in the morning. The money was all there,
but the old fellow was so cute that he wouldn't tell any one how much it
was. The neighbors had persuaded him to bank it, and he was coming to
town the next morning with it, and that night some of them were going to
help him mount guard over it. Father told the men at milking time, and
he said Jacobs looked as unconscious as possible. However, from that day
there was a change in him. He never told father in so many words that
he' d resolved to be an honest man, but his actions spoke for him. He
had been a kind of sullen, unwilling fellow, but now he turned handy and
obliging, and it was a real trial to father to part with him."

Miss Laura was intensely interested in this story. "Where is he now,
Cousin Harry?" she asked, eagerly. "What became of him?"

Mr. Harry laughed in such amusement that I stared up at him, and even
Fleetfoot turned his head around to see what the joke was. We were going
very slowly up a long, steep hill, and in the clear, still air, we could
hear every word spoken in the buggy.

"The last part of the story is the best, to my mind," said Mr. Harry,
"and as romantic as even a girl could desire. The affair of the stolen
box was much talked about along Sudbury way, and Miss Jerrold got to be
considered quite a desirable young person among some of the youth near
there, though she is a frowsy-headed creature, and not as neat in her
personal attire as a young girl should be. Among her suitors was Jacobs.
He cut out a blacksmith, and a painter, and several young farmers, and
father said he never in his life had such a time to keep a straight
face, as when Jacobs came to him this spring, and said he was going to
marry old Miser Jerrold's daughter. He wanted to quit father's employ,
and he thanked him in a real manly way for the manner in which he had
always treated him. Well, Jacobs left, and mother says that father would
sit and speculate about him, as to whether he had fallen in love with
Eliza Jerrold, or whether he was determined to regain possession of the
box, and was going to do it honestly, or whether he was sorry for having
frightened the old man into a greater degree of imbecility, and was
marrying the girl so that he could take care of him, or whether it was
something else, and so on, and so on. He had a dozen theories, and then
mother says he would burst out laughing, and say it was one of the
cutest tricks that he had ever heard of.

"In the end, Ja