"I do not like thee, Dr. Fell!The reason why I cannot tell.But one thing 'tis, I know full well—I do not like thee, Dr. Fell."
Father had certain types he could not stand. I have heard him say: "I can stand a fool; I can stand a fat fool; but a fat fool with a littlemouth I can't abide." I think Mr. Gaillard came under his ban. He was fat and had a little mouth, and certainly while he was not a fool on all subjects, he was a big enough fool on the subjects he was a fool on to spread over all the things he was not a fool on.
I dreaded going to tea with the Gaillards. I had a terrible feeling that I might "sass" his Eminence of the Tum Tum. There was something about the way he pulled down his vest and wiped off his chin that deprived me of reason. I could well understand the temporary aberration that is the plea of criminals who say that some instinct over which they have no control compels them to commit murder. I could have punched Mr. Gaillard one with all the joy on earth.
"I feel the same way," declared Zebedee, when I voiced the above sentiments to him.
"Me, too! Me, too!" tweedled the twins.
"Do you know, Green, I think if Mrs. Green likes Mr. Gaillard, she had better broach the subject of the scholarship for Louis."
"Oh, Mr. Tucker! You can do it so much better than I can."
"Now I don't want to be a shirker and will do it with joy, as I don't regard the old cove one way or the other. I'd just as soon ask him to come be printer's devil on my newspaper as not. But this is the thing: We want him to consent and let Louis have this chance, and I believe your husband will bear me out that it is good psychology for a person who really likes another to ask a favor rather than one who only pretends to. Now you say you like Mr. Gaillard——"
"So I do—that is, I don't dislike him, and I think he has some fine points."
"It would take an X-ray to discover them through all that plumpness," put in Dee flippantly.
"You, as the wife of the man who was commissioned by the President of Exmoor to bestow this honor on a Southern boy, would be the appropriate person, anyhow—that is, unless Green himself will do it."
"Not I! I feel toward him just as Miss Pagedoes, and speaking of psychology—my astral body is at war with his astral body to such an extent that a pricking in my thumb tells me he will grant no request of mine and Molly must bell the cat."
"All right! I am willing to do anything my lord and master puts on me, if you really think I can succeed."
"Succeed! Of course you can!" we chorused.
"Tomorrow afternoon, then, when we have tea with them in their garden, will be 'the time, the place, and the girl.' He will have to be nice under his own vine and fig tree," suggested Zebedee.
"There is one thing I ask of you," begged Dum.
"And what is that? I feel myself to be very important," and Mrs. Green wasted another beautiful blush.
"Wear blue! Your own blue! I know he is the kind of old man who can't resist a beautiful woman in blue."
A RED, RED ROSE
I don't know whether it was the blue of her eyes or her dress or perhaps the fact that they matched so beautifully, but at any rate Mrs. Green put the proposition up to Mr. Gaillard with such adroitness that he consented to the scholarship, and so quickly that she could hardly believe the battle was won.
"I had not half used up my arguments," she said afterward, "and felt that I must go on persuading when he was already persuaded."
She had started out with the premises that of course he must feel sorry for the benighted North, so sadly in need of the softening influence of the South. She descanted on how a little leaven of good manners would leaven a whole lump of bad manners, and how popular Southernstudents were in Northern schools and colleges because of the good manners and breeding they brought with them. (This was particularly hard on Mrs. Green, as she firmly held the opinion that people were the same all over the world, that good manners were the same everywhere. She felt, however, that she would use any argument to make Mr. Gaillard see the light.)
She then told the story of the grateful man who had established the scholarship at Exmoor for the four years of the academic course and expatiated on his opinion of Southern youths. She lauded the college as having turned out such good men. Gradually she got to the subject of Louis and how close Wellington was to Exmoor, and before the old man knew what he was doing he had consented to Louis' accepting the scholarship. He did it with an air of having loaded the Yankees with benefits in allowing one of his exalted position and azure blood to stoop and mingle with them; but it made no difference to us what he felt on the subject, just so he would let Louis accept.
We were having tea in their lovely garden and Louis was showing us his flowers while Mrs. Green was wheedling "papa." She looked so lovely I verily believe the old gentleman would have accepted the scholarship himself just to be only ten miles from her for four years.
I believe Claire was even happier than Louis when "papa's" ultimatum was pronounced. She was going to miss him more than even she could divine, but her love for him was so deep that she was willing to give up anything for him. Louis was glad and grateful, but the truth of the matter was he was so taken up with Dee that mere college and scholarships meant little to him.
"His eyes look just like Brindle's when he looks at her that way," sniffed Dum, who did not relish too much lovering toward her twin. "I shouldn't be in the least astonished if he began to whine to be taken up next."
