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ye. I sed it then, if I never sed it afore. There ain't one chance in a million that a soul that sees ye will spot ye as Mis' King. You and Mister Cyril never went on to Dufferin Street all the time you was here afore, only to cum an' go. An' as they never knowed your faces as sech, even at Hi' Sanderson's, where I told all about ye, an' bragged on ye, I can tell ye, how ken a soul on 'em, now, think as Mis' King and Missis Darcy is one an' the same individooal? Not much."

Evelyn did not over-estimate her success, nor mistake the disposition of Miss Buzzill.

"Acquisitiveness an' alimentiveness, they stick out on 'er head e'enamost as big as turkey's eggs. I felt 'em. When she thought I was rubbin' her head down for the nervous headache, I felt 'em. She thought I was makin' the passes, an' I was; but they wasn't all I was doin'. I meant to hev the bumps on her cran'um settled once for all, afore you got into its clutches; an' I settled 'em. I know jest what they be. My! Ef her eyes were sot only a little nearer together, an' conscientiousness hed ben the least trifle smaller, she'd ben a thief which now she isn't. Jest keep 'er sartin the dollars are comin' in, an' keep 'er stomic full, an' you won't hev no trouble, not a mite. I'll keep ye supplied in cookies an' crullers, an' when you see she's gittin' fractious, jest you say, 'Mis' Buzzill, hev a cruller? Mis' Buzzill, do take a cookie!' an' she'll be all right."

Agnes obeyed Evelyn's injunctions with extreme benefit to herself. She soon discovered that poor Miss Buzzill, though largely endowed with both, was by no means all acquisitiveness or all alimentiveness. She had "her good streaks," even Evelyn acknowledged, and Agnes was not slow to find them out. Perhaps the most strongly marked was her love for little children. The lonely woman, whom her compatriots called "a stingy, crooked old maid," had ever a tender spot in her heart and a sugar-plum in her pocket for every little child she met.

"I ought to hev teched philoprogenitiveness," said Evelyn, after listening to Agnes' recital of Miss Buzzill's fondness for Vida; "but I was so overcome with the bigness of t'other bumps, I never thought on't. Nat'relly one wouldn't, with an old maid, knowin' she hed no sort o' use for sech a bump."

"I think she makes great use of it," said Agnes. "I could forget every fault in one so kind to little children. And it is so much to me to have Vida with me; I couldn't have her if she was disagreeable to Miss Buzzill, and in her way."

of "the new Dufferin milliner" spread abroad. She was "from Paris," "from London," as it happened; but wherever from, she was "a high-born lady reduced," a widow and yet not a widow. Her husband -an earl, a lord, somebody of grand degree - had fallen into disgrace and fled, and she had taken refuge in the Dominion. But whether a countess in exile or a grisette in disguise, all agreed that the bonnets she made had an air of grace and "style" unknown before as a home product of Dufferin. "The quality," as Evelyn called them, sent less frequently to Montreal or "home" to London, for bonnets; the middle class withdrew their patronage from the Lake, and Miss Buzzill flourished and drew money into her drawer beyond her wildest dreams.

Nor was Agues without positive pleasure in her work, for it was success. If it was patience and weariness and sideache sometimes, it was taste and beauty and reward in the ultimate. Her keen artistic sense lightened and crowned her labor. When she held up a bonnet finished as perfectly as her hands could fashion it, the pleasure she felt in beholding it was the same in quality, if fainter in degree, as that which filled her when she used to hold up a picture to her eyes, as good as she could make it. And never in all her life had she seen money look like this which was laid in her hand by Miss Buzzill. She had earned it. Miss Buzzill might look melancholy, as she involuntarily did, to part with (to her) so many beloved dollars; but her gloomy visage some way failed to chill Agnes' delight. She had worked for them; because she had worked for them skilfully, tirelessly, faithfully, they were hers. She was not receiving dole, but just recompense; and as she realized this, these dollars took on a dignity and brightness no dollars had ever worn in her eyes before. As usual, she, the person most concerned, was the last to hear the faint whispers afloat in the air concerning her. Nor was it strange that they floated so wide of the truth. Though not far beyond the boundary, she was nevertheless in a foreign country; certainly far enough in it to discover that the natives of the Dominion emulated their kindred "at home" across the Atlantic in this, as in all else, their supreme indifference to all the internal life of "the States."

