on!"

"Hoity toity!" exclaimed the mother, quite as much surprised as nettled
at this original and forcible way of stating a domestic fact. "What has
become of your modesty? Do you mean to insult both your father and
myself?"

"No!" said the young girl, in a sharper tone and with her words cut off
much shorter and more decidedly than was her habit. While those plump
little white fingers had been toying with the leaves of the book,
sitting there in the twilight, heart and hand had evidently both been
busy, and they had produced any other effect rather than making their
owner more tractable. "No! mother, no! But I tell you, once for all,
that the match you are talking of is hateful! I have tried to keep still
while the affair seemed at some distance, but now that you bring it
closer it fills my whole being with disgust! Do drop it if you do not
wish to drive me mad or make me disobedient. Oh, mother!" and the whole
manner of the young girl seemed to change and melt in a moment, as she
rose hastily from her chair, ran to that on which her mother was seated,
threw herself on her knees with her arms around her parent, and buried
her face in the sheltering lap,--"oh mother! do be my friend instead of
my enemy, in this! I cannot--indeed I cannot marry that man!"

There are a good many things they think they cannot do--these young
girls--and they never know themselves until they are tried. Perhaps it
may not always be well to try them to their full capacity, however!

What Mrs. Maria Owen might have answered to this appeal, under other
circumstances, is uncertain. She was, or intended to be, a good and
tender mother, and would have cut off her right hand rather than do any
thing which could make against the ultimate happiness of her daughter;
and she really, at that moment, must have caught a glimpse of the fact
that the heart of the young girl was very much interested in her
refusal. But if there was any sentiment which the worthy woman
entertained more deeply than another, it was the belief that Judge Owen,
her husband, was the most wonderful man in the world. She thought of him
with pride when his portly figure disappeared down the steps of a
morning, when he was starting to go to "Court." She thought of him with
a respect amounting to reverence when she contemplated him sitting

"At once mild and severe,
On his seat of dooming,"

(to quote good old Esaias Tegner) a local Rhadamanthus from whose
judgment there c