"Why, Dum, I thought you liked Louis!"
"So I do. I like Brindle, too, and Oliver, the kitten; but I like them in their places, and that is not everlastingly glued to Dee's side. I must sayI think he had better get out and hustle some before he comes lollapalusing around Dee." I was awfully afraid someone would hear Dum, and stirred my tea very loudly to drown her tirade.
"But, Dum, Dee grabbed his hand herself last night; she said she did," I whispered, trying to set the conversation in a lower tone.
"Yes, I know that! But don't you reckon I saw him holding on to it for dear life? He was mighty limp on Claire's side and mighty strenuous on Dee's. When he had to put back a lock of hair, I saw him let go of his sister's hand and swing to Dee's. And Dee with about as much feeling for him as a wooden Indian!"
The Tuckers were, father and daughters, very strict about one another's admirers. I remembered how Dee had sniffed over Reginald Kent's admiration for Dum, and Zebedee, too; and how Dum and Dee carried on over any attention their father paid any female or any female paid him. Zebedee had not yet scented out Louis as a possible lover, but when he did I was sure to hearfrom him. They one and all brought their grievances to me. I used to think if any of them ever should unite themselves to anyone in the holy bonds of matrimony, they would have to have a triple wedding to keep the persons the Tuckers were marrying from getting their eyes scratched out. If they were all in the same boat, they would have to behave and sit steady.
In the meantime, Dee's influence over Louis was certainly a wholesome one. Whether his love for her was of the undying brand or just the calf kind, it was very sincere and ardent, so ardent that Dee must soon wake up and realize that she had done a right serious thing when she put out her girlish hand and drew back that poor boy's soul just as it was getting ready for the journey to the Great Beyond. She was in a measure responsible for him now, and the time would come when she would have to be a woman and no longer a wooden Indian, have to treat Louis with a different manner from the one she had for Brindle and Oliver; that is, of course, provided Louis' love turned out to be the undyingbrand and not the calf kind. When it was said that Dee Tucker treated anyone like a dog, it meant the highest praise for that person. She treated all dogs with a great deal more consideration than she did most people.
Every flower Dee admired, Louis immediately wanted to give her, but she persuaded him to let them go on blooming where they belonged. He had a greenhouse in the back of the garden, where some wonderful roses bloomed all the year round. A great Jaqueminot filled one side of the house, its crimson blooms beautiful to behold. Louis cut one and brought it out to Dee. I was glad I was the only one who heard him as he gave it to her, as I am sure Dum would have "acted up," as Mammy Susan calls it. Dum had gone to the tea table to put down her cup, and Mrs. Green had detained her a moment, while I wandered on in the maze of gravel walks. An oleander hid me from Louis and Dee as he handed her the marvelous open rose, and with a voice that even a wooden Indian would have remarked, he said:
"When I send thee a red, red rose,The sweetest flower on earth that grows,Think, dear heart, how I love thee.Listen to what the red rose saithWith its crimson leaf and fragrant breath:'Love, I am thine in life and death!Oh, my love, doth thou love me?'"
"Humph! Going some!" I thought, and backed down the walk, thereby running into Dum, who smeared a lettuce sandwich on my back in the encounter; but she did not know what I had heard.
MORE LETTERS
Mrs. Edwin Green, from Mrs. Kent Brown.
