ve gone smart as a cock pheasant.

It was at tea-time, and I was a-crying on to my bread-and-butter,
and mother sniffing a little for company behind the tea-tray, and
father, he bangs down his fist in a way to make the cups rattle
again, and he says--

'You've got to give him up, my girl. You write and tell him so, and
I'll take the letter as I go down to the church to-night to
practice. I've been a good father to you, and you must be a good
girl to me; and if you was to marry him, him being what he is, I'd
never speak to you again in this world or the next.'

'You wouldn't have any chance in the next, I'm afraid, James,' said
my mother gently, 'for her poor soul, it couldn't hope to go to the
blessed place after that.'

'I should hope not,' said my father, and with that he got up and
went out, half his tea not drunk left in the mug.

Well, I wrote that letter, and I told William right enough that him
and me could never be anything but friends, and that he must think
of me as a sister, and that was what father told me to say. But I
hope it wasn't very wrong of me to put in a little bit of my own,
and this is what I said after I had told him about the friend and
sister--

'But, dear William,' says I, 'I shall never love anybody but you,
that you may rely, and I will live an old maid to the end of my days
rather than take up with any other chap; and I should like to see
you once, if convenient, before we part for ever, to tell you all
this, and to say "Good-bye" and "God bless you." So you must find
out a way to let me know quiet when you come home from learning the
farming in Somerset.'

And may I be forgiven the deceitfulness, and what I may call the
impudence of it! I really did give father that same letter to post,
and him believing me to be a better girl than I was, to my shame,
posted it, not doubting that I had only wrote what he told me.

That was the saddest summer ever I had. The roses was nothing to me,
nor the lavender neither, that I had always been so fond of; and as
for the raspberries, I don't believe I should have cared if there
hadn't been one on the canes; and even the little chickens, I
thought them a bother, and--it goes to my heart to say it--a whole
sitting was eaten by the rats in consequence. Everything seemed to
go wrong. The butter was twice as long a-coming as ever I knowed it,
and the broad beans got black fly, and father lost half his hay with
the weather. If it had been me that ha