He had long ago compelled the admiration of the little butcher-boy.  They had been playmates together at the public school, and although the Judge’s son looked down from an infinite height upon his poor little comrade, the butcher-boy worshipped him with the deepest and most fervent adoration.  He had for him the admiring reverence which the boy who can’t lick anybody has for the boy who can lick everybody.  He was a superior being, a pattern, a model; an ideal never to be achieved, but perhaps in a crude, humble way to be imitated.  And there is no hero-worship in the world like a boy’s worship of a boy-hero.

The sight of this fortunate and adorable youth was familiar enough to the butcher-boy, but the thing he did startled and shocked that poor little workingman almost as much as if his idol had committed a capital crime right before his very eyes.  For the Judge’s son suddenly let a look into his face that meant mischief, glanced around him to see whether anybody was observing him or not, and, failing to notice the butcher-boy, quickly and dexterously changed the two baskets.  Then he went back into the house and shut the door on himself.

The butcher-boy reined up his horse and jumped from his cart.  His first impulse, of course, was to undo the shocking iniquity which the object of his admiration had committed.  But before he had walked back a dozen yards, it struck him that he was taking a great liberty in spoiling the other boy’s joke.  It was wrong, of course, he knew it; but was it for him to rebuke the wrong-doing of such an exalted personage?  If the Judge’s son came out again, he would see that his joke had miscarried, and then he would be displeased.  And to the butcher-boy it did not seem right in the nature of things that anything should displease the Judge’s son.  Three times he went hesitatingly backward and forward, trying to make up his mind, and then he made it up.  The king could do no wrong.  Of course he himself was doing wrong in not putting the baskets back where they belonged; but then he reflected, he took that sin on his own humble conscience, and in some measure took it off the conscience of the Judge’s son—­if, indeed, it troubled that lightsome conscience at all.  And, of course, too, he knew that, being an apprentice, he would be whipped for it when the substitution was discovered.  But he didn’t mind being whipped for the boy he worshipped.  So he drove out along the road; and the wife of the poor shipping-merchant, coming to the back-door, and finding the basket full of good things, and noticing especially the beautiful China oranges, naturally concluded that her husband’s ship had come in, and that he had provided his family with a rare treat.  And the Judge, when he came home to dinner, and Mrs. Judge introduced him to the rump-steak and potatoes—­but I do not wish to make this story any more pathetic than is necessary.

A few months after this episode, perhaps indirectly in consequence of it—­I have never been able to find out exactly—­the Judge’s son, my wife’s uncle, ran away to sea, and for many years his recklessness, his strength, and his good looks were only traditions in the family, but traditions which he himself kept alive by remembrances than which none could have been more effective.