CHAPTER XXXIV.
WHO TOLD TOMMY TO SPEAK "Miss Alison Cray presents her compliments to--and requests the favor of their company at her marriage with Mr.Ivie McLean, on January 8th, at six o'clock." Tommy in his Sabbath clothes, with a rose from the Dovecot hot-house for buttonhole (which he slipped into his pocket when he saw other boys approaching), delivered them at the doors of the aristocracy, where, by the way, he had been a few weeks earlier, with another circular.
"Miss Alison Cray being about to give up school, has pleasure in stating that she has disposed of the good-will of her establishment to Miss Jessy Langlands and Miss S.Oram, who will enter upon their scholastic duties on January 9th, at Hoods Cottage, where she most cordially," and so on.
Here if the writer dared (but you would be so angry) he would introduce at the length of a chapter two brand-new characters, the Misses Langlands and Oram, who suddenly present themselves to him in the most sympathetic light.

Miss Ailie has been safely stowed to port, but their little boat is only setting sail, and they are such young ones, neither out of her teens, that he would fain turn for a time from her to them.
Twelve pounds they paid for the good-will, and, oh, the exciting discussions, oh, the scraping to get the money together! If little Miss Langlands had not been so bold, big Miss Oram must have drawn back, but if Miss Oram had not had that idea about a paper partition, of what avail the boldness of Miss Langlands?
How these two trumps of girls succeeded in hiring the Painted Lady's spinet from Nether Drumgley--in the absence of his wife, who on her way home from buying a cochin-china met the spinet in a cart--how the mother of one of them, realizing in a klink that she was common no more, henceforth wore black caps instead of mutches (but the father dandered on in the old plebeian way), what the enterprise meant to a young man in distant Newcastle, whose favorite name was Jessy, how the news travelled to still more distant Canada, where a family of emigrants which had left its Sarah behind in Thrums, could talk of nothing else for weeks--it is hard to have to pass on without dwelling on these things, and indeed--but pass on we must.
The chief figure at the wedding of Miss Ailie was undoubtedly Mr.T.
Sandys.

When one remembers his prominence, it is difficult to think that the wedding could have taken place without him.

It was he (in his Sabbath clothes again, and now flaunting his buttonhole brazenly) who in insulting language ordered the rabble to stand back there.

It was he who dashed out to the 'Sosh to get a hundred ha'pennies for the fifty pennies Mr.McLean had brought to toss into the air.