A New Graft on the Family Tree by Pansy

IT is not my purpose to detail to you what was said in the Morgan family when the astounding revelations connected with that evening in the parlour were made known to them. That the revelations were astounding you can hardly doubt,-at least to certain members of the family. The father and mother would hardly have been more amazed had an angel from heaven descended and claimed their daughter Dorothy for a friend. Not that they regarded the young minister in an angelic light; but they had, although they did not admit it even to themselves, much stanch loyalty of heart to the profession. A minister was a person to respect, not so much on account of himself as because of his profession. Farmer Morgan felt this. Sneer as he might, in a sort of good-natured, tolerant way, at the inconsistencies of Christians, ministers included, he never went beyond certain general phrases, and he disliked to hear others go even so far as that. Besides, Mr. Butler had grown into the genuine affections of this family. They did not know it. Farmer Morgan would have been amazed had anybody told him that he liked Mr. Butler very much; he would have been likely to think the person mistaken; yet it was true.

As for the mother, along with her respect for the minister, and a certain sense of satisfied pride in the fact that he had actually sought her daughter for a wife, came a feeling of utter astonishment that anybody wanted Dorothy. Why, Dorothy was nothing but a child. The idea of her being married! She looked at her in a kind of maze; for several days she studied over it and tried to understand it. It had never seemed to occur to her to look upon this daughter as one growing into a woman. She had seemed to stay somewhere in the region of twelve, or at best fourteen; a girl to be directed and managed; to be told peremptorily what to wear, and where to go, and where not to go; in short, a child, to obey unquestioningly-an older child than Nellie, of course, but after all a child.