"Please, sir," said he to the doctor, who was sitting cross-legged on the balustrade, with his red silk umbrella over his head,--"please, sir, if you'll be good enough to take me now, and give me any hole to sleep in, I'll work for your honour night and day; and as for wages, Mother says, 'just suit yourself, sir.'" "My child," said the doctor, taking Lenny by the hand, and looking at him with the sagacious eye of a wizard, "I knew you would come! and Giacomo is already prepared for you! As to wages, we'll talk of them by and by." Lenny being thus settled, his mother looked for some evenings on the vacant chair, where he had so long sat in the place of her beloved Mark; and the chair seemed so comfortless and desolate, thus left all to itself, that she could bear it no longer.
Indeed the village had grown as distasteful to her as to Lenny,--perhaps more so; and one morning she hailed the steward as he was trotting his hog-maued cob beside the door, and bade him tell the squire that "she would take it very kind if he would let her off the six months' notice for the land and premises she held; there were plenty to step into the place at a much better rent." "You're a fool," said the good-natured steward; "and I'm very glad you did not speak to that fellow Stirn instead of to me.

You've been doing extremely well here, and have the place, I may say, for nothing." "Nothin' as to rent, sir, but a great deal as to feelin'," said the widow.

"And now Lenny has gone to work with the foreign gentleman, I should like to go and live near him." "Ah, yes, I heard Lenny had taken himself off to the Casino, more fool he; but, bless your heart, 't is no distance,--two miles or so.

Can't he come home every night after work ?" "No, sir," exclaimed the widow, almost fiercely; "he sha'n't come home here, to be called bad names and jeered at!--he whom my dead good man was so fond and proud of.

No, sir; we poor folks have our feelings, as I said to Mrs.Dale, and as I will say to the squire hisself.