range gentleman talking to her quite intimate,
with a flower in his hand.

"I called out to her to come back to her work directly. She looked up at
me, smiling in her bold impudent way, and said:--'Father has told me I
may stop and learn what this gentleman is so kind as to teach me about
my geraniums.' After that, I could say nothing more before the stranger:
and when he was gone, and she came back triumphing, and laughing, and
singing about the room, more like a mad play-actress than a decent young
woman, I kept quiet and bore with her provocation. But I went down to my
brother Joshua the same day, and talked to him seriously, and warned him
that she ought to be kept stricter, and never let to have her own way,
and offered to keep a strict hand over her myself, if he would only
support me properly. But he put me off with careless, jesting words,
which he learned to repent of bitterly afterwards.

"Joshua was as pious and respectable a man as ever lived: but it was
his misfortune to be too easy-tempered, and too proud of his daughter.
Having lost his wife, and his eldest boy and girl, he seemed so fond of
Mary, that he could deny her nothing. There was, to be sure, another one
left of his family of children, who--"

(Here, again, Mat lost patience. He had been muttering to himself
angrily for the last minute or two, while he read--and now once more he
passed over several lines of the letter, and went on at once to a new
paragraph.)

"I have said she was vain of her good looks, and bold, and flighty; and
I must now add, that she was also hasty and passionate, and reckless.
But she had wheedling ways with her, which nobody was sharp enough to
see through but me. When I made complaints against her to her father,
and proved that I was right in making them, she always managed to get
him to forgive her. She behaved, from the outset, (though I stood in the
place of a mother to her,) as perversely towards me as usual, in respect
to Mr. Carr. It had flattered her pride to be noticed and bowed to just
as if she was a born lady, by a gentleman, and a customer at the shop.
And the very same evening, at tea time, she undid before my face the
whole effect of the good advice I had been giving her father. What with
jumping on his knee, kissing him, tying and untying his cravat, sticking
flowers in his button-hole, and going on altogether more like a child
than a grown-up young woman, she wheedled him into promising that he
wou