So he's married and gone! Come, Phineas, sit thee down by thy old father; I am glad thee wilt always remain a bachelor." We settled ourselves, my father and I; and while the old man smoked his meditative pipe I sat thinking of the winter evenings when we two lads had read by the fire-side; the summer days when we had lounged on the garden wall.

He was a married man now, the head of a household; others had a right--the first, best, holiest right--to the love that used to be all mine; and though it was a marriage entirely happy and hopeful, though all that day and every day I rejoiced both with and for my brother, still it was rather sad to miss him from our house, to feel that his boyish days were quite over--that his boyish place would know him no more.
But of course I had fully overcome, or at least suppressed, this feeling when, John having brought his wife home, I went to see them in their own house.
I had seen it once before; it was an old dwelling-house, which my father bought with the flour-mill, situated in the middle of the town, the front windows looking on the street, the desolate garden behind shut in by four brick walls.

A most un-bridal-like abode.

I feared they would find it so, even though John had been busy there the last two months, in early mornings and late evenings, keeping a comical secrecy over the matter as if he were jealous that any one but himself should lend an eye, or put a finger, to the dear task of making ready for his young wife.
They could not be great preparations, I knew, for the third of my father's business promised but a small income.

Yet the gloomy outside being once passed, the house looked wonderfully bright and clean; the walls and doors newly-painted and delicately stencilled:--( "Master did all that himself," observed the proud little handmaid, Jenny--Jem Watkins's sweetheart.