"Just as an example of the way in which some of my suitors broached the subject I will describe a scene. Fancy me kneeling on the floor, stanching the blood from quite a serious cut on Benton's hand. The door opens behind me, and a man I never have seen before, thrusts his head and half his body in at the opening. His salutation is 'Howdy!'--his first remark, 'I heern thar was a mighty purty widder livin' here; and I reckon my infurmation was correct. If you would like to marry, I'm agreeable.'" "How did you receive this candidate? You have not told me what you replied on these occasions," I said, amused at this picture of pioneer life. "I turned my head around far enough to get one look at his face, and asking him rather crossly 'if there were any more fools where he came from,' went on bandaging Benton's hand." The recollection of this absurd incident caused the narrator to laugh as she had not often laughed in my hearing. "This may have been a second Werther," I remarked, "and surely no Charlotte could have been more unfeeling than you showed yourself. It could not be that a man coming in that way expected to get any other answer than the one you gave him?" "I do not know, and I did not then care. One day a man, to whose motherless children I had been kind when opportunity offered, slouched into my room without the ceremony of knocking and dropping into a chair as if his knees failed him, began twirling his battered old hat in an embarrassed manner, and doing as so many of his predecessors had done--proposing off-hand. He had a face like a terra-cotta image, a long lank figure, faded old clothes, and a whining voice." "He told me that he had no 'woman,' and that I had no 'man,' a condition that he evidently considered deplorable. He assured me that I suited him 'fustrate;' that his children 'sot gret store by me,' and 'liked my victuals;' and that he thought a 'heap' of my little boy. He also impressed upon me that he had been 'considerin' the 'rangement of jinin' firms for some time. To close the business at once, he proposed that I should accept of him for my husband then and there." "And pray, what did you say to _him_!" "I told him that I did not know what use I had for him, unless I should put him behind the stove, and break bark over his head." This reply tickled my fancy so much that I laughed until I cried. I insisted on knowing what put it into her mind to say that. "You see, we burned fir wood, the bark of which is better to make heat than the woody portion of the tree; but is never sawed or split, and has to be broken. I used to take up a big piece, and bring it down with a blow over any sharp corner to knock it into smaller fragments, and something in the man's appearance, I suppose, suggested that he might be good for that, if for nothing else. I did not stop to frame my replies on any forms laid down in young ladies' manuals; but they seemed to be conclusive as a general thing."