ate her lord, and her
doing so had been a joke between Luke and Rachel,--

will not come to reason without a lawsuit, I must scrape
together all the capital I have, or I shall be fifty years
old before I can begin. He is a pig-headed old fool, and
I shall be driven to ruin him and all his family. I would
have done,--and still would do,--anything for him in
kindness; but if he drives me to go to law to get what
is as much my own as his share is his own, I will build
another brewery just under his nose. All this will require
money, and therefore I have to run about and get my
affairs settled.

But this is a nice love-letter,--is it not? However, you
must take me as I am. Just now I have beer in my very
soul. The grand object of my ambition is to stand and
be fumigated by the smoke of my own vats. It is a fat,
prosperous, money-making business, and one in which there
is a clear line between right and wrong. No man brews bad
beer without knowing it,--or sells short measure. Whether
the fatness and the honesty can go together;--that is the
problem I want to solve.

You see I write to you exactly as if you were a man
friend, and not my own dear sweet girl. But I am a very
bad hand at love-making. I considered that that was all
done when you nodded your head over my arm in token that
you consented to be my wife. It was a very little nod, but
it binds you as fast as a score of oaths. And now I think
I have a right to talk to you about all my affairs, and
expect you at once to get up the price of malt and hops in
Devonshire. I told you, you remember, that you should be
my friend, and now I mean to have my own way.

You must tell me exactly what my mother has been doing and
saying at the cottage. I cannot quite make it out from
what she says, but I fear that she has been interfering
where she had no business, and making a goose of herself.
She has got an idea into her head that I ought to make a
good bargain in matrimony, and sell myself at the highest
price going in the market;--that I ought to get money,
or if not money, family connexion. I'm very fond of
money,--as is everybody, only people are such liars,--but
then I like it to be my own; and as to what people call
connexion, I have no words to tell you how I despise it.
If I know myself I should never have chosen a woman as my
companion for