Spring came at last.  Its softer skies were as blue over Dalton as in the wide fields without, and its footsteps as bloom-bringing in Miss Lucinda’s garden as in mead or forest.  Now Monsieur Leclerc came to her aid again at odd minutes, and set her flower-beds with mignonette borders, and her vegetable-garden with salad herbs of new and flourishing kinds.  Yet not even the sweet season seemed to hurry the catastrophe that we hope, dearest reader, thy tender eyes have long seen impending.  No, for this quaint alliance a quainter Cupid waited,—­the chubby little fellow with a big head and a little arrow, who waits on youth and loveliness, was not wanted here.  Lucinda’s God of Love wore a lank, hard-featured, grizzly shape, no less than that of Israel Slater, who marched into the garden one fine June morning, earlier than usual, to find Monsieur in his blouse, hard at work weeding the cauliflower-bed.

“Good mornin’, Sir! good mornin’!” said Israel, in answer to the Frenchman’s greeting.  “This is a real slick little garden-spot as ever I see, and a pootty house, and a real clever woman too.  I’ll be skwitched, ef it a’n’t a fust-rate consarn, the hull on’t.  Be you ever a-goin’ back to France, Mister?”

“No, my goot friend.  I have nobody there.  I stay here; I have friend here:  but there,—­oh, non! je ne reviendrai pas! ah, jamais! jamais!”

“Pa’s dead, eh? or shamming?  Well, I don’t understand your lingo; but ef you’re a-goin’ to stay here, I don’t see why you don’t hitch hosses with Miss Lucindy.”

Monsieur Leclerc looked up astonished.

“Horses, my friend?  I have no horse!”

“Thunder ‘n’ dry trees!  I didn’t say you hed, did I?  But that comes o’ usin’ what Parson Hyde calls figgurs, I s’pose.  I wish’t he’d use one kind o’ figgurin’ a leetle more; he’d pay me for that wood-sawin’.  I didn’t mean nothin’ about hosses.  I sot out fur to say, Why don’t ye marry Miss Lucindy?”

“I?” gasped Monsieur,—­“I, the foreign, the poor?  I could not to presume so!”

“Well, I don’t see ’s it’s sech drefful presumption.  Ef you’re poor, she’s a woman, and real lonesome too; she ha’n’t got nuther chick nor child belongin’ to her, and you’re the only man she ever took any kind of a notion to.  I guess ’t would be jest as much for her good as yourn.”

“Hush, good Is-ray-el! it is good to stop there.  She would not to marry after such years of goodness:  she is a saint of the blessed.”

“Well, I guess saints sometimes fellerships with sinners; I’ve heerd tell they did; and ef I was you, I’d make trial for ‘t.  Nothin’ ventur’, nothin’ have.”

Whereupon Israel walked off, whistling.