it were for this she was born? She
did not rebel--there was no violence in her--but she regretted
exceedingly. In spite of her slenderness, it was a wide,
mother-lap in which her hands rested, an obvious cradle for little
children. And instinctively it would come to you as you looked at
her, that there could be no more comfortable place for a tired man
to come home to, than a household presided over by this
slow-moving, gentle woman. There was nothing old-maidish about
Miss Mattie but the tale of her years. She had had offers, such as
Fairfield and vicinity could boast, and declined them with tact,
and the utmost gratitude to the suitor for the compliment; but her
"no" though mild was firm, for there lay within her a certain quiet
valiant spirit, which would rather endure the fatigue and
loneliness of old age in her little house, than to take a larger
life from any but the man who was all. A commonplace in fiction;
in real life sometimes quite a strain.

The sun distorted himself into a Rugby football, and hurried down
as though to be through with Fairfield as soon as possible. It was
a most magnificent sun-set; flaming, gorgeous, wild--beyond the
management of the women of Fairfield--and Miss Mattie stared into
the heart of it with a longing for something to happen. Then the
thought came, "What could happen?" she sighed again, and, with eyes
blinded by Heaven-shine, glanced down the village street.

She thought she saw--she rubbed her eyes and looked again--she did
see, and surely never a stranger sight was beheld on Fairfield's
street! Had a Royal Bengal tiger come slouching through the dust
it could not have been more unusual. The spectacle was a man; a
very large and mighty shouldered man, who looked about him with a
bold, imperious, keep-the-change regard. There was something in
the swing of him that suggested the Bengal tiger. He wore
high-heeled boots outside of his trousers, a flannel shirt with a
yellow silk kerchief around his neck, and on his head sat a white
hat which seemed to Miss Mattie to be at least a yard in diameter.
Under the hat was a remarkable head of hair. It hung below the
man's shoulders in a silky mass of dark scarlet, flecked with brown
gold. Miss Mattie had seen red hair, but she remembered no such
color as this, nor could she recall ever having seen hair a
foot-and-a-half long on a man. That hair would have made a fortune
on the head of an actress, but Miss Mattie was ign