His remark was simple in tenor--in effect that her bell-cow was “a wee cat-ham'ed”; but Janet scented its underlying tenderness as a hungry traveller noses a dinner on a wind, and after that drove her cows round by the corner which was conveniently veiled by heavy maple-bush. Indeed, it was to the friendly shadows which shrouded it, day or dark, that Cap'en McKay--a man wise in affairs of the heart by reason of much sailing in and out of foreign ports--afterward attributed the record which Timmins set Zorra in courting. “He couldna see her bones, nor her his bow-legs,” the mariner phrased it. But be this as it may, whether or no each made love to a voice, Cupid ran a swift course with them, steeplechasing over obstacles that would have taken years for a Zorra lad to plod around. In less than six months they passed from a bare goodnight to the exchange of soul thoughts on butter-making, the raising of calves, fattening of swine, and methods of feeding swedes that they might not taint cow's milk, and so had progressed by such tender paths through gentle dusks to the point where Timmins was ready to declare himself in the light of this present morning. Assured by one glance that Timmins's courage still hung at the point to which she had screwed it the preceding evening, Janet drooped again to her work. To his remark that the potatoes were looking fine, however, the elder made no response--unless a gout of tobacco smoke could be so counted. With eyes screwed up and mouth drawn down, he gazed off into space--a Highland sphinx, a Gaelic Rhadamanthus. His manner, however, made no impression on Timmins's stolidity. The latter's eye followed the elder's in its peregrinations till it came to rest, when, without further preliminaries, he began to unfold his suit, which in matter and essence was such as are usually put forward by those whom love has blinded. It was really an able plea, lacking perhaps those subtilities of detail with which a Zorra man would have trimmed it, but good enough for a man who labored under the disadvantages which accrue to birth south of the Tweed and Tyne. But it did not stir the elder's sphinxlike calm. “Ha' ye done?” he inquired, without removing his gaze from the clouds; and when Timmins assented, he delivered judgment in a cloud of tobacco smoke. “Weel--ye canna ha' her.” After which he resumed his pipe and smoked placidly, wearing the air of one who has settled a difficult question forever. But if stolid, Timmins had his fair share of a certain slow pugnacity. “Why?” he demanded. The elder smoked on. “Why?” “Weel,”--the elder spoke slowly to the clouds,--“I'm no obliged to quote chapter an' verse, but for the sake of argyment--forbye should Janet marry on an Englisher when there's good Scotchmen running loose?”