in latterly a
tear or two might have been seen to fall, and form its little circle on
the surface of the water. She now looked up, disclosing features still
comely, but which had acquired an expression of fretfulness, in the
same long course of evil fortune that had thrown a sullen gloom over
the temper of the unprosperous yeoman.

"I am his wife," said she, a shade of irritability just perceptible in
the sadness of her tone. "These poor little things, asleep on the
ground, are two of our children. We had two more, but God has provided
better for them than we could, by taking them to Himself."

"And what would thee advise Josiah and me to do?" asked Miriam, this
being the first question which she had put to either of the strangers.

"'Tis a thing almost against nature for a woman to try to part true
lovers," answered the yeoman's wife, after a pause; "but I'll speak as
truly to you as if these were my dying words. Though my husband told
you some of our troubles, he didn't mention the greatest, and that
which makes all the rest so hard to bear. If you and your sweetheart
marry, you'll be kind and pleasant to each other for a year or two, and
while that's the case, you never will repent; but, by and by, he'll
grow gloomy, rough, and hard to please, and you'll be peevish, and full
of little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by the fireside, when
he comes to rest himself from his troubles out of doors; so your love
will wear away by little and little, and leave you miserable at last.
It has been so with us; and yet my husband and I were true lovers once,
if ever two young folks were ."

As she ceased, the yeoman and his wife exchanged a glance, in which
there was more and warmer affection than they had supposed to have
escaped the frost of a wintry fate, in either of their breasts. At that
moment, when they stood on the utmost verge of married life, one word
fitly spoken, or perhaps one peculiar look, had they had mutual
confidence enough to reciprocate it, might have renewed all their old
feelings, and sent them back, resolved to sustain each other amid the
struggles of the world. But the crisis passed and never came again.
Just then, also, the children, roused by their mother's voice, looked
up, and added their wailing accents to the testimony borne by all the
Canterbury pilgrims against the world from which they fled.

"We are tired and hungry!" cried they. "Is it far to the Shaker
village?"

The Shaker youth