ACCEPTING A THANKSGIVING INVITATION.
A week before Thanksgiving, Marion Parke received this note from her Aunt Betty:—
Dear Niece,—If you haven’t anywhere else to go, and have money to come with, you can take the cars from Boston up here and spend Thanksgiving Day with us at Belden. Your pa used to think a lot of coming here when he went to college—the great pity he ever went. He might have been well-to-do if he had stuck to farming, but he always hankered after an eddication, and he got it, and nothin’ else. Your Cousin Abijah will drive over in his cutter and bring you here. Don’t have nothing to do with Isaac Bumps; he’ll charge you twenty-five cents, and tell you it’s a mile and a half from the station to my house, but it’s only a mile, and don’t you hear to him, for your Cousin Abijah can’t come until after the milking, and if the cows are fractious, it may make him belated.
I am your great-aunt,
Betsy Parke.
Marion had previously received a letter from her father, saying,—
“If you have an invitation from your Aunt Betty to spend Thanksgiving with her in Belden, by all means accept it. I want you to see the town in which I was born; there is not a mountain or a valley there that does not often cover these flat prairie-lands with their remembered beauty. As they were a part of my boyish life, so are they a part of my man’s; and when you come home we can talk of them together. I was not born in the old farmhouse where your aunt now lives, but my father was, and his father, and his father’s father, 137 and your Aunt Betty was a kind, loving sister to your grandfather long years ago.
“Go, and write me all about the old home, all about the old aunt, and make her forget, if you can, that I would not be a farmer.”
Before the coming of this letter, Marion had many invitations from her schoolmates to spend Thanksgiving with them at their homes. Her room-mates were very urgent that she should go to Rock Cove; and besides her longing to see that wonderful mysterious thing, the ocean, she had learned so much of their homes during the weeks they had been together, that she almost felt as if she knew all the friends there, and would be sure of a welcome.
But her father’s letter left her no choice, and a few cordial lines of acceptance went from her to her Aunt Betty by the next mail. Of this decision Miss Ashton heartily approved.
And now began in the school the pleasant bustle which precedes this holiday vacation. Recitations were gone through by the hardest. Meals were eaten in indigestible haste; devotional exercises were filled with “wandering thoughts and worldly affections.”
All through the long corridors and out from the open doors came crowded, eager words of inquiry and consultation. One would have thought who heard them, that these girls had been close prisoners, breaking away from a hard, dull life, instead of what most of them really were, happy girls bound for a frolic. 138
Miss Ashton heard it all without the least injury to her feelings. She had heard it for years, and, in truth, was as glad of her vacation as any of her girls.
A journey alone in a new country, with the beauty of the autumn all gone, and the rigors of a New England winter already beginning to show themselves, made Marion, self-reliant as she usually was, not a little timid as she saw the tall academy building lost behind the hills, between which the cars were bearing her on to New Hampshire. A homesick feeling took possession of her, and a dread that she might find Kate Underwood’s tableaux a reality when she should reach her old aunt in the mountain-girded farmhouse.
Three hours’ ride through a bare and uninteresting country brought her to Belden.
The day was extremely cold here. The snow, which had seemed to her very deep at Montrose, lay piled up in huge drifts, not a fence nor a shrub to be seen. All around were spurs of the White Mountains, white, literally, as she looked up to them, from their base to their summit. There were great brown trees clinging stiff and frozen to their steep sides; sharp-pointed rocks, raising their great heads here and there from among the trees.
Majestic, awful, solemn they looked to this prairie child, as she stood on the cold platform of the little station gazing up at them.
A voice said behind her, startling her,— 139
“You’d better come in, marm. It’s what we call a terrible cold day for Thanksgiving week. Come in, and warm you.”
Marion turned, to see a man in a buffalo overcoat, with whiskers the same color as the fur, eyes that looked the same, a big red nose, a buffalo fur cap pulled well down over his ears, with mittens to match.
He stood in an open door, to which he gave a little push, as if to emphasize his invitation.
Inside the ladies’ room of the station a red-hot stove sent out a cheerful welcome. To this the man added stick after stick of dry pine wood, much to Marion’s amusement and comfort, as she watched him.
“Come from down South?” he asked, after he had convinced himself of the impossibility of crowding in another.
“From the West,” said Marion pleasantly.
“You don’t say so. You ain’t Aunt Betty Parke’s niece, now, be ye?”
“I am Marion Parke. Did you know my father?”
“Let me see. Was your father Philip Parke? Phil, we used to call him when he was a boy, the one that would have an eddication, and went a home-missionarying after he got chock-full of books. Aunt Betty, she took it hard. Be he your father?”
“Yes,” said Marion, laughing; “he is my father.”
“You don’t say so, wull, naow, I’m beat. You 140 don’t favor him not a mite; you sarten don’t. An’ you’re here to get an eddication too, be ye?”
“Yes; that’s what I hope to do. I’m sorry it’s so cold here; I should like to walk to my aunt’s if it were not.”
The man gave a chuckle, which Marion did not at all understand, jammed the stove full of wood again, and remarked as he crowded in the last knot,—
“There’s your Cousin Abijah; I know his old cowbells a mile off! Better get warm!”
Marion was hovering close over the stove when the door opened and Cousin Abijah entered.
“There you be,” he called out hilariously as he saw her. “Not froze nuther! You’re clear grit! I told your Aunt Betty so, and she said ‘seein’ was believin’.’ As soon as I’ve thawed my hands a mite, we’ll be joggin’. Dan, that’s the hoss, isn’t the safest to drive in the dark.”
The early twilight was already dropping down over the hills before “the mite of thawing” was done, and then wrapped up in an old blanket shawl Aunt Betty had sent, and covered by two well-worn buffaloes, they started.
What a ride it was! Marion will never forget how Dan crawled along up a mountain road, where the path ran between huge snow-drifts, under beetling rocks that looked as if an avalanche might at any moment fall from them and crush horse and riders in the sleigh. Sometimes going under arches of old pine-trees, the arms of which had met and interlocked, 141 long, long years ago; up steep declivities, where the horse seemed almost over their heads, down steep declivities, where they seemed over the horse’s head, never meeting any one, only hearing the dull moaning of the wind among the forest trees, and the louder moaning of old Dan, as he toiled painfully along.
At last there came an opening that widened until they crossed the mountain spur, and the little village of Belden lay before them.
Marion saw a church steeple, a few houses, a sawmill, and great spaces covered with snow. To one of these houses, on the outskirts of the village, Cousin Abijah drove. The house was a two-storied old farmhouse, innocent of paint or blind. There was not a fence round, or a tree near it. On one side was a wooden well-top, with a long arm holding an iron-bound bucket above it, the arm swinging from a huge beam, from which, in its turn, swung two large stones, suspended from the well-sweep by an iron chain. A well-worn foot-path came from a back door to it, and on this path stood a yellow dog, nose in air, and tail beating time on a snow-bank.
It was the only living thing to be seen, and Marion’s heart sank within her. She was cold, tired, and homesick; and she saw at once that around the small front door, before which Cousin Abijah in his gallantry had stopped, no footstep had left a mark. The snow-bank reached to the handle, clung 142 to it, and as absolutely refused entrance, as did a shrill voice which at once made itself heard, but from whence Marion could not conjecture. It said, however, “Go round to the back door! What’s good enough for me, is good enough for them that come to see me!”
“I hope I see you well,” said a not unkindly voice, as Marion stepped out of the sleigh.—Page 143. Miss Ashton’s New Pupil.