 A Real New England Girl by Anna I. Parsons 1. The Shower 2. Oxford County 3. The Stranger and the Girl 4. The Youth and the Girl 5. Pansy and Richard Go Trading 6. The Marvelous Storyteller 7. The Dinner 8. The The Minister Comes for Tea 9. Pansy's Father 10. Pansy and Her Mother 11. Poland Springs 12. The Birthday Cake 13. Ned Patterson Comes for a Visit 14. The Blue Berrying Party 15. The Beginning of Wisdom 16. The Tempted and the Penitent 17. The Concert 18. Stanley's Ride 19. The Bench by the Wayside 20. The Banker and the Widow 21. The Bag of Nuts 22. How They Kept Thanksgiving at Little Farm 23. Hardly a Merry Christimas 24. A Call Down and a Caller 25. The Pride of Mrs. Bradford 26. A Happy New Year 27. Amusement and Winter Sport 28. Kim 29. Richard, the Lion Hearted 30. A Tour of the White Mountains 31. Talking Over the Trip with Henry Bright 32. Thoughts That Lie Too Deep for Words 33. Economics 34. His Toast 35. The Busy Haunts of Man 36. Christmas in New York 37. The Last Night of Their Visit 38. The Language Understood by All 39. Sugaring Off 40. Correspondence 41. Commencement 42. Conclusion Afterward     |
Talking Over the Trip with Henry Bright "Children are God's apostles, day by day Sent forth to preach of love and hope and peace." -- Lowell The day following Pansy and Richard's return was one of those extremely warm summer days which occasionally afflict even the hilly country, and for the nonce, makes life exceedingly uncomfortable, except as one is able to find shade and cooling breezes under some friendly tree. In the afternoon, Mrs. Bradford and Ruth brought their rocking chairs and sewing out under the wide spreading willow where Pansy lay on the grass looking up through its green branches to the blue beyond, replete with happiness just to be at home again. It was thus that Henry Bright found them when he came to call and to hear from Pansy an account of her trip about the mountains of their sister state. The old soldier and Pansy had long been warm friends and confidants. Though he was wrinkled and gray and old enough to be her grandfather, she always addressed him by his given name of Henry. Into his willing ears she had ever poured her hopes and ambitions, well knowing that his sympathy was with her and that he took an interest in even the most trivial acts of her life. With his splendid memory, love of learning, and ability to impart knowledge, Henry Bright should have been a leader in the educational world, but just before he attained the age of eighteen, the great Civil War broke out, and he had shouldered a musket and spent his early manhood in the rough life of a soldier. When he returned home, his mother refused to listen to his ever leaving her again, and so he had smothered a secret ambition to enter college, and continued the pursuit of agriculture on his father's farm, but managed always to find time for the reading of many books and papers. Now, in his old age, he was a unique character such as is rarely found in any community. No problem was too profound for his understanding; no tale too simple to elicit his interest. The children of the neighborhood were one of his great sources of pleasure, and he listened to and advised in their childish plans and plottings as though personal supervision of them all had been divinely allotted to him by the Good Father who never fails to recompense the noble sacrifice of a son for his mother. "Is this the much travelled Pansy Bradford?" he asked in his rich voice after he had greeted Mrs. Bradford and Ruth. "Yes, Henry, I surely am the much travelled Pansy Bradford; I have been out of the State of Maine into the State of New Hampshire and all the way around the White Mountains, and I've got so much to tell you that I don't know where to begin, so just sit down with your back up against the stone wall and help me to unload some of the knowledge I have been gaining during the past week." "You might begin by telling me how Richard stood the trip." "Richard? Why Richard didn't know there was such a word as cranium all the while we were away. I had to be almost stern to keep him from walking to the top of Mt. Washington and doing many other things that wouldn't have been good for him. He has done nothing but whistle ever since we got back home." "I suppose you stopped at the big hotels?" "Yes, Henry, the very swellest and best in the mountains where you go to bed at night with the sweet strains of music floating up on the night wind to lull you to sleep, and get up in the morning with the sweet perfume of flowers teasing you to come down stairs and choose which shall be your companions for that particular day. Sometimes Stanley brought the bouquets to us and sometimes Mr. Winthrop told me to select them for Mrs. Winthrop, Julia, and myself; that was one of the chores I never had to be told twice to attend to. After we got the flowers, we all marched into breakfast very precisely, two by two, and the headwaiter would run so fast to pull out the chairs for us, that I was afraid he would slip and break his leg or injure himself in some way. When we were all seated, the waitress began bringing on the plates; first, one for your fruit, then one for your cereal, one for your chops, and one for your flapjacks, besides a lot of other dishes that I never took time to count." "I was glad to eat breakfast out of the frying pan when I was soldiering down in old Virginia." "Yes, Henry, but you were there for a great cause, and Great Causes don't make much display of china and table linen. Any minute you stood a chance of dying a hero, and then they would have buried you in a trench, and your frying pan, tin spoon, and canteen wouldn't have been even a happy memory; whereas, we