we were remiss.  He said, that, if the Bishop came to preach at Naguadavick, all the Episcopal clergy of the neighborhood were present; if Dr. Pond came, all the Congregational clergymen turned out to hear him; if Dr. Nichols, all the Unitarians; and he thought we owed it to each other, that, whenever there was an occasional service at a Sandemanian church, the other brethren should all, if possible, attend.  “It looked well,” if nothing more.  Now this really meant that I had not been to hear one of Dr. Fillmore’s lectures on the Ethnology of Religion.  He forgot that he did not hear one of my course on the “Sandemanianism of Anselm.”  But I felt badly when he said it; and afterwards I always made Dennis go to hear all the brethren preach, when I was not preaching myself.  This was what he took exceptions to,—­the only thing, as I said, which he ever did except to.  Now came the advantage of his long morning-nap, and of the green tea with which Polly supplied the kitchen.  But he would plead, so humbly, to be let off, only from one or two!  I never excepted him, however.  I knew the lectures were of value, and I thought it best he should be able to keep the connection.

Polly is more rash than I am, as the reader has observed in the outset of this memoir.  She risked Dennis one night under the eyes of her own sex.  Governor Gorges had always been very kind to us; and when he gave his great annual party to the town, asked us.  I confess I hated to go.  I was deep in the new volume of Pfeiffer’s “Mystics,” which Haliburton had just sent me from Boston.  “But how rude,” said Polly, “not to return the Governor’s civility and Mrs. Gorges’s, when they will be sure to ask why you are away!” Still I demurred, and at last she, with the wit of Eve and of Semiramis conjoined, let me off by saying, that, if I would go in with her, and sustain the initial conversations with the Governor and the ladies staying there, she would risk Dennis for the rest of the evening.  And that was just what we did.  She took Dennis in training all that afternoon, instructed him in fashionable conversation, cautioned him against the temptations of the supper-table,—­and at nine in the evening he drove us all down in the carryall.  I made the grand star-entree with Polly and the pretty Walton girls, who were staying with us.  We had put Dennis into a great rough top-coat, without his glasses,—­and the girls never dreamed, in the darkness, of looking at him.  He sat in the carriage, at the door, while we entered.  I did the agreeable to Mrs. Gorges, was introduced to her niece, Miss Fernanda,—­I complimented Judge Jeffries on his decision in the great case of D’Aulnay vs.  Laconia Mining Co.,—­I stepped into the dressing-room for a moment,—­stepped out for another,—­walked home, after a nod with Dennis, and tying the horse to a pump;—­and while I walked home, Mr. Frederic Ingham, my double, stepped in through the library into the Gorges’s grand saloon.