t o' a sister, ye know,
Tim, 'count o' Jean."

Tim made a horrible grimace. "Well, come on! Let's think o' somethin'
good an' awful to do to Sawed-Off!" he cried, anxious to change the
subject.

All winter the double wooing of Miss Long had caused great excitement
in the village. Folks declared it was scandalous the way Ella Anne
carried on with those two fellows of hers, never giving either one more
chance than the other, and it would be a caution if she wasn't left
again, the way she was when young McQuarry married the squaw.

Ella Anne's conduct caused consternation in the Long family, too. The
young lady was suspected of favoring young MacDonald, while her parents
strongly encouraged Mr. Wilmott. Sawed-Off was decidedly "well fixed,"
with his cattle and his cheese factory, while the young fellow from the
Highlands was a gay lad, with never an acre to his name, and no match
for a girl who had had a year's music lessons, not to speak of all the
other attainments of Miss Long.

So far, Davy and Tim had been quite impartial, and had strewn both
suitors' paths with such difficulties that the younger man had finally
laid violent hands upon them; and Sawed-Off had complained to the
respective authorities set over each. The latter treatment had not
troubled the mischief-makers much. Mrs. Munn declared that talking
always did harm, and talking to boys was worse than useless. Jake and
Hannah bewailed their eldest's sudden fall from grace, and wondered if
his growing intimacy with John McIntyre was having an evil effect upon
the child. And there it ended. The boys still continued their
attentions to the rival lovers, and so closely had they watched the
proceedings that on the last night of May they were in possession of a
secret plot for the morrow, which the lovers fondly believed to be
their own.

Hidden behind the Longs' cedar hedge one night, the eldest orphan had
overheard some whispers between Ella Anne and the young Lochinvar.
They were going to run away, Tim had gathered--have a regular
elopement, like Evelina and Daring Dick, in the book he and Davy had
just read. "The night before the mill starts," young MacDonald had
whispered, "everybody'll be too busy to notice." Well, the mill
started to-morrow! And besides that, Davy, who had been on the lookout
while his fellow conspirator lay beneath the hedge, had spied Sawed-Off
Wilmott come crawling from behind the lilac bushes at the Longs' gate,
and go