and that is saying a good deal, and shows how much more real what was passing before him was, even to a farmer, than the agricultural customs of the ancients. I remember one thing more,—an attack which Betty the servant made upon me one day as I came in through the kitchen where she was churning, and stopped to ask her for a drink of buttermilk. “I say, cousin Paul,” (she had adopted the family habit of addressing me generally as cousin Paul, and always speaking of me in that form,) ‘something’s amiss with our Phillis, and I reckon you’ve a good guess what it is. She’s not one to take up wi’ such as you,” (not complimentary, but that Betty never was, even to those for whom she felt the highest respect,) “but I’d as lief yon Holdsworth had never come near us. So there you’ve a bit o’ my mind.” And a very unsatisfactory bit it was. I did not know what to answer to the glimpse at the real state of the case implied in the shrewd woman’s speech; so I tried to put her off by assuming surprise at her first assertion. “Amiss with Phillis! I should like to know why you think anything is wrong with her. She looks as blooming as any one can do.” “Poor lad! you’re but a big child after all; and you’ve likely never heared of a fever-flush. But you know better nor that, my fine fellow! so don’t think for to put me off wi’ blooms and blossoms and such-like talk. What makes her walk about for hours and hours o’ nights when she used to be abed and asleep? I sleep next room to her, and hear her plain as can be. What makes her come in panting and ready to drop into that chair,”—nodding to one close to the door,—“and it’s ‘Oh! Betty, some water, please’? That’s the way she comes in now, when she used to come back as fresh and bright as she went out. If yon friend o’ yours has played her false, he’s a deal for t’ answer for; she’s a lass who’s as sweet and as sound as a nut, and the very apple of her father’s eye, and of her mother’s too’ only wi’ her she ranks second to th’ minister. You’ll have to look after yon chap, for I, for one, will stand no wrong to our Phillis.” What was I to do, or to say? I wanted to justify Holdsworth, to keep Phillis’s secret, and to pacify the woman all in the same breath. I did not take the best course, I’m afraid. “I don’t believe Holdsworth ever spoke a word of—of love to her in all his life. I’m sure he didn’t.” “Ay. Ay! but there’s eyes, and there’s hands, as well as tongues; and a man has two o’ th’ one and but one o’ t’other.” “And she’s so young; do you suppose her parents would not have seen it?” “Well! if you axe me that, I’ll say out boldly, ‘No’. They’ve called her ‘the child’ so long—‘the child’ is always their name for her when they talk on her between themselves, as if never anybody else had a ewe-lamb before them—that she’s grown up to be a woman under their very eyes, and they look on her still as if she were in her long clothes. And you ne’er heard on a man falling in love wi’ a babby in long clothes!”