With his salary as cashier, Lynde’s income was Vanderbiltish for a young man in Rivermouth.  Unlike his great contemporary, he did not let it accumulate.  Once a month he wrote a dutiful letter to his uncle David, who never failed to answer by telegraph, “Yours received.  God bless you, Edward.”  This whimsical fashion of reply puzzled young Lynde quite as much as it diverted him until he learned (through his friend, John Flemming) that his aunt Vivien had extorted from the old gentleman a solemn promise not to write to his nephew.

Lynde’s duties at the bank left him free every afternoon at four o’clock; his work and his leisure were equally pleasant.  In summer he kept a sail-boat on the river, and in winter he had the range of a rich collection of books connected with an antiquated public reading-room.  Thus very happily, if very quietly, and almost imperceptibly the months rolled round to that period when the Nautilus Bank gave Edward Lynde a three weeks’ vacation, and he set forth, as we have seen, on Deacon Twombly’s mare, in search of the picturesque and the peculiar, if they were to be found in the northern part of New Hampshire.

III

IN WHICH MARY TAKES A NEW DEPARTURE

It was still dark enough the next morning to allow the great chimneys to show off their colored fires effectively, when Lynde passed through the dingy main street of K—–­and struck into a road which led to the hill country.  A short distance beyond the town, while he was turning in the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five rods of his horse’s head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac as it plunged into a tunnel through a spur of the hills.  Mary went sideways, like a crab, for the next three quarters of a mile.

To most young men the expedition which Edward Lynde had undertaken would have seemed unattractive and monotonous to the last degree; but Lynde’s somewhat sedentary habits had made him familiar with his own company.  When one is young and well read and amiable, there is really no better company than one’s self—­as a steady thing.  We are in a desperate strait indeed if we chance at any age to tire of this invisible but ever-present comrade; for he is not to be thrown over during life.  Before now, men have become so weary of him, so bored by him, that they have attempted to escape, by suicide; but it is a question if death itself altogether rids us of him.