The day wore on, and as the arrangements drew nearer to completion, the anxieties were turned towards the guests themselves, who were to have arrived at five o'clock. It was now six, and yet no sign of their coming! Fully a dozen times had Mrs. Ricketts called Martha from some household cares by the adjuration, “Sister Anne, sister Anne, seest thou nobody coming?” Mercury had twice ventured out on the high-road, from which he was driven back by a posse of hooting and laughing children; and Dalton himself paced up and down the terrace in a state of nervous impatience, not a little stimulated by hunger and certain flying visits he paid to the iced punch, to see if it was keeping cool. There is, assuredly, little mesmeric relation between the expecting host and the lingering guest, or we should not witness all that we do of our friends' unpunctuality in this life. What a want of sympathy between the feverish impatience of the one and the careless dalliance of the other! Not that we intend this censure to apply to the case before us, for Haggerstone had not the very remotest conception of the honors that awaited him, and jogged along his dusty road with no greater desire to be at the end of the journey than was fairly justifiable in one who travelled with German post-horses and Foglass for a companion. Six o'clock came, and, after another hour of fretful anxiety, it struck seven. By this time beef had become carbon, and fowls were like specimens of lava; the fish was reduced to the state of a “purée,” while everything meant to assume the flinty resistance of ice was calmly settling down into a fluid existence. Many an architectural device of poor Martha's genius was doomed to the fate of her other “castles,” and towers and minarets of skilful shape dropped off one by one, like the hopes of her childhood. All the telegraphic announcements from the kitchen were of disasters, but Mrs. Ricketts received the tidings with a Napoleonic calmness; and it was only when warned by the gathering darkness over Dalton* s brow that she thought it wiser to “give in.” Dalton's ill-humor had, however, a different source from that which she suspected. It proceeded from the quiet but steady importunity with which little Hans paced up and down before the door, now appearing before one window, now before another, totally insensible to the cold discouragement of Dalton's looks, and evidently bent on paying no attention to all the signs and signals intended for his guidance.