THE Judge rode slowly up the valley of the Kennebec on his way to County Court at Norridgewock. There were not wanting stagecoaches between the state capital and his destination, and in the stable of his sumptuous home, in the suburbs of Maine’s largest city, were coach and pair far more in keeping with the judicial dignity than the sturdy bay beneath him and the worn saddlebags which formed a part of his modest equipment. Legal gentlemen whom the Judge encountered in his journey surveyed him with surprise not unmingled with disapproval. Had he not been chosen from among themselves to uphold with dignity the legal majesty and honor of the whole state ? Yet here he was, traveling like a country lawyer, without attendant, and in mudspattered raiment.

The Judge, unconscious of criticism, rode on in humility of spirit such as he had not known in the three years he had sat upon the judicial bench. Not political preference, but personal integrity joined with brilliancy of mind, had won for him the highest honors in his state’s bestowal, and Judge Preston had accepted them as a call to higher duties, yet with unbiased recognition of his own worth. To-day, riding leisurely along the fragrant valley, with the wide river glistening upon his right, and rounded hills of pasture, field, and woodland rising above him on the left, he questioned for the first time his fitness for the high position. The Judge was on his way to hold court for the first time in his native county. He glanced downward at himself, as the bay horse, with drooping head, climbed the long hill, from the summit of which the village of Bloomfield would be visible, and hastily removed his riding gloves, while the reins lay loosely upon the horse’s neck. “I should n’t want them to feel I had grown stuck up,” the Judge assured himself, falling unconsciously into the vernacular of his younger days. He put the gloves on again in a moment; for the white hand, with its finger ring of gold, bore no resemblance to the sturdy brown fist which had been wont to hold the plough or hoe handle for hours of each summer morning, before its owner walked cheerily along this same road to study at Bloomfield Academy. Indeed, the hand emphasized far more forcibly than did the glove the change which years had brought. The Judge sighed, but lifted his head a moment later to recall, with boyish enthusiasm long unknown, a woodchuck hole in yonder wall, and hastily repelled an inclination to dismount. His eyes, grown keen in long study of human faces, rested upon the blossoming orchard beyond the wall, passing over the “cider apple trees ” nearest the road to the well-remembered “summer sweetings ” farther on. The Judge’s mouth watered. “I wish it was three months later, ” he declared to his bay horse with unjudicial fervor.

He drew rein for a moment on the summit. The village had grown halfway up the hills; one church spire was missing from the old common, while two, which were strangers to the Judge, pointed heavenward from the Island. Columns of smoke marked the enterprises which had changed the quiet country village of his remembrance to a bustling manufacturing town. The Judge remembered, with a homesick pang, that old Bloomfield was Bloomfield no longer, but had become merged in one with its sister town across the river, under another name. “I won’t stop here an hour,” he determined with resentment quite foreign to the calm brain, whose freedom from emotional qualities was believed by his colleagues to be the secret of Judge Preston’s unerring judgment. Stiffly erect he rode down the long hill into the village, but resentment softened into retrospection as he went.

There was the old mill by Courrier Brook, where a barefoot boy upon a gaunt white horse had gone with grist; and beyond it the shady river bank, where a student had sat with lunch and books through the sunny hour of noon. He stopped his horse before a square building, the second story of which had once been the public hall. From its cobwebbed windows notes from long past singing-schools seemed to echo. The Judge looked slowly up to its roof in some disappointment. “ I thought it was higher,” he said in a puzzled tone.

A low room over the village cobbler’s shop had been his first law office. The whole building, it appeared, was now occupied as a dwelling, and a pile of bedding protruded from the window, behind which he had sat in delicious idleness, all unappreciated in those days, waiting for clients.

Faces from open doorways and upon the street surveyed the traveler with mild curiosity, but without sign of recognition. Upon some of them the Judge thoughtfully traced family resemblances to former townsmen, and struggled with his mental arithmetic to determine whether they might be acquaintances of his youth or another generation who knew him not. He stopped suddenly before a low brown house where a gray-haired man was sawing wood in a spiritless manner. “That’s Hiram Jennings!” decided the Judge without hesitation. “ I should have known him anywhere. ” But when the sawyer, with an air of one quite willing to delay his work, came toward the gate, the Judge, embarrassed, turned his head aside, and humbly inquired the way to Norridgewock, over a road which he and Hiram Jennings had traveled side by side upon many a youthful excursion. He rode on thoughtfully.

