“Yes; here they be,” said Brother William, solemnly drawing a couple of the most romantic and highly flavoured of the penny weeklies of the day from his breast-pocket, and opening and smoothing them out, so as to display to the best advantage the woodcuts on the front pages of each, where, remarkably similar in style, a very undulatory young lady in evening dress was listening to the attentions of a small-headed, square-shouldered gentleman of impossible height, with an enormous moustache, worn probably to make up for his paucity of cranial hair. “Yes; here they be; and I don’t think much of ’em either.”
“No! what do you know about them?” said the girl sharply. “If it had been the Farmer’s Friend, with its rubbish about crops and horseballs and drenches, you would say it was good reading.”
“Mebbe,” said Brother William, placing his soft hat very carefully upon the rounded knob of his thistle staff, and standing it up in a corner of the room adjoining the kitchen. “Mebbe, Fanny, my lass; but I don’t see what good it’s going to do you reading ’bout dooks and lords a-marrying housemaids, as they don’t never do—do they, Martha?”
“I never knew of such a thing, Mr Cressy,” said Martha in a quiet demure way. “I did once hear of a gentleman marrying his cook.”
“Yes,” said Brother William solemnly, “I think I did hear of such a thing as that, and that might be sensible; but in them magazines they never marry the cooks—it’s always the housemaids—and Fanny’s getting her head full of such stuff.”
“You mind your own business, William, and let me mind mine, if you please,” said the young lady warmly.
“Oh, all right, my dear; only, I’m your brother, you know,” said the young man, hitching himself more comfortably into his chair. “Got company, I see.”
“How did you know?” cried Fanny.
“I was over at the station delivering my bit o’ wheat, when Sir James come in with that Mr Prayle. I don’t think much of him.”
“And pray, why not?”