'Here have we got a most desirable match in the very house with you--one only requiring the most ordinary assiduity on the part of any handsome and well brought-up young woman, to secure the prize. Nature has done its part for you, and I, though you think so little of your mother's love, have done mine; and yet you send your thoughts wool-gathering far and wide to take up with a penniless, ill-principled, disreputable licentiate! Not even ordained! Nor ever likely to be, if a's true that's suspected. For shame, woman! An' show mair sense!' 'Mamma! I am nothing to the gentleman you allude to! He would rather sit in Peter's room and smoke tobacco, than trouble with me. And I care just as little for him.' 'Ay! There it is! You're that indolent you canna be fashed to make yourself commonly agreeable to your brother's friend! Do you take yourself for another 'Leddy Jean' in the ballad, that all the lords and great men in the country are to come bowin' and fraislin' for a glint o' _your_ e'e? You are vastly mistaken if you do! The young men of fortune now-a-days know their own weight too well for any such nonsense. A girl will have to make herself agreeable before she need expect attention even, not to speak of a proposal.' 'But I don't want a proposal! and I don't want _him!_ Am I for sale, that I am to be trotted out and shown off to him, as Jock Speirs does with papa's colts, when the horse-couper comes round?' 'Sophia Sangster! To think I should live to see the day when my own child would taunt me with being a match-making mother! Is that the outcome of all my self-denying care and love? But you'll change your mind yet, my lady, or I'm mistaken. When your poor mother is laid in the kirk-yard, and yourself are a middle-aged spinster living in lodgings, up a stair, in some country town, spending your time cutting up flannel to make petticoats for beggar wives, and no diversion the live long week but the Dorcas meetings on Friday evenings, then you'll remember your poor mother's assiduous endeavours to settle you in life, and you'll see your headstrong folly when it's too late!' Mrs. Sangster seldom attempted to wield the limner's art, and that was the reason why her present effort was so effective on her own sensibilities. She buried her face in her handkerchief and gulped. 'Mamma! what is the good of talking nonsense like this? There is no present fear of my being an old maid; Mr. Brown has asked me to marry him, and that is what I want to talk about,--not about suppositions that can never come to anything.' 'And what would you wish to say, then, in your great wisdom?' 'I would simply say that I am not engaged to anybody, and that I am too much startled by his letter to be able to say more; but he can speak to papa about it.'