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Page 24
From where we stand, under a canopy of rich green leaves, looking out
upon the sunny water through a banian-like colonnade of mighty trunks
and hanging vines, the pearly moss tempering the light like jalousies,
summer seems but a relative idea. Fly-catchers flit back and forth,
barn-swallows and sand-martins skim the lake, and an occasional splash
or ripple at our feet shows that humbler life is getting astir. The
highest life, or what modest man calls such, we have all to ourselves.
Yet not quite; for there is visible yonder, beneath the outer tip of a
live-oak which we have found to stretch and droop twenty-four paces from
the seven-foot trunk, a little fleet of canoes. They belong to the
professional fisherman whose too tarry nets are quite an encumbrance
for some yards of the sandy beach, and whose well may be noticed about a
rifle-shot out from the shore. More than that, though Piscator is
absent, some one is inspecting his boats. In fact,--and it _is simple
fact_, and I am not smuggling in a bit of padding in the shape of
sentiment,--two persons become perceptible, both with their backs
towards us, now and studiedly all the time. One, a man, chooses a boat
after trying several, and, with similar show of unavoidable delay, is
cushioning the seats with carefully-arranged moss in four times the
necessary quantity. During this absorbing process he rips one of his
cuffs, or tears off a button from it, or smears it with the tar that
besets the boat and its oars. This calamity supplies the lady, a neat
young person, with a pretext for occupation, and she uses it to the
fullest and most affectionate extent. It is growing late, and unless we
relieve the couple of our obviously detected presence we shall deprive
them of their Sunday-afternoon row. That it is a row with the stream we
find ten days later, when their wedding becomes the sensation of the
little village.
The old, old story! how pat it comes in! How could it have failed to
come in, when the talk is of birds?
EDWARD C. BRUCE.
THE FERRYMAN'S FEE.
I.
"I am going," said the professor to his friend Miss Eldridge, "to marry
a young woman whose mind I can mould."
Somebody was uncharitable enough to say that he couldn't possibly make
it any mouldier than his own. This was a slander. In the high dry Greek
atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires
dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility.
When an engagement is announced, it is almost invariably followed by one
question, with a variable termination. The dear five hundred friends
exclaim, with uplifted hands,--
"What could have possessed him," or "her"?
In the present case the latter termination was adopted, with but one
dissenting voice: Miss Christina Eldridge said, in low, shocked tones,
"Alas that a man of his simply colossal mind should have been ensnared
by a pretty face, whose soulless beauty will depart in a few short
years!"
The professor would have been very indignant had any one ventured to
suggest to him that the pretty face had anything to do with it. He
imagined himself entirely above and beyond such flimsy considerations.
Yet it is sadly doubtful whether an example in long division, on a
smeared slate, brought to him with tears and faltering accents by Miss
Christina, would have produced the effect which followed when Miss
Rosamond May betrayed her shameful ignorance by handing him the slate
and saying forlornly, "I've done it seven times, and it comes out
differently wrong every time. Can _you_ see what's the matter?" and two
wet blue eyes looked into his through his spectacles, with an expression
which said plainly, "You are my last and only hope."
She was standing by the massive marble-topped table which was the
central feature of the parlor of their boarding-house. One plump
hand--with dimples where the knuckles should have been--rested upon the
unresponsive marble, in the other she held the slate. She was a teacher
of some of the lowest classes in Miss Christina Eldridge's academy for
young ladies, and only Miss Christina knew the almost fathomless depths
of her ignorance.
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