“I wile the hours with tale or song,
    Or web of fancy, fringed with careless rhyme;
  But how to find a fitting lay for thee,
    Who hast the harmonies of every time?”

And Addy looked,

  “Thou art to me most like a royal guest,
    Whose travels bring him to some humble roof,
  Where simple rustics spread their festal fare,
    And, blushing, own it is not good enough.

  “Bethink thee, then, whene’er thou com’st to me,
    From high emprise and noble toil to rest,
  My thoughts are weak and trivial, matched with thine,
    But the poor mansion offers thee its best.”

So Mrs. Marmaduke exalted her horn and exceedingly magnified her manoeuvring office.  On the strength of it, she treated herself to profuse felicitations and fished among her neighbors for more.

CHAPTER II.

And now I will let you into a secret, which, according to the received rules for story-construction, should be barred against you yet a little longer.  I will fling it wide open at once, instead of holding it ajar and admitting you edgewise, as it were, one conjecture at a time.

Miss Wimple had a lover;—­she had had him since six months before her father died, and the decayed publisher had never guessed of him nor Sally confessed him; for the good, thoughtful daughter knew it would but complicate the old man’s perplexities and cares to no purpose.  To be sure, his joyful consent was certain; but so long as he lived, “the thing was not to be thought of,” she said, and it was not wise to plant in his mind a wish with which her duty could not accord.  So Sally’s lover was hushed up,—­hidden in discretion as in a closet.

Simon Blount was his name, and he was a young farmer of five hundred acres in first-rate cultivation, with barns, stables, and offices in complete repair,—­a well-stocked, well-watered place, with “all the modern improvements,” and convenient to the Hendrik branch of the New York and Bunker Hill railroad.

The young man had inherited this very neat property from his father,—­a thriving, intelligent farmer of the best class, Mr. Wimple’s oldest friend, his playmate in boyhood, and his crony when he died.  Simon’s mother and Sally’s had likewise been schoolmates, and intimates to the last, fondly attached to each other, and mutually confiding in each other’s love and truth in times of pain and trouble.

But Mr. Blount and Mrs. Wimple had been dead these ten years;—­they died in the same month.  Simon and Sally were children when that happened, and since then they had grown up together in the closest family intimacy, interrupted only by Sally’s winter schooling in New York, and renewed every summer by her regular seasons at Hendrik.

To the young man and the ripening maiden, then, their love came as naturally as violets and clover-blooms, and was as little likely to take their parents or the familiar country-folk by surprise.