CHAPTER III .-- Mountain Legislation, and its Executive of Blood.
After dinner that day, and while the gentlemen were yet at table, Mary and Julia, who, as we have said, had relieved their mother of those benevolent attentions which she had been in the habit of paying to the neighboring sick and poor, proceeded on their way to the cottage of a destitute woman in the next village, who was then lying in what was considered to be a hopeless state.

The proctor himself, while he exacted with a heartless and rapacious hand the last penny due to him, was yet too good a tactician to discountenance these spontaneous effusions of benevolence on the part of his wife and daughters.

With a good deal of ostentation, and that peculiar swagger for which many shrewd and hard-hearted men of the world are remarkable, he actually got the medicine himself for the helpless invalid in question, not forgetting at the same time to make the bystanders in the apothecary's shop acquainted with the extent of his own private charity and that of his family besides.

The girls had proceeded a part of the way on their charitable errand, when it occurred to them that the medicine, which their father had procured on the preceding day, had been forgotten, and as the sick woman was to commence taking it at a certain hour that evening, it was necessary that either one or both should return for it.
"You needn't come back, Julia," said Mary; "I will myself run home and fetch it.

And accordingly her sister went back at a quick step towards her father's house.