THE Wick family had run the usual course of families for many, many years, and was quite old and respectable when causes, natural and extraordinary, none of them being pertinent to this statement, reduced said family to three members, viz:

Miss Angelica Sudbury Wick, of the Boston branch of the family, who lived in the house of her guardian, old Jonas Thatcher, with whom we have no further concern, and who is therefore to be considered as turned down, although in his day he was a highly respected leather merchant. Miss Angelica Wick was fair and sweet and good up to the last requirement of young womanhood.

Mr. Winkelman Hempstead Wick, of the Long Island branch of the family, a distant cousin of the young lady, and a young man of conscientious mind, an accountant by profession, and very nearly ready to buy out his employer.

Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick, also of the Long Island branch of the family, the grand-uncle of young Winkelman, who had brought up the young man in his own house, and who loved him more than anything else in the world, until, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, he fell in love with, and married a lady named Louisa Nasmyth Pine, whom we will dismiss from consideration as we dismissed the old leather merchant, although she was a most estimable and attractive lady, and did fancy embroidery extremely well. Her only concern with this story is that she bore the elder Mr. Wick a baby, and died three or four months subsequently. But that was enough; plenty; as much as was necessary.

The way that marriage came about was this: old Mr. Wick wanted to see the Wick family perpetuated, but young Mr. Wick was one of those cautious, careful, particular men who get to be old bachelors before they know it. No girl whom he knew was quite exactly what he wanted. If she had been, she would have been too good for any man on earth. In fact, it took young Mr. Wick a number of years to realize that any way he could marry, he could only marry a human being like himself. In the meanwhile his grand-uncle grew impatient; and finally he said that if Winkelman didn’t fix on a girl and get her to agree to marry him by the first of next January, he, Aaron Bushwick Wick, would marry somebody himself. Miss Louisa Nasmyth Pine, being then close on to forty, helped him to get under the line just in time to save his grand-nephew from engaging himself to an ill-tempered widow with five children—which is the kind of woman that those particular men generally pick up in the end. And it serves them right.

And so this marriage brought into existence the baby—Beatrice Brighton Wick.

Old Mr. Wick’s endeavors to hand the name of Wick down to posterity were crowned, as you see, with only partial success. He had a Wick, it was true, but it was a Wick that would be put out by marriage. He found himself obliged to fall back on young Winkelman, and he bethought himself of the distant cousin in Boston. He knew nothing of her, but he reasoned that if she were a Wick, she must be everything that was lovely and desirable; and so he said to his grand-nephew:

Winkelman Wick knew that his grand-uncle was a man of his word, and that “all that sort of thing” meant a very, very comfortable sort of thing, for the old gentleman was rich and had liberal ideas, and drank more port than was good for him. He had no fancy for marrying a strange girl, but he thought there could be no harm in going out to Boston and taking a look at his, so far, distant cousin. Under pretense of wanting to write up the Wick genealogy, he went to Boston, and passed some time under Mr. Thatcher’s hospitable roof. He found Angelica Wick all that his fancy might have painted her but hadn’t; and, as Mr. Thatcher had six daughters of his own, all of them older than Angelica, and none so good-looking, he did not find any difficulty in inducing his pretty cousin to marry him—and she did not back out even when he sprung the baby contract on her. She said that she was a true woman and that she would stand by him, but that she thought it might be a little awkward. Feminine intuition is a wonderful thing. When it is right, it is apt to be right.

The elder Mr. Wick was as good as his word,—only, as is often the case with people who pride themselves upon being as good as their word, he took his own word too seriously. He died of apoplexy shortly after landing at Liverpool. His will, however, was probated in New York, and thus escaped a legacy tax. The will fully carried out every promise he had made to his young kinsman, but he had drawn it to follow absolutely the terms of his proposition. He had never for an instant contemplated the possibility of his dying before he wanted to—people who make their wills very rarely do—and he had so drawn the document that Mr. and Mrs. Winkelman Wick could come into their inheritance only after carrying out their part of the contract, which was to take care of their aunt, baby Beatrice Brighton Wick, for the space of four years, during which Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick had intended, without consideration of the designs of Divine Providence, to sojourn in Europe.

