returned. "There was a pretty girl in the road as we came up, and
I couldn't get him a step beyond her. Heaven knows what's become
of him by now!"

"I bet my right hand that was Molly Peterkin," said Tom. "If
anybody in these parts begins to talk about 'a pretty gal,' you
may be sartain he's meanin' that yaller-headed limb of Satan.
Why, I stopped my Jinnie goin' with her a year ago. Sech women, I
said to her, are fit for nobody but men to keep company with."

"That's so; that's so," agreed old Jacob, in a charitable tone;
"seein' as men have most likely made 'em what they are, an'
oughtn't to be ashamed of thar own handiwork."

"Now, when it comes to yaller hair an' blue eyes," put in Matthew
Field, "she kin hold her own agin any wedded wife that ever made
a man regret the day of his birth. Many's the time of late I've
gone a good half-mile to git out of that gal's way, jest as I
used to cut round old Fletcher's pasture when I was a boy to keep
from passin' by his redheart cherry-tree that overhung the road.
Well, well, they do say that her young man, Fred Turner, went
back on her, an' threw her on her father's hands two days befo'
the weddin'."

"It was hard on Sol, now you come to think of it," said Tom. "He
told me himself that he tried to git the three who ought to marry
her to draw straws for the one who was to be the happy man, but
they all backed out an' left her high an' dry an' as pretty as a
peach. Fred Turner would have taken his chance, he said, like an
honest man, an' he was terrible down in the mouth when I saw him,