“More than you think,” replied the redoubtable Alley. “The queen wears buttons to her garthers, and the knight o' the garther is always obliged to try them on; but always, of course, afore company.” The stranger was exceedingly amused at this bit of by-play between Alley and the honest grazier, and the more so as it drew the conversation from a point of the subject that was painful to him in the last degree, inasmuch as it directly involved the character of Miss Gourlay. “How do you know, then,” proceeded Alley, triumphantly, “but the button-maker that Miss Gourlay has fallen in love with may be a knight o' the garther?” “Begad, there maybe a great dale in that, too,” replied the unsuspicious grazier, who never dreamt that Alley's knowledge of court etiquette might possibly be rather limited, and her accounts of it somewhat apocryphal;--“begad, there may. Well,” he added, with an honest and earnest tone of sincerity, “for my part, and from all ever I heard of that darlin' of a beauty, she deserves a knight o' the shire, let alone a knight o' the garther. They say the good she does among the poor and destitute since they came home is un-tellable. God bless her! And that she may live long and die happy is the worst that I or anybody that knows her wishes her. It's well known that she had her goodness from her angel of a mother at all events, for they say that such another woman for charity and kindness to the poor never lived; and by all accounts she led an unhappy and miserable life wid her Turk of a husband, who, they say, broke her heart, and sent her to an early grave.”