"If you please," said I, "you will have done with all these 'sirs' and 'my lords,' for I am a plain yoeman of County Tryon and wear a buckskin shirt. Not that I would criticise Lord Stirling or any such who still care to wear by courtesy what I have long ago worn out," I added, "but the gentry and nobility of Tryon travel one way and I the other; and my friends should remember it when naming me." She stood looking at me out of her brown eyes, and slowly their troubled wonder changed to dumb perplexity. And, looking, took up her apron's edge and stood twisting it between both hands. "I give you Summer House," said I, "because you are orphaned and live alone and have nothing. I give it because a maid ought to possess a portion; and, thirdly, I give it because I have enough of my own, and never desired more of anything than I need. So take the Summer House, Penelope, with the cattle and fowl and land; for it gives you a station and a security among men and women of this odd world of ours, and lends to yourself a confidence and dignity which only sheerest folly can overthrow." She came, after a silence, slowly, and took me by the hand. "John Drogue," says she in a voice not clear, "I can not take of you this estate." "You shall take it! And when again, where you sit a-knitting, the young men gather round you like flies around a sap-pan--then, by God, you shall know what countenance to give them, and they shall know what colour to give their courting!--suitors, gallants, Whig or Tory--the whole damned rabble----" "Oh," she cried softly, "John Drogue!" And fell a-laughing--or was it a quick sob that checked her throat? But I heeded it not, having caught fire; and presently blazed noisily. "Because you are servant to Douw Fonda!" I cried, "and because you are alone, and because you are young and soft with a child's eyes and yellow hair, they make nothing of schooling you to their pot-house gallantries, and every damned man jack among them comes a-galloping to the chase. Yes, even that pallid beast, Sir John!--and the tears of Claire Putnam to haunt him if he were a man and not the dirty libertine he is!" I looked upon her whitened face in ever-rising passion: "I tell you," said I, "that the backwoods aristocracy is the better and safer caste, for the other is rotten under red coat or blue; and a ring-tailed cap doffed by a gnarled hand is worth all your laced cocked hats bound around with gold and trailed in the dust with fine, smooth fingers!" Sure I was in a proper phrensy now, nor dreamed myself a target for the high gods' laughter, where I vapoured and strode and shouted aloud my moral jeremiad. "So," said I, "you shall have Summer House; and shall, as you sit a-knitting, make your choice of honest suitors at your ease and not be waylaid and hunted and used without ceremony by the first young hot-head who entraps you in the starlight! No! Nor be the quarry of older villains and subtler with persuasion. No!