Mrs. Miller (down Around the River Poems)

John B. McKinney, Attorney and Counselor at Law, as his sign read, / was, for many reasons, a fortunate man. For many other reasons he was / not. He was chiefly fortunate in being, as certain opponents often / strove to witheringly designate him, "the son of his father," since / that sound old gentleman was the wealthiest farmer in that section, / with but one son and heir to, in time, supplant him in the role of / "county god," and haply perpetuate the prouder title of "the biggest / tax-payer on the assessment list. " And this fact, too, fortunate as it / would seem, was doubtless the indirect occasion of a liberal / percentage of all John's misfortunes. From his earliest school-days in / the little town, up to his tardy graduation from a distant college, / the influence of his father's wealth invited his procrastination, / humored its results, encouraged the laxity of his ambition, "and even / now," as John used, in bitter irony, to put it, "it is aiding and / abetting me in the ostensible practice of my chosen profession, a / listless, aimless undetermined man of forty, and a confirmed bachelor / at that! " At the utterance of this self-depreciating statement, John / generally jerked his legs down from the top of his desk; and, rising / and kicking his chair back to the wall, he would stump around his / littered office till the manilla carpet steamed with dust. Then he / would wildly break away, seeking refuge either in the open street, or / in his room at the old-time tavern, The Eagle House, "where," he would / say, "I have lodged and boarded, I do solemnly asseverate, for a long, / unbroken, middle-aged eternity of ten years, and can yet assert, in / the words of the more fortunately-dying Webster, that 'I still live!"

Extravagantly satirical as he was at times, John had always an / indefinable drollery about him that made him agreeable company to his / friends, at least; and such an admiring friend he had constantly at / hand in the person of Bert Haines. Both were Bohemians in natural / tendency, and, though John was far in Bert's advance in point of age, / he found the young man "just the kind of a fellow to have around; " / while Bert, in turn, held his senior in profound esteem -- looked up to / him, in fact, and in even his eccentricities strove to pattern after / him. And so it was, when summer days were dull and tedious, these two / could muse and doze the hours away together; and when the nights were / long, and dark, and deep, and beautiful, they could drift out in the / noon-light of the stars, and with "the soft complaining flute" and / "warbling lute," "lay the pipes," as John would say, for their / enduring popularity with the girls! And it was immediately subsequent / to one of these romantic excursions, when the belated pair, at two / o'clock in the morning, had skulked up a side stairway of the old / hotel, and gained John's room, with nothing more serious happening / than Bert falling over a trunk and smashing his guitar, -- just after / such a night of romance and adventure it was that, in the seclusion of / John's room, Bert had something of especial import to communicate.