It is instinctively pleasant to the monarchical Briton complacently to ignore the crude Republican life which he inherently despises. Dufferin liked its milliner, was proud of her; she did not look like a "Yankee," did look like a lady, she had a mystery else she would never choose to live in a log-house in the wilderness; thus it was most agreeable to the Dufferin mind to believe that she came from London. Believing this, it was in little danger of finding out where she really did come from, while every new story springing from its own premises shot further and further from the truth.

Thus a little child led them in their lowly daily path of work and small traffic. She made a bond of unity between two women who by nature and by fate held naught else in common save their lonely state. Agnes' wish to be a silent partner also went far to soothe Miss Buzzill's professional pride, and to propitiate her personal favor. It was still "Miss Buzzill's shop." Miss Buzzill took orders and received payments, and was the acknowledged head of the establishment; a fact exasperating to Evelyn, but very pleasant to Miss Buzzill. Quite by herself in a little inner room, Agnes made the bonnets; and it was the bonnets that brought in money and fame, a fact Miss Buzzill did not forget, as she proved by being kinder to Agnes than she was The eager torches of color that the autumn bore had to anybody else except Agnes' child; in her fashion, at flained and gone out on forest and Pinnacle. The the bottom of her heart, she loved both. spruces and firs and cedars now pierced the steely air Perhaps all the more for her seclusion, the fame with stings and needles of tawny green.

Dufferin Street had bought its last bonnet for the season. There was nothing to be done in the shop beyond the powers of Miss Buzzill to perform; thus she was reluctantly compelled to acquiesce when Agnes, with Vida, withdrew to Tarnstone Pinnacle, there in seclusion to await the "spring opening," which Miss Buzzill intended should be of a magnificence unknown before in all the chronicles of Dufferin.

There are

no half-tones or tints in this dazzling land of the north, this land of swift transitions, and of vivid effects. Suddenly, in early September, in a single night, the frost fell. In the morning, every flower in the garden stood stiff and stark in mail of ice. Agnes could have wept over these late-born tender children of the northern year, over the little frozen faces of the pansies, the dead sweet-peas and tube-roses, slaughtered innocents. Another night the heavens danced with auroras. Wave after wave of rose-red flame rolled up from the horizon. Through this ruddy sea in quick succession flew innumerable lances of ever-changing hues, violet and primrose, rose-red, the palest pink, the faintest azure, shooting to the zenith; while the whole concave of heaven throbbed and flashed in coruscating splendor.

In the morning, lo! nature's reaction! Heaven's fiery glow gone out in ashen gray. Gray upon the sky, gray in all the air; snow, dense and spotless, lying heavy upon the earth; the cedars fringed with ermine; the firs stretching out their strong arms and lifting up their cone-like crowns swathed in the same immaculate fleece. Then the gray curtain was lifted, and the sun, riding through a dazzling heaven, drew the earth's whiteness after him and exhaled it into the snow clouds that canopied his setting. After the melting of the first snow came the Indian summer. It was the soul of the earlier summer come back with a pleading softness in its breath that the first summer had not. Misty banners trembled about the mountain-tops. The whole world seemed to float in nebulous gold. The atmosphere was penetrated with a vague, haunting sweetness. Wafts of winey fragrance came up from the beds of moist, ripe leaves that lined the forest, from the spicy ferns still peering green from their shaded coverts, and from the exuding balsams of the spruces and firs.

In this halcyon season Agnes and Vida lived in the woods. These had no voice nor language that Agnes did not know. These had no minor tone that did not penetrate her exquisitely attuned ear. Boughs just astir in the still air, the patter of the dropping nut, the tiny rustle of the squirrel in the leaves, the cry of the cricket in the russet grass, each gave out its own distinct note of music to her soul. From color, odor, sound, were woven these perfect days. To this woman alone, a sense of yearning came out of their opaline deeps. All she had lost, the more she had missed, haunted indefinably their sad and subtle beauty. There was a sadness in the soul of the season that touched

the sadder soul within her.

