“It’s only a Yankee pedlar,” said Mr. Sutton to the landlord who was coming out, and entirely careless of being overheard by the stranger; and he walked up to his chamber, where he awakened a diminutive poodle, his travelling companion, from the siesta with which it was recruiting after its journey, and occupied himself in cracking his handkerchief at it, until an additional stir in the house indicated the approach of tea-time. He then came down, carrying Cupidon, for so was the animal appellated; and found in the bar-room a young gentleman, a law-student, to whom he had delivered a letter on his arrival, and who was a boarder in the house. The other stranger had, meanwhile, entered the room, and was cooling himself at an open window, with his short curling hair pushed back from a forehead remarkable in its whiteness and intellectual development, and crowning a face of strikingly handsome lineaments and prepossessing expression. “How do you contrive to exist in this stupid place?” asked our dandy of his new acquaintance, whose name was Wallis; “they say there are some genteel people about,—have you any pretty girls among them to flirt with?” “We have some pretty young ladies, but don’t use them for that purpose exactly,” replied Wallis; “we admire them, and wait on them and try to please them, and then, when we can afford it, we marry them, if they don’t object.” “Have you seen anything of a lady vagabondising in this region,—a Miss Valeria North?” “Miss Valeria North, the fashionable heiress of B——? the niece of the celebrated Judge North? what should she be doing here?” “Oh, I don’t know,—it’s beginning to be genteel for people to get tired of society, and to go hunting up out-of-the-way places that one knows nothing about except from the maps; I heard in the railroad cars that she was making a tour along the river here, and was in hopes that I might fall in with her. What do you know of her?” “I heard a great deal about her at Saratoga last summer, where I happened to stop for a few days. Every body was talking about her beauty, talents and accomplishments, and in particular about her plain and simple manners, so singular in an heiress and a belle. The young men, mostly, seemed to have been afraid of her; regarding her as a female Caligula who would have rejoiced in the power of decapitating all the silliness, stupidity and puppyism in the world with one stroke of her wit.” “Indeed!” said Sutton, with a weak laugh that proved him not to apprehend what he was laughing at; “I hope she’ll soon come along; I’m prepared for a dead set at her. Girls of two or three hundred thousands are worth that trouble; it’s a much pleasanter way to get pocket money than to be playing the dutiful son for it.” Wallis elevated his eyebrows, but made no other reply. “That, I suppose, is one of your village beauties,—that one walking in the garden with the pink dress on and the black apron,” resumed Sutton.