months' opportunity of studying the character of the
beloved one, you coolly inform me that the whole thing was a mistake. I
repeat that you are a humbug."

"If you don't hold your tongue, and that quick," he replied, "I'll send
this boot at your ugly head. Now, then!"

I ducked, fully expecting it was coming, and laughed silently under the
bed-clothes. I was very happy to hear this--I was very happy to hear
that a man, whom I really liked so well, had got the better of a
passion for a woman who I knew was utterly incapable of being to him
what his romantic high-flown notions required a wife to be. "If this
happy result," I said to myself, "can be rendered the more sure by
ridicule, that shall not be wanting. Meanwhile, I will sue for peace,
and see how it came about."

I rose again and saw he had got his other boot half off, and was
watching for me. "Jim," said I, "you ain't angry because I laughed at
you, are you?"

"Angry!" he answered. "I am never angry with you, and you know it. I've
been a fool, and I ought to be laughed at."

"Pooh!" said I, "no more a fool than other men have been before you,
from father Adam downwards."

"And he was a most con--"

"There," I interrupted: "don't abuse your ancestors. Tell me why you
have changed your mind so quick?"

"That's a precious hard thing to do, mind you;" he answered. "A
thousand trifling circumstances, which taken apart are as worthless
straws, when they are bound up together become a respectable truss,
which is marketable, and ponderable. So it is with little traits in
Mary's character, which I have only noticed lately, nothing separately,
yet when taken together, to say the least, different to what I had
imagined while my eyes were blinded. To take one instance among fifty;
there's her cousin Tom, one of the finest fellows that ever stepped;
but still I don't like to see her, a married woman, allowing him to
pull her hair about, and twist flowers in it."

This was very true, but I thought that if James instead of Tom had been
allowed the privilege of decorating her hair, he might have looked on
it with different eyes. James, I saw, cared too little about her to be
very jealous, and so I saw that there was no fear of any coolness
between him and Troubridge, which was a thing to be rejoiced at, as it
would have been a terrible blow on our little society, and which I
feared at one time that evening would have been the case.

"Jim," said I, "I have got some