“They know nothing about it,” she said, “that calls Miss Gourlay’s sweetheart a button-maker.  Miss Gourlay’s not the stuff to fall in love wid any button-maker, even if he made buttons of goold; an’ sure they say that the king an’ queen, and the whole royal family wears golden buttons.”

“I think, in spaiking of buttons,” observed the grazier, with a grin, “that you might lave the queen out.”

“And why should I lave the queen out?” asked Alley, indignantly, and with a towering resolution to defend the privileges of her sex.  “Why ought I lave the queen out, I say?”

“Why,” replied the grazier, with a still broader grin, “barring she wears the breeches, I don’t know what occasion she could have for buttons.”

“That only shows your ignorance,” said Alley; “don’t you know that all ladies wear habit-shirts, and that habit-shirts must have buttons?”

“I never heard of a shirt havin’ buttons anywhere but at the neck,” replied the grazier, who drew the inference in question from his own, which were made upon a very simple and primitive fashion.

“But you don’t know either,” responded Alley, launching nobly into the purest fiction, from an impression that the character of her mistress required it for her defence, “you don’t know that nobody is allowed to make buttons for the queen but a knight o’ the garther.”

“Garther!” exclaimed the grazier, with astonishment.  “Why what the dickens has garthers to do wid buttons?”

“More than you think,” replied the redoubtable Alley.  “The queen wears buttons to her garthers, and the knight o’ the garther is always obliged to try them on; but always, of course, afore company.”

The stranger was exceedingly amused at this bit of by-play between Alley and the honest grazier, and the more so as it drew the conversation from a point of the subject that was painful to him in the last degree, inasmuch as it directly involved the character of Miss Gourlay.

“How do you know, then,” proceeded Alley, triumphantly, “but the button-maker that Miss Gourlay has fallen in love with may be a knight o’ the garther?”

“Begad, there maybe a great dale in that, too,” replied the unsuspicious grazier, who never dreamt that Alley’s knowledge of court etiquette might possibly be rather limited, and her accounts of it somewhat apocryphal;—­“begad, there may.  Well,” he added, with an honest and earnest tone of sincerity, “for my part, and from all ever I heard of that darlin’ of a beauty, she deserves a knight o’ the shire, let alone a knight o’ the garther.  They say the good she does among the poor and destitute since they came home is un-tellable.  God bless her!  And that she may live long and die happy is the worst that I or anybody that knows her wishes her.  It’s well known that she had her goodness from her angel of a mother at all events, for they say that such another woman for charity and kindness to the poor never lived; and by all accounts she led an unhappy and miserable life wid her Turk of a husband, who, they say, broke her heart, and sent her to an early grave.”