the business!” cried Moses.
“I could ‘a’ done it as easy as nothin’ if my arm had been a leetle mite smaller,” said Bill Peters.
“You’re a trump, sonny!” exclaimed Uncle Cash, as he helped Moses untie Buttercup’s head and took the gag out.
“You’re a trump, Lisha, and, by ginger, the cow’s your’n; only don’t you let your blessed pa drink none of her cream!”
The welcome air rushed into Buttercup’s lungs and cooled her parched, torn throat. She was pretty nearly spent, poor thing, and bent her head (rather gently for her) over the Little Prophet’s shoulder as he threw his arms joyfully about her neck, and whispered, “You’re my truly cow now, ain’t you, Buttercup?”
“Mrs. Baxter, dear,” said Rebecca, as they walked home to the parsonage together under the young harvest moon; “there are all sorts of cowards, aren’t there, and don’t you think Elisha is one of the best kind.”
“I don’t quite know what to think about cowards, Rebecca Rowena,” said the minister’s wife hesitatingly. “The Little Prophet is the third coward I have known in my short life who turned out to be a hero when the real testing time came. Meanwhile the heroes themselves—or the ones that were taken for heroes—were always busy doing something, or being somewhere, else.”
Eighth Chronicle.
Abner Simpson’s New Leaf
Rebecca had now cut the bonds that bound her to the Riverboro district school, and had been for a week a full-fledged pupil at the Wareham Seminary, towards which goal she had been speeding ever since the memorable day when she rode into Riverboro on the top of Uncle Jerry Cobb’s stagecoach, and told him that education was intended to be “the making of her.”
She went to and fro, with Emma Jane and the other Riverboro boys and girls, on the morning and evening trains that ran between the academy town and Milliken’s Mills.
The six days had passed like a dream!—a dream in which she sat in corners with her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed; stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted the committee when reading at sight from “King Lear,” but somewhat discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have mentioned it, but if so she had not remembered it.
In these first weeks among strangers she passed for nothing but an interesting-looking, timid, innocent, country child, never revealing, even to the far-seeing Emily Maxwell, a hint of her originality, facility, or power in any direction. Rebecca was fourteen, but so slight, and under the paralyzing new conditions so shy, that she would have been mistaken for twelve had it not been for her general advancement in the school curriculum.
Growing up in the solitude of a remote farm house, transplanted to a tiny village where she lived with two elderly spinsters, she was still the veriest child in all but the practical duties and responsibilities of life; in those she had long been a woman.
It was Saturday afternoon; her lessons for Monday were all learned and she burst into the brick house sitting-room with the flushed face and embarrassed mien that always foreshadowed a request. Requests were more commonly answered in the negative than in the affirmative at the brick house, a fact that accounted for the slight confusion in her demeanor.
“Aunt Miranda,” she began, “the fishman says that Clara Belle Simpson wants to see me very much, but Mrs. Fogg can’t spare her long at a time, you know, on account of the baby being no better; but Clara Belle could walk a mile up, and I a mile down the road, and we could meet at the pink house half way. Then we could rest and talk an hour or so, and both be back in time for our suppers. I’ve fed the cat; she had no appetite, as it’s only two o’clock and she had her dinner at noon, but she’ll go back to her saucer, and it’s off my mind. I could go down cellar now and bring up the cookies and the pie and doughnuts for supper before I start. Aunt Jane saw no objection; but we thought I’d better ask you so as to run no risks.”
Miranda Sawyer, who had been patiently waiting for the end of this speech, laid down her knitting and raised her eyes with a half-resigned expression that meant: Is there anything unusual in heaven or earth or the waters under the earth that this child does not want to do? Will she ever settle down to plain, comprehensible Sawyer ways, or will she to the end make these sudden and radical propositions, suggesting at every turn the irresponsible Randall ancestry?
“You know well enough, Rebecca, that I don’t like you to be intimate with Abner Simpson’s young ones,” she said decisively. “They ain’t fit company for anybody that’s got Sawyer blood in their veins, if it’s ever so little. I don’t know, I’m sure, how you’re goin’ to turn out! The fish peddler seems to be your best friend, without it’s Abijah Flagg that you’re everlastingly talkin’ to lately. I should think you’d rather read some improvin’ book than to be chatterin’ with Squire Bean’s chore-boy!”
“He isn’t always going to be a chore-boy,” explained Rebecca, “and that’s what we’re considering. It’s his career we talk about, and he hasn’t got any father or mother to advise him. Besides, Clara Belle kind of belongs to the village now that she lives with Mrs. Fogg; and she was always the best behaved of all the girls, either in school or Sunday-school. Children can’t help having fathers!”
“Everybody says Abner is turning over a new leaf, and if so, the family’d ought to be encouraged every possible way,” said Miss Jane, entering the room with her mending basket in hand.
“If Abner Simpson is turnin’ over a leaf, or anythin’ else in creation, it’s only to see what’s on the under side!” remarked Miss Miranda promptly. “Don’t talk to me about new leaves! You can’t change that kind of a man; he is what he is, and you can’t make him no different!”
“The grace of God can do consid’rable,” observed Jane piously.
“I ain’t sayin’ but it can if it sets out, but it has to begin early and stay late on a man like Simpson.”
“Now, Mirandy, Abner ain’t more’n forty! I don’t know what the average age for repentance is in men-folks, but when you think of what an awful sight of em leaves it to their deathbeds, forty seems real kind of young. Not that I’ve heard Abner has experienced religion, but everybody’s surprised at the good way he’s conductin’ this fall.”
“They’ll be surprised the other way round when they come to miss their firewood and apples and potatoes again,” affirmed Miranda.
“Clara Belle don’t seem to have inherited from her father,” Jane ventured again timidly. “No wonder Mrs. Fogg sets such store by the girl. If it hadn’t been for her, the baby would have been dead by now.”
“Perhaps tryin’ to save it was interferin’ with the Lord’s will,” was Miranda’s retort.
“Folks can’t stop to figure out just what’s the Lord’s will when a child has upset a kettle of scalding water on to himself,” and as she spoke Jane darned more excitedly. “Mrs. Fogg knows well enough she hadn’t ought to have left that baby alone in the kitchen with the stove, even if she did see Clara Belle comin’ across lots. She’d
