Captain Carroll was standing on the porch with a compound look of
kindest pity and mirth on his face when the Carroll ladies came
strolling round that way from the pond. He kissed them all, as was
his wont; then he laughed out inconsequently.

"What are you laughing at, dear?" asked Amy.

"At my thoughts, sweetheart."

"What are your thoughts, daddy?" asked Charlotte.

"Thoughts I shall never tell anybody, honey," he replied, with
another laugh. And Captain Arthur Carroll never did tell.



Chapter III


History often repeats itself where one would least expect it, and the
world-old tide of human nature has a way of finding world-old
channels. Therefore it happened in Banbridge, as in ancient times,
that there was a learned barber, or perhaps, to be more strictly
accurate, a barber who thought that he was learned. He would have
been entirely ready, had his customers coincided with his views, to
have given his striped pole its old signification of the ribbon
bandage which bound the arm of a patient after bleeding, and added
surgery to his hair-cutting and his beard-shaving. John Flynn had the
courage of utter conviction as to his own ability to master all