This brings the situation exactly down to bed-rock. On the tenth of April, eighteen hundred and tumty-tum, Mr. Winkelman Wick and Miss Angelica Wick were married in the old Wick house on Montague Street, Brooklyn. On the twenty-fifth of April Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick ended his journey across the Atlantic at the Port of Liverpool, England. On the twenty-seventh of April he started on that other journey for which your heirs pay your passage money—and he certainly was not happy in his starting place. On the twenty-eighth of the same month young Mr. and Mrs. Wick knew the terms of their grand-uncle’s will; and on the thirtieth the old Wick mansion was in the hands of the trustees, and the young Wicks were in a hotel in charge of their baby-aunt, Beatrice, who was herself in charge of an aged Irishwoman, whose feet were decidedly more intelligent than her brain. That is one of the beauties of Ireland. You can get every variety of human being there from a cherub to a chimpanzee.

They were very comfortable in the hotel, and would have liked to stay there, but that awful contract had as many ways of making itself disagreeable as an octopus has. They had pledged themselves, with and for the benefit of the baby, to provide a suitable place in the country without unreasonable delay. Their lawyer informed them that reasonable delay meant three weeks and not one day more. As their contract began on the tenth of April, they had, therefore, one day left to them to carry out this provision. Moreover, the contract, after defining the phrase “a suitable country place” in terms that would have fitted a selling advertisement of the Garden of Eden, went on to specify that no place should be considered suitable that was not at least forty miles from any city of twenty thousand inhabitants, or upward. When Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick wanted pure country air for a baby, he wanted it pure. If he could, he would probably have had it brought in sealed bottles.

Picking a place of residence for four long years is not an agreeable task under conditions such as these, especially to a young couple prematurely saddled with parental cares, and equipped with only twenty days of experience in the matrimonial state. They discussed the situation for hours on end. Mrs. Wick wept, and Mr. Wick contributed more profanity than is generally used by a green husband. They even asked the Irish nurse if she could not suggest some suitable place, and they stated the whole situation to her very clearly and carefully. She thought a while, and then suggested Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland. However, indirectly, she assisted them to solve the problem. Mr. Wick told her to go to Jericho; and Mrs. Wick suddenly brightened up and said:

“Why, that’s so, Winkelman!”

Mr. Wick stared in horror at his wife. Was the sweet young thing going crazy under the strain? But no; Mrs. Wick was looking as bright as a rose after an April shower, and she grew brighter and brighter as she stood thinking in silence, nodding her pretty head affirmatively, pursing her lips, and checking off the various stages of her thought with her finger tip on her cheek. Finally she said:

“And you could use the little room for a dressing room. Yes, dear, I’m quite certain it will do beautifully.”

After a while Mr. Wick convinced his wife that he was not a mind-reader, and then he got some information. Of course she did not stay convinced—no woman ever did. All women think that the mechanism of their thought is visible like a model in a glass case.

Mrs. Wick had forgotten that she herself owned a country house. This was more excusable than it seems on the face of it, for she had never seen the house, nor had she ever expected to see it. In fact, it was hardly to be called a house; it was only a sort of bungalow or pavilion which had once belonged to a club of sportsmen, and which her father had taken for a bad debt. It was situated in the village of Jericho, of which she knew nothing more than that her father had said that it was a good place for trout, and was accessible by several different railroads. Concerning the house itself she was better informed. She had had to copy the plans of its interior on many occasions when her guardian had made futile efforts to sell or to rent it. She also knew that the place was fully furnished, and that an old woman lived in it as care-taker, rent free, and liable to be dispossessed at any moment.

The nurse was told that they would go to Jericho with her. She only asked would the baby take her bottle now or wait till she got there?

* * *

Jericho Junction is one of those lonely and forsaken little stopping-places on the outskirts of the great woods that are the sportsman’s paradise, with a dreary, brown-painted, pine box, just big enough for the ticket agent, the baggage master, the telegraph operator, the flagman, the local postmaster, and the casual or possible intending passenger. As this makes two persons in all, the structure is not large.

The casual passenger and the full corps of local railway officials were both present at Jericho Junction when the 6:30 P. M. train loomed out of the dreary, raw May twilight, and drew up in front of the little box. Now, these two occupants of the tiny station were neighbors but not friends. Farmer Byam Beebe lived “a piece back in the country, over t’wards Ellenville South Farms.” Mr. John D. Wilkins, station agent, telegraph operator, and all the rest of the functionaries of Jericho Junction, dwelt in his little box, midway between Ellenville South Farms and the nearest important town, Bunker’s Mills, a considerable manufacturing settlement. A houseless stretch of ten miles separated the neighbors; but not even ten miles had stood between them and a grudge of many years’ duration. Beebe hated Wilkins, and Wilkins hated Beebe. Never mind why. They were close neighbors for that region; and that more close neighbors do not kill each other testifies every day to the broad spread of Christian charity.