New York, April .., 19...Molly Darling:Your letter was good to get. Kent and I had begun to feel like -in-laws, it had been so long since you had written. Mother Brown, the usually faithful chronicler of all the doings and sayings of the family, had cut us off with a postal. Now that we know she is "keepin' keer" of little Mildred, we can understand her silence better. When Mother Brown does anything, she does it all over, and I am sure when she is doing such a thing as attend to anything so precious as her beloved grandchild she has no time for mere letter writing.Kent and I were greatly interested in what you had to tell us of the charming Virginians you have met in Charleston. It was almost uncanny, in a way, to hear from you of these people, as we had just been hearing of them from a very nice young man with whom Kent has struck up an acquaintance at the Y. M. C. A. gym, where Kent goes regularly to keep from getting flabby. The young man's name is Reginald Kent. It was the name Kent that they had in common (one in front and one behind) that first brought them together. They were always getting mixed up on account of it, my Kent answering when the other Kent was called, and vice versa.This young Mr. Kent is an illustrator and advertising artist. He really is very clever and very wide-awake. He was dining with us at the very time that your letter was brought to me, on the last mail. I had to open it and read part of it aloud. He had just been telling us of some cousins named Winn he visits in the country in Virginia, and of some Richmond girls whom he has met staying with Page Allison, and thesegirls are no other than your Tucker twins. He says the first time he met them he went on a deer hunt and that Miss Dum Tucker actually shot a deer. I was slightly incredulous, he thought, and to prove his story he took out of his pocketbook two kodak pictures, one of a very handsome, spirited-looking girl with her hair coming down and a rifle raised to her shoulder, and the other a fallen buck with a young girl kneeling beside him, her arms around his neck and her face buried on his shoulder. That one, he said, was Miss Dee, who wept buckets over the death of the buck, but managed afterward to partake of some of the venison.I have an idea Mr. Reginald Kent thinks that Miss Dum Tucker is about the most attractive person he ever met. He is certainly very attractive himself, singularly wholesome and clean in appearance and mind. He seemed very happy at the prospect of this paragon of a girl's coming to New York to study. I will be very glad to be of any use to your friends I can, and if they do decide to come I will find board for them andmother them, too, if they need it. I know you are grinning at the idea of my mothering anything—I, the harum-scarum, the flibberty-jibberty—but I am really very much settled down. I am so steady and good that Kent is afraid I am sick.Caroline is doing the work very well for us. I am the envy of all the people we know because I can boast a really, truly Kentucky Bluegrass cook. She is awfully funny about New York, but I think is beginning to like it very well. Gas scared her nearly to death for a few days. She seemed to think there was some kind of magic in it, and I had to light the stove for her a million times a day. I found she was just keeping it burning all the time to save matches, and when I told her to turn it out if she wasn't using it, she almost cried, because, it seems, she was afraid of the pop it gave when she lit it. Then she began calling on me every time she wanted to light it, but after a week or so of such humoring she has learned to do it herself, and now everything is going along swimmingly. I find she is savingthe burnt matches, though, to make some kind of bracket with—something she saw back in "Kaintucky."I think the greatest shock she ever had was when she found out that in New York you had to pay for onions. "I nebber hearn tell of no sich a place. If'n you ain't made out ter grow none yo'se'f, looks ter me lak some er yo' neighbors mought be ginerous enough to gib yer a han'ful fer seasonin', not fer fryin' or b'ilin'. I wouldn' spec a whole mess er onions as a gif'—but it do seem a shame ter hab ter buy a dash er seasonin'."She almost got her head knocked off with the dumb-waiter the other day. She thought it was down, and it was up, and she put her head in the shaft to watch for it, all the time giving the most vigorous pulling to the rope. The dumb-waiter descended with great force and hit her squarely on the top of the head. I heard a great bump and flew to the kitchen. "Caroline! Caroline! What is the matter?" I cried. "'Tain't nothin' much, Miss Judy, but it mought 'a' been. Thatthere deaf-and-dumb dining-room servant done biffed me a lick that pretty near knocked a hole in his flo'." "Did it hurt very badly?" "No'm, it didn't ter say hurt none. It jes' dizzified me a leetle. You see, Miss Judy, it jes' hit me on the haid."Just on the head!I think Caroline is almost as much afraid of Aunt Mary's disapproval now that the old woman is dead as she was in her lifetime. Whenever she passes the picture I did of Aunt Mary on the back porch of Chatsworth shelling peas, she suddenly gets in a great hurry. She is not as a rule very energetic, but at the sight of Aunt Mary she gets a great move on her. She came in the other day from some jaunt she had been on, it being her afternoon off, and said: "Looks lak wherever I goes folks seem to 'vine I'm from de Souf. I ast a colored gemman how he guessed it an' he said it was my sof' accident what gimme away. I's goin' ter try ter speak mo' Yankeefied an' see if'n I can't pass fer Noo York."Caroline's first attempt at being Yankeefiedwas almost fatal. She made friends with some of the white maids in the apartment house, some Scandinavians, and in her endeavor to become New Yorky she swapped recipes with them, and the next morning served for breakfast the result: corn bread with sugar in it! You can picture Kent.Kent and I are seeing some very pleasant people, but both of us are working very hard. I work every morning at the Art Students' League from 9 to 12. That means I leave the house with Kent. I go to market on the way to the League and get back to luncheon. Sometimes he comes in to luncheon, too, but he is usually too busy. In the afternoon I sew or read or go shopping or to the matinee, always something to do in New York, and then we have dinner at 6:30 and long, delightful evenings together, usually at home; but sometimes we take in a show and sometimes we dine at a restaurant. We have callers in the evening often and also return calls, but Kent is not much of a caller, as you know.We have company to dinner, too, quite oftennow that Caroline has found herself. Kent delights in bringing home unexpected company. He has a notion he is still living in Kentucky and that this little two-by-four flat is Chatsworth itself. Caroline is fortunately accustomed to it, but I am afraid she will soon become corrupted by these Scandinavians, who would not put up with it one moment. Of course I don't mind how many companies he brings home, and if we are short on rations I can do like the immortal Mrs. Wiggs and just put a little more water in the soup. This idiosyncrasy of my young husband, however, has taught me to keep a supply of canned soups, asparagus tips, etc., in the store-room. My friends among the young married set tell me they market day by day and never have anything like that on the shelves as it makes the servants wasteful. Maybe it does, but I feel quite safe with Caroline and the canned goods, as she has never yet learned how to use a can-opener.Please give the learned professor my best love. Kent sends his love to you both. This is such along letter I am sure it will take two stamps to send it.Your ever devoted,Judy Kean Brown.
