sore struggle it was. He never allowed himself to kiss her, though
he was sore tempted one day, when he bought her a cream-colored pony, and
she flung her arms round his neck before Mr. Bartley and kissed him
eagerly; but he was so bashful that the girl laughed at him, and said,
half pertly, "Excuse the liberty, but if you will be such a duck, why,
you must take the consequences."

Said Bartley, pompously, "You must not expect middle-aged men to be as
demonstrative as very young ladies; but he has as much real affection
for you as you have for him."

"Then he has a good deal, papa," said she, sweetly. Both the men
were silent, and Mary looked to one and the other, and seemed a
little puzzled.

The great analysts that have dealt microscopically with commonplace
situations would revel in this one, and give you a curious volume of
small incidents like the above, and vivisect the father's heart with
patient skill. But we poor dramatists, taught by impatient audiences to
move on, and taught by those great professors of verbosity, our female
novelists and nine-tenths of our male, that it is just possible for
"masterly inactivity," _alias_ sluggish narrative, creeping through sorry
flags and rushes with one lily in ten pages, to become a bore, are driven
on to salient facts, and must trust a little to our reader's intelligence
to ponder on the singular situation of Mary Bartley and her two fathers.

One morning Mary Bartley and her governess walked to a neighboring town
and enjoyed the sacred delight of shopping. They came back by a
short-cut, which made it necessary to cross a certain brook, or rivulet,
called the Lyn. This was a rapid stream, and in places pretty deep; but
in one particular part it was shallow, and crossed by large
stepping-stones, two-thirds of which were generally above-water. The
village girls, including Mary Bartley, used all to trip over these
stones, and think nothing of it, though the brook went past at a fine
rate, and gradually widened and deepened as it flowed, till it reached a
downright fall; after that, running no longer down a decline, it became
rather a languid stream.

Mary and her governess came to this ford and found it swollen by recent
rains, and foaming and curling round the stepping-stones, and their tops
only were out of the water now.

The governess objected to pass this current.

"Well, but," said Mary, "the other way is a mile round, and papa expects
us to be punctual at mea