an Fergusson at five-and-forty was sonsy to
the last degree. Her husband, twenty years older, was sun-dried and
wind-dried and frost-bitten till he had become sapless as a leaf blown
along the highway on a bask March day, when the fields are full of
sowers, and the roads cloudy with "stoor."

"Come ben! This way, sir--and you, too, Joe," she cried, opening a
door into an inner room, "ye will no hae seen Meysie's bairns?"

As I had never even heard of Meysie, I certainly had not.

But the goodwife's next words enlightened me.

"Caleb, ye see, was marriet afore he took up wi' me. 'Deed, his lassie
Meysie is maybe aulder than I am mysel'--and a solit, sensible woman.
But this is the first time her bairns hae comed sae far to see me!"

She flung the door open, and there, sitting one on a sofa, and the
other on a footstool by the fire, I saw two grown-up young ladies--so
at least they appeared to me. And I began to fear that my tea was
going to cost me dear. For at that time conversation was a difficult
art to me with anyone whom I could neither fight nor call names.

The girls--twenty or twenty-two they seemed--oh, ever so old--looked
just as if they had been doing nothing. That is, the one with the
straight-cut face, very dignified, who made a kind of long droopy
picture of herself on the sofa, was reading a book, or pretending to,
while the other on the stool did nothing but nurse her knees and look
out at the window.

That was the one I liked best, though, of course, not like Elsie--I
should think not, indeed. But she was little, she had a merry face,
and I am sure she had been laughing just before we came in. Indeed, I
am none so sure that she had not been listening at the keyhole and made
a rush for the footstool.

"Bairns," said Mrs. Caleb the Second, "this is the Englishy minister,
and a kind friend o' us auld folk. Though Caleb, your gran'dad, gies
him awfu' spells o' argumentincation aboot things I ken nocht aboot!
'Deed, I wonder whiles that Maister Ablethorpe ever looks near us
again!"

"Oh, no," said the Hayfork Minister, smiling, "it takes two to make an
argument, and I never argue with Mr. Fergusson. I only receive
instruction, as a younger from an elder!"

"Hear to him," cried the goodwife, "he doesna mean a word he is
sayin'--I can aye tell by the glint in his e'e."

Then she introduced the girls in due form. One, the tall tired-looking
girl on the sofa, was Constantia, and the little