“‘But I’ll bet he won’t, without a fight, anyway,’ says I, clinching up my fist; and then I went to sleep quite comf’table.

“Now, there wa’n’t but one place, as I knew of, where harebells was to be found; and Harnah had showed me that place herself the summer afore, and I had picked the flowers for her.  So I made up my mind to go next day and see if they was in blow; and, if they was, to get a bunch anyway, and take the resk of giving ’em to Harnah arterwards.

“I couldn’t git away in the morning nohow; for Hitty seemed to know it was something about Harnah that was calling me, and contrived all sorts of business to keep me to hum:  but, after dinner, I jist took my hat, and cleared out afore she knowed it, and, by the time she missed me, was half a mile up the river.

“’Twas a pooty day as ever you see; and as I rowed along, listening to the water running by the boat, and the wind rustling in the trees, I began to feel real sort of good, and didn’t care half so much about Sam or the British cap’n as I did when I started.  When I come to the landing at Uncle ’Siah’s, I never stopped, though I looked with all my eyes for any signs of Harnah; but couldn’t see no one but Sam going out to the cornfield, with a hoe on his shoulder.

“‘Good for you, Sam,’ says I to myself.  ’Hard work’s dreadful wholesome for love-sickness.’  So I rowed along as merry as a cricket, and pretty soon tied up my boat, and struck off into the woods.  It was consid’able of a walk; and I strolled along easy till I came to the place whar the harebells growed, ’bout a mile and a half from the river.  This was a high clift, covered with brush and trees on one side, and on the other falling sheer down to a little deep valley, with another clift rising opposite.  These clifts joined each other at the two ends of the valley:  so there was no getting into it anyway but down the faces of ’em, and that was as much as a man’s neck was worth; but, fur’s I know, no man had ever wanted to, nor ever tried to, till that day.

“The harebells growed on the very edge of the fust clift, and a little way down the face of it, and looked mighty pooty a-floating in the wind.  Harnah, who was kind of romantic, said they was the plume in the old clift’s hat; and she called the place the Lovers’ Rock, ’case, she said, the two clifts seemed taking hold of hands, and jist going to kiss.”

“That sounds like Harnah, anyway,” muttered Mehitable contemptuously.

“Yes, it’s more uv an idee than you’d ’a been likely to git off, ain’t it, Hit?” asked Seth with a malicious grin, and winking at the company.

But Mehitable preserving a prudent silence, and only showing her feelings by an accelerated movement of her knitting-needles, her husband elevated his eyes again to the ceiling, recrossed his legs, and continued:—­

“I scrambled up the back of the clift easy enough; and, sure enough, there was the posies, all in blow, and tossing their heads at me as if they knowed how pooty they was, and dared me not to say so.  Somehow they made me think of Harnah; and I spoke right out,—­