Our dear friend Captain Clapsaddle was away when my grandfather fell sick, having been North for three months or more on some business known to few.  ’Twas generally supposed he went to Massachusetts to confer with the patriots of that colony.  Hearing the news as he rode into town, he came booted and spurred to Marlboro’ Street before going to his lodgings.  I ran out to meet him, and he threw his arms about me on the street so that those who were passing smiled, for all knew the captain.  And Harvey, who always came to take the captain’s horse, swore that he was glad to see a friend of the family once again.  I told the captain very freely of my doings, and showed him the clipping from the Gazette, which made him laugh heartily.  But a shade came upon his face when I rehearsed the scene we had with my uncle and Mr. Allen in the garden.

“What,” says he, “Mr. Carvel hath sent you to Mr. Allen on your uncle’s advice?”

“No,” I answered, “to do my uncle justice, he said not a word to Mr. Carvel about it.”

The captain turned the subject.  He asked me much concerning the rector and what he taught me, and appeared but ill-pleased at that I had to tell him.  But he left me without so much as a word of comment or counsel.  For it was a principle with Captain Clapsaddle not to influence in any way the minds of the young, and he would have deemed it unfair to Mr. Carvel had he attempted to win my sympathies to his.  Captain Daniel was the first the old gentleman asked to see when visitors were permitted him, and you may be sure the faithful soldier was below stairs waiting for the summons.

I was some three weeks with my new tutor, the rector, before my grandfather’s illness, and went back again as soon as he began to mend.  I was not altogether unhappy, owing to a certain grim pleasure I had in debating with him, which I shall presently relate.  There was much to annoy and anger me, too.  My cousin Philip was forever carping and criticising my Greek and Latin, and it was impossible not to feel his sneer at my back when I construed.  He had pat replies ready to correct me when called upon, and ’twas only out of consideration for Mr. Carvel that I kept my hands from him when we were dismissed.

I think the rector disliked Philip in his way as much as did I in mine.  The Reverend Bennett Allen, indeed, might have been a very good fellow had Providence placed him in a different setting; he was one of those whom his Excellency dubbed “fools from necessity.”  He should have been born with a fortune, though I can think of none he would not have run through in a year or so.  But nature had given him aristocratic tastes, with no other means toward their gratification than good looks, convincing ways, and a certain bold, half-defiant manner, which went far with his Lordship and those like him, who thought Mr. Allen excellent good company.  With the rector, as with too many others, holy orders were but a means to an end.  It was a sealed story what he had been before he came to Governor Sharpe with Baltimore’s directions to give him the best in the colony.  But our rakes and wits, and even our solid men, like my grandfather, received him with open arms.  He had ever a tale on his tongue’s end tempered to the ear of his listener.