a poet or in love, we must admit that there was no resurrection for the larkspurs and pansies upon which the little boots of Miss Susie Barringer landed.  Yet she was not of the coarse peasant type, though her cheeks were so rosy as to cause her great heaviness of heart on Sunday mornings, and her blue lawn dress was as full as it could afford from shoulders to waist.  She was a neat, hearty and very pretty country girl, with a slightly freckled face, and rippled brown hair, and astonished blue eyes, but perfectly self-possessed, and graceful as a young quail.

A young man’s ears are quick to catch the rustling of a woman’s dress.  The flight of this plump bird in its fluttering blue plumage over the rail-fence caused our young man to look up from his spading:  the scowl was routed from his brow by a sudden incursion of blushes, and his mouth was attacked by an awkward smile.

The young lady nodded, and was hurrying past.  The scowl came back in force, and the smile was repulsed from the bearded mouth with great loss:  “Miss Tudie, are you in a hurry?”

The lady thus addressed turned and said, in a voice that was half pert and half coaxing, “No particular hurry.  Al, I’ve told you a dozen times not to call me that redicklis name.”

“Why, Tudie, I hain’t never called you nothing else sence you was a little one so high.  You ort to know yer own name, and you give yerself that name when you was a yearling.  Howsom-ever, ef you don’t like it now, sence you’ve been to Jacksonville, I reckon I can call you Miss Susie—­when I don’t disremember.”

The frank amende seemed to satisfy Miss Susie, for she at once interrupted in the kindest manner:  “Never mind, Al Golyer:  you can call me what you are a-mind to.”  Then, as if conscious of the feminine inconsistency, she changed the subject by asking, “What are you going to do with that great hole?—­big enough to bury a fellow.”

“I’m going to plant this here seedlin’, that growed up in Colonel Blood’s pastur’, nobody knows how:  belike somebody was eatin’ an apple and throwed the core down-like.  I’m going to plant a little orchard here next spring, but the colonel and me, we reckoned this one ’ud be too old by that time for moving, so I thought I’d stick it in now, and see what come out’n it.  It’s a powerful thrifty chunk of a saplin’.”

“Yes.  I speak for the first peck of apples off’n it.  Don’t forget.  Good-morning.”

“Hold on a minute, Miss Susan, twell I git my coat.  I’ll walk down a piece with you.  I have got something to say to you.”

Miss Susie turned a little red and a little pale.  These occasions were not entirely unknown in her short experience of life.  When young men in the country in that primitive period had something to say, it was something very serious and earnest.  Allen Golyer was a good-looking, stalwart young farmer, well-to-do, honest, able to provide for a family.  There was nothing presumptuous in his aspiring to the hand of