sure you were a very pretty,
smart girl in your young days"--with another quizzical glance at Flora.

The old lady drew herself up, and smiled approvingly upon her black-eyed
tormentor.

"Na, na, Mister Jeames, my gude man that's dead an' gane said to me, the
verra day that he made me his ain--'Katie, ye are nae bonnie, but ye a'
gude, which is a' hantle better.'"

"No doubt he was right, Mrs. Waddel; but I really think he was very
ungallant to say so on his wedding-day, and did not do you half
justice."

"Weel, weel," said the good dame, "every ain to his taste. He was not
ow'r gifted that way himsel; but we are nane sensible o' our ain
defects."

The great attraction in the small, windowless closet in which James
slept, was an enormous calabash, which her son, the idol of Mrs.
Waddel's heart, had brought home with him from the South Seas. Over this
calabash, the simple-hearted mother daily rehearsed all the wonderful
adventures she had gathered from that individual, during his short
visits home; and as she possessed a surprisingly retentive memory, her
maternal reminiscences would have filled volumes,--to all of which James
listened with the most earnest attention, not on account of the
adventures, for they were commonplace enough, but for the mere pleasure
of hearing Mrs. Waddel talk broad Scotch, from which he seemed to derive
the most ludicrous enjoyment. Mrs. Waddel had two daughters, to whom
nature had been less bountiful than even to herself. Tall, awkward,
shapeless dawdles, whose unlovely youth was more repulsive than the
mother's full-blown, homely age,--with them the old lady's innocent
obliquity of vision had degenerated into a downright squint, and the
redness round the rims of their large, fishy-looking, light eyes, gave
the idea of perpetual weeping,--a pair of Niobes, versus the beauty,
whose swollen orbs were always dissolved in tears. They crept slip-shod
about the house, their morning wrappers fitting so easily their slovenly
figures, that you expected to see them suddenly fall to the ground, and
the young ladies walk on in native simplicity.

"My daughters are like mysel--na' bonnie," said Mrs. Waddel. "They
dinna' tak' wi' the men folk, wha look mair to comeliness than gudeness
now-a-days in a wife. A' weel, every dog maun ha' his day, an' they may
get husbands yet.

"I weel remember, when Noncy was a bairn, she was the maist ugsome wee
thing I ever clappit an e'e upon. My Leddy W. lodged