"In half a crack," replied Parson Christian, pulling a great key out of his pocket and locking the church door. He was sexton as well. Then he got up into the sledge, word was called, the fiddle broke out, and away they went for the river-bank. A minute more and they were flying over the smooth ice with the morning sunlight chasing them, and the music of fifty lusty voices in their ears. They had the longer journey, but they reached the vicarage as early as the coaches that had returned by the road. Then came the breakfast--a solid repast, fit for appetites sharpened by the mountain air. Parson Christian presided in the parlor, and Brother Peter in the kitchen, the door between being thrown open. The former radiated smiles like April sunshine; the latter looked as sour as a plum beslimed by the earthworms, and "didn't know as he'd ever seen sec a pack of hungry hounds." After the breakfast the toasts, and up leaped Mr. Bonnithorne. That gentleman had quite cast off the weight of his anxiety. He laughed and chaffed, made quips and cranks. "Our lawyer is foreclosing," whispered a pert young damsel in Greta's ear. "He's getting drunk." Mr. Bonnithorne would propose "Mr. and Mrs. Ritson." He began with a few hoary and reverend quotations--"Men are April when they woo, December when they wed." This was capped by "Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives." Mr. Bonnithorne protested that both had been true, only with exceptions. Paul thanked the company in a dozen manly and well-chosen phrases, and then stepped to the kitchen door and invited the guests over whom Brother Peter presided to spend the evening at the Ghyll. The ladies had risen and carried off Greta to prepare for her journey, when Gubblum Oglethorpe got on his feet and insisted on proposing "the lasses." What Gubblum had to say on the subject it is not given to us to record. By some strange twist of logic, he launched out on a very different topic. Perhaps he sat in the vicinity of Nancy Tantarum, for he began with the story of a funeral.