“Won’t you kiss me for good-bye, ’Tenty?”

Dear me! of course she kissed him, and thought how good he was to kiss her, and told him so.  Whereupon he got better and better; and when the sexton came to ring the bell for nine o’clock, they only just heard his steps in time to steal away unobserved through the starry darkness, and go round past the pine-grove.  So reaching home at the aforesaid late hour, where Mr. Ned became good again when he stooped to unlatch the gate, ’Tenty looked so fresh and rosy and sweet when she came in, that Aunt ’Viny growled to herself, found fault with her gruel, scolded at the blanket, tipped over the teacup, and worried ’Tenty back into stern reality, till the girl stole off to her bed.  Not to sleep,—­oh, no!  Waste such sweetness on sleep?  Never!  She lay there, broad awake, and thought it all over, and how very nice it was to have anybody love her so much, and how she should like to be handsome and smart and worthy so much honor, till the cock crowed for dawn, and then she fell asleep, nowise daunted by the recollection that Ned had said nothing to her except that she was as sweet as a ripe blackberry and as pretty as a daisy; for to her innocent logic actions spoke louder than words, and she knew that anybody who did so (?) must love her enough to marry her.

So Ned sailed for Valparaiso, and ’Tenty stayed at home.  Aunt ’Viny got no better in all those winter-snows and blows; they are not favorable to rheumatism, these New-England airs; so ’Tenty had enough to do; but she was happy and contented.  And winter crept by and merged into spring, and spring into autumn, before Deerfield heard any news of Ned Parker; though, in the mean time, one report after another of his being engaged to various girls, at length settling with marked weight on Hannah-Ann Hall, spread over the village and was the theme of Sunday-noon gossips and sewing-society meetings, greatly to ’Tenty’s contempt and amusement,—­though the contempt was too bitter and the amusement too tremulous to be pleasant.  For did not she know better?  People don’t kiss people when they don’t like them:  a self-evident proposition, but one that required some assertion and repetition to weigh its right weight in her mind.

Poor little ’Tenty!  In that cold November there came a letter to Doctor Parker just as he was getting out of his gig, after a round of visits.  The postmaster, going home to dinner, handed it to him, and, going back from dinner, was called in to lift him up-stairs to his bed.  Ned Parker had been wrecked off the Horn, the crew took to their boats, and only one boat, with one surviving man to tell the tale, was picked up by a whaler coming back to New Bedford from the Pacific; all the rest were gone.  Doctor Parker was old and feeble; this only child was all he had; paralysis smote his body when the smitten mind bowed before that dire knowledge, and he never looked up again.  Content would have given anything