"Where is your girl?" asked Mrs. Harding, anxiously.
"I left her to come in the cars. She will be here in three days."
"Oh, did you get one, then?" asked his wife and two or three others, in a breath.
"To be sure I did; but I had hard enough work to find her. My experience was almost as romantic as yours, wife."
"Do give us your history," said Mrs. Pinkerton, after Mr. Harding was settled, and quietly sipping his tea.
"Well," said Mr. Harding, with a self-satisfied air, for he had actually engaged a girl, "one experiences wonderful alternations of hope and fear in this business, I can assure you. I have made as many as fifty calls, and inquiries without number. I rode over frightful hills and almost impassable roads, and met with many discouraging receptions; but I was determined to succeed, and I did."
Mr. Harding's history of his "girl hunt" kept his family chatting, laughing, and wondering till a late hour. But we spare the reader the details of his ride.
The day that the new girl was expected was damp and cloudy. The sun scarcely showed itself all the morning, and, now and then, a heavy mist or slow drizzling rain added to the discomfort and gloom. Late in the morning, a lumbering old stage-coach came rattling up to Mr. Harding's door, and from it alighted a girl, evidently somewhat over twenty years of age, with a very dark, sallow complexion and large coal-black eyes, which seemed made on purpose to look everything through. Notwithstanding the dull, uncomfortable morning, she was dressed in a flounced lawn with a white ground. A gold pencil dangled at her side, and she flaunted the largest of gold hoops in her ears, and an enormous piece of red glass in her breast-pin.
"Can that be the new girl?" asked Mrs. Pinkerton, as the stranger whisked up the gravel-walk and pulled the bell.
"The very one," answered Mr. Harding, who caught a glimpse of her figure at the door.