ome, before your
dear nose is quite cut off.--Oh, I beg your pardon, sir; I never saw
you."

"My fate in life is to be overlooked," Mr. Mordacks answered, with
a martial stride; "but not always, young lady, with such exquisite
revenge. What I look at pays fiftyfold for being overlooked."

"You are an impudent, conceited man," thought Mary to herself, with
gross injustice; but she only blushed and said, "I beg your pardon,
sir."

"You see, sir," quoth the farmer, with some severity, tempered, however,
with a smile of pride, "my daughter, Mary Anerley."

"And I take off my hat," replied audacious Mordacks, among whose faults
was no false shame, "not only to salute a lady, sir, but also to have a
better look."

"Well, well," said the farmer, as Mary ran away; "your city ways are
high polite, no doubt, but my little lass is strange to them. And I like
her better so, than to answer pert with pertness. Now come you in, and
warm your feet a bit. None of us are younger than we used to be."

This was not Master Anerley's general style of welcoming a guest, but he
hated new-fangled Frenchified manners, as he told his good wife, when
he boasted by-and-by how finely he had put that old coxcomb down. "You
never should have done it," was all the praise he got. "Mr. Mordacks is
a business man, and business men always must relieve their minds." For
no sooner now was the general factor introduced to Mistress Anerley
than she perceived clearly that the object of his visit was not to make
speeches to young chits of girls, but to seek the advice of a sensible
person, who ought to have been consulted a hundred times for once that
she even had been allowed to open her mouth fairly. Sitting by the fire,
he convinced her that the whole of the mischief had been caused by sheer
neglect of her opinion. Everything she said was so exactly to the point
that he could not conceive how it should have been so slighted, and she
for her part begged him to stay and partake of their simple dinner.

"Dear madam, it can not be," he replied; "alas! I must not think of it.
My conscience reproaches me for indulging, as I have done, in what
is far sweeter than even one of your dinners--a most sensible lady's
society. I have a long bitter ride before me, to comfort the fatherless
and the widow. My two legs of mutton will be thawed by this time in the
genial warmth of your stable. I also am thawed, warmed, feasted I may
say, by happy approximation to a mind