the seat. The ground was warm, dry sand, strown with the fine dead leaves of past seasons, brown and aromatic. A light south wind woke the voices of every bough above, and the melancholy susurrus rose and fell in delicate cadences; while beyond the green meadow, Westbury River, a good-sized brook, babbled and danced as if there were no pine-tree laments in the world.
I believe the air, and the odor, and the crying wind drove the violets quite out of both the two heads that drooped silently over that pine log. If Sally had been nervous or poetical, she would have been glad to recollect them; but no such morbidness invaded her healthy soul. She sat quite still till George said, in a suppressed and rather broken tone,—
"I was sorry to vex you last night, Sally! I could not be sorry for any thing else."
"You did grieve me very much, Mister George," said Sally, affecting a little distance in her address, but sufficiently tender in manner.
"Well, I suppose you don't see it the way I do," returned George; "and I am very sorry, for I had rather please you than any body else."
This was especially tender, and he possessed himself of Sally's little red hand, unaware or careless that it smelt of onions; but it was withdrawn very decidedly.
"I think you take a strange way of showing your liking!" sniffed the damsel.
George sat astounded. Another tiny spider-thread stopped the fly; a subtle ray of blue sped sideways out of Sally's eye, that meant,—"I don't object to be liked."
"I wish with all my heart I knew any good way to please you," he fervently ejaculated.
"I should think any way to please people was a good way," retorted Sally, saying more with her eyes than with her voice,—so much more, that in fact this fly was fast. A little puff of wind blew off Sally's bonnet; she looked shy, flushed, lovely. George stood up on his feet, and took his hat off.
"Sally!" said he, in the deepest notes of his full, manly voice, "I love you very much indeed; will you be my wife?"
Sally was confounded. I rejoice to say she was quite confounded; but she was made of revolutionary stuff, and what just now interfered with her plans and schemes was the sudden discovery how very much indeed she loved George Tucker; a fact she had not left enough margin for in her plot.
But, as I said, she was made of good metal, and she answered very low,—
"I do like you, George; but I never will marry a Britisher and a Tory."
A spasm of real anguish distorted the handsome face, bent forward to listen.
"Do you mean that, Sally? Can't you love me because we don't think alike?"
Sally choked a little; her tones fell to a whisper. George had to sit down close to her to hear.
"I didn't say I didn't love you, George!"—A blissful pause of a second; then in a clear, cold voice,—"But my mind's set. I can't marry a Britisher and a Tory, if I died sayin' so."
George gasped.
"And I cannot turn traitor and rebel, Sally. I can not. I love you better than any thing in the world; but I can't do a wicked thing; no, not even for you."
He was pale as death. Sally's secret heart felt proud of him, and never had she been so near repenting of her work in the good cause before; but she was resolute.
"Very well!" replied she, coolly, "if you prefer the king to me, it's not my fault; when your side beats, you can take your revenge!"
The thorough injustice of this speech roused her lover's generous indignation.
"If you can think that way of me, Sally, it is better for us both to have me go! Good night!" And away strode the loyal fellow, never looking back to see his sweetheart have a good cry on the pine-log, and then an equally comfortable fit of laughter; for she knew very well how restless Mister George would be, all alone by himself, and how much it meant that they both loved each other, and both knew it.
Sally's heart was stout. A sort of Yankee Evangeline, she would not have gone after Gabriel; she would have staid at home and waited for him to the end of time; doing chores and mending meanwhile, but unmarried, in the fixed intention of being her lover's sixth wife possibly, but his wife at last.
So she went home and got supper, strained and skimmed milk, set a sponge for bread, and slept all night like a dormouse. George Tucker never went to bed.
"Hooraw!" roared Long Snapps, trundling in to dinner, the next day; "they're wakin' up down to Bostin! Good many on 'em's quit the town. Them 'are Britishers is a-gettin' up sech a breeze; an' they doo say the reg'lars is comin' out full sail, to cair' off all the amminition in these parts, fear o' mutiny 'mongst the milishy!"
"Come along!" shouted Zekle, "let 'em come! like to see 'em takin' our powder an' shot 'thout askin'! Guess they'll hear thunder, ef they stick their heads inter a hornet's nest."
"Dredful suz!" exclaimed Aunt Poll, pulling turnips out of the pot with reckless haste, and so scalding her brown fingers emphatically; "be they a-comin' here? will they fetch along the batterin' rams?"
"Thunder an' dry trees," ejaculated Zekle, "what does the woman—"; but at that instant Long made for the door, and flung it open, thereby preventing explanations.
"Goin' to Concord, George?" shouted he to George Tucker, who in a one-horse wagon and his Sunday-best clothes was driving slowly past.
"No! goin' to Lexington, after corn. Can I do anything for you?"
"Well, no, I 'xpect not. When be you a-comin' back?"
"I don't know."
"Well, go long! good-luck to ye; keep to wind'ard o' squalls, George."
Long nodded, and George drove on. That day the whole village of Westbury was in an uproar. News had come from Boston that the British were about to send out forces to possess themselves of all the military stores in the country, and forestall rebellion by rendering it helpless. From every corner of every farm and village, young men and old mustered; from every barn, horses of all sizes and descriptions were driven out and saddled; rusty muskets, balls of all shapes and of any available metal that would melt and run, disabled broadswords, horse-pistols, blunderbusses, whatever wore any resemblance to a weapon, or could be rendered serviceable to that end,—all were hunted out, cleaned, mended, and laid ready;—an array that might have made a properly drilled and equipped army smile in contempt, but whose deficiencies were more than supplied by iron sinews, true blood, resolve and desperate courage.
Sally and Aunt Poll partook the gale of patriotism. They scoured the "ole queen's arm" to brilliancy; they ran bullets by the hour; baked bread and brewed Spring beer, with no more definite purpose than a general conviction that men must and would eat, as the men of their house certainly did, in the intervals of repairing harness, filling powder-horns and shot-belts, trotting over to the tavern after news, and coming back to retail it, till Aunt Poll began to imagine she heard the distant strokes of a battering-ram, and rushing out in terror to assure herself, discovered it to be only Sam Pequot, an old Indian, who, with the apathy of his race, was threshing in the barn.
Aunt Poll took down Josephus to refresh her memory, and actually drew a laugh from Sally's grave lips by confiding to her this extreme horror of the case; a laugh she forgave, since Sally reassured her by recommending to her notice the fact that Jerusalem had stone walls that were more difficult to climb than stone fences. As for Sally, she thought of George, all day of George, all night; and while
