, if this were a long story instead of a short one, might be given a description of Peter Skerrett’s house and the menu of Mrs. Skerrett’s dinner.  Peter and his wife had both been to great pillory dinners, ad nauseam, and learnt what to avoid.  How not to be bored is the object of all civilization, and the Skerretts had discovered the methods.  I must dismiss the dinner and the evening, stamped with the general epithet, Perfection.

“You will join us again to-morrow on the river,” said Mrs. Skerrett, as Wade rose to go.

“To-morrow I go to town to report to my Directors.”

“Then next day.”

“Next day, with pleasure.”

Wade departed and marked this halcyon day with white chalk, as the whitest, brightest, sweetest of his life.

CHAPTER X.

FOREBODINGS.

Jubilation!  Jubilation now, instead of Consternation, in the office of
Mr. Benjamin Brummage in Wall Street.

President Brummage had convoked his Directors to hear the First
Semi-Annual Report of the new Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.

And there they sat around the green table, no longer forlorn and dreading a, failure, but all chuckling with satisfaction over their prosperity.

They were a happy and hilarious family now,—­so hilarious that the President was obliged to be always rapping to Order with his paper-knife.

Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself as a Director of so successful a Company.  The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider itself as permanent in the newspapers, and the Treasurer had very unnecessarily inserted the notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of already.

When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed the honor of having discovered Wade, or at least of having been the first to appreciate him.

They all invited him to dinner,—­the others at their houses, Sam Gwelp at his club.

They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick.  They still remembered the panic of last summer.  They passed a unanimous vote of the most complimentary confidence in Wade, approved of his system, forced upon him an increase of salary, and began to talk of “launching out” and doubling their capital.  In short, they behaved as Directors do when all is serene.

Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the absurdities of the Board and all their vague propositions.

“Dunderbunk,” said Churm, “was a company started on a sentimental basis, as many others are.”