On the day preceding Tant’ Sannie’s wedding, Gregory Rose sat in the blazing sun on the stone wall behind his damb-and-wattle house. It was warm, but he was intently watching a small buggy that was being recklessly driven over the bushes in the direction of the farm-house. Gregory never stirred till it had vanished; then, finding the stones hot, he slipped down and walked into the house. He kicked the little pail that lay in the doorway, and sent it into one corner; that did him good. Then he sat down on the box, and began cutting letters out of a piece of newspaper. Finding that the snippings littered the floor, he picked them up and began scribbling on his blotting-paper. He tried the effect of different initials before the name Rose: G. Rose, E. Rose, L. Rose, L. Rose, L. L. L. L. Rose. When he had covered the sheet, he looked at it discontentedly a little while, then suddenly began to write a letter.

“BELOVED SISTER,

“It is a long while since I last wrote to you, but I have had no time. This is the first morning I have been at home since I don’t know when. Em always expects me to go down to the farm-house in the morning; but I didn’t feel as though I could stand the ride to-day.

“I have much news for you.

“Tant’ Sannie, Em’s Boer step-mother, is to be married to-morrow. She is gone to town to-day, and the wedding feast is to be at her brother’s farm. Em and I are going to ride over on horseback, but her cousin is going to ride in the buggy with that German. I don’t think I’ve written to you since she came back from school. I don’t think you would like her at all, Jemima; there’s something so proud about her. She thinks just because she’s handsome there’s nobody good enough to talk to her, and just as if there had nobody else but her been to boarding-school before.

“They are going to have a grand affair to-morrow: all the Boers about are coming, and they are going to dance all night; but I don’t think I shall dance at all; for, as Em’s cousin says, these Boer dances are low things. I am sure I only danced at the last to please Em. I don’t know why she is fond of dancing. Em talked of our being married on the same day as Tant’ Sannie; but I said it would be nicer for her if she waited till the shearing was over, and I took her down to see you. I suppose she will have to live with us (Em’s cousin, I mean), as she has not anything in the world but a poor fifty pounds. I don’t like her at all, Jemima, and I don’t think you would. She’s got such queer ways: she’s always driving about in a gig with that low German; and I don’t thing it’s at all the thing for a woman to be going about with a man she’s not engaged to. Do you? If it was me now, of course, who am a kind of connection, it would be different. The way she treats me, considering that I am so soon to be her cousin, is not at all nice. I took down my album the other day with your likenesses in it, and I told her she could look at it, and put it down close to her; but she just said, Thank you, and never even touched it, as much as to say — What are your relations to me?