"I am his wife," said she, a shade of irritability just
perceptible in the sadness of her tone. "These poor little
things, asleep on the ground, are two of our children. We had two
more, but God has provided better for them than we could, by
taking them to Himself."

"And what would thee advise Josiah and me to do?" asked Miriam,
this being the first question which she had put to either of the
strangers.

" 'Tis a thing almost against nature for a woman to try to part
true lovers," answered the yeoman's wife, after a pause; "but
I'll speak as truly to you as if these were my dying words.
Though my husband told you some of our troubles, he didn't
mention the greatest, and that which makes all the rest so hard
to bear. If you and your sweetheart marry, you'll be kind and
pleasant to each other for a year or two, and while that's the
case, you never will repent; but, by and by, he'll grow gloomy,
rough, and hard to please, and you'll be peevish, and full of
little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by the fireside,
when he comes to rest himself from his troubles out of doors; so
your love will wear away by little and little, and leave you
miserable at last. It has been so with us; and yet my husband and
I were true lovers once, if ever two young folks were ."

As she ceased, the yeoman and his wife exchanged a glance, in
which there was more and warmer affection than they had supposed
to have escaped the frost of a wintry fate, in either of their
breasts. At that moment, when they stood on the utmost verge of
married life, one word fitly spoken, or perhaps one peculiar