“’Tisn’t needed,” said Alanson. What was a candle’s star to that blazing sun in the fireplace? He turned his shoulder so the light fell upon the “Saturday Evening Post,” and read a harrowing installment about some Bride of the Wilderness. There was domestic bliss in this snug cabin, the wind-song of the wheel, and the winter night with its breath of Christmas. Alanson droned on in a high key, the mother watching him as long as she was able to resist so many monotones. She went to sleep before Wilda’s stint of spinning was done, and before Alanson read with impressive voice, “To be con-tin-u-ed.” That wary inspection of each other which people of that time called courting had varied its routine so little for twelve years betwixt this pair, that Alanson felt bound to make his usual remark as Wilda sat down to knit. “Well, folks is still talking about us getting married, Wilda.” “Let them talk,” said Wilda, putting her hair behind her ear, and smiling while she looked at Sweetness. “I come here pretty regular. Don’t you think it’s about time we set the day?” Wilda answered, without moving her eyes from the trundle-bed, “Don’t you think we better let well enough alone, Lanson?” “Well, now, ’tisn’t well enough,” argued Alanson, and to the sylvan mind there is accumulated force in an oft-used argument. “You’ve got these woods lots and the house and a cow”-- “Yes, I’m well fixed,” murmured Wilda. --“but you have to leave your mother and go out among the neighbors to airn a living. How do you know sometime the house won’t burn down?” “I am jub’ous about it often,” owned Wilda, biting the end of a knitting-needle. But catching the yarn over her little finger she drove it ahead with her work. “Then eventually she might die.” “I’ve thought of that,” sighed Wilda. “And I’ve thought what’d become of her if I’s to be taken and her left. Then who’d let her pet rooster and hen--that she’s just as tickled with as a child--roost in the house, and clean after them without fretting her?” Alanson glanced at Speckle and Banty sticking like balls to their perch, and he volunteered some discreet possibilities. “When folks begins to get used to such things before they’re too old and sot in their ways, seems to me like chickens in the house would be natteral enough--though not brought up to it.” Whenever Alanson made this great concession, Wilda always fell back upon her observations of marriage. “But there’s Mary Jane Willey. She had fifteen hundred dollars in her own right, and was well fixed with bedding and goods--six chairs and a bread-trough and a cupboard. And all that didn’t satisfy her, but she must have a man to speckalate with her money and lose it; and now he’s took to drinking, her and her children are like to go on the county.” Alanson interlaced his fingers across his chest and set his thumbs to whirling. “She ought to got a man like me,” he observed humorously.