a man’s ideal of what the sex should be.  When he spoke of her behind her back it was with indignant sympathy as “poor Miss Kesiah,” or “that poor good soul Kesiah Blount”—­for in spite of a natural bent for logic, and more than forty years of sedulous attendance upon the law, he harboured at the bottom of his heart an unreasonable conviction that Kesiah’s plainness was, somehow, the result of her not having chosen to be pretty.

“Any sport, Jonathan?” he inquired cheerfully, while he buttered his waffles.  “If I scared up one Molly Cotton-tail out of the briars I did at least fifty.”

“No, I didn’t get a shot,” replied Gay, “but I met a poacher on my land who appeared to have been more successful.  There seems to be absolutely no respect for a man’s property rights in this part of the country.  The fellow actually had the impudence to stop and bandy words with me.”

“Well, you mustn’t be too hard on him.  His ancestors, doubtless, shot over your fields for generations, and he’d probably look upon an attempt to enforce the game laws as an infringement of his privileges.”

“Do you mean that the landowner is utterly unprotected?”

“By no means—­go slow—­go slow—­you might search the round globe, I believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbours.  But they’ve always been taught, you see, to regard the bird in the air as belonging to the man with the gun.  On these large estates game was so plentiful in the old days and pot-hunters, as they call them, so few, that it didn’t pay a man to watch out for his interest.  Now that the birds are getting scarce, the majority of farmers in the State are having their lands posted, but your uncle was too little of a sportsman to concern himself in the matter.”

“Well, I knocked a tooth out of the fellow, so the whole county will be after me like a pack of hounds, I suppose.  I wonder who he was, by the way—­young, good looking, rather a bully?”

“The description fits a Revercomb.  As they are your next neighbours it was probably the miller or his brother.”

“I know the miller, and it wasn’t he—­but when I come to think of it, the youngster had that same rustic look to him.  By Jove, I am sorry it was a Revercomb,” he added under his breath.

A frown had settled on the face of the old gentleman, and he poured the syrup over his buckwheat cakes with the manner of a man who is about to argue a case for the defence when his natural sympathies are with the prosecution.

“They are an irascible family from the mother down,” he observed, “and I’m sorry you’ve got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county.”  He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they remained in her presence.

A little later, when the two men were smoking in the library, Gay brought the conversation back again to the point at which the lawyer had so hastily dropped it.