were out for a good time, and, now I'm back, it's a great pleasure to me to think of all those soiled dishes I didn't have to wash and dry and set away in the closet." Henry chuckled and was obliged to lean forward so as not to hurt himself on the stone wall. "Just like serving your country; the negative things give you more pleasure than the positive." "Well, Henry, the positive things you see on a tour are very interesting; for instance, we positively saw the best dressed man in the United States at one of the hotels. He had clothes for morning, noon and night, made after the very latest London designs, and changes them according to a regular schedule every day. When he is home in Chicago, if it comes time to change and he is out in his motor car, Stanley says, he pulls down the shades, and gets out of one suit and into another just as though he were home in his own room." "He keeps on dress parade all the time." "Why, Henry, I should say he keeps parading his dress all the time." "Granted, that you are more correct than I!" Again the old soldier chuckled. "Then there was the human Youth's Companion. One day we were seated at a table near an elderly lady with beautiful white hair and a complexion like a very luscious peach when it is getting overripe, and with her was a submissive-looking, brown haired young man who I thought was her son, but Stanley said he was her husband; that she is a noted authoress and generally known among college men as 'The Youth's Companion'." "Sounds like an infringement of copyright." "It looked more like a case of robbing the cradle." Pansy accompanied her words with a little shake of the head as if, like King Solomon, the way of a man with a maid were beyond her understanding. She looked away for a moment up into the cloudless blue, then resumed her narration. "Another interesting thing we saw at the hotels were the belles. There were belles from Boston, belles from New York, belles from Philadelphia, belles from Chicago, and other places. "Now, Henry, don't think it's winter time and get all goose flesh! These belles don't come on strings, but are real, live young women who know all the 'Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles.' and are more like ornamental trees than anything else to which I can compare them. The tall, slender ones are like beautiful elms, and the medium-sized ones are like nice maples. "When these belles are with gentlemen, they can talk on most any subject, but when they are together, or with other ladies, they nearly always talk about millinery and dress and such things. I heard the name Worth, Callot, Paquin, and Poiret mentioned so often, that I thought they must be members of the Four Hundred, or some other exclusive set, but when I spoke to Stanley about them, he said they were dressmakers for the beau monde. "Sometimes when I watched these belles talking so animatedly with their group of friends, I thought probably I should tremble and feel as if I had been spoken to by the President if one of them should notice me, but one night after supper, I found out just how it feels to be talked to by a belle. I stopped to look at something in one of the parlors and got separated from the others. I had on my white organdy dress and the blue sash and hair ribbon Ruth gave me and a fresh bouquet. While I was standing up looking about for the others, I heard a voice beside me -- a very melodious voice with an accent like that of Ned Patterson, the young man who visited Stanley last summer -- say, 'You look as if you had just stepped out of a picture.' "I turned around, and there was one of those belles speaking to me. She was smiling and looked so human that I didn't tremble, but answered her as precisely as if it had been Mrs. Judge Wheeler speaking to me after meeting: 'No, ma'am, I didn't step out of a picture; I came in the motor car with Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop, Stanley, Julia, and Richard.' "Then she said almost under her breath, 'Is it possible any more were made from the same mold!' "I thought she was speaking about my dress, and not to appear stupid, said, 'Neither Worth, nor Callot, nor Paquin, nor Poiret, but mother was the moldest.' She looked at me very puzzled. Just then Richard came and said, 'Pansy, we are waiting for you to play Rook!' "I said, 'This is my brother Richard.' "She looked at Richard in surprise, then she looked at me and her face grew kind of wishful. I knew I had made some mistake in answering her, and so that she wouldn't say anything else I didn't understand, I said, 'Stanley and Julia are waiting, so please excuse us.' Richard and I bowed and backed away as best we could with the other people standing around. "The next forenoon when we were about to start off in the motor car, she came out on to the piazza with a gentleman and said, with a little flutter of a lace handkerchief, 'Good bye, Pansy! Good bye, Richard!' and we both called back, 'Good bye!' " "Stanley said, 'How did you get acquainted with the beautiful belle of Baltimore?' "I told him of my meeting her in the parlor the night before, and what she had said to me and what I had said to her, and when I came to the part about those dressmakers, the Winthrops laughed so much that I shall never try to talk in the vocabulary of a belle again. Stanley told me I should have said modiste and not moldest." "You were very presumptuous and deserved to be laughed at," said Ruth. "You should always be sure you are right, then go ahead," said Mrs. Bradford. "I did the best I could. I am sure, if those belles came here to Little Farm, they would make some mistakes, too." "Did you have any such torrid days as these in the mountains," asked