"Your grief does you honour, my dear madam, allow me to say," says he, wiping the memorials of his own from his red eyes. "It honours you vastly. It is something in this benighted age to know that the reverence for polite letters has not yet died out amongst us. And I, on my part, will never be persuaded that the descendant of so noble and learned a gentleman, whatever the errors of his youth, could fall into an act of such a hideous kind. I blame the publick press too for disseminating such a story. If it is false, as I believe it to be, oh, the pity of it! But if it should be true, the pity is the greater. With your permission, I will destroy this newspaper, lest this scandalous thing it contains should come under the eye of Blodgett, and she should spread it amongst the village folk." I protest with all my settled views on life, and my arbitrary way of looking at things, I did not know whether to burst out into a shout of laughter, or fall a-weeping too, for, ecod! there was an affecting side to the affair when our simple old parson tore up the offending newspaper in a hundred pieces, all to preserve the fair name of that philosopher who had perished of the gout a full thirty years ago. Cynthia was so greatly shaken, that to defend her from his observation I was even moved to indulge in the parson's fondness for the dead languages and abstruse theories. However, I had just induced him to quarrel with Cicero on the strength of something that Cicero ought to have said and yet had not said at all, when Blodgett returned, bearing the ring. That redoubtable lady observed Cynthia's distress at once, but did not put the same construction on it that her master had. "Very natural to be sure," says she. "Weddings are strange, exciting things, and apt to upset the strongest of us. I remember the first time I went through the ceremony. I was mortal worried by it." Mrs. Blodgett having by this time fully entered into the affair, took Cynthia in hand. She insisted that Cynthia should go with her upstairs, "to tidy herself like," and be accomplished generally in a manner more befitting the occasion. Indeed so enthusiastic had the housekeeper become about it that she even proposed to search for some of her own discarded nuptial garments, which she ventured to say with a bit of fettling and contriving, a pleat here and a tuck there, Cynthia after all might not lack for a wedding-gown. The conceit of a young lady who a week ago had been of the first fashion, appearing as a bride in a gown that had once done duty for the admirable Blodgett, convulsed me with laughter. And this behaviour was heightened rather than depressed when I recollected that such an attire would consort very aptly with the hobnailed appearance of the bridegroom.