rds.

"Faith, an' a good tin bushel she's taken off the russets," Mike said to
Norah; "an' as for thim gillies yer was so fond of, there's none left to
spake of on any o' the trees. Now if she'd er tuk thim old blue pearmain
trees, I wouldn't have said a word. But, 'Oh no!' sez she, 'I must have
all pink uns;' an' it was jest the pink uns that was our best trees;
that's jest as much sinse as ye wimmin's got."

"Wull, thin, an' I'm thinkin' yer wouldn't have grudged Miss Hetty her
own apples, if it was in barrls ye had 'em," replied the practical
Norah, "an' I don't see where's the differ."

"Yer don't!" said Mike, angrily. "If it had ha plazed God to make a man
o' yer, ye'd ha known more 'n yer do;" and with this characteristically
masculine shifting of his premises, Mike turned his back on Norah.

Neither Hetty nor Doctor Eben had ever heard that lovers should not wed
in May; and, as they looked up at the great fragrant pink and white
boughs on the walls, Hetty exclaimed:

"Nobody ought to be married except when apple-trees are in bloom.
Nothing else could have been half so lovely in the rooms, and the
fire-light makes them all the prettier. What a genius Sally has for
arranging flowers. Who would have thought common stone jars could look
so well?"

Sally had taken the largest sized gray stone jars she could buy in
Welbury, and in these had set boughs six and seven feet long, looking
like young trees. On the walls she had placed deep wooden boxes with
shield-shaped fronts; these fronts were covered with gray lichens from
the rocks; the rosy blossoms waved from out these boxes, looking as much
at home as they did above the lichen-covered trunks of the trees in the
orchard.

"Poor dear Sally!" Hetty continued, "she had a hard time the first part
of the evening. That stony old woman wouldn't speak to her. But I took
her in hand afterward. Did you observe?"

"Observe!" shouted Dr. Eben. "I should think so. You hardly waited till
the minister had got through with us."

"I didn't wait till then," replied Hetty, demurely. "I was planning it
all the while he was telling me about my duty to you. I didn't believe
he could tell me much about that, anyway; and the duty that weighed on
my mind most at that minute was my duty to Sally."

And thus, in the flickering fire-light and the apple-blossom fragrance,
the two wedded lovers sat talking and dreaming, and taking joy of each
other while the night wore on. There was no