ded, and
cuffed and knocked him about to his heart's content. All this was very
natural, and there's nothing at all to wonder at about it.

'It IS matter of wonder, though, that anyone of Mr. Nathaniel Pipkin's
retiring disposition, nervous temperament, and most particularly
diminutive income, should from this day forth, have dared to aspire to
the hand and heart of the only daughter of the fiery old Lobbs--of old
Lobbs, the great saddler, who could have bought up the whole village
at one stroke of his pen, and never felt the outlay--old Lobbs, who was
well known to have heaps of money, invested in the bank at the nearest
market town--who was reported to have countless and inexhaustible
treasures hoarded up in the little iron safe with the big keyhole, over
the chimney-piece in the back parlour--and who, it was well known,
on festive occasions garnished his board with a real silver teapot,
cream-ewer, and sugar-basin, which he was wont, in the pride of his
heart, to boast should be his daughter's property when she found a man
to her mind. I repeat it, to be matter of profound astonishment and
intense wonder, that Nathaniel Pipkin should have had the temerity to
cast his eyes in this direction. But love is blind; and Nathaniel had
a cast in his eye; and perhaps these two circumstances, taken together,
prevented his seeing the matter in its proper light.

'Now, if old Lobbs had entertained the most remote or distant idea of
the state of the affections of Nathaniel Pipkin, he would just have
razed the school-room to the ground, or exterminated its master from the
surface of the earth, or committed some other outrage and atrocity of
an equally ferocious and violent description; for he was a terrible
old fellow, was Lobbs, when his pride was injured, or his blood was up.
Swear! Such trains of oaths would come rolling and pealing over the way,
sometimes, when he was denouncing the idleness of the bony apprentice
with the thin legs, that Nathaniel Pipkin would shake in his shoes
with horror, and the hair of the pupils' heads would stand on end with
fright.

'Well! Day after day, when school was over, and the pupils gone, did
Nathaniel Pipkin sit himself down at the front window, and, while he
feigned to be reading a book, throw sidelong glances over the way in
search of the bright eyes of Maria Lobbs; and he hadn't sat there many
days, before the bright eyes appeared at an upper window, apparently
deeply engaged in reading