"'Yes.'
"She looked all about the glade, and then up at me.
"'Well, did you?' she said."
* * * * *
This is Peterson's story exactly as he told it to me on my return. That is some time ago now, but there is little to add. Mr. Bliss Bulliston is now much better both in health and in temper, and there is every reason to believe that I shall lose my assistant some of these days. The young couple are talking of going out to British Columbia. No complete collection of the eggs of that Colony has ever been made, and Peterson says that the climate is so healthy there, that for some years there will be nothing for him to do but to help Truda with her collecting.
This is all very well now, in the first months of an engagement, but as a family man myself, I have my doubts as to the permanence of such an arrangement.
TWO HUMOURISTS
Our gentle humourist is Nathan Monypenny. No man ever heard him laugh aloud, yet as few had ever seen him without a gleam of something akin to kindly humour in his eye. Even now, when the bitterness of life and its ultimate loneliness are upon him, it is a pleasure to be next Nathan, even at a funeral. During that dreadful ten minutes when the black-coated, crinkle-trousered company waits outside for the "service" to be over, his company is universally considered "as good as a penny bap and a warm drink." In former days, within the memory of my father, he had a friend and fellow-humourist in the village, one "Doog" (that is, Douglas) Carnochan.
The contrast between the two companions was remarkable. They both lived in the same street of our little country hamlet. Indeed, necessarily so, for Whinnyliggate has but one street, strictly so called. The few cottages along the "Well-road," and the more pretentious cluster of upstarts which keeps the Free Kirk in countenance on the braeface, have never arrogated to themselves the name of a street.
So at one end of the Piccadilly-cum-Regent-street of Whinnyliggate—the upper end—lived Nathan Monypenny, and at the other end dwelt his rival, Doog, also, though less worthily, denominated "humourist." They were thus separated by something considerably less than a quarter of a mile of honest unpavemented king's highway. But, though they were personally friends, green oceans and trackless continents lay between their several characters and dispositions.