Little Phil had a sweet temper, a loving disposition, and endeared
himself to all with whom he came in contact.
The hack, after a brief passage down the main street, deposited the
passengers at the front of the Clarendon Hotel. The colonel paid the
black driver the quarter he demanded--two dollars would have been the
New York price--ran the gauntlet of the dozen pairs of eyes in the
heads of the men leaning back in the splint-bottomed armchairs under
the shade trees on the sidewalk, registered in the book pushed forward
by a clerk with curled mustaches and pomatumed hair, and accompanied
by Phil, followed the smiling black bellboy along a passage and up one
flight of stairs to a spacious, well-lighted and neatly furnished
room, looking out upon the main street.
_Three_
When the colonel and Phil had removed the dust and disorder of travel
from their appearance, they went down to dinner. After they had eaten,
the colonel, still accompanied by the child, left the hotel, and
following the main street for a short distance, turned into another
thoroughfare bordered with ancient elms, and stopped for a moment
before an old gray house with high steps and broad piazza--a large,
square-built, two-storied house, with a roof sloping down toward the
front, broken by dormer windows and buttressed by a massive brick
chimney at either end. In spite of the gray monotone to which the
paintless years had reduced the once white weatherboarding and green
Venetian blinds, the house possessed a certain stateliness of style
which was independent of circumstance, and a solidity of construction
that resisted sturdily the disintegrating hand of time.
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