e would not venture to discountenance altogether any one
who had married into their connection so decidedly. Her young folks
were to hear nothing of the matter, as it would not do to propagate an
idea which might bring about its own accomplishment.

At the almshouses to-day, the threat had been spoken plainly enough; and
Hope had found his visit there a very unpleasant one. It had been
wholly disagreeable. When within a mile and a half of the houses, a
stone had been thrown at him from behind a hedge. It narrowly missed
him. A little further on, there was another, from the opposite side of
the road. This indication was not to be mistaken. Hope leaped his
horse over a gate, and rode about the field, to discover who had
attacked him. For some time he could see no one; but, on looking more
closely to the fence, he saw signs in one part that hedging was going
on. As he approached the spot, a labourer rose up from the ditch, and
was suddenly very busy at his work. He looked stupid, and denied having
thrown any stones, but admitted that there was nobody else in the field
that he knew of. Further on, more stones were thrown: it was evidently
a conspiracy; but Hope could find no one to call to account for it, but
an old woman in one case, and two boys in another.--As he rode up to the
almshouses, the aged inmates came out to their doors, or looked from
their fanciful Gothic windows, with every indication of displeasure in
their faces and manner. The old women shook their heads at him, and
some their fists; the old men shook their sticks at him. He stopped to
speak to one man of eighty-three, who was sitting in the sun at his
door; but he could get no answer out of him, nothing but growls about
the doctor being a pretty doctor not to have mended his patient's
eye-sight yet. Not a bit better could he see now than he could a year
ago, with all the doctoring he had had: and now the gentleman would not
try anything more! A pretty doctor, indeed! But it would not be long
before there would be another who would cure poor people's eyes as if
they were rich: and poor people's eyes were as precious to them as rich
people's.--He next went into a house where an aged woman was confined to
bed with rheumatism; but her gossips stopped him in the middle of the
room, and would not let him approach her, for fear he should be her
death. As she had been lying awake the night before, she had heard her
deceased husband's shoes dance