Suddenly as it came, the Indian summer went. It was winter at once. The dead pansies were buried beneath the embankment of straw that encircled the log-house. Double windows and doors were set to protect its inmates from the freezing cold without. By day and night the snow fell, till it made the forest road impassable, and piled up around the cottage solid walls as high as itself. Jim Dare, now grown an athletic fellow, spent many days cutting paths through this mass. By degrees a way was made through it past the woods, but the mass remained on the frozen earth to be subdued and melted away only by the late May sun. At long intervals the south wind rose and the rain fell just long enough to let the night set every tree, bough, and leafy spray, and even the Pinnacle itself, in mail of crystal that froze and glittered in the sunlight, and transformed the whole scene into a sight of enchantment.

No matter what the mutations of the elemental world

might be, within the log house all was warmth and comfort. No winter was rigorous enough to exhaust Evelyn's woodpile, that pile of split and seasoned maple so dear to every northern heart. Nor could any North American winter be long enough to exhaust her garnered stores; her grain of wheat and corn, of barley and buckwheat. Had not Daisy been sacrificed for beef and candles, and Towzer for spare-rib and “cracklin"? Towzer was a pig, who never grew to be a hog. He lived in a palace of a peu, he had his weekly bath, and his daily conversations with his mistress as she poured out his smoking repasts of potatoes and meal, through all his earthly sojourn. Evelyn shed many tears at the thought of his demise, yet she slew him no less, and now Towzer, the quintessence of " pig-pork," was packed in a barrel in the depths of Evelyn's cellar, a source of pride to her heart greater even than when he grunted his replies to her remarks from out of his well-kept sty. Her kitchen walls were garlanded with strings of dried apples, and white bags filled with dried blackberries and Canadian plums. It was garnished also with many bunches of dried pennyroyal and peppermint, summer savory, sage, and thyme; and, biggest of all, bunches of dried catnip for her cats. Her skeins of snowy wool had long been ready for the spinning. Before the autumn days were done, her yarn was spun and ready. By the time the winter nights began, Evelyn was at her winter occupation, busily knitting; this time, a pair of red and white stockings for Vida.

Agnes' winter rest had come. She spent it chiefly in her own little inner room, teaching her child, making necessary garments, thinking long, long thoughts, contrasting the life she lived now, the solitude surrounding her, with her life at the capital two winters before, her life at Lotusmere one year ago. Could a more utter transition come to any life? She never forgot the large debt of gratitude that she owed to Evelyn even in little things, and spent many evenings reading to her and listening to her chatter, when had she listened to her own inner impulse, only, she would have stayed in the solitude of her own room.

Saturday brought the crowning night of the week, for it was on Saturday only that Jim Dare mounted John and rode through snow and biting cold to Dufferin for the mail. It was never a large one, nevertheless it was the event of the week. It brought to Agnes a letter from her only correspondent, "Mary Ben," as she lovingly called her: a letter that made her hands tremble as she opened it, and her heart often ache — oh, how hopelessly!-after reading it. Yet as if she delighted in self-torture, she would not be deprived of it. It brought also Evelyn's Tribune, and the journals and magazines in which Agnes sparingly indulged, to keep her brain from starving.

"I'd like to know what's to hender," exclaimed Evelyn on one of these winter Saturday nights, as she thrust out a newspaper to Agnes, who sat with a bleached face and a far-distant look in her eyes, after reading a letter which she had silently dropped into her pocket. Speechless she was, yet how her heart dumbly cried within her. Mary Ben wrote that “she had been told that Miss Kane had gone to Ulm to visit her friends. Mr. King had gone to Washington, and Lotusmere was closed for the winter." She was inly crying for her home, for her lost love, for her buried child.

"There's nuthin' in the world to hender," said Evelyn. "You talk like a book, an' I know ye can write

one if you want to; an' somehow I've sot my heart on your gittin' that hundred dollars. You've only to say you will, an you'll git it; I'm sure on't," and she pointed to the advertisement of a Boston publishing house, offering one hundred dollars as a prize to the competitor who should write the best story for boys, the prize to be awarded by impartial judges.

"I'd like to know what's to hender?" again asked Evelyn, as Agnes looked up after reading the notice. "Here's language bulgin' out your eyes big as plums back of each on 'em; an' as for boys, nothin' is more surprisin' than the knowledge you hev on 'em, except the pashunce you show to 'em. An' you jest write that book. Come, now, you'll try, won't ye, deary?" in the most wheedling tones. "My heart is perfectly sot on it."

