"Boys," continued Jasperson; "I'm a-goin' to tell ye something;
because--well, because I feel like it. I've never had no best girl!"
"Jasperson," said Ajax, "I can't believe that. What! you, a young
and----"

"I ain't young," interrupted the man of independent means. "I'm nigh
on to thirty-six. Don't flim-flam me, boys. I ain't young, and I ain't
beautiful, but fixed up I am--dressy, an' that should count."

"It does count," said my brother, emphatically. "I've seen you,
Jasperson, on Sundays, when I couldn't take my eyes off you. The girls
must be crazy."

"The girls, gen'lemen, air all right; the trouble ain't with them.
It's with me. Don't laugh: it ain't no laughin' matter. Boys--I'm
bashful. That's what ails Jasper Jasperson. The girls," he cried
scornfully; "you bet they know a soft snap when they see it, and I am
a soft snap, an' don't you forget it!

"I left my own land," he continued dreamily, in a soft, melancholy
voice, "because there ain't a lady within fifteen miles o' my barn,
and here there's a village, and----"

"Her name, please," said Ajax, with authority; "you must tell us her
name."

"Wal," he bent forward, and his face came out of the shadows; we could
see that his pale blue eyes, red-rimmed and short-sighted, were
suffused with tender light, and his pendulous lower lip was a-quiver
with emotion; even the hair of his head--tow-coloured and worn _à la