New York, April .., 19...
Your letter was good to get. Kent and I had begun to feel like -in-laws, it had been so long since you had written. Mother Brown, the usually faithful chronicler of all the doings and sayings of the family, had cut us off with a postal. Now that we know she is "keepin' keer" of little Mildred, we can understand her silence better. When Mother Brown does anything, she does it all over, and I am sure when she is doing such a thing as attend to anything so precious as her beloved grandchild she has no time for mere letter writing.
Kent and I were greatly interested in what you had to tell us of the charming Virginians you have met in Charleston. It was almost uncanny, in a way, to hear from you of these people, as we had just been hearing of them from a very nice young man with whom Kent has struck up an acquaintance at the Y. M. C. A. gym, where Kent goes regularly to keep from getting flabby. The young man's name is Reginald Kent. It was the name Kent that they had in common (one in front and one behind) that first brought them together. They were always getting mixed up on account of it, my Kent answering when the other Kent was called, and vice versa.
This young Mr. Kent is an illustrator and advertising artist. He really is very clever and very wide-awake. He was dining with us at the very time that your letter was brought to me, on the last mail. I had to open it and read part of it aloud. He had just been telling us of some cousins named Winn he visits in the country in Virginia, and of some Richmond girls whom he has met staying with Page Allison, and thesegirls are no other than your Tucker twins. He says the first time he met them he went on a deer hunt and that Miss Dum Tucker actually shot a deer. I was slightly incredulous, he thought, and to prove his story he took out of his pocketbook two kodak pictures, one of a very handsome, spirited-looking girl with her hair coming down and a rifle raised to her shoulder, and the other a fallen buck with a young girl kneeling beside him, her arms around his neck and her face buried on his shoulder. That one, he said, was Miss Dee, who wept buckets over the death of the buck, but managed afterward to partake of some of the venison.
I have an idea Mr. Reginald Kent thinks that Miss Dum Tucker is about the most attractive person he ever met. He is certainly very attractive himself, singularly wholesome and clean in appearance and mind. He seemed very happy at the prospect of this paragon of a girl's coming to New York to study. I will be very glad to be of any use to your friends I can, and if they do decide to come I will find board for them andmother them, too, if they need it. I know you are grinning at the idea of my mothering anything—I, the harum-scarum, the flibberty-jibberty—but I am really very much settled down. I am so steady and good that Kent is afraid I am sick.
Caroline is doing the work very well for us. I am the envy of all the people we know because I can boast a really, truly Kentucky Bluegrass cook. She is awfully funny about New York, but I think is beginning to like it very well. Gas scared her nearly to death for a few days. She seemed to think there was some kind of magic in it, and I had to light the stove for her a million times a day. I found she was just keeping it burning all the time to save matches, and when I told her to turn it out if she wasn't using it, she almost cried, because, it seems, she was afraid of the pop it gave when she lit it. Then she began calling on me every time she wanted to light it, but after a week or so of such humoring she has learned to do it herself, and now everything is going along swimmingly. I find she is savingthe burnt matches, though, to make some kind of bracket with—something she saw back in "Kaintucky."
I think the greatest shock she ever had was when she found out that in New York you had to pay for onions. "I nebber hearn tell of no sich a place. If'n you ain't made out ter grow none yo'se'f, looks ter me lak some er yo' neighbors mought be ginerous enough to gib yer a han'ful fer seasonin', not fer fryin' or b'ilin'. I wouldn' spec a whole mess er onions as a gif'—but it do seem a shame ter hab ter buy a dash er seasonin'."
