“I d’ ’low the maid done it out o’ pique,” he cried ecstatically, “I d’ ’low she did! She did do it along of her feelin’s bein’ hurt with me a-holdin’ back so long. That’s a different story, my dear--a different story altogether! I bain’t one to bear malice along o’ that; ’twas but nat’ral arter all. E-es, I d’ ’low I be a terrible slow-coach; but, ye see, I’d a-got set i’ my bachelor ways, and it did take I a long time for to make up my mind; and then, as I do tell ’ee, I wur a-waitin’ and expectin’ for you to give in. But I’ve spoke now, and if you’ll say the word, my dear, all can be forgive and forgot.” Bethia presumably did speak the word, for she resigned her post as tax-collector that very evening, and she and her Jacob were “asked in church” on the following Sunday. As for that matter of the summons, it was settled “out of court”. THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT. Daniel Chaffey stood poised on a step-ladder nailing up the fine Gloire de Dijon rose which was trailed over the wall of his house. He had already performed the same operation for the jessamine which grew over the porch and for the purple clematis on the right of it. He had tied his dahlias so tightly and firmly to a variety of newly cut stakes, that each individual scarlet bloom reminded one in some measure of a choleric old gentleman suffering from a tight and high shirt-collar. He had scraped the little path till the cobble-stones of which it was composed stood revealed each almost in its entirety. From his exalted position he could survey the whole frontage of his own roof--a sight in which an artist would have revelled, for not only was the thatch itself mellowed by time and weather to the most exquisite variety of tones, but on its mouldering surface had sprung up a multitude of blooms, vying in brightness with those of the garden beneath--not merely your common everyday mosses and lichens, though patches of these were to be found in every shade of emerald and topaz and silver, but flowers, real flowers, seemed to thrive there; saxifrages, toad-flax, snap-dragon, and, just where the bedroom gable jutted out, a flaming bunch of poppies. It will be seen from this that Daniel Chaffey’s house was an old one; it bore a date over the door, cut roughly in the weather-beaten stone--1701. It had mullioned windows with diamond panes, and an oaken door studded with nails. It had indeed once been the village schoolhouse, though the Chaffey family had been in possession of it now for many generations, and had farmed, more or less successfully, the small holding attached to it.