do break a kine or the likes on these here j'yful occasions;
other some do exchange goold rings. Your young mistress and me, _we_
exchange nags. She takes my pieball, I take her gray,' says he. 'Saddle
him for me, Joe,' says he, 'and wish me j'y.'

"So I clapped Muster Neville's saddle on the gray, and a gave me a
goolden guinea, a did; and I was so struck of a heap I let un go without
wishing on him j'y; but I hollered it arter un, as hard as I could. How
you looks! It be all right, bain't it?"

Squire Peyton laughed heartily, and said he concluded it was all right.

"The piebald," said he, "is rising five, and _I've_ had the gray ten
years. We have got the sunnyside of the bargain, Joe."

He gave Joe a glass of wine and sent him off, inflated with having done
a good stroke in horseflesh.

As for Kate, she was red as fire, and kept her lips close as wax; not a
word could be got out of her. The less she said, the more she thought.
She was thoroughly vexed, and sore perplexed how to get her gray horse
back from such a man as George Neville; and yet she could not help
laughing at the trick, and secretly admiring this chevalier, who had
kept his mortification to himself, and parried an affront so gallantly.

"The good-humored wretch!" said she to herself. "If Griffith ever goes
away again, he will have me, whether I like or no. No lady could resist
the monster long without some other man close at hand to help her."

CHAPTER V.

As, when a camel drops in the desert, vultures, hitherto unseen, come
flying from the horizon, so Mr. Charlton had no sooner succumbed than
the air darkened with undertakers flocking to Bolton for a lugubrious
job. They rode up on black steeds, they crunched the gravel in grave
gigs, and sent in black-edged cards to Griffith, and lowered their
voices, and bridled their briskness, and tried hard, poor souls! to be
sad; and were horribly complacent beneath that thin japan of venal
sympathy.

Griffith selected his Raven, and then sat down to issue numerous
invitations.

The idea of eschewing funereal pomp had not yet arisen. A gentleman of
that day liked his very remains to make a stir, and did not see the fun
of stealing into his grave like a rabbit slipping aground. Mr. Charlton
had even left behind him a sealed letter containing a list of the
persons he wished to follow him to the grave and attend the reading of
his will. These were thirty-four, and amongst them three known to fame:
n