"I would do anything in my power that your heart was set on; you know that," said Agnes warmly, "but I should never for one instant feel as if I could win this hundred dollars. And if I try and fail, as I'm almost certain to do, you will feel worse, Evelyn, than if I hadn't tried at all."

"Jest you try!" said Evelyn oracularly, steadying her dancing brown eyes into a measuring look fixed upon Agnes. "Bumps don't lie, nev-er. Faces don't lie, for they can't, no matter if they do try; an' a feelin' heart don't lie, not when it's chock full an' runnin' over with love an' sorrer. Be a good little gal an' try jest to please me, won't ye?" and Evelyn, getting up, smoothed back Agnes' hair and kissed her forehead.

Agnes burst into tears. It was a little thing, a loving thing, for the toil-hardened hand to do, for the simple, honest lips to express. There were none others to caress or to love her now, and this fact, with the touch and action, bringing back so utterly as they did the caress and kiss of another, alas! how far back in the past! just at this moment were more than Agnes' overstrained heart could receive without visible emotion.

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Anything I can do I will try to do, to please you, Evelyn," she said, as she rose to go in to her child. Sleep was not for her that night. The uprooted past, Mary Ben's letter, Evelyn's injunction, her own aching heart and tumultuous brain, forbade it. But she slept late into the morning. Evelyn amused Vida in the kitchen," shewed" Jim into his Sunday clothes, and walked her domain on tiptoe, that Agnes might sleep. She appeared at last with a perfectly serene face.

"Evelyn," she said quietly, "I will write the boys' book, if you can promise me one thing: that you won't take it very much to heart if I don't get the prize. It is in my power to write something, but it may be far from my power to win the hundred dollars. If you'll promise to keep this in mind, so as not to be too much disappointed, I will try."

"I'll promise anything, queeny, if you'll try," said the conquering Evelyn, as she gave the final Sabbath twist to a corkscrew curl before her fifty-cent lookingglass, prior to settling herself for her Sunday reading, consisting of her hymn-book and Bible, with the almanac and phrenological tracts interspersed by way of condiments.

Nothing came so near to Agnes as the life of a boy. For more than seven years she lived in closest sympathy with the boy nature. It had no fault, no need, that she did not know. She had sympathized with her boy in everything, from his yearning for a "a good lit

tle bear," to his eager questionings of the heavenly mysteries to which his young soul so soon went forth. Through him she cared for all living boys. When she shut herself up to consider them, she found that it was not the impossible, unnatural, "goody" boy, but the every-day, sinning, much-suffering, knocked-about, denounced, "trounced," yet ever beloved boy of the hu man family, whom her heart yearned over. Was she not his spontaneous defender and saviour from a little child? Yes, she had something for him! a story of help and cheer and happiness she would make for this boy, wherever on the earth he might be, and in her heart dedicate it to the memory of her own lost one, for whose sake all other boys had grown yet more dear.

Thus in the little log-house in the northern solitude, the work of brain and heart began. Did the will never falter? the heart never grow weary? Often. How often, only they can tell who, without encouragement, without cheer from any assured source, shut away from every exterior prop, resting on their own souls alone, weave on to completeness the web of thought and experience spun from the brain and life, perhaps from the very life-blood of the heart. What is easier than to pass judgment on the work, to criticise any lack of finish, even in its passage? But if it be woven of the stuff out of which human life is made, it is never lightly or easily done.

Agnes wrote only with fulness and power when she forgot what she was doing. Then heart, soul, and brain gave of their overflow without effort and without stint. But the moment the conscious thought came of what she was attempting, all assurance of touch left her. A deep distrust of her powers, a sense of her own temerity, made both mind and hand falter and halt. What right had she to suppose, because she had insight in her soul and love in her heart to respond to the need of the every-day boy, that she had also the gift to embody either in a form to which the ratherhard-to-be-suited little man would spontaneously respond? She painted the truth, then was afraid of it. She would attempt to hold it far out from her mental vision, and pronounce judgment upon it as if she were a disinterested judge. Nobody, nobody on earth, fit to decide upon it, would say that was just the fancy or thing to put in a story. She was sure of it. Her soul was brave, her mind was timid. She was without experience. She had never won success. She was alone. The world was wide and cold. Could she ever venture to send her fledgling out into it adrift? If she did, it would drop and die for lack of shelter and warmth. Where in all the world was the hand strong and true to take it in, care for it, start it for steady though lowly flight?

