'It is not just book-learning or the want of it as makes a wife
think much or little of her husband,' replied my father,
evidently unwilling to give up a project which had taken deep
root in his mind. 'It's a something I don't rightly know how to
call it--if he's manly, and sensible, and straightforward; and I
reckon you're that, my boy.'

'I don't think I should like to have a wife taller than I am,
father,' said I, smiling; he smiled too, but not heartily.

'Well,' said he, after a pause. 'It's but a few days I've been
thinking of it, but I'd got as fond of my notion as if it had
been a new engine as I'd been planning out. Here's our Paul,
thinks I to myself, a good sensible breed o' lad, as has never
vexed or troubled his mother or me; with a good business opening
out before him, age nineteen, not so bad-looking, though perhaps
not to call handsome, and here's his cousin, not too near cousin,
but just nice, as one may say; aged seventeen, good and true, and
well brought up to work with her hands as well as her head; a
scholar--but that can't be helped, and is more her misfortune
than her fault, seeing she is the only child of scholar--and as I
said afore, once she's a wife and a she'll forget it all, I'll be
bound--with a good fortune in land and house when it shall please
the Lord to take her parents to himself; with eyes like poor
Molly's for beauty, a colour that comes and goes on a milk-white
skin, and as pretty a mouth--,

'Why, Mr Manning, what fair lady are you describing?' asked Mr
Holdsworth, who had come quickly and suddenly upon our
tete-a-tete, and had caught my father's last words as he entered