was a far less brilliant spectacle than the bride of last year, Mrs.
Robert Brownlow, who with her handsome oval face, fine figure, and
her tasteful dress, perfectly befitting a young matron, could not
help infinitely outshining the little girlish angular creature,
looking the browner for her bridal white, so that even a deep glow,
and a strange misty beaminess of expression could not make her
passable in Kenminster eyes.

How would Joe Brownlow's fancy turn out?




CHAPTER II. THE CHICKENS.



John Gilpin's spouse said to her dear,
"Though wedded we have been
These twice ten tedious years, yet we
No holiday have seen."—-Cowper.


No one could have much doubt how it had turned out, who looked, after
fifteen years, into that room where Joe Brownlow and his mother had
once sat tete-a-tete.

They occupied the two ends of the table still, neither looking much
older, in expression at least, for the fifteen years that had passed
over their heads, though the mother had-—after the wont of active old