Henry, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. "No, they were mostly temperate or frigid, but once we did have an electrical storm that was more severe than anything we ever had here at Paris. It was the day we had dinner at the Crawford House. This hotel faces a nice grassy plateau with mountains all about it, and just space enough at the base of some of them so that the railroad can wiggle in and out. They call it the Notch, because it is an indentation in the land. Well, while we were eating dinner, between one and two o'clock, Aeolus and Jupiter had a quarrel, and Aeolus let loose all the winds at once, and Jupiter, with lightnings in his hand and wrath in his eye, began hurling thunderbolts that must have gone all the way around the mountains, for I never heard such rumbling before. The rain came down in torrents, and darkness prevailed so that you couldn't see your hand before your face, except that they turned on all the lights at the hotel, the music played, and people tried to appear interested in the tornado, but I guess they were all as glad as Richard and me when Aeolus and Jupiter became reconciled, and sent Iris to apologize with a rainbow." "You haven't told Henry anything about the natural curiosities of the mountains," said Mrs. Bradford. "O mother, Henry knows more about them than the natives themselves, and if I tried to tell him anything of a geographical nature, he would be sure to find some flaw in my story." "I'd never do anything of the kind!" said the old soldier stoutly. "Henry, just look up there!" said Pansy, pointing to Mt. Washington, shrouded in soft blue haze and looking particularly entrancing on this hot afternoon. "That's the greatest curiosity they've got in New Hampshire, and like the cat that could stare at the king, we people here in Maine -- in Oxford County -- can look at it without stirring off our own little grass plots." "Quite correct, and I want to add, with the very able account you have given us this afternoon, I feel as if I had looked at a lot of other curiosities, too, without stirring very far from home. Hereafter, I shall champion Stanton Winthrop, for he never did a better act in his life than when he took you and Richard on that mountain trip." As Henry finished speaking, Kim came trotting into the yard with the usual air of importance when commissioned to deliver a letter. "What brings you here panting this hot afternoon?" said Pansy, placing her hands lightly on Kim's shoulders. "Has your master been overcome with the heat, or did you just want to get a swig of switchel on your own account?" She opened the leather pouch attached to his collar and took therefrom a letter. "There, now, go over and sit down by Henry while I read this. He knows all about what it is to be a good watchdog, and make men disappear who are keen on stirring up a bees' nest." Tearing open the letter, she read it aloud. Dear Pansy: I have been glued all day to the shady side of the piazza, and only got up stairs to write this note on the excuse of hunting for photographic material. Col. Roger Dean Williams Lee with his son and daughter arrived this A.M. and Miss Lee fears freckles more than a Hindoowild beast, therefore my detention in shady places. How are you and Richard and what are you doing this hot afternoon? I can't meet you tonight at the half-way tree, but I'll see you both tomorrow Virginia Lee willy-nilly. Believe me, I begrudge every minute of the time lost, because in three weeks now I'll have to cut sticks and stride, and it's a long time between September 1st and December 25th. I want to repeat that you and Richard are cordially and urgently invited to spend the Christmas holidays with us in New York, and you can't do the Winthrop family a greater favor than by accepting this invitation. The White Mountain trip would have been fruit pudding without the plums if you had not been with us. Send me a line via Kim's Despatch to make glad the shady places. If my excuse were stronger, This letter would be longer. Hastily but sincerely, Stanley. "Stanley's hard to understand," said Pansy, laying down the letter on the grass. "He'll hobnob with society people and surpass the best in wit and wisdom, and then he will sit down with Richard and me and do nothing in particular just as cheerfully." "He is what you call a well rounded young man," said Henry. "His father was a very quick, level headed young man in the old days." "Here comes Richard and Uncle Will! Now I'll go for the switchel." Regardless of the high temperature, Pansy's willing feet took her hurriedly into the house from whence she soon returned with a large pitcher, glasses, a small tin basin, and writing material. "Here, Kim!" she called, setting down the basin and filling it with switchel, "You can have yours first and then Richard and Uncle Will." After she had filled the glasses and passed them around, when sat down and wrote the answer to Stanley's note: Dear Stanley: We are all here under the willow tree with Henry Bright for company, and I have managed to forget the heat in talking about our trip. Richard has just come from work, and says he's a little tender from loafing so long, but he expects to harden if this weather doesn't keep up so long he melts. We both want to thank you again for your kindness, and we hope life's leas will ever prove as pleasant for you as the mountain trip was for us. It's a long, long time to Christmas, And New York's a long, long way; It's a long, long time to Christmas, And we don't know what to say." Semper idem, Pansy. Read and approved, Richard. Slipping the letter into the mail pouch, she gave Kim a little pat and said, with a tender, girlish smile, "Now, you can go!" Click Here for Chapter 32 |