The wood sawyer had been the only pupil who outranked himself at the Academy, whose brick walls shone through the foliage on yonder hill. “ He seems satisfied enough, ” the Judge assured himself. “ May be he ’s never realized any difference, and I should n’t want to be the one to remind him of it now that it’s years too late.”

The village was behind him now, and spires of the county seat five miles beyond rose among the hills. The Judge stopped by a watering-trough in the cool shadow of the woodland and looked absently about him. A moment later he dismounted with a half-guilty air; there was no one in sight, — even the bay horse, with nose buried deeply in the clear water, was intent upon his own refreshment. Judge Preston sat upon a mossy knoll while his white fingers searched eagerly among the leaves, and forgot for a moment all his hardly acquired stores of legal knowledge as he tasted “young iv’ries ” for the first time in thirty years. There was a crimson Benjamin in the buttonhole of his coat as he rose to mount his horse again. Then, for the first time, he heard the sound of voices at a little distance, and caught, behind a screen of birch trees, the flutter of a muslin dress. A tall young man approached him bashfully, drawing with him a seemingly reluctant maiden, whose cheeks rivaled the pink roses in her summer bonnet.

“ I did n’t know but what you might be a lawyer, ” the young man explained.

Judge Preston assented. “Why, yes, I suppose I am — a kind of lawyer, ” he said.

“Lawyer enough to marry folks? ” persisted the youth eagerly, while the girl’s color deepened.

“ Oh yes, ” the Judge responded readily. It was exactly a quarter of a century since he first performed a marriage ceremony in the low-ceiled office down yonder, but it seemed like yesterday as he recalled it. The girl had had pink cheeks and a summer dress like this one. Looking closer, he observed that this one, too, had been crying, and wondered if it were an emotion common to brides. The Judge himself had never married.

“You see,” the bridegroom said in a confidential tone, “we walked out to the Falls this afternoon to get the thing fixed up. But Elder Hook was down with measles, which we ain’t neither of us ever had, and the Baptist minister ’d gone to Augusty to tend a funeral, — some connection of his, I understood. Wa’n’t it, Miny? ”

“His wife’s cousin,” supplemented the bride. “He died with fever real sudden they said.”

“I wish’t he ’d waited,” declared the young man regrettully. “We thought of goin’ to Squire Clark, but he tried a lawsuit against Miny’s father once, and besides, havin’ made up our minds to a religious weddin’, we could n’t seem to bring ’em down to a legal one.”

“I see,” said the Judge thoughtfully. The maiden wiped her eyes.

“ She’s all tired out, ” the bridegroom explained. “ We ought to rode, but my gray colt was lame, and both our folks was ploughin’. Miny would n’t minded the walk commonly, but she set up late last night to finish her dress, and stood to the cake-board all the mornin’ rollin’ pie-crust and mixin’ dough for a little kind of house warmin’ we was goin’ to have to-night. The fuss and furbelows that goes with gettin’ married nowadays is terrible wearin’ on womenfolks. Well, we got back here, and she was so tired what with the disappointment and all, we stopped to rest. And it kind of come over us that here we’d had all that walk for nothin’, and notellin’ when it could come off, for they said Elder Tyler might stop over to visit a spell; and here we wa’n’t married after all, and all that stuff cooked up, and the folks invited, to say nothin’ of a grass stain on Miny’s dress, which could n’t never be bran span new again. ’T wa’n’t any wonder she could n’t help but cry, and though she wa’n’t blamin’ me, you know how it is, Squire, when a woman cries, — a man feels as if he was all to blame. We was both wishin’ we ’d let Lawyer Clark have the job in spite of the lawsuit. Then you come. You looked so kind of human settin’ there eatin’ young iv’ries that I says to Miny, says I, ‘That ’s our chance. He ’s a lawyer on his way to court, which sets to-morrow,’ says I.” He drew a folded paper from his pocket. “ Will you marry us, Squire ? ”

The Judge considered, running his eyes over the document, which assured him that no impediment existed to a union between John Strong and Elmina Foster.

“The lack of witnesses seems to be the only objection,” he said.

The bridegroom’s face fell. “ I forgot that,” he said. “Tom Hicks and Luella Savage went with us, but when they found it wa’n’t comin’ off they did n’t feel like wastin’ the whole afternoon, so they went off pleasurin’ on their own account with peanuts and lemonade for treat. Well, that spoils it all, and I guess we might’s well give up for this time.”

Elmina put away her handkerchief, smoothed down her dress, and adjusted the lace ties of her bonnet. “Nimrod Weston and his brother was pullin’ stumps in the next field when we come down,” she suggested shyly.

