I began to attend to business as a student, but Henry went on with his skylarking. Dan'l Webster Smead went to work buying produce for the Boston market, and spent every evening at home. He got his wife a hired girl, and the poor woman soon had a happier look in her face. The children wore new clothes, and a touch of the buoyant spirit of the racer Montravers, now cast out of his life, soon entered the home of Smead.
Ralph Buckstone and I had become the special favorites of Appleton Hall. Florence had managed to keep me out of mischief for some time. Naturally, my love for her had led to the love of decency and honor, which meant that I must do the work set before me and keep on fairly good terms with myself. It was Florence, I am sure, who had had a like effect upon Ralph. We took no part, thereafter, in the ranker deviltry of the boys and did fairly good work in school.
One evening Ralph came to my room and told me that he had had a quarrel with his father. It seemed that a clever remark of Florence about the last spree of the Colonel had reached his ears. The Colonel, boiling with indignation, had made some slighting reference to her and all other women in the presence of his son. High words and worse had followed, in the course of which the sacred, gold-headed cane of the Colonel, presented to him by the Republican electors of the town, had been splintered in a violent gesture. The cane had been used, not for assault, but for emphasis. Ralph had been blamed by the Colonel for the loss of his temper and the loss of his cane. The great man might have forgiven the former, but the latter went beyond his power of endurance. So he turned the boy out of doors, and Ralph came directly to my room, where his father found and forgave him with great dignity in the morning, and bade him return to his home.
There was some drunken brawling in the streets by night, and now and then a memorable battle, followed by prosecution and repairs. About then Appleton Hall gave a lecture on the morals of Griggsby, which was the talk of the school and the village for a month or more. In it were the words about Daniel Webster and the first Bunker Hill oration which I quoted at the beginning of this little history. People began to wake up.