lifted it off with the grace of a grown man. "I know it's my place. But
the young lady may keep it--now. _I'd_ rather be a gentleman!" said
Dakie Thayne.

"You've got the best of it!" This came from Marmaduke Wharne, as the
door closed upon the boy, and the stage rolled down the road toward
Cherry Mountain.

There is a "best" to be got out of everything; but it is neither the
best of place or possession, nor the chuckle of the last word.




CHAPTER VII.


DOWN AT OUTLEDGE.

Among the mountains, somewhere between the Androscoggin and the Saco,--I
don't feel bound to tell you precisely where, and I have only a
story-teller's word to give you for it at all,--lies the little
neighborhood of Outledge. An odd corner of a great township such as they
measure off in these wilds; where they take in, with some eligible
"locations" of intervale land, miles also of pathless forest where the
bear and the moose are wandering still, a pond, perhaps, filling up a
basin of acres and acres in extent, and a good-sized mountain or two,
thrown in to keep off the north wind; a corner cut off, as its name
indicates, by the outrunning of a precipitous ridge of granite, round
which a handful of population had crept and built itself a group of