ord.

So he refuted to see the anxious striker, and turned to compliment the
rector on his admirable sermon on the sin of Judas, who sold his master
for thirty pieces of silver.

And August Wehle had nothing left to do. The river was falling fast, the
large boats above the Falls were, in steamboat-man's phrase, "laying up"
in the mouths of the tributaries and other convenient harbors, there
were plenty of engineers unemployed, and there were no vacancies.

CHAPTER XXXI.

CYNTHY ANN'S SACRIFICE.

Jonas had been all his life, as he expressed it in his mixed rhetoric,
"a wanderin' sand-hill crane, makin' many crooked paths, and, like the
cards in French monte, a-turnin' up suddently in mighty on-expected
places." He had been in every queer place from Halifax to Texas, and
then had come back to his home again. Naturally cautious, and especially
suspicious of the female sex, it is not strange that he had not married.
Only when he "tied up to the same w'arf-boat alongside of Cynthy Ann, he
thought he'd found somebody as was to be depended on in a fog or a
harricane." This he told to Cynthy Ann as a reason why she should accept
his offer of marriage.

"Jonas," said Cynthy Ann, "don't flatter. My heart is dreadful weak, and
prone to the vanities of this world. It makes me abhor myself in dust
and sackcloth fer you to say such things about poor unworthy me."

"Ef I think 'em, why shouldn't I say 'em? I don't know no law agin
tellin' the truth ef you git into a place where you can't no ways help
it. I don't call you angel, fer you a'n't; you ha'nt got no wings nor
feathers. I don't say as how as you're pertikeler knock-down handsome.
I don't pertend that you're a spring chicken. I don't lie nor flatter. I
a'n't goin' it blind, like young men in love. But I do say, with my eyes
open and in my right senses, and feelin' solemn, like a man a-makin' his
last will and testament, that they a'n't no sech another woman to be
found outside the leds of the Bible betwixt the Bay of Fundy and the Rio
Grande. I've 'sought round this burdened airth,' as the hymn says, and
they a'n't but jest one. Ef that one'll jest make me happy, I'll fold my
weary pinions and settle down in a rustic log-cabin and raise corn and
potaters till death do us part."

Cynthy trembled. Cynthy was a saint, a martyr to religious feeling, a
medieval nun in her ascetic eschewing of the pleasures of life. But
Cynthy Ann was also a woman. And a woman whose spr