e spot. I mind it well; I was young
mysel'." (Here Nance Edgar sighed and was silent awhile, looking at
the pouting bo-peep of the little blue flames between the hearth bars.)
"A-well, youth comes and youth goes, but at the last the greensward
covers it like Miser Hobby's cottage.

"Long they dwelt there, Miser Stennis and his daughter Bell. She had
the name of being bonnie to look on in her young days, and many a lover
would fain have hung up his hat behind the kitchen door and taken his
seat at Hobby Stennis's table as his son-in-law.

"But Hobby was a far-seeing carle and a plain-spoken. He had but one
word for all such.

"'When I hae a felt want for ony sons-in-law I will put a notice in
Editor Drake's weekly screed, or hae it intimated in the parish kirk!'

"There were ill reports even then about the miser. Lights were seen
wandering up the hillsides above the cottage when the nights were mirk
and unkindly. Hobby would be found far from home with a basket
gathering simples and medical plants--that is, by his way of it. So he
grew to be counted a wizard, and had the name of money which is so
useful to a man in some ways, but more than all else makes the folk
jealous, too.

"It was less than natural that Hobby should always have the best lint
wherewith to weave the flowered tablecovers by which he made his fame.
Why should he have early potatoes a clear fortnight before the rest of
the Breckonsiders? But chiefly it was the ill-will about money that
bred bad blood. Over the door of the parish church of Breckonside they
had printed the motto, 'We serve the Lord.' But the right words should
have been, 'We envy and grieve at the good of our neighbour.' For when
the men thought of Miser Stennis's money bags they could have felled
him, and when the women saw Bell Stennis's bonnie face smiling over her
braw mantle, they set to work and bethought them what lie they could
tell about her. All except me, and I was always by her side, as near
as might be, loving her more than my own flesh and blood. And Bell
told me all that was in her heart, because you see we had been at
school together, sitting side by side on the same bench and sharing the
same apple and toffee stick.

"So I was the only soul that knew it beforehand, when Bonnie Bell
suddenly took matters into her own hand and gave Miser Hobby a
son-in-law he had never bargained for--a first cousin of her own, an
ensign in a marching regiment. The two fo