trousers, and jingling silver
spurs.

"Kin I do anythin' for ye, miss, at the Forks?"

Miss Mayfield looked up quietly. "I think not," she said indifferently,
as if the flaming-Jeff was a very common occurrence.

Jeff here permitted the mare to bolt fifty yards, caught her up sharply,
swung her round on her off hind heel, permitted her to paw the air once
or twice with her white-stockinged fore-feet, and then, with another
dash forward, pulled her up again just before she apparently took Miss
Mayfield and her chair in a running leap.

"Are you sure, miss?" asked Jeff, with a flushed face and a rather
lugubrious voice.

"Quite so, thank you," she said coldly, looking past this centaur to the
wooded mountain beyond.

Jeff, thoroughly crushed, was pacing meekly away when a childlike voice
stopped him.

"If you are going near a carpenter's shop you might get a new shutter
for my window; it blew away last night."

"It did, miss?"

"Yes," said the shrill voice of Aunt Sally, from the doorway, "in course
it did! Ye must be crazy, Jeff, for thar it stands in No. 8, whar ye
must have put it after ye picked it up outside."

Jeff, conscious that Miss Mayfield's eyes were on his suffused face,
stammered "that he would attend to it," and put spurs to the mare, eager
only to escape.

It was not his only discomfiture; for the blacksmith, seeing Jeff's
nervousness and anxiety, was suspicious of something wrong, as the world
is apt to be, and appeased his conscience after the worldly fashion,
by driving a hard bargain with the doubtful brother in affliction--the
morality of a horse trade residing always with the seller. Whereby
Master Jeff received only eighty dollars for horse and outfit--worth at
least two hundred--and was also mulcted of forty dollars, principal and
interest for past service of the blacksmith. Jeff walked home with
forty dollars in his pocket--capital to prosecute his honest calling
of innkeeper; the blacksmith retired to an adjoining tavern to discuss
Jeff's affairs, and further reduce his credit. Yet I doubt which was the
happier--the blacksmith estimating his possible gains, and doubtful
of some uncertain sequence in his luck, or Jeff, temporarily relieved,
boundlessly hopeful, and filled with the vague delights of a first
passion. The only discontented brute in the whole transaction was poor
Rabbit, who, missing certain attentions, became indignant, after the
manner of her sex, bit a piece out of h