She almost got her head knocked off with the dumb-waiter the other day. She thought it was down, and it was up, and she put her head in the shaft to watch for it, all the time giving the most vigorous pulling to the rope. The dumb-waiter descended with great force and hit her squarely on the top of the head. I heard a great bump and flew to the kitchen. "Caroline! Caroline! What is the matter?" I cried. "'Tain't nothin' much, Miss Judy, but it mought 'a' been. Thatthere deaf-and-dumb dining-room servant done biffed me a lick that pretty near knocked a hole in his flo'." "Did it hurt very badly?" "No'm, it didn't ter say hurt none. It jes' dizzified me a leetle. You see, Miss Judy, it jes' hit me on the haid."
Just on the head!
I think Caroline is almost as much afraid of Aunt Mary's disapproval now that the old woman is dead as she was in her lifetime. Whenever she passes the picture I did of Aunt Mary on the back porch of Chatsworth shelling peas, she suddenly gets in a great hurry. She is not as a rule very energetic, but at the sight of Aunt Mary she gets a great move on her. She came in the other day from some jaunt she had been on, it being her afternoon off, and said: "Looks lak wherever I goes folks seem to 'vine I'm from de Souf. I ast a colored gemman how he guessed it an' he said it was my sof' accident what gimme away. I's goin' ter try ter speak mo' Yankeefied an' see if'n I can't pass fer Noo York."
Caroline's first attempt at being Yankeefiedwas almost fatal. She made friends with some of the white maids in the apartment house, some Scandinavians, and in her endeavor to become New Yorky she swapped recipes with them, and the next morning served for breakfast the result: corn bread with sugar in it! You can picture Kent.
Kent and I are seeing some very pleasant people, but both of us are working very hard. I work every morning at the Art Students' League from 9 to 12. That means I leave the house with Kent. I go to market on the way to the League and get back to luncheon. Sometimes he comes in to luncheon, too, but he is usually too busy. In the afternoon I sew or read or go shopping or to the matinee, always something to do in New York, and then we have dinner at 6:30 and long, delightful evenings together, usually at home; but sometimes we take in a show and sometimes we dine at a restaurant. We have callers in the evening often and also return calls, but Kent is not much of a caller, as you know.
We have company to dinner, too, quite oftennow that Caroline has found herself. Kent delights in bringing home unexpected company. He has a notion he is still living in Kentucky and that this little two-by-four flat is Chatsworth itself. Caroline is fortunately accustomed to it, but I am afraid she will soon become corrupted by these Scandinavians, who would not put up with it one moment. Of course I don't mind how many companies he brings home, and if we are short on rations I can do like the immortal Mrs. Wiggs and just put a little more water in the soup. This idiosyncrasy of my young husband, however, has taught me to keep a supply of canned soups, asparagus tips, etc., in the store-room. My friends among the young married set tell me they market day by day and never have anything like that on the shelves as it makes the servants wasteful. Maybe it does, but I feel quite safe with Caroline and the canned goods, as she has never yet learned how to use a can-opener.
Please give the learned professor my best love. Kent sends his love to you both. This is such along letter I am sure it will take two stamps to send it.
Your ever devoted,Judy Kean Brown.
Page Allison from Dr. James Allison of Milton, Va.:
Bracken, April .., 19...My dear Daughter:Mammy Susan and I were very glad to hear from you. You are a nice girl to write such a fine, long letter to a mere afterthought. If you write that splendid a letter to a mere afterthought, what would you do for a beforethought?Your new friends sound delightful. I wish I might know them. The only kick I have about being nothing but a country doctor is that I meet so few new people. Of course it is interesting work, and I am not out of love with it, but sometimes I do get a weeny, teeny bored with poor Sally Winn's aches and pains, and wish eithershe had some new aches or she could tell about them in a more scintillating manner. Some new people are moving into our neighborhood, the Carters. Of course, as the name indicates, they are not new people except to our neighborhood. They have taken the old overseer's cottage on the Grantly estate, leased it from the two Miss Grants for a year, and are coming bag and baggage in a few days. I don't know how many of them there are, but I believe it is quite a family of girls and one or more boys and a mother and father, one of them an invalid. More pink pump water to be concocted by yours truly, I fancy. I hope they will be agreeable, since no doubt we will have to see something of them. The cottage is in miserable repair, and I only hope it will not tumble down on them. If they are coming to our county for fresh air, they will get it there winter and summer, as there are cracks in the walls as big as those in a corn crib. Pretty lawn, though, about the prettiest I know of anywhere, and trees that make me think of Tennyson's "immemorial elms." I shall not call on these new neighborsuntil you come home—that is, unless I am sent for to come and bring some pink pump water.I have had a letter from General Price, Harvie's grandfather, asking for the pleasure of your company in the month of July on a house-party he is giving his grandson. It is such a dignified, ponderous