They walked along the smooth woodland road, the Judge following the pair with the bay horse’s bridle across his arm.

“It won’t be a religious weddin’, after all, ” John Strong suggested doubtfully. “You ’re sure you ain’t goin’ to mind that when it’s too late, Miny? ”

Miny cast an appealing look toward the Judge. “You don’t ever make a prayer when you — marry folks — do you ? ” she asked.

Judge Preston hesitated; the legal world would not have called him a praying man, and the substantial check he gave each year to the support of a city church was believed to throw all burden of his spiritual development upon his pastor. Still, he reflected, he had never yet joined two undying souls in the bonds of matrimony without feeling himself an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty. “We ’ll see,” he said whimsically. “Out here in the Temple of Nature it may be the Creator is near enough to hear even a lawyer’s prayer.” He stopped in the road a moment later, as vigorous shouts indicated that the witnesses they sought were near at hand. Habitual reserve suddenly overcame Judge Preston. “We need not detain your neighbors from their work for that part of it, ” he explained. “Let us have the prayer first.

“O Lord, ” he prayed, standing bareheaded in the shadow of an aged pine tree, “bless this couple waiting now before thy judgment seat. May they live their earthly life in unselfish devotion one to the other, training their descendants to righteous living and good citizenship, at peace with their neighbors, and in fear of Thee. Let the union about to be consummated be not for time, but for eternity. Amen.”

The Weston brothers cheerfully left their ropes and oxen to lean blackened hands upon the stone wall. Nimrod’s admiring eyes were fixed upon Elmina’s face as she stood by the roadside beneath a wild cherry tree in full bloom, but the brother, with increasing respect, studied Judge Preston’s face. It was not until the ceremony was over, and the Judge, having received the proffered fee only to slip it into the bride’s hand with a gold piece from his own pocket, had ridden on his way, that the elder Weston turned to the newly married pair.

“You ’re a modest couple, you two,” he said derisively. “The best ain’t none too good for yer. That was Judge Preston, that was. I saw him oncet when I was workin ’ in a saw mill down to Bangor, and a feller that got killed sued for damages, — leastways his folks did, —and I ’ll stump any man that ’s seen Judge Preston oncet not to know him again.”

John Strong looked after the cloud of dust with crestfallen face. “ I guess he thinks we ’re cheeky,” he said.

Elmina serenely polished the gold piece with her handkerchief. “There has n’t any of the girls I know ever been married by a judge,” she said with satisfaction. “And nobody can say it was n’t a religious weddin’, either, for there is n’t a minister in Somerset County could have made a better prayer.”

The Judge rode on. Long afternoon shadows were beginning to rest upon the landscape, bringing the traveler pleasant reminder that the end of his journey was near at hand. His wandering attention fixed itself again upon matters professional, as he wondered just what work awaited him in the old courthouse across the river where he had tried and won his first case. The bay horse shied suddenly, and the Judge looked down at a small boy industriously digging by the wayside. “Dandelion greens, ” he remarked with inspired recollection. “I believe I should like some for supper.”

Ten cents for the greens and twentyfive for the pail which held them effected a purchase, and a little later the lawyers of the county, who had already arrived at the Norridgewock Hotel, stared in amazement as the travelstained Judge rode up to the door, bearing his supper upon the saddle before him.

“You need n’t have brought provisions, ” the offended landlady remarked. “There’s stewed chicken and pound cake for supper, and roasts in plenty for to-morrow.”

The Judge looked penitent. “Madam,” he said, “the fame of your house is too widespread to allow a doubt of its abundance. But I have n’t tasted dandelion greens for twenty years.”

It was, perhaps, a fortunate circumstance for Judge Preston that the first cases brought before him were suits which included some intricate problems of legal rights and demanded his close attention, for he found himself, even while losing no word of testimony or plea, absently assigning the jury to various families of the region. And the prosecuting attorney conceived a lifelong prejudice when the Judge smiled broadly in the midst of his most eloquent plea, never dreaming that the smile was occasioned by the memory of a practical joke which the “boys ” of Bloomfield had once played upon the maternal grandfather of the jury’s foreman.

When the first criminal trial began, the Judge awoke from absent-minded retrospection to vivid interest in the proceedings. His keen eyes missed no varying expression upon the face of witness or attorney, and the prisoner, a young man of twenty, became the object of his thoughtful scrutiny. More than once he interrupted a witness with an irrelevant personal inquiry as to his ancestry or family connection.

