odils and early garden flowers. For a rejected
suitor I felt singularly cheerful; for a blighted being I made a most
excellent meal; and for the desperate misogynist I had determined on
becoming I surely felt too much placid satisfaction at Mrs. Anderson's
homely talk.

But it was really pleasant to lie back in the capacious leathern chair,
while this good woman cleared away the tea-things, and lazily eyeing the
fire, listen to the history of herself and her family, of her husband,
her children, her landlord, of her courtship, her marriage, her
troubles, of the death of her mother in the room overhead the year
before last, and of the wedding of her eldest boy Robert which is to
take place this summer as soon as the corn is carried.

Such openness of disposition, so often found among people of Mrs.
Anderson's class, is very refreshing, and it is convenient too. You know
at once where you stand. I wish it were the custom in society. I should
then have learned from Catherine's own lips how many fellows she had
already sent to the right-about, and I should have given her no
opportunity of adding to their number.

I came down very late to breakfast this morning--my first breakfast in
the country is always luxuriously late--and I found a tall and pretty
young girl busy building up the fire in my sitting-room. I guessed at
once she was the "Annie" of whom I heard a long and pleasing account
last night. Annie is the image of what her mother must have been twenty
years ago. She has the same agreeable blue eyes, the same soft straw
coloured hair. But while Mrs. Anderson wears hers in bands at each side
of the head, Annie's is drawn straight back to display the smoothest of
white foreheads, the freshest of freckled little faces in the world. She
is about seventeen, and a sweet girl, I feel sure. Could no more play
with a man's feelings than she could torture one of the creatures
committed to her care. She has charge of the poultry, she tells me, and
is allowed half the profits. Mem.--I shall eat a great many eggs.

April 5.--I have done an excellent thing in exchanging the hollow shams
of society for the healing powers of nature. I shall live to forget
Catherine and to be happy yet. And there was after all something
artificial about that girl. Pretty, certainly, but with the beauty of
the stage; now little Annie here is pretty with the beauty of the sky
and meadows.

I am delighted with this place. There is nothing like the c