ook. On occasion of leaving home
for some weeks, the lady took the opportunity of intimating to the
people at the cottage that there was a perfect understanding between
the girls and herself, as perfect a confidence as there can be between
mother and daughters; that their acquaintances came by her permission,
and so forth. Harry promised to be attentive and sociable with his
sister, and not to grow hot with the cook about how to feed the fowls
and manage the churn. That was the time when Dinah left off peeping
through the laurels to see who went to the back door, and looking
mysterious and sympathetic when holding forth to Miss Foote about young
people. Still it was long before she left off locking her door and
hiding the key, if she turned her back for a minute, and taking every
body she did not know for a thief. She was left to her own notions; but
with Harry a serious remonstrance was necessary, more than once, within
the first year of his new service. Miss Foote was as much annoyed as
amused with his higgling ways, all in zeal for her interests. She feared
that she should have the reputation in the neighborhood of being a
perfect miser, so wonderful were Harry's stories of the bargains he
attempted to drive. She told him she hoped he would never succeed in any
one such bargain as the many he told her of; and she laid her positive
commands upon him never, in her name, to beat down the seller of any
article she sent him to buy. As she supposed, she found he had caught up
the trick from example, and had not the knowledge whereby to remedy it.
When she told him it was not the way of the place to cheat in making
charges he shook his head, and very nearly put his tongue in his cheek;
but when she explained to him how prices came to be, and how an article
can not properly be bought for less than it took to make or grow it, he
was convinced at once, and his higgling method was softened down into a
mere excessive strictness and vigilance in buying and selling
transactions. There never was any real meanness about the man. In a few
months he sent his father ten shillings; in a few months more he sent
him L1. A small anecdote will show better than this, that money is not
naturally the first object with him. When his employer kills a pig he is
allowed to take a quarter at wholesale price, and Dinah cures the ham so
well that by selling it they get their bacon for next to nothing. One
autumn, when two pigs were killed, there was su