Of all these things and many more she was too keenly conscious for her work's good. She had many despondent days, when she shut up her portfolio and locked it out of sight, in regret and humility of soul. That the beloved image of her little hero could ever be painted by her hand was impossible; of that she felt certain. It remained for her to go back to Miss Buzzill and her bonnets; she could make a bonnet, a pretty one; she had proved that; but to make the word-portrait of a living boy, alive, life-inspiring as well as lifedestroying, to do him justice was beyond her power. On the whole she was glad she had learned it before she had proved her failure by demonstrated defeat in the shape of a publisher's pitilessly polite note of refusal

Nevertheless, in characteristic defiance of her fiats, the boy of her heart was often too much for her wavering will. In spite of all her doubt and dread as to how he would look to others who loved him not, she loved him so entirely, and saw him so distinctly, that the passion to individualize him, to paint him as she saw him, would overpower all the menacing thoughts waiting in ambush, and with sure but delicate strokes the image of the boy traced amid all his environments and entanglements became week by week more vividly distinct. And when in the unconscious glow of creation she held him up to the eyes of untutored Evelyn, who laughed and cried over him with equal delight, Agnes had already found her audience and tasted the only unalloyed sweet of authorship.

Thus the soul-child grew in shade and sunshine, amid laughter and tears. He had attained the perfect stature of his boyhood, and his whole story was told, before Miss Buzzill returned with her spring goods from Montreal. The very day that Jim Dare carried the precious package containing his story in his inside pocket through the woods and over the hills to the post-office at Dufferin, Miss Buzzill herself appeared in the door of the log-house at the Pinnacle. She came to inquire when "Madame Darcy" (as she was called by Evelyn's "quality") would come to the Corners to make ready for "the opening." Miss Buzzill's orangetinged countenance was illuminated by a bonnet of the brightest canary. She said, "I thought I'd give 'em at meetin' jest a spec of what's comin'. None of yer gay, dashin' colors for me, I can tell ye. What I will hev

is a plain, stiddy yaller."

(To be continued.)

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. RAIN ONE SOLITARY MEETS ANOTHER.

It was now five o'clock, and the dawn was promising to break in hues of drab and ash.

The air changed its temperature and stirred itself more vigorously. Cool, elastic breezes coursed in transparent eddies round Oak's face. The wind shifted yet a point or two and blew stronger. In ten minutes every wind of heaven seemed to be roaming at large. Some of the thatching on the wheat-stacks was now whirled fantastically aloft, and had to be replaced and weighted with some rails that lay near at hand. This done, Oak slaved away again at the barley. A huge drop of rain smote his face, the wind snarled round every corner, the trees rocked to the bases of their trunks, and the twigs clashed in strife. Driving in spars at any point and on any system inch by inch he covered more and more safely from ruin this distracting impersonation of seven hundred pounds. The rain came on in earnest, and Oak soon felt the water to be tracking cold and clammy routes down his back. Ultimately he was reduced well-nigh to a homogeneous sop, and a decoction of his person trickled down and stood in a pool at the foot of the ladder. The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.

Oak suddenly remembered that eight months before this time he had been fighting against fire in the same spot as desperately as he was fighting against water now- and for a futile love of the same woman. As for her But Oak was generous and true, and dismissed his reflections.

It was about seven o'clock in the dark leaden morning when Gabriel came down from the last stack, and thankfully exclaimed, “It is done ! ” He was drenched, weary,

and sad; and yet not so sad as drenched and weary, for he was cheered by a sense of success in a good cause. Faint sounds came from the barn, and he looked that way. Figures came singly and in pairs through the doors all walking awkwardly, and abashed, save the foremost, who wore a red jacket, and advanced with his hands in his pockets, whistling. The others shambled after with a conscience-stricken air: the whole procession was not unlike Flaxman's group of the suitors tottering on towards the infernal regions under the conduct of Mercury. The gnarled shapes passed into the village, Troy, their leader, entering the farm-house. Not a single one of them had turned his face to the ricks, or apparently bestowed one thought upon their condition. Soon Oak too went homeward, by a different route from theirs. In front of him against the wet, glazed surface of the lane he saw a person walking yet more slowly than himself, under an umbrella. The man turned and apparently started: he was Boldwood. "How are you this morning, sir?" said Oak.

