the famous White Mountain places. He invited the enterprise of outside
capital, and advocated a narrow-gauge road up the valley of the river
through the Notch, so as to develop the picturesque advantages of that
region. In all this, the color of mockery let the wise perceive that
Bartley saw the joke and enjoyed it, and it deepened the popular impression
of his smartness.

This vein of cynicism was not characteristic, as it would have been in
an older man; it might have been part of that spiritual and intellectual
unruliness of youth, which people laugh at and forgive, and which one
generally regards in after life as something almost alien to one's self.
He wrote long, bragging articles about Equity, in a tone bordering on
burlesque, and he had a department in his paper where he printed humorous
squibs of his own and of other people; these were sometimes copied, and in
the daily papers of the State he had been mentioned as "the funny man of
the Equity Free Press." He also sent letters to one of the Boston journals,
which he reproduced in his own sheet, and which gave him an importance that
the best endeavor as a country editor would never have won him with the
villagers. He would naturally, as the local printer, have ranked a little
above the foreman of the saw-mill in the social scale, and decidedly below
the master of the Academy; but his personal qualities elevated him over the
head even of the latter. But above all, the fact that he was studying law
was a guaranty of his superiority that nothing else could have given; that
science is the fountain of the highest distinction in a country town.
Bartley's whole course implied that he was above editing the Free Press,
but that he did it because it served his turn. That was admirable.

He sat a long time with these girls' letters before him, and lost himself
in a pensive reverie over their photographs, and over the good times he
used to have with them. He mused in that formless way in which a young