"And you'll be married soon?"
"Come barley harvest—'ess."
"I will dance at your wedding, Margery."
"We shaänt have daäncing, because Wully says it leads to what oughtn't to happen."
Charles made a wry face.
"Going to wed a Puritan, eh?"
"Nay," said the buxom maid. "He's carter to Farmer Jahn Hogbin."
"Then, surely, he will let you have a merry junketing at the bride-ale."
"Naw, indeed an' he wawnt, because his sister Molly when they were thrawing the stocking last year fell on her back, and Wully's fam'ly is a proud and proper fam'ly and Wully says we mun be married wi' no such nonsense."
This long proclamation of propriety made Margery quite breathless, so Charles, with a bow and the present of a crown, passed on his way. Margery's case gave him more food for meditation. There was a buxom hale wench with the bloom of a peach, throwing away her ample charms upon a puritanical clod whose only ambition seemed to be the preservation of a mealy-mouthed decorum. Pshaw! such prime beauty deserved a better fate. Such a wedding as hers should have made old wives' fireside gossip for a score of years and the tale of it quickened the hearts of every lover and his lass that listened beneath the golden summer moon. Had he the control of the ceremony, by Heaven! they should have danced the dawn in, and every man and every maid should have gone to sleep with a face as pale as the morning sky. It was ridiculous that young Cupid should be breeched for the bidding of a lubberly half-baked ploughboy.