epistle that I am afraid I shall have to send to Richmond for the proper stationery with which to reply. Nothing less than crested vellum could possibly carry my acceptance. The King of England could not observe more form were you being invited to put in two weeks at Windsor. It is very kind of him, however, to ask my little girl, and I hope by the aid of the dictionary to express myself with ease and verbosity in acknowledging the honor. Of course you want to go?I shall be pleased to have the volume of Henry Timrod's poems. I'd like to see the Coogler poems, too. I enjoyed the extracts immensely. I have often heard of him and remember reading some reviews of his stuff when it came out years ago, before you were born, but I havenever seen any of it. His efforts were so impossible that the reviewers treated him, one and all, with mock seriousness, and I believe I have heard he took them all seriously and thought he was being praised when they were only poking fun at him. It is rather pathetic, I think, although of course he was an awful blockhead.Mammy Susan was pleased at your account of the flowers in Charleston, and hopes you can send her a few clippin's. Her things are doing very well, and her lemon verbena has grown so that I tell her we shall have to build a lean-to to keep it in. She misses you very much and is beginning to count the days to the middle of May, when I assure her you will be back with us.I hope your ankle is behaving itself. You do not mention it, so I fancy it is. Please remember me most kindly to all the Tuckers—father and daughters. I hope you are not bothering Jeffry Tucker by being with them too much. I think there is such a thing as the best friend wearing out her welcome by staying too long. I am sending you a check for your expenses. Youhave not divulged how much your board will be, but if I do not make the check large enough, please inform me directly. A sickly winter means a little more money in the bank in the spring for a country doctor. Thank goodness, however, the spring seems to be a healthy one. I'd like to be a Chinese doctor and be paid only when my patients stay well. Sometimes it saddens me to feel that my living depends on disease.Good-by, my dear little daughter.Father.
Bracken, April .., 19...
Mammy Susan and I were very glad to hear from you. You are a nice girl to write such a fine, long letter to a mere afterthought. If you write that splendid a letter to a mere afterthought, what would you do for a beforethought?
Your new friends sound delightful. I wish I might know them. The only kick I have about being nothing but a country doctor is that I meet so few new people. Of course it is interesting work, and I am not out of love with it, but sometimes I do get a weeny, teeny bored with poor Sally Winn's aches and pains, and wish eithershe had some new aches or she could tell about them in a more scintillating manner. Some new people are moving into our neighborhood, the Carters. Of course, as the name indicates, they are not new people except to our neighborhood. They have taken the old overseer's cottage on the Grantly estate, leased it from the two Miss Grants for a year, and are coming bag and baggage in a few days. I don't know how many of them there are, but I believe it is quite a family of girls and one or more boys and a mother and father, one of them an invalid. More pink pump water to be concocted by yours truly, I fancy. I hope they will be agreeable, since no doubt we will have to see something of them. The cottage is in miserable repair, and I only hope it will not tumble down on them. If they are coming to our county for fresh air, they will get it there winter and summer, as there are cracks in the walls as big as those in a corn crib. Pretty lawn, though, about the prettiest I know of anywhere, and trees that make me think of Tennyson's "immemorial elms." I shall not call on these new neighborsuntil you come home—that is, unless I am sent for to come and bring some pink pump water.
I have had a letter from General Price, Harvie's grandfather, asking for the pleasure of your company in the month of July on a house-party he is giving his grandson. It is such a dignified, ponderous epistle that I am afraid I shall have to send to Richmond for the proper stationery with which to reply. Nothing less than crested vellum could possibly carry my acceptance. The King of England could not observe more form were you being invited to put in two weeks at Windsor. It is very kind of him, however, to ask my little girl, and I hope by the aid of the dictionary to express myself with ease and verbosity in acknowledging the honor. Of course you want to go?
I shall be pleased to have the volume of Henry Timrod's poems. I'd like to see the Coogler poems, too. I enjoyed the extracts immensely. I have often heard of him and remember reading some reviews of his stuff when it came out years ago, before you were born, but I havenever seen any of it. His efforts were so impossible that the reviewers treated him, one and all, with mock seriousness, and I believe I have heard he took them all seriously and thought he was being praised when they were only poking fun at him. It is rather pathetic, I think, although of course he was an awful blockhead.
Mammy Susan was pleased at your account of the flowers in Charleston, and hopes you can send her a few clippin's. Her things are doing very well, and her lemon verbena has grown so that I tell her we shall have to build a lean-to to keep it in. She misses you very much and is beginning to count the days to the middle of May, when I assure her you will be back with us.
