“Oh, no,” said Kenelm, modestly. “But I honestly think Mr. Bob would be a wiser man, and a weightier man, and more removed from the grasshopper state, if he would think less and eat more pudding.”
When the supper was over the farmer offered Kenelm a clay pipe filled with shag, which that adventurer accepted with his habitual resignation to the ills of life; and the whole party, excepting Mrs. Saunderson, strolled into the garden. Kenelm and Mr. Saunderson seated themselves in the honeysuckle arbour: the girls and the advocate of progress stood without among the garden flowers. It was a still and lovely night, the moon at her full. The farmer, seated facing his hayfields, smoked on placidly. Kenelm, at the third whiff, laid aside his pipe, and glanced furtively at the three Graces. They formed a pretty group, all clustered together near the silenced beehives, the two younger seated on the grass strip that bordered the flower-beds, their arms over each other’s shoulders, the elder one standing behind them, with the moonlight shining soft on her auburn hair.
Young Saunderson walked restlessly by himself to and fro the path of gravel.
“It is a strange thing,” ruminated Kenelm, “that girls are not unpleasant to look at if you take them collectively,—two or three bound up together; but if you detach any one of them from the bunch, the odds are that she is as plain as a pikestaff. I wonder whether that bucolical grasshopper, who is so enamoured of the hop and jump that he calls ‘progress,’ classes the society of the Mormons among the evidences of civilized advancement? There is a good deal to be said in favour of taking a whole lot of wives as one may buy a whole lot of cheap razors. For it is not impossible that out of a dozen a good one may be found. And then, too, a whole nosegay of variegated blooms, with a faded leaf here and there, must be more agreeable to the eye than the same monotonous solitary lady’s smock. But I fear these reflections are naughty; let us change them. Farmer,” he said aloud, “I suppose your handsome daughters are too fine to assist you much. I did not see them among the haymakers.”
“Oh, they were there, but by themselves, in the back part of the field. I did not want them to mix with all the girls, many of whom are strangers from other places. I don’t know anything against them; but as I don’t know anything for them, I thought it as well to keep my lasses apart.”
“But I should have supposed it wiser to keep your son apart from them. I saw him in the thick of those nymphs.”
“Well,” said the farmer, musingly, and withdrawing his pipe from his lips, “I don’t think lasses not quite well brought up, poor things! do as much harm to the lads as they can do to proper-behaved lasses; leastways my wife does not think so. ‘Keep good girls from bad girls,’ says she, ‘and good girls will never go wrong.’ And you will find there is something in that when you have girls of your own to take care of.”
“Without waiting for that time, which I trust may never occur, I can recognize the wisdom of your excellent wife’s observation. My own opinion is, that a woman can more easily do mischief to her own sex than to ours; since, of course, she cannot exist without doing mischief to somebody or other.”
“And good, too,” said the jovial farmer, thumping his fist on the table. “What should we be without women?”
“Very much better, I take it, sir. Adam was as good as gold, and never had a qualm of conscience or stomach till Eve seduced him into eating raw apples.”