he values the married state as he
ought."

"What do you mean, Charles? I never saw a man more polite to ladies in my
life."

"Yes, but--"

"But what? You are always so mysterious, Charles dear."

"Mysterious! No, Carry; but if you could hear what the Doctor says of the
ladies sometimes."

"Ay, when you men get together, my dear, I know what that means-pretty
things you say of us. But you are all alike; you know you are, love!"

"I am sure," said the Parson, simply, "that I have good cause to speak
well of the sex--when I think of you, and my poor mother."

Mrs. Dale, who, with all her "tempers," was an excellent woman, and loved
her husband with the whole of her quick little heart, was touched. She
pressed his hand, and did not call him _dear_ all the way home.

Meanwhile the Italian passed the fields, and came upon the high-road
about two miles from Hazeldean. On one side stood an old-fashioned
solitary inn, such as English inns used to be before they became railway
hotels--square, solid, old-fashioned, looking so hospitable and
comfortable, with their great signs swinging from some elm tree in front,
and the long row of stables standing a little back, with a chaise or two
in the yard, and the jolly landlord talking of the crops to some stout
farmer, who has stopped his rough pony at the well-known door. Opposite
this inn, on the other side the road, stood the habitation of Dr.
Riccabocca.

A few years before the date of these annals, the stage coach, on its way
to London from a seaport town, stopped at the inn, as was its wont, for a
good hour, that its passengers might dine like Christian Englishmen--not
gulp down a basin of scalding soup, like everlasting heathen Yankees,
with that cursed railway whistle shrieking like a fiend in their ears! It
was the best dining-place on the whole road, for the trout in the
neighboring rill were famous, and so was the mutton which came from
Hazeldean Park.

From the outside of the coach had descended two passengers who, alone
insensible to the attractions of mutton and trout, refused to dine--two
melancholy-looking foreigners, of whom one was Signor Riccabocca, much
the same as we see him now, only that the black suit was less threadbare,
the tall form less meager, and he did not then wear spectacles; and the
other was his servant. "They would walk about while the coach stopped."
Now the Italian's eye had been caught by a mouldering dismantled house on
the other side