I hope your ankle is behaving itself. You do not mention it, so I fancy it is. Please remember me most kindly to all the Tuckers—father and daughters. I hope you are not bothering Jeffry Tucker by being with them too much. I think there is such a thing as the best friend wearing out her welcome by staying too long. I am sending you a check for your expenses. Youhave not divulged how much your board will be, but if I do not make the check large enough, please inform me directly. A sickly winter means a little more money in the bank in the spring for a country doctor. Thank goodness, however, the spring seems to be a healthy one. I'd like to be a Chinese doctor and be paid only when my patients stay well. Sometimes it saddens me to feel that my living depends on disease.
Good-by, my dear little daughter.
Father.
THE SUMMING UP
Charleston had taken a strong hold on all our affections. The spirit of the place seemed to possess us as we lazed away the hours in Miss Arabella's tangled old garden or in Louis' more combed and brushed one. Our friendship for the Greens grew stronger and deeper, and we were soon addressing Mrs. Green as Molly and her husband as 'Fessor. All of us were staying in the beautiful old Southern city longer than we had intended. Zebedee said he had no excuse for lingering longer, as he had threshed out the political situation to his own satisfaction and the dissatisfaction of the South Carolina "ring." He should be back on his job in Richmond, but he said he felt like one of the lotus-eaters and nothing much made any difference to him.
'Fessor also had overstayed his holiday, but he declared that his assistant at Wellington could do the work as well as he could, which amused Molly greatly as she said it was the first time he had acknowledged that his assistant could do anything at all; he looked upon him usually as purely ornamental and not intended for use.
I knew father and Mammy Susan were wondering if I had forgotten them entirely, but my conscience, too, was lulled to rest, and I felt as though I could spend the rest of my days dreaming and dozing. Tweedles, of course, had nothing to do but stay with a light heart as no one was expecting them home but poor Brindle; and as Brindle was left in care of the elevator boy, who spoiled him outrageously, even treating him to ice cream cones, I really believe he did not mind being left nearly so much as Dee liked to think he did.
Every day we lengthened our stay in Charleston was as another pearl on the string to poor Louis, and to Claire, too, I think. Thanks to Molly and Zebedee, his Eminence of the TumTum had accepted the whole crowd as desirable, and that meant that we could see as much of his children as we wanted to; and as we wanted to see them all the time, we did.
We went on wonderful jaunts with them, and saw everything that could be seen, Louis acting as guide. Sometimes we even persuaded one of the dear old ladies to go with us. I am sure they saw things they had not seen for a decade. We noticed one thing, that when Zebedee was along they always left their pokers behind.
Sullivan's Island thrilled us, and Dum and Zebedee tried to work out the whole scene of Poe's "Gold Bug," but as the island is now a popular summer resort, it was not an easy matter to do.
There is no use in trying to describe the Magnolia Gardens. The azaleas were in full bloom, and nowhere else in the world, I verily believe, is there such a sight. Some of the bushes are thirty feet high and look like giant bouquets.
"I feel like the country woman at the circus the first time she saw a hippopotamus," declaredZebedee; "I don't believe there's no sich thing! It doesn't seem possible that these are growing plants and that in Richmond at Easter I have had to pay five dollars for a little azalea not much more than two feet high."
The dark green of the magnolia and live-oak trees enhanced the glory of the flowers. It was so beautiful it hurt. Molly said it made her feel as she did the first time she ever saw an opera at the Metropolitan in New York. It was her freshman year at Wellington, and she had been invited to visit in New York during the Christmas holidays.
"It was 'Madame Butterfly,' and the scenery was so wonderful to me I could hardly listen to the music. I fancy cherry-blossom time in Japan must be almost as beautiful as this, but I can't believe it is quite so brilliant."
Magnolia Cemetery, which is just outside of Charleston and which Dee had refused to see without Zebedee, certainly would be a nice place to be buried in. It was sadder to visit because of the new graves there, and Zebedee had to abandonhis usual cheerful graveyard spirits. He was quite solemn and kept his hat off all the time.
Louis skirted us around the outer edge of the cemetery first and saved the great old oak for the last. It burst upon us with such force that as a crowd we were left breathless. The beauty of the azaleas at Magnolia gardens, compared to this hoary old monarch, were as a cheap obituary poem to the twenty-third psalm. And in saying that I do not mean to belittle the beauty of the gardens, but I have to put them in that category to make a place high enough in the scale of comparison for that tree.
It was huge, but bent over with years like some old man, and one great limb was resting on the ground, giving it the look of one kneeling in prayer. The foliage was vigorous and glossy, deeper and richer in color than that of many younger trees, just as the wonderful words of some grand old man, John Burroughs or his ilk, will make the utterances of younger men seem pale and feeble.
