The Captain, with great gravity, was snapping with his thumb and finger the superfluous mud with which Bose had embellished his trowsers.
"Come in here," said Mewker, chuckling and scratching his chin. "I'll get you a brush. No hurry. Time enough before the ceremony."
The Captain walked after him through the hall, and caught a glimpse of the parlors, radiant with wax-lights, and crowded with such a display of company as was rarely seen in Little-Crampton.
"Come in here," said Mewker, still chuckling, as he opened the door. "This is your room;" and he winked, and gave the bridegroom such a nudge with his knobby elbow as almost tumbled him over the bed. "Your room—understand The bridal-chamber! Wait here, now; wait here till I get a brush."
The Captain, left alone, surveyed the apartment. The pillow-cases were heavy with lace. Little tasteful vases filled with flowers, made the air drunk with fragrance; a white, worked pin-cushion was on the bureau, before an oval glass, with his own name wrought there-on in pin's heads. The astral lamp on the mantel shed a subdued and chastened light over the whole. Long windows reached to the floor, and opened on the piazza; light Venitian blinds were outside the sashes, without other fastenings that a latch. The Captain tried the windows, and they opened with a touch of his thumb and fore-finger. He had not slept in so insecure a place for more than twenty years. Then he thought of the phantom horseman, and the deep pond behind the house. He shivered a little, either from cold or timidity. The window was partially raised, so he throws it up softly, touches the latch; the blinds are open; he walks out on the piazza, and then covertly steals around to the front of the house, where he finds Shatter and the wagon, with old Jim peering through the blinds to see the wedding come off.
"Jim," he says, in a hoarse whisper, "take me hum. I aint a-goin' to sleep in such a room as that, no how."
The old boy quietly unbuckled the hitching-strap, and when Mewker got back with the brush, Shatter was flying through the mud toward the Oakery, at a three-minute gait. Two or three quick
