The hint did not take, as the saying goes; and Miss Jean having departed, and Miss Isabella Gentle, who had also a competency, having arrived, he tried the same plan with her; for his spirit for speculation was still strong; and he expected, yet, to make a far more successful hit than he had even done in the case of Miss Belinda Yellowlees. Now, Miss Isabella was just as sincere in her admiration of his sorrow as was Miss Jean Gibbs; and all that was gone over about the loss he had sustained, and the consolation of the children, and the feeling he exhibited, as became a good husband and a loving father. But the moment he made a hint about the poor creatures having no female to look after them, the same effect was as evident as in the case of Miss Jean—for Miss Isabella, for a certainty, did not seem to relish it.
"All this may come of my being too eager and too soon," said he. "But I fear these six children will be stumbling-blocks in the way of my farther enterprise; for a woman will not give so much for a man with six children, as she would do for himself. Had my second transaction come up to the first, I might to-day have been an independent man. But a third may do better; and, if it don't, it shall not, by Hymen, be Mr Caleb Crabbin that will be to blame."
Nor, indeed, could it be alleged that he spoke falsely; for, as soon as the proper time came, he set about a very vigorous search for a third helpmate in every direction where he thought he had any chance. He tried again Miss Jean Gibbs and Miss Isabella Gentle; but the children formed an objection which they could not get over.
"I will never marry a man with six children—no—nor five, nor four, nor three, nor two," said Miss Jean.
"I would far rather live and die an old maid, than become the slave of another woman's family," was the reply of Miss Isabella.
And then he tried Miss Julia Cross, who had something of a lying stock, though not much, and her answer was just as peremptory.
"I hold the woman to be mad, Mr Caleb Crabbin," said she, "who would undertake the charge of six children. One might as well become a schoolmistress at once."
And after this rebuff, he tried Miss Angelina Crabbe, who had an annuity of somewhere about seventy-five pounds, besides about three hundred of old savings; but Angelina said that she would not be a stepmother for the whole earth.
"I see it will not do," said he, after some farther rejections. "Unless I take a wife with nothing, I will never get another, where it is known that I am burdened with six children. But he who takes a wife with nothing is but a sorry trafficker; and the never a wife with nothing, were she as fair as Venus, will Caleb Crabbin marry in this world. I will pack off the whole crew, and try my fortune under other colours."
The resolution thus formed he put in execution, by getting the whole of his children boarded with friends who lived at a distance, upon the pretence that he was going to take a trip away somewhere abroad. Having achieved this preliminary, he set off for the nearest good watering-place, being no other than the noted Pitcaithly, where so many "wanters," have, with various success, been supplied; and he had not been a week there when he fell in with a buxom widow of five-and-thirty, who was reported as being worth not a jot less than one hundred and fifty pounds a-year, secured on the strong Atlas, by the providence of her deceased husband. The name she carried, Mrs Jemima Bowsie, was a mixture of her own maiden name and the surname of her husband, very well blended; and she carried herself with such an air of frankness, surrounded with the eclat of her fortune, which she had taken care to blaze pretty well, that Mr Caleb Crabbin was immediately struck.