I only wishes I'd a-got a bit of a place fitty for to ask 'ee and the young leddies to come to, sir." "Never mind, Jabez; we can wait.

Perhaps you'll have one soon," said Dan consolingly, and he glanced knowingly round the table, letting his eye rest for a moment longer on Fanny than any one else.

"By another Christmas we may--dear me, I think this room must be very hot," he remarked, breaking off abruptly to look at Fanny's rosy cheeks.

But Fanny rather tartly told him to "go on with his tea and never mind nothing 'bout hot rooms, nor anything else that didn't concern him," and quite unabashed he turned to Jabez again.
"You see," he explained, "if you hadn't gone to father that day I shied the wood at you, we shouldn't have had Aunt Pike here, and Fanny wouldn't have asked us out here to tea because Aunt Pike was out, because, you see, she wouldn't be here to go out, and we couldn't be glad about her going, for we shouldn't know anything about it to be glad about, and so there wouldn't be anything special to ask us here for, and so--" "Master Dan," cried Jabez piteously, "if you don't stop to once, the little bit of brain I've got'll be addled! Iss, my word, addled beyond recovery, and me a poor man with my living to get." "It do put me in mind of my old granny," said Grace, laughing, "when poor grandfather died, and she was getting her bit of mourning.

'Well,' she saith, 'if my poor dear Samuel had died a week sooner or later, and Miss Peek had put her clearance sale back or fore a week, I should have missed that there remlet of merino and lost a good bargain, whereas now it'll always be a pleasure to me to look at and feel I saved two shillings on it.'" "Now, Fanny," cried Dan, "a story from you, please." Fanny demurred a little, of course.