"What! another new hat?" cried the young wife, whose quick woman's eye at once caught the je ne sais quoi—the air of the thing, as her husband rejoined her later in the day.
The gentleman explained;—"And you thought the other so becoming too, Belle," he added, in a half-deprecatory tone; "but Chauncey was so strenuous about it, and I knew he would appeal to you, and that you would not be satisfied without"——
"But they allowed you really nothing for the other, though it was quite new, and certainly a nice hat. What a pity, now, that you did not travel in your old one, though it was a little worse for wear, or even in the cap you bought to fish in. There was Mr. —— in the same car with us, looking anything but elegant, I am sure, with the queerest-looking old
'Kossuth,' I believe they are called, on, and the roughest overcoat!"
"But, you know, Belle, dear, such a dress is not considered admissible for the clergy."
"No! well, whatever is sensible and convenient should be, I am convinced now, if I was not before."
Our young clergyman, as he turned the still-cherished plan of the new shawl anxiously in his mind, a "sadder and a wiser" man than before, determined never again to buy a new dress hat expressly to perform a journey in, especially when going directly from the "rural districts" to a large city; besides laying up for future use some other collateral resolutions and reflections of an equally wise and practical character.
"Why, Belle," said the "superb" Chauncey to his fair sister-in-law, drawing her little son nearer to him, as he leaned on his mother's lap after dinner, "this is really a magnificent boy, 'pon-my-word!—you should take him to 'Bradbrook's' and fit him up! Would you like a velvet jacket, eh, my fine fellow?"
The curly-headed child pointed his dimpled forefinger towards the pretty garment he was wearing, and said, timidly, "Pretty new coata, mamma made for him."
"I believe," responded the young mother, quietly, bending her beaming eyes upon the little face lovingly upturned to hers, "that Willie will have to do without a velvet jacket for the present; mamma intended to get one for him in New York, but"——the sentence was finished mentally with "papa's second new hat has taken the money." This will reveal the secretly-cherished plan of the young rector's wife, with which a faint sketch of a pretty cap to crown the shining curls of her darling, had dimly mingled, almost unconsciously to herself, until brought out by the power of that "tide in the affairs of men"—necessity!