“Oh, don’t I know, Silas! Wot would yer pore mother say ef she were to come alive again, and see this bitter day? Oh, Silas! you that has been brought up on the Bible—han’t you read your Scripter to some purpose? ‘Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain.’ Oh, Silas! Silas! it’s Mary Ann Hatton, or one of them other sober women you ought to be taking to wife.”
“Yes,” said Silas, “and wouldn’t both on us have been as cross as two sticks? I’m taking a bonny bit of a gel to wed, wot’s sweet as a rose to look at, and with a perfume o’ the lavender and the cherry-pie about her. Good inside and out is Jill, and I guess ef Solomon were alive, he’d say as the price of a gel like Jill were above rubies.”
“I heerd tell,” said Aunt Hannah, in a slow voice, “that you was quite gone off yer head, Silas, my man, but I didn’t go to believe it, until I had clapped my own two eyes on yer. I’m mournful, thinkin’ on yer pore mother. But there’s no manner of use in wasting words on a man wot’s gone silly, so I’ll wish yer a werry good-evening.”
“You stay a bit,” said Silas. “Jonathan and me, we are doing up the cottage, and you had ever a cute eye for a good bit of furniture. Come and see what I am doing. I doubt ef you’d know the place.”
With many sighs and groans, Aunt Hannah was induced to enter the cottage. She behaved in a melancholy way when she got inside, for the sight of her sister’s vacant chair provoked a sudden flood of tears, which embarrassed and annoyed Silas.
“Eh dear, eh dear,” she sobbed, “to think of the last time I ha’ seen pore Maria a-bolstered up in that cheer. She had the asthmey awful, and she said to me, ‘Hannah, it ketches me most when I lies down.’ She said them words over and over, and I don’t think I ever heerd anything more mournful. Eh, and ef that ain’t the lavender I see’d her put in with her own hands into that identical muslin bag, my name ain’t Hannah Royal! Oh, Silas! it’s wonderful how you can go agin a mother like that!”
“I ain’t a-going agin her,” said Silas; “you shet up now, Aunt Hannah, you has said enough. Wot do you think of this table and chair as I has bought? And this rug to put in front of the stove? Come now, give us your opinion; it’s worth having.”
Thus appealed to Aunt Hannah immediately wiped her tears, and going down on her knees began to feel the texture of the rug, and to put it up to her nose, and to sniff at it, and then hold it between herself and the light.
“I misdoubt me that it ain’t made with three threads across,” she said, laying it down with some contempt. “And the colour’s too flashy for my taste. I like a drab ground, with a teeny sprig of purple on it. Let me look at that ’ere table. You don’t mean to tell me, Silas, as you has gone and bought a meehogany table? Don’t yer know as sech a table is sinful waste to a man in your station?”
“It were goin’ dirt cheap,” said Silas, in an apologetic tone.