ut heroes and
heroines; but, I'd like to live here, myself. Yes," she continued,
rather to herself than to her listener, "I do believe this is what I was
made for. I've always wanted to live amongst old things, in a stone
house with dormer-windows. Why, there isn't a single dormer-window in
Eriecreek, nor even a brick house, let alone a stone one. O yes, indeed!
I was meant for an old country."

"Well, then, Kitty, I don't see what you're to do but to marry East and
live East; or else find a rich husband, and get him to take you to
Europe to live."

"Yes; or get him to come and live in Quebec. That's all I'd ask, and he
needn't be a very rich man, for that."

"Why, you poor child, what sort of husband could you get to settle down
in _this_ dead old place?"

"O, I suppose some kind of artist or literary man."

This was not Mrs. Ellison's notion of the kind of husband who was to
realize for Kitty her fancy for life in an old country; but she was
content to let the matter rest for the present, and, in a serene
thankfulness to the power that had brought two marriageable young
creatures together beneath the same roof, and under her own observance,
she composed herself among the sofa-cushions, from which she meant to
conduct the campaign against Mr. Arbuton with relentless vigor.

"Well," she said, "it won't be fair if you are not happy in this world,
Kitty, you ask so little of it"; while Kitty turned to the window
overlooking the street, and lost herself in the drama of the passing
figures below. They were new, and yet oddly familiar, for she had long
known them in the realm of romance. The peasant-women who went by, in
hats of felt or straw, some on foot with baskets, and some in their
light market-carts, were all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their
fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since childhood in many a
tale of France or Germany; and the black-robed priests, who mixed with
the passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and now and then courteously
gave way, or lifted their wide-rimmed hats in a grave, smiling
salutation, were more recent acquaintances, but not less intimate. They
were out of old romances about Italy and Spain, in which she was very
learned; and this butcher's boy, tilting along through the crowd with a
half-staggering run, was from any one of Dickens's stories, and she
divined that the four-armed wooden trough on his shoulder was the
butcher's tray, which figures in every noveli