tea-kettle, open whatever clams and oysters she was about to cook, and, above all, to recount for her delight one of those inimitable yarns of his, at whose points he himself was sure to laugh till the rafters of the house shook and the plates in the dresser rattled again.  But this was merely the first stage of his passion.  Before long, as is not unusual in such cases, it took another and more bodeful turn.  That inextinguishable laughter of his was heard no more, or at best gave place to a feeble tittering; his stories dropped from his lips with but flat pungency; and instead of performing his lady-love’s ‘chores’ with a mirthful readiness, he went through them in a heartsick way, the while directing towards her furtive looks of supplication.  The true state of matters was now obvious to all Old Bill was another fatally-stricken victim of that spooney archer-boy who next to death holds dominion over men; and with his case, thus momentous, we could but feel a renewed interest in his behalf, and busy our tongues about him.  I, for my part, thought that as he was a widower, and needful of a wife to comfort him in his advancing age, and that as the present object of his affections, if not a highly ‘forcible’ woman, seemed at all events to be one of whom no great harm was to be feared, there could be no valid objection to his being joined to her; particularly if nothing was divulged proving her to be other than what she seemed.  But this view I found to be on the whole unacceptable to my auditory.  Almost to a man they condemned the propriety of the match.  It could not actually be said that they disliked Mrs. Hose, but they were jealous of her, as, in her manner and style of array, she considerably dimmed the lustre of their own women; and they distrusted her as she was a stranger; it being a marked habit with most of our folks to distrust all strangers save those from whom they expect pecuniary awards.  But meanwhile, notwithstanding this criticism, the little idyl in our midst was developing itself apace.  On the afternoon of one beautiful Sunday, a day in which we of course ordinarily did no work, when the dinner-table had been well cleared away, what should we see but old Bill swinging forth with his sailor gait from the house, and arrayed as jauntily as his check shirt and pea-jacket (his only suit of apparel at hand) would permit, to be speedily followed by Mrs. Rose, who with one set of finger-tips held up the light folds of a sweetly blue lawn skirt, and with the other bore aslant before her a bewitching pink parasol.  Undoubtedly there was a great indulgence in sly winks and suppressed titterings on the part of such of us as chanced to be witnesses of this at once festal and sentimental sally; but the twain heeded naught whatsoever of these manifestations, but struck off along the snow-white strand where the sea was droning its hymn so lazily that it would have inevitably put itself to sleep, if the fish-hawks had not so continually disturbed it by mischievously diving headlong