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girl should be well educated and prepared for any change in her circumstances--but unfortunately she has proved to be rather a wilful young person, and it has been impossible entirely to fulfil his intentions with regard to her. Ah, he wasn't wise always, poor Jonathan, but I never doubted that he meant well at bottom, however things may have appeared. His anxiety in the case of your mother was very beautiful, and if his plans seem to have miscarried, we must lay the blame after all, on the quality of his judgment, not of his heart." "And the girl will be twenty-one next April, I am told?" "Her birthday is the seventeenth, exactly ten years from the date of Jonathan's death." CHAPTER VIII SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL At dusk that evening the miller, who had spent the day in Applegate, stopped at Bottom's Ordinary on his way home, and received a garbled account of the quarrel from the farmers gathered about the hospitable hearth in the public room. The genius of personality had enabled Betsey Bottom to hold open doors to the traveller long after the wayside tavern in Virginia had passed from the road and the one certain fact relating to the chance comer was that he never came. By combining a store with a public house, she managed still to defy the progress of time as well as the absence of guests. "Thank the Lord, I've never been one to give in to changes!" it was her habit to exclaim. The room was full of tobacco smoke when Abel entered, and as he paused, in order to distinguish the row of silhouettes nodding against the ruddy square of the fireplace, Adam Doolittle's quavering voice floated to him from a seat in the warmest corner. The old man was now turning ninety, and he had had, on the whole, a fortunate life, though he would have indignantly repudiated the idea. He was a fair type of the rustic of the past generation--slow of movement, keen of wit, racy of speech. "What's this here tale about Mr. Jonathan knockin' Archie down an' settin' on him, Abel?" he inquired. "Ain't you got yo' hand in yet, seein' as you've been spilin' for a fight for the last fortnight?" "I hadn't heard of it," replied Abel, his face flushing. "What in hell did he knock Archie down for?" "Jest for shooting' a few birds that might as well have been flying about on yo' land as on his, if thar minds had been set over toward you." "Do you mean Mr. Jonathan got into a quarrel with him for hunting on his land? Why,
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