Queer Judson by Joseph C. Lincoln — Read

It was an evening in early June, that on which George and Carey Judson left the office of J. C. Judson & Co. and started on the walk to the home of the former. Wellmouth was quiet and peaceful, its serenity undisturbed, its Saturday night suppers of baked beans and brown bread already on the tables of its householders or awaiting the arrival of fathers or sons on their way home from stores and shops--or, in rarer instances, of belated summer boarders or city relatives "down on vacation, " who, out "codding" or "mackereling, " had allowed sport to render them forgetful of time. The Boston morning newspapers, brought down by the noon train, had been distributed and read long before and nothing in their contents was of particular, intimate interest to Wellmouthians. A sensation--even a sensation such as the Osborne and Judson failure--becomes an old story in six months and, although Wellmouth had not forgotten it, and, because of its disastrous consequences to so many citizens, was not likely to forget it for many a year, it had ceased to regard it as the only worthwhile subject of conversation. Even Carey Judson's progress, in his brother's company, from Wharf Lane to the Main Road and along the Main Road to the remodeled towered and dormered residence on Lookout Hill was no longer of such interest as to distract the attention of an impatient housewife from the consequences attendant upon an indefinite delay of supper.

Such a housewife, peering from the dining-room window, may have sniffed disdainfully at the sight of the brothers as they walked home together. She may have declared, as some of them did, that she should think Carey Judson would be ashamed to have the face to be seen among the folks he had swindled; but it was merely a casual remark expressive of a settled conviction. Carey Judson was a disgrace, and every one admitted it, but the reasons why he was a disgrace had been discussed and dissected and vivisected at homes and at sewing circles and after and before church on Sunday until even those who had suffered most were tired of the subject. When the disgrace himself first returned to the village his shame and its course were subjected to a second picking to pieces, but he had been in Wellmouth for a fortnight now, and even his brazen effrontery in coming back and his brother's soft-heartedness in allowing him to do so were getting to be old stories.