The prisoner, on the testimony of two eyewitnesses, was easily proved guilty of repeated thefts from a neighbor’s granary; his attorney made a weak and faltering defense, which did as much to convict his client as the opposing lawyer’s triumphant prosecution.

Judge Preston arose to give his charge to the jury, his eyes resting thoughtfully upon the prisoner. “Young man,” he asked, “was n’t your father Ezekiel Meecham who married Maria Comstock? ”

The prisoner nodded sullenly.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” continued the Judge, “you know the prisoner’s ancestry. You know the Comstocks were honest enough, but too shiftless to cook the food the neighbors gave them, and you know that the Meechams as a family possessed an unusual and most singular combination of qualities which would lead them to steal anything they could get their hands on, while at the same time they would n ’ t tell a lie to save their lives. ”

The audience looked interested. There were emphatic nods of agreement throughout the room. The Judge turned to the prisoner.

“Young man,” he said again, “you have pleaded not guilty as a legal technicality and by advice of your counsel. Now tell me the truth. Did you commit these thefts, or did you not? ”

The prisoner hesitated. “I took some popcorn — once, ” he admitted, with an anxious glance toward his counsel. “We was havin’ a bonfire on the Island, and ’t was too fur to go home. But I never went again, nor took another thing, I don’t care what they say.”

“I believe you, ” replied Judge Preston, adding, as the boy took his seat, “Of course, gentlemen of the jury, I do not advise you to acquit the prisoner of later charges upon his own testimony. Neither do I expect that you will convict him on the testimony we have heard, without taking into consideration the well-known fact that Charles M. Finley’s grandfather was a great man to jump at conclusions, and the Gateses as a family were so near of sight that they could n’t be depended upon to tell a colt from a calf at ten rods’ distance in broad daylight, not to mention moonlight. The charge against the prisoner is for breaking and entering, which offense he has by his own confession once committed. It is your manifest duty to find him guilty, remembering, while you do not countenance the practice, that the boys of Somerset County have been accustomed to make free with their neighbors’ popcorn and sweet apples from the time we ourselves were boys.”

Fifteen minutes later the foreman of the jury arose to give the verdict. “We find the prisoner guilty of the popcorn just as he says,” he announced, “but not of the oats and corn that was missed afterwards. We figure that a family that never owned a hoss would n’t have no use for oats, and the Judge’s charge was n’t necessary to remind us that no descendant of the Comstocks was n’t likely to steal corn which had got to be shelled.”

The Judge beamed with approval upon the jury, then addressed himself to the audience.

“I suppose you are all thinking,” he said slowly, “that there is n’t much hope for a young man made up of Comstock and Meecham in equal parts, and he might as well be in jail where he can’t steal as out of jail where he ’s liable to. You may be right. But you will remember, as I do, that Ezekiel Meecham’s maternal grandfather was an honorable and God-fearing man, and as I have watched the prisoner these last two days his resemblance to that ancestor has grown upon me. I believe there ’s the making of a good citizen in him, and the state can’t afford to lose it by fixing the jail-mark upon him at his age. Therefore, instead of sentencing him to a term of imprisonment, I condemn him to pay one hundred dollars fine and the costs of this trial, and to be committed to jail until such fine is paid.”

“It practically amounts to imprisonment for life, ” the sheriff declared, lingering in the room after court adjourned for the day. “No Meecham livin’ ever saw a hundred dollars all to once.” But the Judge, standing erect and dignified by the clerk’s desk, was counting crisp bills from a well-filled pocketbook.

“ I have paid your fine, ” he explained a moment later to the embarrassed but grateful prisoner. “One hundred and thirty-eight dollars in all. You can repay me at your leisure.”

Ruel Meecham flushed angrily at the laugh which arose. “I hope to die if I don’t pay it,” he declared. “You fellows just wait and see.”

There was no lack of dignity upon Judge Preston’s part as he sat in the judicial seat listening to the last case of the term. The fragrance of lilacs and early roses floated through the open window, and the blue river, only a few yards distant, was filled with a surging mass of brown logs, which indicated that “ the drive ” had reached Norridgewock. But neither beauty of nature nor the skillful gymnastics of red-shirted river drivers had power to distract the Judge’s attention from his work. The courtroom was crowded, for the case of Deborah B. Gilman against Lysander R. Gilman had attracted wide attention, and the sympathy of the whole county round about was divided between the nervous little woman suing for divorce, after a quarter century of married life, and the bluff, hard-handed farmer who admitted in aggrieved tone that he shared his wife’s desire for separation, but “did n’t want it made to look as if he was the only one to blame.”

