ction, where she
took the cars for Pymantoning one afternoon after a day's shopping with
her mother in Lakeland. It did not last very long, and in fact it
hardly survived the brief stay which the young man made in Pymantoning,
where his want of success in art-goods was probably owing to the fact
that he gave his whole time to Cornelia, or rather Cornelia's mother,
whom he found much more conversable; he played upon the banjo for her,
and he danced a little clog-dance in her parlor, which was also her
shop, to the accompaniment of his own whistling, first setting aside
the bonnet-trees with their scanty fruitage of summer hats, and pushing
the show-table against the wall. "Won't hurt 'em a mite," he reassured
her, and he struck her as a careful as well as accomplished young man.
His passion for Cornelia lingered a while in letters, which he proposed
in parting, and then, about six months later, Mrs. Saunders received
the newspaper announcement of his marriage to Miss Tweety Byers of
Lakeland. There were "No Cards," but Mrs. Saunders made out, with Mrs.
Burton's help, that Tweety was the infantile for the pet name of
Sweety; and the marriage seemed a fit union for one so warm and true as
the young traveller in art-goods.

Mrs. Saunders was a good deal surprised, but she did not suffer keenly
from the disappointment which she had innocently done her best to bring
upon her daughter. Cornelia, who had been the passive instrument of her
romance, did not suffer from it at all, having always objected to the
thickness of the young man's hands, and to the early baldness which
gave him the Shakespearian brow he had so little use for. She laughed
his memory to scorn, and employed the episode as best she could in
quelling her mother's simple trust of passing strangers. They worked
along together, in the easy, unambitious village fashion, and kept
themselves in the average comfort, while the time went by and Cornelia
had grown from a long, lean child to a tall and stately young girl, who
carried herself with so much native grace and pride that she had very
little attention from the village youth. She had not even a girl
friendship, and her chief social resource was in her intimacy at the
Burtons. She borrowed books of them, and read a good deal; and when she
was seventeen she rubbed up her old studies and got a teacher's
certificate for six months, and taught a summer term in a district at
Burnt Pastures. She came home in the fall, a