"Are you there, Pether?" 

 "Yes, my love," he replied, quickly, while, in an undertone, he murmured to himself, "ah! there's a melancholy laceration to my gentility, my cary spowsy, I can't instill aristocratical idayas into her deleterious temperature, anyway." 

 Now, Mrs. Peter Bulworthy deserves a distinctive paragraph, and she shall have it. 

 Although morally she was Peter's much better half, yet bodily she could aspire to no such appellation. In regard of personal weight, they bore about the same relative affinity as a fine, fat, substantial round of beef would to the carving-fork beside it. The physical difference, however, she amply made up for, by keeping her prongs ever actively employed pricking the unfortunate Peter at every assailable point. Peter was pinguid, plump, and plethoric—she was thin to attenuation. Peter's voice, though husky, was rich and oily—hers was like the attrition of ungreased cart-wheels. Peter affected dignity and social status—she gloried in her unmitigated vulgarity; he, poor man, had long ago given up every idea of resisting her domestic tyranny. "Anything for a quiet life," was his motto, and, with something akin to proper retribution, the indignities and annoyances, which he, in the plenitude of his pocket-power, inflicted upon his poorer neighbors, was repaid tenfold on his devoted head, when he came within the circle of Mrs. Bulworthy's operations. 

 "I wonder how her temper is this morning," thought Peter, as he cast a furtive glance towards her eyes as she sailed into the room, dressed in—I wish I could describe that walking-dress; all I can say, is, that it looked as if she had laid a wager that she could display in her attire every color in existence, and, won it. 

 "Well, Pether dear, and how is my ould man to-day?" said she. The Squire released an imprisoned sigh, in gratitude for this manifestation of so unusual a mildness of temper; emboldened thereby to remonstrance, he also ventured to remark: 

 "I wish, my love, you wouldn't address me by the antiquitous appellation of 'ould man.' It was all very well when we kept a bit of a shop"—— 

 "Oh, now, Pether, you're comin' over me wid your larning," she replied, with a dash of vinegar. "You know that I never cared a thranieen for the likes, nor never wants to make myself out anything but what I am. Not all as one, as some folks I know, that's never happy except they're spittin' out mouthfuls of words big an' hard enough to 

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