“Why, law, Hannah, who else should I have saved it for but my own dear old sweetheart?  I never so much as thought of another.”

“With all these comforts about you, you might have married some blooming young girl.”

“Lord, dear woman, I ha’n’t much larnin’, nor much religion, more’s the pity; but I hope I have conscience enough to keep me from doing any young girl so cruel a wrong as to tempt her to throw away her youth and beauty on an old man like me; and I am sure I have sense enough to prevent me from doing myself so great an injustice as to buy a young wife, who, in the very natur’ of things, would be looking for’ard to my death as the beginning of her life; for I’ve heard as how the very life of a woman is love, and if the girl-wife cannot love her old husband—­Oh, Hannah, let us drop the veil—­the pictur’ is too sickening to look at.  Such marriages are crimes.  Ah, Hannah, in the way of sweethearting, age may love youth, but youth can’t love age.  And another thing I am sartin’ sure of—­as a young girl is a much more delicate cre’tur’ than a young man, it must be a great deal harder for her to marry an old man than it would be for him to marry an old woman, though either would be horrible.”

“You seem to have found this out somehow, Reuben.”

“Well, yes, my dear; it was along of a rich old fellow, hereaway, as fell in love with my little Kitty’s rosy cheeks and black eyes, and wanted to make her Mrs. Barnabas Winterberry.  And I saw how that girl was at the same time tempted by his money and frightened by his age; and how in her bewitched state, half-drawn and half-scared, she fluttered about him, for all the world like a humming-bird going right into the jaws of a rattlesnake.  Well, I questioned little Kitty, and she answered me in this horrid way—­’Why, brother, he must know I can’t love him; for how can I?  But still he teases me to marry him, and I can do that; and why shouldn’t I, if he wants me to?’ Then in a whisper—­’You know, brother, it wouldn’t be for long; because he is ever so old, and he would soon die; and then I should be a rich young widow, and have my pick and choose out of the best young men in the country side.’  Such, Hannah, was the evil state of feeling to which that old man’s courtship had brought my simple little sister!  And I believe in my soul it is the natural state of feeling into which every young girl falls who marries an old man.”

“That is terrible, Reuben.”

“Sartinly it is.”

“What did you say to your sister?”

“Why, I didn’t spare the feelings of little Kitty, nor her doting suitor’s nyther, and that I can tell you!  I talked to little Kitty like a father and mother, both; I told her well what a young traitress she was a-planning to be; and how she was fooling herself worse than she was deceiving her old beau, who had got into the whit-leathar age, and would be sartin’ sure to live twenty-five or thirty years longer, till she would be an old woman herself,