There wasn’t much to go on, to be sure.  Great events no longer considered it worth their while to honor so quiet a place.

One Fourth of July the Temple Grammar School burnt down—­set on fire, it was supposed, by an eccentric squib that was seen to bolt into an upper window—­and Mr. Grimshaw retired from public life, married, “and lived happily ever after,” as the story-books say.

The Widow Conway, I am able to state, did not succeed in enslaving Mr. Meeks, the apothecary, who united himself clandestinely to one of Miss Dorothy Gibbs’s young ladies, and lost the patronage of Primrose Hall in consequence.

Young Conway went into the grocery business with his ancient chum, Rodgers—­Rodgers & Conway!  I read the sign only last summer when I was down in Rivermouth, and had half a mind to pop into the shop and shake hands with him, and ask him if he wanted to fight.  I contented myself, however, with flattening my nose against his dingy shop-window, and beheld Conway, in red whiskers and blue overalls, weighing out sugar for a customer—­giving him short weight, I’ll bet anything!

I have reserved my pleasantest word for the last.  It is touching the Captain.  The Captain is still hale and rosy, and if he doesn’t relate his exploit in the War of 1812 as spiritedly as he used to, he makes up by relating it more frequently and telling it differently every time!  He passes his winters in New York and his summers in the Nutter House, which threatens to prove a hard nut for the destructive gentleman with the scythe and the hour-glass, for the seaward gable has not yielded a clapboard to the eastwind these twenty years.  The Captain has now become the Oldest Inhabitant in Rivermouth, and so I don’t laugh at the Oldest Inhabitant any more, but pray in my heart that he may occupy the post of honor for half a century to come!

So ends the Story of a Bad Boy—­but not such a very bad boy, as I told you to begin with.