A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and mentally discomfited with very little more trouble! The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton (already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset, strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar way;--and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them, dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.