"I have had a stern and lonely life," thought Wade, as he blew out his
candle last night, "and what has it profited me?"

Perhaps the pioneer sunbeam answered this question with a truism, not
always as applicable as in this case,--"A brave, able, self-respecting
manhood is fair profit for any man's first thirty years of life."

But, answered or not, the question troubled Wade no more. He shot out of
bed in tip-top spirits; shouted "Merry Christmas!" at the rising disk of
the sun; looked over the black ice; thrilled with the thought of a long
holiday for skating; and proceeded to dress in a knowing suit of rough
clothes, singing, "_Ah, non giunge_!" as he slid into them.

Presently, glancing from his south window, he observed several matinal
smokes rising from the chimneys of a country-house a mile away, on a slope
fronting the river.

"Peter Skerrett must be back from Europe at last," he thought. "I hope he
is as fine a fellow as he was ten years ago. I hope marriage has not made
him a muff, and wealth a weakling."

Wade went down to breakfast with an heroic appetite. His "Merry Christmas"
to Mrs. Purtett was followed up by a ravished kiss and the gift of a
silver butter-knife. The good widow did not know which to be most charmed
with. The butter-knife was genuine, shining, solid silver, with her
initials, M.B.P., Martha Bilsby Purtett, given in luxuriant flourishes;
but then the kiss had such a fine twang, such an exhilarating titillation!
The late Perry's kisses, from first to last, had wanted point. They were,
as the Spanish proverb would put it, unsavory as unsalted eggs, for want