The boys ask with glowing cheeks if there is a river at Crochettown, and are thrown into ecstasy by the reply that a large steamboat touches there twice a week, and that there is a drawbridge.  We are less interested in the statement that the schools are good, but hear with delight the history of one Dumple, an innkeeper, who persecutes our church and sells quantities of “rum” to our young men.  William, the son of Wiggins, our predecessor, was once seen in the bar-room and reported to his father, who fetched him home by posse comitatus, and found that he smelled strongly of soda water.

As we go along the road in this way, our furniture mean time having been shipped by water, a very compact and knotty young man rides up behind us upon a nag which we at once identify as church property.  The sleekness of the flanks betokens his conversance with other people’s corn-cribs, and he has a habit of shying at all the farm-house gates as if habituated to stopping whenever he liked and staying to dinner.  His Perseus has a semi-gallant, semi-verdant way of lifting his hat, and his voice is hard as his knuckles.

“Woa, Sal!” he says (all preachers drive mares, it may be interpolated), “have I the pleasure of addressing Brother Ryder?”

“The same, sir.”

“My name is Chough, sir; the annual Conference has done me the favor of associating my name with yours at Swan Neck.”

“Oh, ho!  You are my colleague; my wife, Brother Chough!”

The wife runs Brother Chough over immediately, who looks very red and awkward, and she gives her estimate of him in an undertone.  It will be bad for Chough if he is at all airish or scholastic, or individual in his opinions, for between a senior pastor’s wife and his young assistant there is an hereditary distrust; conceit has no show at all in a young itinerant.

But Chough wisely confines his remarks to asking questions about the bishops, and agrees with us that Doctor Bim’s address on the church extension cause was sound as the Fathers, and finally gives us his own extraction, which we trace to the respectable Choughs of Caroline County, and at once fraternize with him.

Those were happy days for us children!  Cornfield and barn and negro quarter rolled by us like things of fable.  We watched the squirrels in the scrubwood as never again we shall take interest in human companionship, and stopped at farm-house troughs to water our nag with keener joy than that with which we have since gazed upon far blue seas or soft cis-alpine lakes and rivers.

At last we reach the place; the complement of free negro cabins lies on its outskirts; we ask the way to the Methodist preacher’s residence, and learning with feigned surprise that “he has just gone an’ lef town for good,” cross a sandy creek and bridge, climb a hill, and stop at our future threshold.

It is an ancient edifice of brick; a pigmy stable stands beside it, with a gate intervening, and in the rear we have a lot big enough to graze one frugal horse, and a garden sufficiently large to employ us boys.  Our father starts off immediately to find the keys; but in the face of a gathering of small lads in pinafores and jack-knives, who come to gaze at us, we scale the gate, enter a back shutter, and cry a welcome to our mother from the second-story front.