“A maid.”
“Verily, thou art a shrewd fellow to have guessed it. Come up, therefore, and tell me all thou knowest which thou mayst do, and yet be gone in five minutes.”
“That my civility may the more brightly shine against the foil of thine uncivil words, I will come, and, to heap coals of fire on thy head, I will tell thee of the scene on shipboard. The choosing of husbands and wives went on as merrily as the choosing of partners for a country-dance. It was a busy market, I can tell thee.”
“A market—how meanest thou?”
“Why, ‘tis thus they manage it, by bargain and sale; and belike ‘tis as good an arrangement as any, since when the husband hath paid down his hundred pound of tobacco for a wife, he is bound to make himself believe he hath a bargain, and the wife, seeing he hath set so high an estimate on her worth, in honor must strive to live up to his valuation.”
“And was every one of the twenty maids married thus?”
“Ay, all but one, and she remained without a partner from choice, which thou wouldst have declared impossible. Many offered for her, though she wore her veil and coverchief close and would not show her features. But she would look at none, and went off at the last to lodge with her friend—one that was taken to wife by Miles Cary. I was somewhat struck with curiosity over the conduct of the one unwed maid, and I searched out her name in the ship’s register, where she is set down as Elizabeth Devon. Now, fare thee well! for my five minutes are over, and if I told thee more, ‘twould be what I know not, and, ergo—lies.”
After my nimble-witted friend was gone his way, I sat for long, looking down into the street and watching the bridal couples as they passed from under Parson Buckle’s blessing to their new homes. All this billing and cooing and setting up of new households made me feel but the more lonely and doleful. So I went not abroad that day, tho’ I was well enow to be out, but sat reading and studying with no other comforter than my pipe. But, to say truth, the pipe is no mean consoler, and there is no friend that doth so adapt himself to thine every mood, so partake, as it were, the very shade and subtlety of thy thought and feeling, as tobacco. Well, as I sat thus, the day wore on to evening. The flame in my pipe was expiring with a final flicker, when a knock sounded at my door.
“Come in!” I called, and Miles Cary entered.
“Why, how now, Cary! Art thou come to complain of thy bride of half-a-dozen hours? Hath she beaten thee over the head with the new broomstick, and thou art ashamed of thy black eye, and come to get it healed by stealth after dark?”