“None. But as Deborah says, I know no good; and if there had been any good to be known, it must have come within my knowledge. I cannot help knowing who the persons are to whom the peasantry in my rounds look with respect and good will, and whom they consider their friends as well as their betters. And in like manner, I know who they are from whom they never expect either courtesy or kindness.” “You are right, my friend; and Deborah is right. Her answer came from a wise heart; and I was not sorry that her determination was so promptly made, and so resolutely pronounced. But I wish, if it had pleased God, the offer had been one which she could have accepted with her own willing consent, and with my full approbation.” “Yet,” said the Doctor, “I have often thought how sad a thing it would be for you ever to part with her.” “Far more sad will it be for me to leave her unprotected, as it is but too likely that, in the ordinary course of nature, I one day shall; and as any day in that same ordinary course, I so possibly may! Our best intentions, even when they have been most prudentially formed, fail often in their issue. I meant to train up Deborah in the way she should go, by fitting her for that state of life in which it had pleased God to place her, so that she might have made a good wife for some honest man in the humbler walks of life, and have been happy with him.” “And how was it possible,” replied the Doctor, “that you could have succeeded better? Is she not qualified to be a good man's wife in any rank? Her manner would not do discredit to a mansion; her management would make a farm prosperous, or a cottage comfortable; and for her principles, and temper and cheerfulness, they would render any home a happy one.” “You have not spoken too highly in her praise, Doctor. But as she has from her childhood been all in all to me, there is a danger that I may have become too much so to her; and that while her habits have properly been made conformable to our poor means, and her poor prospects, she has been accustomed to a way of thinking, and a kind of conversation, which have given her a distaste for those whose talk is only of sheep and of oxen, and whose thoughts never get beyond the range of their every day employments. In her present circle, I do not think there is one man with whom she might otherwise have had a chance of settling in life, to whom she would not have the same intellectual objections as to Joseph Hebblethwaite: though I am glad that the moral objection was that which first instinctively occurred to her.