Mr. Beebe so hated Mr. Wilkins that he made it a regular practice to stop at the station after his day’s work was done, to wait for this particular train. Silent and unfriendly, he would loaf in the station for an hour and a half, and the station master dared not put him out, for he was possibly an intending passenger on the train as far as the next flag-station, which was a railroad crossing a mile and a quarter further on. Mr. Beebe never bought a ticket from Mr. Wilkins, on the occasions when he did ride. He paid his way on the cars, five cents, plus ten cents rebate-check, and this rebate-check he redeemed at Mr. Wilkins’s office the next day. Furthermore, he made a point of going out just before the train arrived, and waiting on the other side of it to get in, so that Mr. Wilkins could not tell whether he boarded the train or walked off through the thick woods that crowded down to the very edge of the line.

Thus it happened that as the train arrived on the evening of the first of May, Mr. Beebe, being on the farther side of the track from the railroad station, saw an Irish nurse blunder helplessly off the platform in front of him, holding a six months’ old baby in her arms, and stand staring straight before her in evident bewilderment. Mr. Beebe accosted her in all kindness:

“Your folks got off the other side, I guess. This here ain’t the right side for nobody, only me.” Then he prodded the baby with a large and horny finger. “How old will that young ’un be?” he inquired.

“Six months, sorr,” replied the nurse; “gahn on seven.”

“Is that so?” said Mr. Beebe, with polite affectation of interest. “Folks been long married?”

“Wan month, sorr,” replied the nurse.

“Which?” inquired Mr. Beebe.

“Wan month, sorr,” replied the nurse.

* * *

On the other side of the train of cars, station agent John D. Wilkins saw an old-fashioned carryall drive up, conducted by an elderly woman of austere demeanor. She was dressed in black alpaca, and her look was stern and severe, and, necessarily, highly respectable. He saw a young man and a young woman descend from the train, and saw the young man hand the young woman into the carryall behind the elderly lady. Then, as the young man turned as though to look for some one following him, he heard the young woman say:

“That you, Hi? Meet me at the station when the 7:21 gets in. I’ve got a news item for you that will make the Eagle scream this trip, sure.”

If Mr. Wilkins had not been so zealous in breaking his employer’s rules in the interest of personal journalism, he would have heard the young man thus enjoined to inflict humiliating punishment upon a parent’s sister, respond to this cruel counsel in these words:

“It will only make her cry more;—why, where the deuce is the brat, anyway?”

When CÆsar expressed a preference for being the first man in a village, over a second-fiddle job in Rome, he probably never reflected how much it would rile him if he should happen to find out that there was just as big a man in the next village who didn’t know CÆsar from a cheese-cake; yet that is the poor limitation of local bigness. Great is Mr. Way in Wayback, and great is Mr. Hay in Hayville; but what is Mr. Way in Hayville, and what is Mr. Hay in Wayback? Two nothings, two casual strangers, with no credit, with no say-no, two mere chunks of humanity whose value to the community is strictly proportionate to the size of their greenback wads, and the laxity or tenacity of their several grips thereon.

At nine o’clock that night two local CÆsars, in two towns but a score of miles from each other, donned the ermine of power, waved the sceptre of authority, and told their pale-faced but devoted followers that “SOMETHING had got to be done about IT.”

The “IT,” of course, was an “OUTRAGE”—it always is when something has got to be done about it, and the something generally means just about nothing.

In the front parlor of his large mansard-roof residence, Mr. Bodger—Mr. Theophilus Scranton Bodger, prominent manufacturer, pillar of the Church, candidate for the mayoralty, and general all around magnate and muldoon of Bunker’s Mills, sat amid surroundings of much elegance, black walnut, gilt, plush and hand-painted tidies, and slapping a broad palm with a burly fist, told Mr. Stalls, Mr. Wilkins and Mrs. Bodger that something had got to be done about it.

At the same moment, in the Sunday School room of the Baptist Church in Ellenville South Farms, Mr. Manfred Lusk Hackfeather, theological student, Sunday School superintendent, social leader and idol of the ladies in Ellenville South Farms, told six fluttering feminine things, who gazed at him in affectionate awe, that something had got to be done about it.