"Yes, it is a wet day. Oh, I am well, very well I thank you quite well."

"I am glad to hear it, sir."

Bold wood seemed to awake to the present by degrees. "You look tired and ill, Oak," he said then, desultorily regarding his companion.

"I am tired. You look strangely altered, sir." "I? Not a bit of it: I am well enough. What put that into your head?"

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"I thought you didn't look quite so topping as you used to, that was all.”

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"Overlooked them," repeated Gabriel slowly to himself. It is difficult to describe the intensely dramatic effect that announcement had upon Oak at such a moment. All the night he had been feeling that the neglect he was laboring to repair was abnormal and isolated - the only instance of the kind within the circuit of the country. Yet at this very time, within the same parish, a greater waste had been going on, uncomplained of and disregarded. A few months earlier Boldwood's forgetting his husbandry would have been as preposterous an idea as a sailor forgetting he was in a ship. Oak was just thinking that whatever he himself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was a man who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changed voice that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve his heart by an outpouring.

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"Oak, you know as well as I that things have gone wrong with me lately. I may as well own it. I was going to get a little settled in life; but in some way my plan has come to nothing."

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I thought my mistress would have married you," said Gabriel, not knowing enough of the full depths of Boldwood's love to keep silence on the farmer's account, and determined not to evade discipline by doing so on his own. "However, it is so sometimes, and nothing happens that we expect," he added, with the repose of a man whom misfortune had inured rather than subdued.

"I dare say I am a joke about the parish," said Boldwood, as if the subject came irresistibly to his tongue, and

with a miserable lightness meant to express his indiffer

ence.

"Oh no: I don't think that."

"But the real truth of the matter is that there was not, as some fancy, any jilting on her part. No engagement ever existed between me and Miss Everdene. People say so, but it is untrue: she never promised me!" Boldwood stood still now and turned his wild face to Oak. "Oh, Gabriel," he continued, "I am weak and foolish, and I don't know what, and I can't fend off my miserable grief!

I had some faint belief in the mercy of God till I lost that woman. Yes, He prepared a gourd to shade me, and like the prophet I thanked Him and was glad. But the next day He prepared a worm to smite the gourd, and wither it; and I feel it is better to die than to live.'

A silence followed. Boldwood aroused himself from the momentary mood of confidence into which he had drifted, and walked on again, resuming his usual reserve.

"No, Gabriel," he resumed with a carelessness which was like the smile on the countenance of a skull; "it was made more of by other people than ever it was by us. I do feel a little regret occasionally, but no woman ever had power over me for any length of time. Well, good morning. I can trust you not to mention to others what has passed between us two here."

(To be continued.)

THE WOODEN WEDDING.

"Or course Louison must come home for the wooden wedding," decided the whole of the Gruhners assembled in full family conclave; the said family conclave being composed of Grandfather and Grandmother Gruhner, Widow Grubner, and her two daughters, Margot, whose fifth wedding day was to be celebrated, and Gretchen, the laughter-loving, youngest of the family. Besides whom were present Wilhelm Raus, Margot's husband, and Hans, the miller's son.

"Yes, yes, Fräulein Louison must come home for the wedding, of course," echoed Hans.

And then everybody laughed. First of all, because no one in the world but Hans would have dreamed of dignify: ing little Louison Grubner with so imposing a title; and next, because poor Hans could never so much as mention Louison's name, titled or not, without causing a laugh in the family circle. His admiration for that young person, freely expressed on all occasions when the object of his affections was not present, and his extreme shyness in her society, had long been a standing joke in the village of Brushofen, and had earned for him the nickname of "the bashful lover."

When they all laughed, Hans blushed a very furious and unbecoming red.

