ard
herself as the owner of a property that she had all her life been
accustomed to consider as a part of her late uncle. The heirs expectant,
"a'ter reading the insterment," as Baiting Joe told his cronies, when he
related the circumstances over a mug of cider that evening, "fore and aft,
and overhauling it from truck to keelson, give the matter up, as a bad
job. They couldn't make nawthin' out of oppersition," continued Joe, "and
so they tuck the horse, and the looking-glass, and the pin-cushion, and
cleared out with their cargo. You couldn't get one of that breed to leave
as much as a pin behind, to which he thought the law would give him a
right. Squire Job went off very unwillingly; for so strong was his belief
in his claim, that he had made up his mind, as he told me himself, to
break up the north meadow, and put it in corn this coming season."

"They say that Minister Whittle took it very hard that nawthin' was said
about him, or about meetin', in the deacon's will," observed Jake Davis,
one of Baiting Joe's cronies.

"That he did; and he tuck it so hard that everybody allows the two sermons
he preached the next Sabba' day to be the very two worst he ever _did_
preach."

"They must have been pretty bad, then," quaintly observed Davis: "I've
long set down Minister Whittle's discourses as being a _leetle_ the worst
going, when you give him a chance."

It is unnecessary to relate any more of this dialogue, nor should we have
given the little we have, did it not virtually explain what actually
occurred on the publication of the contents of the will. Roswell met with
no opposition in proving the instrument, and the day after he was admitted
to act as executor he was married to Mary Pratt, and became tenant, by the
courtesy, to all her real estate; such being the law _then_, though it is
so no longer. _Now_, a man and his wife may have a very pretty family
quarrel about the ownership of a dozen tea-spoons, and the last, so far as
we can see, may order the first out of one of her rocking chairs, if she
see fit! Surely domestic peace is not so trifling a matter that the law
should seek to add new subjects of strife to the many that seem to be
nearly inseparable from the married state.

Let this be as it may, no such law existed when Roswell Gardiner and Mary
Pratt became man and wife. One of the first acts of the happy young
couple, after they were united, was to make a suitable disposition of the
money found buried