otting team, his new cutter, and the bells, to give
Grace her first sleigh-ride. The steppers were of the 2:30 class, the
roads good, and the fair English girl-wife was in ecstacies. They drove
past the Jasper farm on the hill, and Sedgwick told Grace that it was his
dream for years to accumulate $30,000 to release the mortgage from his
father's farm and to buy the Jasper farm.

"Then what would I have done?" asked Grace.

"Married some English banker, or may be some 'My Lord Fitzdoodle,'
probably," said Sedgwick.

"But, then, suppose a year later I had seen you, what would become of
me?" she said.

"We should have been very formal and polite, and then have gone our
several ways," said Sedgwick.

"Yes, because you are a man of principle, and I hope my pride of
womanhood would have sustained me, but my heart would have broken, for
with me it was a mad passion which absorbed my life before I had been in
your presence half an hour," said Grace; and then added: "I do not any
more wonder at the crimes which come of mismated marriages."

Then Sedgwick told her how, when he left her side the first time, he took
that ride and asked cabbie how much they would charge at Newgate to hang
him.

And they both laughed, but there were tears in the eyes of Grace even
while she smiled. But she rallied in a moment and said:

"Why not buy the place still? Except to leave my mother, I would be on
that farm with you as happy a wife as ever lived. I would rather live
upon that hill than in our great modern Babel, London."

Just then the cutter went in and out of a "Thank-ee-mom"--a hollow
between two snowdrifts--and Sedgwick bent and kissed his wife.

"Thanks," said Grace.

"That was a kiss on principle. That was a pure duty," said Sedgwick.
Then he explained how venerable was the custom, and elaborated upon the
respect due it because of its age and its usefulness to bashful lovers,
because a youth must kiss the girl who goes sleighing with him whenever
he comes to a "Thank-ee-mom" among the drifts.

"What a poor old country England is," said Grace.

"Why so?" asked Sedgwick.

"Why, had we but had snowdrifts and 'Thank-ee-moms,' I would have made
you kiss me three weeks sooner than you did," said Grace.

"Did you want me to kiss you sooner than I did?" asked Sedgwick.

"O, you blind darling!" said Grace. "When I read of your exploit before
the church in Devonshire, I told Jack and Rose that I would like to kiss
that man. T