In kneeling and coming so in touch with Mother Earth, this Father of the Forest had borrowed of her fullness, and now his trunk and huge limbs were covered with an exquisite ferny growth. Wild violets and anemones bloomed happily in the crotches of his great arms, and I saw a tiny wild strawberry ripening on his knee, having escaped the vigilance of the many birds nesting in the upper branches. Spanish moss hung in festoons from some of the limbs, seeming like a venerable beard.
I have never had anything affect me as that tree did. It was so gallant and brave, so kindly and beneficent! It had the spirit of youth and the kindliness of old age; the playfulness of a child and the wisdom of centuries. It must have seen the Indians crowded out by the white men; looked out across the harbor at the storming of Fort Moultrie, and almost a century later at the defence of Fort Sumter. Wars and rumors of wars were nothing to this veteran. While we were there a perky wren pounced down on the defenceless strawberry and gobbled it up, and Iam sure the gray beard thought no more of the gobbling up of the redmen than he did of that red berry. His comparisons were of æons and not of decades or mere centuries.
"There is no use in talking about it!" exclaimed Zebedee. "I've got to climb that tree, if it means one hundred dollars' fine and a month in jail."
That was exactly the way I felt. It seemed to me as though I simply had to get up that tree. The park policeman was nowhere in sight, and Zebedee ran lightly up the bent back of the ancient giant, Dum after him. It was easy climbing, and I would have followed suit in spite of my ankle, that I could not yet quite trust, if I had not seen the helmet of the policeman looming up over a near-by sepulchre.
Claire was shocked at what seemed to her a desecration, but Louis said afterward he knew just how Mr. Tucker felt. He had always wanted to get up that tree, and he considered it a kind of homage due the old oak. Trees were meant to climb, and it was no more a desecrationto climb one even if it did happen to be in a cemetery, than it was to smell a rose that bloomed there.
The policeman, all unconscious of the coons he had treed, came ambling up and stood and talked to us for quite a while until Dee tactfully drew him off to descant on the glories of the William Washington monument. Zebedee and Dum sat very still in their leafy bower, so still that Zebedee declared a bird came and tweaked some of Dum's hair out to help line his nest; but Dum said he did it himself until she had to make a noise like a catbird to make him stop.
There is no telling what fine and punishment would have been imposed on the miscreants. It was not that it was such a terribly naughty thing to do, but just that it had never been done before. They slipped down, however, while the policeman's back was turned and came up smiling around the other side with the innocent expression a cat assumes when he has been in the cream jug.
"It was worth it," whispered Zebedee to me;"I am so sorry you couldn't get up, too. The old fellow was glad to have us up there. He told me that no children had climbed up to hug him for at least a hundred years. I didn't tell him that I was grown up, but just let him treat me like a little child. He didn't know the difference."
"I shouldn't think he would," I laughed, "when there isn't any difference."
And now it is time to stop, and I shall have to close my story of Charleston. All of us wanted to dream on there forever. It had been a wonderful time. We had made lifelong friends of Molly Brown and 'Fessor Green. We had flopped into the lives of the Gaillards and expected to stay. We had made our way into one of the most difficult and exclusive homes in the city of exclusive homes, and Miss Judith and Miss Arabella Laurens had taken us to their fluttering hearts.
Their thin pocketbooks had also opened to take in a fair and generous recompense for their kind hospitality—but it had been Zebedee and not EdwinGreen who had finally and tactfully completed our business arrangements.
Now Zebedee said he must get back to his newspaper. He felt it calling him, as he had discovered an advertisement on the editorial page—a crime in newspaperdom that was deserving of capital punishment. He must get back and chop off somebody's head.
Then 'Fessor Green began to fear his assistant was not able to do his work, and Molly couldn't wait another day to see little Mildred, her baby. I knew it was selfish for me to stay any longer from father, who did have a stupid time of it when all was told.
Dee began to feel that Brindle missed her. Dum said it was because Louis had the same expression in his eyes that Brindle did and it made Dee feel that she must get back to her pet.
We parted from our friends with many assurances of meeting again. The Greens asked us to visit them at Wellington or in Kentucky, where they spent their summers, and of course we asked them to come see us in Virginia. Molly was tosend us letters of introduction to her friends in New York, and Louis was planning to stop in Richmond on his way to Exmoor. Parting was only planning for future meetings.
I was to stay at Bracken for several months and then meet my friends at Price's Landing, so sometime I shall tell you my experiences there, in "A House Party with the Tucker Twins."
THE END
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