trousseau and a bridegroom on one's hands is
quite sufficient for any young lady's capacity; so she presently left
her brother Sam to explain his sketch-book to Linda alone.

All went evenly until the page was opened, the bit of silver paper lifted
off, and Dunore was before her. What a start--colour--exclamation! Her
beloved Irish home, with its green low hills, and its purple sea-line
afar. 'Oh, Mr. Holt, I am so glad that you went to see Dunore!' Her eyes
were full of tears as she gazed.

'Are you? I went there for your sake, Linda, to look at the place you
loved so much.' And--and--what precise words he used then, or how he
understood that she would prize the drawing a thousandfold for his sake,
neither rightly remembered afterwards. But--

'In April the ice always breaks up,' remarked old Hiram, with a huge
laugh at his own joke.

* * * * *

Mr. and Mrs. Sam Holt, after their wedding trip to Niagara, settled
down soberly at Daisy Burn as if they had been married a hundred years,
Arthur said. They brought back with them a fugitive slave, who had made
her escape from a Virginian planter. Dinah proved a faithful and useful
nurse to the Daisy Burn children. Fugitive slaves are found all over
Canada as servants, and generally prove trustworthy and valuable.

CHAPTER XLV.

EXEUNT OMNES.

Now, in the year 1857, came a retributive justice upon Zack Bunting, in
the shape of a complete collapse of all his gains and their produce. He
had placed them in a New York bank which paid enormous interest--thirty
per cent., people said; and when that figure of returns is offered, wise
men shake their heads at the security of the principal. Nevertheless,
all went rightly till the commercial panic of the period above mentioned,
when Zack's possessions were reduced to their primitive nonentity, and
the old proverb abundantly illustrated, 'Ill got, ill gone.'

'Libby,' quoth Andy one afternoon, soon subsequently to the above
occurrence, 'they say that precious limb of an uncle of yours isn't
goin' to come back here at all at all. I'm tould Mrs. Zack an' Ged is
packing up, to be off to some wild place intirely.'

He waited, gazing at her energetic movements in washing the dinner
plates (for the luxury of ware had supplanted tin before now at Cedar
Creek), to see what effect the news would produce. None. Miss Liberia
merely uttered 'Wal!'

'Won't you be very lonesome in the world all by yo