Mrs. Beacham, who had kept house for her well-beloved John from the hour when the old man had departed for a world where seed-time and harvest are no more, was a woman acknowledged by all who knew her (and, indeed, she had, for that matter, been known to boast of the peculiarity herself) to have not only a “will” but “ways” of her own. She was a bustling busy personage, one whom no one in her household would have ventured to “answer;” while as for interference with any of her orders or arrangements, why not even John himself would have dreamt of such a thing. The love of power and rule was in her plebeian breast fully as firmly implanted as in that of the autocratic mistress of the Castle--the division of her kingdom would have been as unpleasant a disintegration to the one as to the other; and it therefore required some little courage on John Beacham’s part to enable him to go through with credit the duty of imparting to his mother that he was about to take unto himself a wife. Between Mrs. Beacham and her son there had always existed a sincere, though not a demonstrative, affection. They had, moreover, no secrets from one another, and nothing in John’s previous life and conversation had ever tended to awaken in the susceptible mind of the “old lady” the natural jealousy of a mother. It was wonderful during his twenty years or thereabouts of manhood how very little the straightforward fully-occupied fellow had had to tell. On his first emerging from hobbledehoyhood, that discreet body, his mother, had not been without her fears that John would play, after the example of other lads, the lover and the fool. Anxiously, and much as a fussy trembling hen watches, when they seem likely to get into troubled waters, the erratic movements of a brood of ducklings, so did the parent of honest unsentimental John torment herself with the fear that some “silly useless chit,” some “forward wasteful hussy,” was alluring her precious son into the hot waters of a love-scrape. Time wore on, however; the down gave place to bristles on the young farmer’s chin, his voice grew manly, and he took his place as one having authority in the family councils, while as yet he betrayed no symptoms calculated to justify his mother’s alarm. The neighbours (for a single young man in John’s position is, to a certain extent, public property) began at length to grow alarmed at the apparently phlegmatic character of Mr. Beacham’s idiosyncrasy. It seemed to them so terribly likely that he would live and die a bachelor; and then what a throwing away of advantages, what a loss to some young woman or other of the many who would have said “yes” to John of such a house and home as would be provided for her at the Paddocks!