As usual, the world was mistaken. Abby was as free from all mercenary feelings as she was from all other frailties. But she had her own notions about doing good. She saw in Sampson Terricott a highly imaginative and gifted man, wasting mental power in immature schemes which his timidity thwarted in their very outset, and suffering a fine fortune to be idle in his hands for want of energy to take up his stewardship. He was weak in health, and subject to attacks of morbid spirits which sometimes threatened his reason. In a word, Abby saw that he wanted some one to take care of him, and she fixed upon herself as the fittest person. She was now nine-and-twenty, in the full bloom of health and beauty, and, as she argued, “if society provides no other resource for destitute females than marriage, I must marry, or at my father’s death find myself a beggar.” Having come to this conclusion, she decided that, as the giving herself a master was out of the question, and the idea of possessing a slave in her husband was equally disagreeable, she had better divide the difference, and unite herself to one who needed a stronger nature on which to rest. How the courtship was managed no one ever knew. I am inclined to think there was not much love-making, and from the kind of dreamy surprise which Sampson exhibited when questioned about his engagement, it is presumed he was scarcely conscious of his own happiness. People said that Miss Leyburn, reversing the usual order of things, had popped the question to Sampson, who stammered out, “Yes,” through sheer fright. The probability is that he did exactly as she directed him. She gave him to understand she meant to marry him, and if he offered no resistance, feeling rather pleased at being relieved from responsibility for the rest of his life. They were married in the chapel of the college, and the half-suppressed glee of the saucy students may be imagined. All the blank walls about the college were filled with caricatures, illustrative of the one idea, “_paired, not matched_.” One of these charcoal libels was particularly annoying, it represented a nondescript and beautiful winged animal—a Hippogriff—with the face of a woman, curving her proud neck beneath a rein held in the hands of Apollo, while directly beneath was a second representation of the same magnificent creature tamely yoked with an ox to the plough.