“It is I.”

“Well, I’ll be hanged!  What are ye doin’ at this time ev night.  Ain’t yuz afraid of ghosts?”

“Oh dear no.  I had a bad headache and couldn’t sleep, so came out to try if a walk would cure it,” I explained.

We were a quarter of a mile or so from the house, so Peter slackened his speed that I might keep pace with him.  His knowledge of ’etiquette did not extend as far as dismounting.  There is a great difference between rudeness and ignorance.  Peter was not rude; he was merely ignorant.  For the same reason he let his mother feed the pigs, clean his boots, and chop wood, while he sat down and smoked and spat.  It was not that he was unmanly, as that this was the only manliness he had known.

I was alone in the schoolroom next afternoon when Mr M’Swat sidled in, and after stuttering and hawing a little, delivered himself of: 

“I want to tell ye that I don’t hold with a gu-r-r-r-l going out of nights for to meet young men:  if ye want to do any coortin’ yuz can do it inside, if it’s a decent young man.  I have no objections to yer hangin’ yer cap up to our Peter, only that ye have no prawperty—­in yerself I like ye well enough, but we have other views for Peter.  He’s almost as good as made it sure with Susie Duffy, an’ as ole Duffy will have a bit ev prawperty I want him to git her, an’ wouldn’t like ye to spoil the fun.”

Peter was “tall and freckled and sandy, face of a country lout”, and, like Middleton’s rouse-about, “hadn’t any opinions, hadn’t any ideas”, but possessed sufficient instinct and common bushcraft with which, by hard slogging, to amass money.  He was developing a moustache, and had a “gu-r-r-r-l”; he wore tight trousers and long spurs; he walked with a sidling swagger that was a cross between shyness and flashness, and took as much pride in his necktie as any man; he had a kind heart, honest principles, and would not hurt a fly; he worked away from morning till night, and contentedly did his duty like a bullock in the sphere in which God had placed him; he never had a bath while I knew him, and was a man according to his lights.  He knew there was such a thing as the outside world, as I know there is such a thing as algebra; but it troubled him no more than algebra troubles me.

This was my estimation of Peter M’Swat, junior.  I respected him right enough in his place, as I trust he respected me in mine, but though fate thought fit for the present to place us in the one groove, yet our lives were unmixable commodities as oil and water, which lay apart and would never meet until taken in hand by the omnipotent leveller—­death.

Marriage with Peter M’Swat!

Consternation and disgust held me speechless, and yet I was half inclined to laugh at the preposterousness of the thing, when Peter’s father continued: 

“I’m sorry if you’ve got smitten on Peter, but I know you’ll he sensible.  Ye see I have a lot of children, and when the place is divided among ’em it won’t be much.  I tell ye wot, old Duffy has a good bit of money and only two children, Susie and Mick.  I could get you to meet Mick—­he mayn’t be so personable as our Peter,” he reflected, with evident pride in his weedy firstborn, and he got no farther, for I had been as a yeast-bottle bubbling up, and now went off bang!