The salary of the good Doctor has grown, by progressive increase, to be at this date some seven hundred dollars a year,--a very considerable stipend for a country parish in that day. It was understood that the proposed colleague would expect six hundred. The two joined made a somewhat appalling sum for the people of Ashfield. They tried to combat it in a variety of ways,--over tea-tables and barn-yard gates, as well as in their formal conclaves; earnest for a good thing in the way of preaching, but earnest for a good bargain, too. "I say, Huldy," said the Deacon, in discussion of the affair over his wife's fireside, "I wouldn't wonder if the Doctor 'ad put up somethin' handsome between the French girl's boardin', and odds and ends." "What if he ha'n't, Tourtelot? Miss Johns's got property, and what's _she_ goin' to do with it, I want to know?" On this hint the Deacon spoke, in his next encounter with the Squire upon the street, with more boldness. "It's my opinion, Squire, the Doctor's folks are pooty well off, now; and if we make a trade with the new minister, so's he'll take the biggest half o' the hard work of the parish, I think the old Doctor 'ud worry along tol'able well on three or four hundred a year; heh, Squire?" "Well, Deacon, I don't know about that;--don't know. Butcher's meat is always butcher's meat, Deacon." "So it is, Squire; and not so dreadful high, nuther. I've got a likely two-year-old in the yard, that'll dress abaout a hundred to a quarter, and I don't pretend to ask but twenty-five dollars; know anybody that wants such a critter, Squire?" With very much of the same relevancy of observation the affair is bandied about for a week or more in the discussions at the society-meetings, with danger of never coming to any practical issue, when a wiry little man--in a black Sunday coat, whose tall collar chafes the back of his head near to the middle--rises from a corner where he has grown vexed with the delay, and bursts upon the solemn conclave in this style:--