A Colonial Wooing
have a rude account-book with him, and when alone he trimmed a quill, and, opening the ink-horn, wrote and figured for some time. Then going to the shop door, he looked up and down the road, and, neither seeing nor hearing any one, he came back, laid a broad board against the little window by the forge, and took hold of the handles at the ends of the little chest. Its weight surprised him, for surely it was not that heavy when he sent it to Ruth. He tried the lid, but found it locked. He looked and frowned and puzzled over it, and then, hurriedly searching through a box of old keys, he tried one after another until a fitting one was found. The bolt turned; he raised the lid and there saw, carefully folded, one of Ruth's dresses, and clothing was beneath it to the bottom of the chest. What did it mean? Then he saw, pinned to the uppermost fold of the dress, the little note-book Robert Pearson had given her. This he took so eagerly that he endangered both it and the dress, and found on its first page a message from her, the second he had ever
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