“No! not thy mother. Thy mother is a very good woman—none better. No! the lass I cared for at nineteen ne’er knew how I loved her, and a year or two after and she was dead, and ne’er knew. I think she would ha’ been glad to ha’ known it, poor Molly; but I had to leave the place where we lived for to try to earn my bread and I meant to come back but before ever I did, she was dead and gone: I ha’ never gone there since. But if you fancy Phillis Holman, and can get her to fancy you, my lad, it shall go different with you, Paul, to what it did with your father.” I took counsel with myself very rapidly, and I came to a clear conclusion. “Father,” said I, “if I fancied Phillis ever so much, she would never fancy me. I like her as much as I could like a sister; and she likes me as if I were her brother—her younger brother.” I could see my father’s countenance fall a little. “You see she’s so clever she’s more like a man than a woman—she knows Latin and Greek.” “She’d forget “em, if she’d a houseful of children,” was my father’s comment on this. “But she knows many a thing besides, and is wise as well as learned; she has been so much with her father. She would never think much of me, and I should like my wife to think a deal of her husband.” “It is not just book-learning or the want of it as makes a wife think much or little of her husband,” replied my father, evidently unwilling to give up a project which had taken deep root in his mind. “It’s a something I don’t rightly know how to call it—if he’s manly, and sensible, and straightforward; and I reckon you’re that, my boy.” “I don’t think I should like to have a wife taller than I am, father,” said I, smiling; he smiled too, but not heartily. “Well,” said he, after a pause. “It’s but a few days I’ve been thinking of it, but I’d got as fond of my notion as if it had been a new engine as I’d been planning out. Here’s our Paul, thinks I to myself, a good sensible breed o’ lad, as has never vexed or troubled his mother or me; with a good business opening out before him, age nineteen, not so bad-looking, though perhaps not to call handsome, and here’s his cousin, not too near cousin, but just nice, as one may say; aged seventeen, good and true, and well brought up to work with her hands as well as her head; a scholar—but that can’t be helped, and is more her misfortune than her fault, seeing she is the only child of scholar—and as I said afore, once she’s a wife and a she’ll forget it all, I’ll be bound—with a good fortune in land and house when it shall please the Lord to take her parents to himself; with eyes like poor Molly’s for beauty, a colour that comes and goes on a milk-white skin, and as pretty a mouth—,