A solemn-looking minister, with red hair, who was present, and whose eyes twinkled some through the smoke, said to another: 

“Charlie, you remember you were completely gone on the professor’s niece who was visiting there from Poughkeepsie?  What become of her.”

Charlie put his feet on the table, struck a match on his trousers, and said: 

“Well, I wasn’t gone on her, as you say, but just liked her.  Not too well, you know, but just well enough.  She had a color of hair that I could never stand—­just the color of yours, Hank—­and when she got to going with a printer I kind of let up, and they were married.  I understand he is editing a paper somewhere in Illinois, and getting rich.  It was better for her, as now she has a place to live, and does not have to board around like a country school ma’am, as she would if she had married me.”

A dark haired man, with a coat buttoned clear to the neck, and a countenance like a funeral sermon, with no more expression than a wooden decoy duck, who was smoking a briar-wood pipe that he had picked up on a what-not that belonged to the host, knocked the ashes out in a spittoon, and said: 

“Boys, do you remember the time we stole that three-seated wagon and went out across the marsh to Kingsley’s farm, after watermelons?”

Four of them said they remembered it well enough, and Jim said all he asked was to live long enough to get even with Bill Smith, the Chicago preacher, for suggesting to him to steal a bee-hive on the trip.  “Why,” said he, “before I had got twenty feet with that hive, every bee in it had stung me a dozen times.  And do you remember how we played it on the professor, and made him believe that I had the chicken pox?  O, gentlemen, a glorious immortality awaits you beyond the grave for lying me out of that scrape.”

The fat man hitched around uneasy in his chair and said they all seemed to have forgotten the principal event of that excursion, and that was how he tried to lift a bull dog over the fence by the teeth, which had become entangled in a certain portion of his wardrobe that should not be mentioned, and how he left a sample of his trousers in the possession of the dog, and how the farmer came to the college the next day with his eyes blacked, and a piece of trousers cloth done up in a paper, and wanted the professor to try and match it with the pants of some of the divinity students, and how he had to put on a pair of nankeen pants and hide his cassimeres in the boat house until the watermelon scrape blew over and he could get them mended.

Then the small brunette minister asked if he was not entitled to some credit for blacking the farmer’s eyes.  Says he:  “When he got over the fence and grabbed the near horse by the bits, and said he would have the whole gang in jail, I felt as though something had got to be done, and I jumped out on the other side of the wagon and walked around to him and put up my hands and gave him ‘one, two, three’ about the nose, with my blessing, and he let go that horse and took his dog back to the house.”