To say that a party of Brooklyn people, conducted in an old-fashioned carryall, by an elderly woman of austere demeanor, entered the deep pine wood in a chilled twilight of early Spring certainly ought to convey an impression of gloom. And certainly gloom of the deepest enshrouded the beginning of that ride. Diligent inquiry elicited from the elderly woman that she was, as the Wicks supposed, Miss Hipsy, the care-taker; that she had received their telegram, or she wouldn’t have been there nohow; that she had had a contrack with the late owner of the premises; that she had lived up to it, whatever other people hed or hedn’t done; that what she had done she would do, and that if she was not satisfactory to other parties, or if other parties was not satisfactory to her, which was most likely to be the case, she was willin’, as far as she was concerned, to take herself off just as soon as she could; that she thanked Providence she had folks in Ellenville she could go to, as respectable as some, that she could go to and no obligations to nobody, and that she was not aware that her contrack called for no general conversation.

Now this extremely discouraging way and manner of Miss Hipsy’s was entirely general and impersonal, like dampness or a close smell in a long unused house. Congenitally sub-acid, a failure to accomplish any sort of an early or late love affair had completely soured her, and many years of solitude had put a gray-green coating of mildew over her moral nature. But the Wicks did not know this, and, remembering their peculiar position, it made them feel extremely uncomfortable.

But the moon came out in the soft Spring sky, and the mists of the evening rolled away, and a great silvery radiance wrapped the cathedral-like spires and pinnacles of the broad spreading pine forest, and, after awhile, the rough corduroy road grew smoother, and the baby stopped crying and went to sleep, and they were all, except Miss Hipsy, beginning to nod off just a little when the wheels crunched on a driveway of white pebbles, and they looked up to see a spacious low building standing out black against the sky, except where a half a dozen brightly lit windows winked at them like friendly eyes.

This was the bungalow, and here they found a sportsman’s supper of cold meat and ale awaiting them. Miss Hipsy told them, by way of leaving no doubt of the unfriendliness of her intentions, that this refection was provided for in the contract. So, also, must have been the deliciously soft beds in which they were presently all fast asleep, even to the baby. And when a traveling baby will sleep, anybody else can.

In the morning the elder Wicks opened their eyes on a world of wonderment and bewilderment. They found themselves living in a well-appointed and commodious club-house, on the banks of a broad and beautiful lake, across which other similar structures with pretty, low, peaked roofs looked at them in neighborly fashion from the other side. Mrs. Wick said that it was too nice for anything.

There was nothing mysterious about the surprise which the Wicks had found awaiting them. Sportsmen have a habit of referring to their possessions in a depreciatory way. They call a comfortable club-house a “box” or a “bungalow” or a “shack,” and they make nothing of calling a costly hotel a “camp.” Indeed, they seem to try to impart a factitious flavor of profanity by christening such structures, whenever they can, “Middle Dam Camp” or “Upper Dam Camp.” And since Mrs. Wick’s father’s club had died out, the further side of Jericho Pond had become a fashionable resort, maintaining two or three Winter and Summer Sanitariums.

Thanks to the contract, they made an excellent breakfast, and their praises of the fare mollified Miss Hipsy to some slight extent. Then they remembered the baby, and after some search they found the Irish nurse walking it up and down on a broad sunny terrace at the back of the house. Below stretched an old-fashioned garden, full of homely, pleasant flowers and simples just beginning to show their buds to the tempting month of May.

The scene was so pleasant that Mr. and Mrs. Wick started out for a walk, and the walk was so pleasant that they prolonged it,—prolonged it until they reached the settlement on the other side of the lake, and the people there were so pleasant that they staid to dinner at a club, and did not get back till nearly supper-time.

* * *

But now we have to recount the fortunes of two social reformers, and it is hard for a reformer to keep straight on the record. Whether they have a genuine reform on their hands, like Martin Luther or the Abolitionists, or whether they are like Mr. Harold Kettledrum Monocle, of New York, who thinks that the Mayor of that city ought to be elected by Harvard College, they are all likely to have what one might call a mote-and-beam sort of time with their neighbors.

Thus did it happen with Mr. Bodger, of Bunker’s Mills, and with Mr. Hackfeather, of Ellenville South Farms, who both found their way to Jericho Pond that pleasant afternoon, the theological student a little in advance of the business man. Mr. Hackfeather came to rebuke a shocking case of impropriety in two so young; Mr. Bodger came to express the sentiment of society at large toward a man who would inflict corporal chastisement on a lady.

