It will not be a matter of much wonder that with all these accomplishments Catti should be importuned in the way of courtship, notwithstanding the injury her fame had suffered from the adventure with Sir John Wynne. But the schoolmistress, elated with the success of her academy, turned a deaf ear to all the praises and protestations of the swains, until, as the village sages say, the right man came. Like all her amiable sex, she professed the utmost abhorrence of mercenary motives in marriage, though many insinuated that she learnt the value of property from never having possessed any. It was observed that she treated with indifference, if not aversion, those unprofitable lovers who had nothing but their goodly persons to recommend them. Certain inuendoes were even thrown out respecting a suspicion of her coquettings with one of the most ugly, miserly, and repulsive of clowns;—one who was not only a clown, but a red-haired one;—not only red haired, but knock-kneed;—not only knock-kneed, but squint-eyed;—not only squint-eyed, but a woman-hater; and worse than all, a foreigner!—being a native of a distant part of the adjoining county of Carmarthen, and known only by the nick-name of Jack o Sîr Gâr, or Carmarthenshire Jack. This amiable and interesting personage certainly possessed all those graces here enumerated, with many others, which were attached to peculiarities of character that rendered him so far like our great national hero Owen Glendower, that he “was not in the roll of common men.” He was at this time the chief husbandman and bailiff at the squire’s, an office which, as he had others under his command, did not aid his personal recommendations to much popularity in the squire’s kitchen. Perhaps no being that ever breathed had so fair an excuse for becoming a misanthrope. His coarse and repulsive exterior, with his churlish manners, and one unchangeable suit of old patched ill-looking clothes, combined to make him an object of distaste to the girls, to whom, and the young men, he became a general butt of ridicule yet only among themselves, for they were fully aware, that it would be a less dangerous experiment to catch a mad bull by the horns, than to rouse the choler of Jack o Sîr Gâr. The standing jest against him was, his qualifications as a trencherman, and his reputation as a “huge feeder” was certainly unrivalled. As there was not a single pastime under the head of amusement, that the ingenuity of man has ever devised for the entertainment of his fellows, save eating, that possessed a charm for him, it might be expected that this solitary recreation would be indulged in the proportion that he excluded all others. He not only performed all the functions of the gross glutton, but as the actors say, “looked the character” to perfection.