Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/152

142 and dispirited men lounged on the tavern steps with that look of fossilized idleness which is peculiar to rural New England. In other countries, idlers look as if they were idling because they liked it; or perhaps because illness or lack of employment had forced, them to idle; but the New England idler, on the steps of his native tavern, or by the stove of his native "store," looks as if he had been there since the prehistoric ages, and had no more volition or interest in his situation than a pterodactyl five hundred feet under ground.

Spite of the rain, I had persisted in riding on the outside of the stage. I took a perverse pleasure in being wet through, and chilled to the marrow. I remember I even thought that I hoped I should take cold and have a rheumatic fever, so that the President might see what had come of sending a fellow down into Maine to spend a winter. Jim Ordway, my chum, had been rusticated with me. His offense was simply calling the President an "inhuman old fool" to his face, on hearing of my sentence of rustication. Jim was a warm-hearted fellow. I have always wondered I did not love him better. He was snug and warm inside the coach, and had been exasperating me all day by breaking out into snatches of the old college songs. For the last hour he had been quiet, and when I sprang down from the top of the coach, and called loudly to him, "Come, jump out, old fellow! Here we are, and an infernal hole it