“How do you do, sir?” said Mrs. Forriner’s eyes and cap; her tongue moved not.

“Just come in town,” pursued her husband; “and has come to take breakfast with us.”

“Have you come in to stay, cousin? or are you going back again to the North?”

“I am not going back at present —­ I am going to stay,” said Winthrop.

The lady was standing up, waiting the instant arrival of breakfast, or not enough at ease in her mind to sit down.  The table and room and furniture, though plain enough and even mean in their character, had notwithstanding a sufficient look of homely comfort.

“You didn’t like it up there where you were?” she went on, changing the places of things on the table with a dissatisfied air.

“Up where, ma’am?”

“O this is not Rufus, —­ this is Winthrop, my dear,” said Mr. Forriner.  “Cousin Winthrop has just come down from —­ I forget —­ from home.  What does brother Landholm call his place, cousin?”

“We sometimes call it after our mountain, ‘Wut-a-qut-o.’”

How sweet the syllables seemed in Winthrop’s lips!

“What?” put in the lady.

Winthrop repeated.

“I should never remember it. —­ Then this is another cousin?” she remarked to Mr. Forriner; —­ “and not the one that was here before?”

“No, my dear.  It is Rufus that is in the country up North somewhere —­ Cousin Winthrop is coming here to be a lawyer, he tells me.”

“Will you sit up, cousin?” said the lady somewhat dryly, after a minute’s pause, as her handmaid set a Britannia metal tea-pot on the board.  The meaning of the request being that he should move his chair up to the table, Winthrop did so; for to do the family justice he had sat down some time before.

“How will your mother do without you at home?” inquired Mrs. Forriner, when she had successfully apportioned the milk and sugar in the cups.

“I have not been at home for three years past.”

“Has she other sons with her?”

“Not another so old as myself.”

“It’s pretty hard on her, aint it, to have her two eldest go off?”

“Where have you been these three years?” put in Uncle Forriner.

“At Shagarack, sir.”

“Ah! —­ Brother Landholm is bringing up all his sons to be civilians, it seems.”

Winthrop was not very clear what his questioner meant; but as it was probable Mr. Forriner himself was in the same condition of darkness, he refrained from asking.

“What’s at Shagarack?” said Mrs. Forriner.

“A College, my dear.”

“College! —­ Have you just come to the city, cousin?”

“He caught cold in the rain last Tuesday and has been lying by ever since, and only got in town this morning.”

“Have you got a place to stay?”

“Not yet, ma’am.  I have been but two hours here.”

“Well, you had better see to that the first thing, and come here and take dinner —­ that’ll give you a chance.  You’ll easily find what you want.”