At least that was the way it sounded to Betsy, but when she took the book and looked where Aunt Abigail pointed she read it correctly, though in a timid, uncertain voice. She was very proud to think she could please a grown-up so much as she was evidently pleasing Uncle Henry, but the idea of reading aloud for people to hear, not for a teacher to correct, was unheard of.
| The Stag at eve had drunk his fill |
| Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill, |
she began, and it was as though she had stepped into a boat and was swept off by a strong current. She did not know what all the words meant, and she could not pronounce a good many of the names, but nobody interrupted to correct her, and she read on and on, steadied by the strongly-marked rhythm, drawn forward swiftly from one clanging, sonorous rhyme to another. Uncle Henry nodded his head in time to the rise and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl’s for a couplet or two. They chanted together thus:
| A moment listened to the cry |
| That thickened as the chase drew nigh, |
| Then, as the headmost foes appeared, |
| With one brave bound, the copse he cleared. |
At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out wide, and the child felt as though the deer had made his great leap there, before her eyes.
“I’ve seen ’em jump just like that,” broke in Uncle Henry. “A two-three-hundred-pound stag go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of thistledown in the wind.”
“Uncle Henry,” asked Elizabeth Ann, “what is a copse?”
“I don’t know,” said Uncle Henry indifferently. “Something in the woods, must be. Underbrush most likely. You can always tell words you don’t know by the sense of the whole thing. Go on.”
And stretching forward, free and far,
The child’s voice took up the chant again. She read faster and faster as it got more exciting. Uncle Henry joined in on