“Tush! Goody Darkmans,” said the second gossip. “They be much prettier and finer, to my mind; and so said Miss Nelly when she plucked them last night and sent me down with them. They says there is not a blade o’ grass that the master does not know. He must be a good man to love the things of the field so.” “Ho!” said Dame Darkmans, “ho! When Joe Wrench was hanged for shooting the lord’s keeper, and he mounted the scaffold wid a nosegay in his hand, he said, in a peevish voice, says he: ‘Why does not they give me a tarnation? I always loved them sort o’ flowers,--I wore them when I went a courting Bess Lucas,--an’ I would like to die with one in my hand!’ So a man may like flowers, and be but a hempen dog after all!” “Now don’t you, Goody; be still, can’t you? What a tale for a marriage day!” “Tally vally!” returned the grim hag, “many a blessing carries a curse in its arms, as the new moon carries the old. This won’t be one of your happy weddings, I tell ye.” “And why d’ ye say that?” “Did you ever see a man with a look like that make a happy husband? No, no! Can ye fancy the merry laugh o’ childer in this house, or a babe on the father’s knee, or the happy, still smile on the mother’s winsome face, some few years hence? No, Madge! the devil has set his black claw on the man’s brow.” “Hush, hush, Goody Darkmans; he may hear o’ ye!” said the second gossip, who, having now done all that remained to do, had seated herself down by the window, while the more ominous crone, leaning over Aram’s oak chair, uttered from thence her sibyl bodings. “No,” replied Mother Darkmans, “I seed him go out an hour agone, when the sun was just on the rise; and I said, when I seed him stroam into the wood yonder, and the ould leaves splashed in the damp under his feet, and his hat was aboon his brows, and his lips went so,--I said, says I, ‘t is not the man that will make a hearth bright that would walk thus on his marriage day. But I knows what I knows, and I minds what I seed last night.” “Why, what did you see last night?” asked the listener, with a trembling voice; for Plother Darkmans was a great teller of ghost and witch tales, and a certain ineffable awe of her dark gypsy features and malignant words had circulated pretty largely throughout the village.