Mrs. Perkins did not like to have her pretty speech received with so much indifference, so she answered,
"I was, perhaps, too much in a hurry when I called Squire Armstrong's daughter, the handsomest: I forgot Anne, and she's a right to be, sence she's got her father's good looks."
"Dear Mrs Perkins, you overwhelm me!" exclaimed the Judge, bowing still lower than before. "I think higher than ever of your taste."
"Ah! You're poking fun at me, me now," said Mrs. Perkins, hardly knowing how to receive the acknowledgment. "But wouldn't you like to take something after your ride?"
Those were not the days of temperance societies, and it would have been quite secundum regulas, had the gentlemen accepted the offer as intended by their hostess. The Judge looked at Armstrong, who declined, and then turning to Mrs. Perkins said,
"The strawberry season is not over, I believe"—
"Oh! I can give you strawberries and cream," interrupted the hospitable Mrs. Perkins.
"And would you be so kind as to give them to us in the veranda? The sun does not shine in, and it will be pleasanter in the open air."
"Sartainly. Eliza Jane!" she cried, elevating her voice and speaking through an open door to one of her little daughters, with a blooming multitude of whom Providence had blessed her,
"Eliza Jane, fetch two cheers into the piazza. That piazza, Judge, is one of the grandest things that ever was. The old man and me and the children, take ever so much comfort in it."