It was an old story. Judge Preston in his legal career had heard it many times before. An overworked, colorless life for the woman, ending in irritated nerves and fretful complaining, which aroused the man to indignant retaliation. “Incompatibility of temperament ” was the plea advanced by the youthful attorney of the wife. The jury had been dismissed, and their places were crowded with interested spectators. The wife’s relatives upon one side of the room glared at the husband’s family connections upon the other. Judge Preston listened without question or comment to long examinations and crossexaminations of neighbors, relatives, and friends. Deborah Gilman, it appeared from the testimony her counsel introduced, had turned her dresses and re-trimmed her bonnets, growing shabbier each year; had discontinued neighborly visits because “the team” was always needed for farm work; had cheerfully donated butter and egg money to the purchase of new farmingtools, and performed her housework all “by hand,” while her husband rejoiced in labor-saving implements for out-ofdoor work. The principal witness in her behalf was the hired man, a loquacious individual, with oiled hair and a red necktie.

“ I never see a woman have a harder time,” Seth Jackson declared. “He wa’n’t never willin’ for her to go nowhere nor have nothin’. ” When pressed for more specific information Seth’s testimony was largely interspersed with “I told hers ” and “said she to mes.”

Lysander Gilman sat with crimson face, and eyes fixed upon the floor, during the long recital of his wife’s wrongs. The plaintiff sobbed hysterically. “ It’s worse ’n I thought come to tell it out in court, ” she declared.

When the defense opened Lysander Gilman drew a long breath of relief, and as it proceeded his head became more erect. “Lysander never had new clothes, neither,” a neighbor declared. “Lots of times he coaxed her to go to the Grange, and she would n’t, because she ’d rather stay to home and hook rugs. She was hookin’ from mornin’ till night when she could get a minute, and a good part of the egg money she spent for colorin’ stuff. All the money they saved was put in the bank in her name. Mebbe they ain’t lived very peaceful together, but Deborah’s just as much to blame as Lysander.”

Judge Preston offered no comment when, as principal witness for the defense, Seth Jackson was called. Seth, bent upon doing his full duty in every relation of life, made quite as strong a witness for the defendant’s cause as he had for the plaintiff.

“She never give him a pleasant word from mornin’ till night,” he asserted. “Naggin’ and twittin’, which is worse ’n downright scoldin’. Many’s the time I ’ve said to him, ’I would n’t stand it,’ says I.”

The late afternoon sun streamed through elm branches into the dusty courtroom as, testimony and pleas concluded, Judge Preston rose in his place.

“You may have shown,” he said addressing the two counsel, “abundant reason why the law should grant divorce to the two petitioners now before this tribunal. But it is an impossible petition for this Court to grant. I married this couple myself down in Bloomfield just twenty-five years ago. I married them good and strong in the fear of the Lord, and in the presence of two reliable witnesses, both of whom are here present to-day. I did n’t marry them for a quarter of a century, or a half of a century, but for whatsoever time of mortal life should be given, until death did them part. What God and Ebenezer Preston have joined together, Ebenezer Preston, alone and single-handed, is n’t going to put asunder.

“ Lysander Gilman and Deborah Gilman stand up, ” the Judge demanded. The two rose uncertainly in their places; neither looked toward the other. “Join hands,” the Judge continued sternly. There was a moment’s hesitation, then the two came nearer together, and Deborah’s thin fingers slipped nervously into Lysander’s sunburned palm. “I sentence you both,” declared the Judge, “to go back to your home and live the remainder of your lives in peace and affection one towards the other. Lysander, as you go through Bloomfield village, you stop and buy your wife a white bonnet with pink roses. It may not be the height of fashion for women of her age to-day, but it ’s what she needs. And then you buy a pound of peppermints such as you had in your pocket on your wedding day, and you two eat every one of them on the way out home. Deborah, you go home and make hot biscuit for supper, and to-morrow morning you put away that rug-hook forevermore. Hereafter, when your housework is done, and there ’s nowhere to go, you sit out under the trees and read, or work in the flower-garden. But, first of all, and before you leave this room, Lysander, you discharge that hired man.”

The Judge rode down the valley next morning in the same humility of spirit in which he had come. His eyes rested thoughtfully on the low windows of his first office as he passed swiftly through his native town.

“ They think that earthly prominence means increase of power,” he mused. “But I have lived to learn that it means only increased responsibility. Well, Hiram Jennings has finished that woodpile. I wonder which of us finds the greater satisfaction in the completion of his task. I should n’t wonder if it were he — that wood is well worked up.”

Harriet A. Nash.