Terrible as with an army with banners, and consumed with the fire of righteousness, Mr. Hackfeather bore down on the old-fashioned garden at the back of the bungalow, in the full glory of the Spring afternoon. As to his person, he was attired in a long, black diagonal frock-coat, worn unbuttoned, and so well worn that its flaps waved in the wind with all the easy grace of a linen duster. Trousers of the kind that chorus together: “We are pants,” adorned his long, thin but heavily-kneed legs. A shoestring necktie, a low cut waistcoat, and a whole-souled, oh-be-joyful shirtfront added to this simple but harmonious effect, and his last year’s hat had a mellow tone against the pale Springtime greens. He tackled Miss Hipsy (who had so far relented from her austerity as to take the baby while the nurse got dinner,) in that old-fashioned garden; and the benign influences of budding nature had no effect whatever upon his pious wrath. He pointed out the discrepancy in the dates of the vital statistics of the Wick family, and he told Miss Hipsy that she was

the servant of sin, (who had been a respectable woman for forty-three years, and if some as ought to know better said it was forty-seven there was no truth in it,) that she was the slave of iniquity and abettor of sin, (and if them she knowed of, one leastways, was alive to-day she would not be insulted,) that the demon vice should not rear its hideous head in that unpolluted community, (and she wasn’t rarin’ no heads, but she could go to them she knowed of as could rare their heads as high as him or any of his friends,) and that even if he, Mr. Hackfeather, had to face all the minions of Satan, and all the retinue of the Scarlet Woman, he would purify the stain or die in the attempt. Mr. Hackfeather’s allusion to the Lady of Babylon probably was born of a mixed condition of mind, and a desire to use forcible language. It did not seem clear to him and it did not seem clear to Miss Hipsy, either. She said she was no such a thing, and never expected to live to see the day she would be so called, especially at her time of life. And, tearful and vociferous, Miss Hipsy marched back to the bungalow, delivered over the baby to the Irish nurse, packed her little old hair trunk with the round top, dragged it down herself to the lakefront dock, and there sat on it in stern grandeur until the afternoon boat came down the lake and took her to Ellenville, presumably to the sheltering arms of them that she knowed of.

Meanwhile, a thing she did not know of was happening on the other side of the house in that same old-fashioned garden. Mr. Bodger, accompanied by Mr. Stalls and Mr. Wilkins, had arrived from Bunker’s Mills to interview the new arrival in the county, whose latitude in administering corporal punishment had aroused the indignation of every humane heart that had been made acquainted with the station master’s story. Mr. Bodger saw the departure of the weeping woman of elderly aspect, he heard her wails, and he saw their cause in a strange young man. This was all the evidence that he wanted. Mr. Bodger made no inquiries into identity or relationship. He weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, he had three men behind him, and he fell upon Mr. Hackfeather as the cyclone falls upon the chicken-coop.

* * *

The consequences of these two meetings were so far-reaching, extending to warrants of arrest, counter charges, civil suits and much civiler compromises, that it was July before the ladies of the Bodger and Hackfeather families picked up their threads of social intercourse, which were knotted only at one point. To both of them it occurred on a fine Summer’s day to call on the new comers at the old bungalow by way of seeing whether the innocent causes of so much dire mischief knew anything about the agitation they had caused.

As the train from Bunker’s Mills met the boat from Ellenville, Mr. Bodger’s wife and Mr. Hackfeather’s mother arrived at the same time, and, sitting in the sunny reception room of the bungalow, glared at each other in chilly and silent hostility, while poor, innocent little Mrs. Wick, much troubled by their strange behavior, tried to talk to both of them at once, and rattled away in her embarrassment until she had talked a great deal more than she had meant to. She told them all the story of Beatrice Brighton Wick, and the will, and the hurried flight to Jericho, and at their surprise at finding Jericho Pond with its Summer and Winter colony so delightful a place that they hardly felt as if they could tear themselves away from it when the four years were up. And she told them that both she and Mr. Wick had thought it might be quite awkward for so newly married a couple to be traveling with a six month’s old baby, and that baby Mr. Wick’s aunt.

“But, do you know,” she said, “we must have been over-sensitive about it, for we never had the first least little bit of trouble. Indeed, the only mishap we had was the other way. The old woman who was in charge of the place here left us suddenly the first day without a word of warning. I couldn’t make out why she was dissatisfied, but my nurse, Nora, told me that she thought that Miss Hipsy thought that the baby was too young. Some people have such an objection to young babies, you know. However, it didn’t the least bit matter, for Nora turned out to be a very good cook, and I took the baby. I wanted to learn, you know.”