wishing there was a man who would have the pluck to do
it."

The Vrouw Grobelaar shook her head. "Good Burghers don't
carry girls away," she said. "They come and drink coffee,
and sit with them, and talk about the sheep."

"And behave as if they had never worn boots before, and
didn't know what to do with their hands," added the maiden.
"Aunt, am I a girl to marry a man who upsets three cups of
coffee in half an hour and borrows a handkerchief to wipe
his knees?"

Now there could be no shadow of doubt that this was an
open-breasted cut at young Fanie van Tromp, whose affection
for Katje was a matter of talk on the farms, and whose
overtures that young lady had consistently sterilized with
ridicule.

The Vrouw Grobelaar was void of delicacy. "Fanie is a good
lad," she said, "and when his father dies he will have a
very large property."

"It'll console him for not adding me to his live stock,"
retorted Katje.

"He is handsome, too," continued the old lady. "His beard
is as black as--"

"A carrion-crow," added Katje promptly.

"Quite," agreed the Vrouw Grobelaar, with a perfect
unconsciousness of the unsavoriness of the suggestion.

"And he walks like a duck with sore feet," went on Katje.
"He is as graceful as a trek-ox, and his conversational
talents are those of a donkey in long grass."

"All that is a young girl's nonsense," observed the old
lady. "I was like that once myself. But when one grows a
little older and fatter, and there is less about one to
take a man's eye,--a fickle thing, Katje, a fickle thing,--
one looks for more in a husband than a light foot and a
smart figure."

Katje was a trifle abashed, for all the daughters of her
house, were they never so slender, grew tubby in their
twenties.

"Besides," continued the worthy Vrouw, "your talk is chaff
from a mill. It must come out to leave the meal clean.
Perhaps, after all, Fanie is the man to carry you off. I
think you would not take so much trouble to worry him if
you thought nothing of him."

The Vrouw Grobelaar had never heard of Beatrice and her
Benedick, but she had a notion of the principle.

"I hate him," cried Katje with singular violence.

"I think not," replied the old lady. "Sometimes the thing
we want is at our elbows, and we cannot grasp it because we
reach too far. Did I ever tell you how Stoffel Struben
nearly went mad for love of his wife?"

"No," said Katje, unwillingly interested. "He was something
of a fool to