“Just so; and therefore false lace will be quite good enough for you. Molly,”—Mrs. Granger’s name was Molly,—“I’ve promised to let them have the use of the great boiler in the back kitchen once a-week, and you are to furnish them with fuel.”
“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Granger, upon whose active charity this loan of her own kitchen boiler made a strain that was almost too severe. But she recovered herself in half a minute. “Very well, my dear; but you won’t expect any dinner on that day.”
“No; I shall expect no dinner; only some food in the rough. You may boil that in the copper too if you like it.”
“You know, my dear, you don’t like anything boiled.”
“As for that, Molly, I don’t suppose any of them like it. They’d all prefer roast mutton.”
“The copper will be your two mites,” whispered the niece.
“Only I have not thrown them in of my own accord,” said Mrs. Granger.
Mr. Frew, who was living in Liverpool, always came over to Plumstock on Friday evening, and spent Saturday and Sunday with the rector and his family. For him those Saturdays were happy days, for Frederick F. Frew was a good lover. He liked to be with Nora, to walk with her, and to talk with her; he liked to show her that he loved her, and to make himself gracious and pleasant. I am not so sure that his coming was equally agreeable to Mr. Granger. Mr. Frew would talk about American politics, praising the feeling and spirit of his countrymen in the North; whereas Mr. Granger, when driven into the subject, was constrained to make a battle for the South. All his prejudices, and what he would have called his judgment, went with the South, and he was not ashamed of his opinion; but he disliked arguing with Frederic F. Frew. I fear it must be confessed that Frederic F. Frew was too strong for him in such arguments. Why it should be so I cannot say; but an American argues more closely on politics than does an Englishman. His convictions are not the truer on that account; very often the less true, as are the conclusions of a logician, because he trusts to syllogisms which are often false, instead of to the experience of his life and daily workings of his mind. But though not more true in his political convictions than an Englishman, he is more unanswerable, and therefore Mr. Granger did not care to discuss the subject of the American war with Frederic F. Frew.
“It riles me,” Frew said, as he sat after dinner in the Plumstock drawing-room on the Friday evening before Christmas Day, “to hear your folks talking of our elections. They think the war will come to an end, and the rebels of the South have their own way, because the Democrats have carried their ticket.”
“It will have that tendency,” said the parson.