posed Dawn.

"How dare you, miss! Beards is a natural adornment gave to man by God,
and it's a unnatural notion to carve them off--"

"Some of them do want adorning, I'll admit," said Dawn.

"He was a good-lookin' man," persisted grandma.

"Must have been with a _beard_!" scornfully contended the
irrepressible Dawn.

"She must be smitten on some of these clean-faced articles," said Mrs
Bray with a laugh, which effected the collapse of Dawn.

"Hold your tongue, miss! surely I can speak in me own house!"
continued grandma. "And he could sing and play, and that sort of
thing. At any rate, this woman was terribly gone on him, and her
husband was heart-broke, and they always lived so happy till then that
the people of the town took it up. They went to the sergeant and told
him what they was goin' to do, and he was in such sympathy with 'em
that he got business that took him to the other end of the town for
that night."

"That'll tell you now!" exclaimed Mrs Bray with interest.

"And they went and collared him," proceeded the narrator.

"That'll tell you now, the faggot!" exclaimed Mrs Bray again.

"So they took him and put him on a horse, naked except his trousers,
about twenty of 'em did it, and rode on either side with tar-pots; and
every time he'd turn his head any way to jaw about what he'd do,
they'd swab him in the mouth with it; and they had bags of feathers,
and nearly smothered him with 'em, till with the black tar stickin'
on every way, and all in his great beard, he would be mistook for
Nebuchadnezzar. When they got him out of the town he was let go, an'
they said if he showed hisself in it again worse than that would
happen him. That's what the men of my day did with a bad egg,"
concluded the old lady, firm in the belief of the superior virtue of
her generation.

"What price beards in a case like that?" came from Dawn.

"That clean-faced feller of yours would have the advantage then," said
Mrs Bray. "And now I'll tell you the point of that story. It was just
the men stickin' up for themselves. If that had been a woman harmed by
her husband going away with some barmaid, or other of them hussies men
are so fond of, there wouldn't have been nothing done to avenge _her_.
_Her_ heart could have broke, and if she said anything about it people
would have sat on her, but when one of the poor darling men is hurt
it's a different thing."

Mrs Bray had yet more to tell, and after another hearty laugh divulge