=DEAR SIR:  As I scorn to act in any manner that may bring reproach upon myself and family, and hold clandestine proceedings unbecoming in any man of character, I take the liberty of distinctly avowing my love for your daughter and humbly request your permission to pay her my addresses, as I flatter myself my family and expectancies will be found not unworthy of your notice.  I have some reason to imagine that I am not altogether disagreeable to your daughter, but I assure you that I have not as yet endeavored to win her affections, for fear it might be repugnant to a father’s will.  I am, etc.=

Under this was provided “A Favorable Answer,” in which Sam Murdock might have said that he had long perceived this thing and applauded it, and would the young man “dine with us to-morrow at six if you are not engaged, and you will then have an opportunity to plead your own cause.”  But chillingly after this graceful assent followed an “Unfavorable Answer,” which Sam Murdock would also see when he opened the book at page 251; and still more portentously on the same page was a letter which Miss Selina Murdock herself might choose to write him, a sickening and dreadful thing entitled, “Unfavorable Reply on the Ground of Poverty.”

“To say that I do not feel pleased and flattered at your proposal would be to tell a useless untruth,” the thing began speciously.  “But how are we situated, what hope of happiness with our unsettled prospects and worse than small means?  Industry has doubtless never been and never will be wanting on your part, but—­” and so to its dreadful end.  It was almost base in its coldness and mercenary calculation.  That phrase about the “useless untruth” implied even a dubious and considering morality; and the conclusion, “we must not entail misery upon others as well as ourselves by a too hasty step,” argued a nature cautious in the extreme.

Yet Mr. Gaskell was too evidently a man of the world, knowing in his ripe experience that there existed a sufficient number of such cold natures to warrant the obtrusion of this heart-rending formula; and I doubt not that these negative specimens of the possible alone restrained my namesake from going beyond mere copies of that first letter.

It will be seen that the influence of Mrs. Potts pervaded our utmost social and commercial limits.  And when the “Compendium” had become a centre-table ornament in the homes of the rich, and a bulky object of awe in humbler abodes, she went over the ground again with other volumes calculated to serve her double purpose, from “Dr. Chase’s Receipt Book” to “Picturesque Italy, profusely Illustrated.”  She also purveyed a line of “art-pieces,” including “Wide Awake and Fast Asleep,” “The Monarch of the Glen,” “Woman Gathering Fagots,” and “Retreat from Moscow.”  Also, little Roscoe, out of school hours, took subscriptions for the Youth’s Companion.