Another small incident showed the same gentlemanly spirit. At the time when his whole soul was engrossed with the desire to make "the experiment" answer, he had a request to present, as often during a whole winter as he could edge it in. There was a certain long, ugly hedge, pernicious in every way, which divided the field from a neighbor's. The hedge belonged to the neighbor; and it appeared that he would be heartily glad to give it away to any body who would take it down and put up some fence which would cover less ground and harbor less vermin. Harry was so eager to be allowed to remove the hedge, that Miss Foote at last told him that she should never have dreamed of his undertaking such a job in addition to his regular work; but that he might please himself. She would put up a new fence if he chose to make way for it. He did it with no help but in felling some pollards. One afternoon, when wheeling up hill an enormous load of wood from the hedge, he heard himself laughed at from the next field. Now, no man winces more under a laugh than Harry; yet he bore it well this time. Some men called out mockingly that he was doing horse's work and man's work at once, and they would not do that to please any body. "No," said Harry, turning full round toward them, "nor, I neither. Miss Foote never asked me to do this. I do it to please myself."
No man, I have said, winces under a laugh more than Harry; and his only suffering worth mentioning, since he came to his new place, has been from this dislike of ridicule. When the cottage was ready, Miss Foote proposed a house-warming, and invited herself and her two maids there to tea. It was a particularly pleasant evening, with a fine fire, and plenty of light, and good tea and cake, and all the five in capital spirits. Harry was made to take the arm-chair by his own fireside; and when he began to crack his jokes it appeared that he had his own notions of the ridiculous. He quizzed his nearest neighbor, an old man, who had married a comparatively young woman, and whose children were forever playing about Miss Foote's gate. When Harry joked about that unequal match, Miss Foote could not laugh. She thought his own infinitely worse. And the poor fellow soon saw that others were quizzing him, much more severely than he had quizzed the old man. He looks grave about Dinah now, and has left off talking of his own prudence in making such a marriage. He has also told his sister that when Dinah dies he shall not marry again. It is very painful; and yet Dinah is improved beyond all that could have been anticipated. She has put off her false front, and lets her grizzled hair appear. She no longer scans Miss Foote's face to make out what it would be most acceptable that she should say, but rattles away about her affairs with a sort of youthful glee. She no longer speaks in a whining tone, but lets her voice take its own way. One day she leaned on her rake (when she was trimming her own flower-bed), and told Miss Foote, without any canting whatever, that she had quite changed her mind about the maids since she came. She was looking too far then, and so did not see what they were; but she found in time that there was no slyness or pretense, but that they were really good faithful girls, working for their employer's good, and with no plots of their own. Old as Dinah seemed to be, there appears to be a chance of her growing ingenuous and agreeable before she dies. The gentry who come to the house observe that they never saw two people so altered as Harry and Dinah; that they seem to have got new faces, a new gait--a new mind.