"Never mind, never mind, friend Hans," said Wilhelm, clapping him on the shoulder encouragingly. "I was young once, and timid too, and yet thou seest I took the bull by the horns at last; and I would advise thee "

But the advice was drowned in a chorus of laughter and expostulations. Margot, perhaps not unnaturally, objected to be compared to a horned bull; and Wilhelm's timidity had not been so patent to the world, even in his young days, as to have made much impression upon it, it would

seem.

However, it was quite decided that Louison was to come home.

She was a bright, dark-eyed girl of about seventeen, an orphan niece of Widow Gruhner, and the bosom friend of her cousin Gretchen, who was her junior by a few months. Louison lived, as a rule, with some distant relatives, who were farmers, a few miles from Königsberg; but her holidays, somewhat few and far between, were always spent in the Gruhners' little cottage, which from her childhood had been considered as her real home, and her visits to Brushfen were looked forward to by all the members of the family with great pleasure. It was now almost a year

since she had been to see them, and it was quite impossible to allow the grand festivities of the "wooden wedding" to take place without ber. So after a somewhat elaborate correspondence between the Widow Gruhner and Frau Liebe, the farmer's wife, whose right hand Louison was, a leave of a fortnight was obtained, and the day was fixed for the young girl's arrival at Brushofen.

Old Gruhner, accompanied by his granddaughter, Gretchen, went to meet her at the coach.

"Two weeks, two whole weeks, my Louison," cried Gretchen, grasping her friend's hand as they walked together up the steep cliff path that led to the cottage. "Only think how delightful! And before the end of that time Hans Steimer will have asked thee to marry him, and then thou wilt stay here always, and live in the pretty new cottage by the mill, and we shall never part with thee again."

"Come, come," retorted Louison, "how dost thou know that by the time Hans Steimer pleases to say 'Wilt thou?' I shall not please to say Nay'?"

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But as she spoke a smile curled the corners of her pretty mouth, and her eyes sparkled, all hidden though they were by their long lashes.

"Well, well, we shall see," returned Gretchen, wisely resolving not to press the matter, at least for the present.

And there were naturally many other subjects of conversation interesting to the family party, or at least to the women portion of it: many questions to ask and be answered, many friends to be inquired for and discussed.

A merry and talkative group were they, as they sat together that evening at work, by the open window of the cottage kitchen. It seemed as though they could never get to the end of their absorbing topics - births, marriages, deaths, changes of one kind or another, rumors of what might be, or might have been, flirtations, feuds who does not know the thousand and one elements of village gossip? If the conversation flagged for a moment, it was sure to break out again directly with an "Oh! what do you think?" or "Have you heard?" or "Do tell me." And then on the tongues would go again, as glibly as though not a word had been spoken for hours.

"Oh! these women, these women," grumbled old Grandfather Gruhner. "Just listen to them click clack, click clacking, for all the world like a flock of geese. Set five women together, and some mischief will be brewing, one may be sure of that." And yet, in spite of his protests, it did not seem that the old man had really any very strong aversion himself to a little gossip, since he hovered about the group, pipe in mouth, with some tenacity, instead of following his son-in-law, Wilhelm, to the garden, where he was busy digging potatoes.

The forthcoming festivities of the wooden wedding, and the presents which were expected or promised for the occasion, of course took up a considerable share of the conversation, and filled up the pauses of village scandal. The custom of giving presents of a special kind on each fifth anniversary of a marriage originated in America, but has been largely adopted in Germany. On the fifth anniversary of the wedding-day all the gifts must be of wood, on the tenth of tin, on the fifteenth of china, and so on until the silver, the twenty-fifth; the golden, the fiftieth; and the diamond, the seldom-reached seventy-fifth year of wedlock, is attained. There was naturally a good deal of arrangement required, and some anxiety manifested by the notable young housewife that the offerings should be such as would give satisfaction alike to the donor and the recipients, that rarest of all cases in the giving and receiving of presents. Possibly Margot had never heard of that unhappy bridal pair whose thoughtful friends provided them with ten toast-racks as wedding gifts. But experience or learning of some kind had evidently made her wise, and she was resolved that no mistake of such a kind should occur in her case. Though the gifts might be limited in kind, as well as in cost, there was no reason why they should not be of very various description. At least so it would seem from the list which she counted on her fingers, more than twice over, for her cousin's benefit, and which included

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