"And why should I lave the queen out?" asked Alley, indignantly, and
with a towering resolution to defend the privileges of her sex. "Why
ought I lave the queen out, I say?"

"Why," replied the grazier, with a still broader grin, "barring she
wears the breeches, I don't know what occasion she could have for
buttons."

"That only shows your ignorance," said Alley; "don't you know that all
ladies wear habit-shirts, and that habit-shirts must have buttons?"

"I never heard of a shirt havin' buttons anywhere but at the neck,"
replied the grazier, who drew the inference in question from his own,
which were made upon a very simple and primitive fashion.

"But you don't know either," responded Alley, launching nobly into the
purest fiction, from an impression that the character of her mistress
required it for her defence, "you don't know that nobody is allowed to
make buttons for the queen but a knight o' the garther."

"Garther!" exclaimed the grazier, with astonishment. "Why what the
dickens has garthers to do wid buttons?"

"More than you think," replied the redoubtable Alley. "The queen wears
buttons to her garthers, and the knight o' the garther is always obliged
to try them on; but always, of course, afore company."

The stranger was exceedingly amused at this bit of by-play between Alley
and the honest grazier, and the more so as it drew the conversation
from a point of the subject that was painful to him in the last degree,
inasmuch as it directly involved the character of Miss Gourlay.

"How do you know, then," proceeded Alley, triumphantly, "but the
button-maker that Miss Gourlay has fallen in love with may be a knight
o' the garther?"

"Begad, there maybe a great dale in that, too," replied the unsuspicious
grazier, who never dreamt that Alley's knowledge of court etiquette
might possibly be rather limited, and her accounts of it somewhat
apocryphal;--"begad, there may. Well," he added, with an honest and
earnest tone of sincerity, "for my part, and from all ever I heard of
that darlin' of a beauty, she deserves a knight o' the shire, let alone
a knight o' the garther. They say the good she does among the poor and
destitute since they came home is un-tellable. God bless her! And that
she may live long and die happy is the worst that I or anybody that
knows her wishes her. It's well known that she had her goodness from her
angel of a mother at all events, for they say that such another woman
for charity a