meddle with your love affairs or your religious feelings, and neither has Hal. S'pose we talk about maple sugar/ Mary did not reply, but her thoughts went toward heaven in silent, self-satisfying prayer.
The Reverend Thomas Rogers—so he must be designated in these pages, because he yet lives—was the avowed suitor for the hand and heart of Mary Ranger; and the winsome girl, with whose prematurely aroused affections her parents had no patience,—and with reason, for she was but a child,—Was the envy of all the older girls of the district, any one of whom, while censuring her fdr her folly in encouraging the poverty-stricken preacher's suit, would gladly have found like favor in his eyes, if the opportunity had been given her.
But while romantic maidens were going into rhapsodies over their hero, and many of the dowager mothers echoed their sentiments, most of the unmarried men of the district remained aloof from his persuasions arid unmoved by his fiery eloquence. But they took him out " sniping "one off-night in true schoolboy fashion; and while Mary Ranger dreamed of him in the seclusion of her snug chamber, the poor fellow stood half frozen at the end of a gulch, holding a bag to catch the snipes that never came.
"If I were not too poor in worldly goods to pay my way in your father's train, I'd go to Oregon," he said, a few nights after the "sniping "episode, as he walked homeward with Mary after coaxing Jean and Hal to keep the little episode a secret from their parents,—a promise they made after due hesitation, but with much sly chuckling, as they munched the red-and-white-striped sugar sticks with which they had been bribed.
