“All right; put on your things quick, and come along! (Down, Scotty! down, sir!) We must stop for Doris, though; and I think Miss Morrison’s there to dinner to-day.”
Stella’s night-black eyes glowed at this, for she silently worshiped her sympathetic teacher.
Arrived at the Doctor’s, they found a large and merry party gathered around the air-tight stove in the shabby parlor, listening with enthusiasm to the warbling of operatic stars on the new phonograph, followed by a “piece” on the piano by demure Doris. There were Grandpa and Grandma Brown, a brisk and well-preserved old couple, with cheeks like rosy winter apples; Uncle Si Wolcott, Mrs. Brown’s eccentric bachelor brother, who lived all alone in a white farmhouse on the “Bay road,” Doris and her father and mother, and, finally, two guests who were not “kin” to any one else present.
One was Miss Morrison, whose home was in an up-to-date little city in a neighboring State, and who must otherwise have eaten her Thanksgiving dinner rather forlornly in a boarding-house; the other, a lanky boy of sixteen or so, who wore glasses and a thoughtful air, had created some amusement for the giggling girls at the academy by his name, which was Honey. When thus appealed to in the velvet tones of some “lady teacher,” the girls seemed to think it funny. His “front name” was Ethan, and he was an orphan with his own way to make, his nearest relative a none too loving “aunt by marriage,” which explains his appearance on the day of family reunions at Mother Brown’s hospitable table.
The present was not, as Grandpa Brown had more than once remarked with apparently a distinct sense of personal injury, a “genoowine old-fashioned Thanksgivin’.” Far from affording the excellent sleighing which had been expected to facilitate family gatherings in Grandpa’s day, and the coasting that had undoubtedly sharpened the youngsters’ appetites for “turkey an’ fixin’s,” an unseasonable Indian summer warmth pervaded this particular twenty-seventh of November. When the young people set out on their walk, Ethan Honey and Miss Morrison being included, they found the country roads soft underfoot, rusty green leaves yet clinging to the wide-spreading apple boughs, with here and there a frost-bitten apple, and even the yellow of ripe corn still nestling in some of the brown stooks that dotted the fields like tattered and smoke-stained wigwams. Red alder berries and gray clematis fringes and the “ghosts of the goldenrod” adorned the wayside, while the purple-brown woodlands melted into a nameless haze upon the lonely horizon line.
“I’m fond of cross-country hikes, aren’t you?” Ethan observed, as he turned to offer Stella an informal lift over the low stone wall that lay between them and a short cut to “Wolcott’s Woods.”
“I do not know that word ‘hikes,’” she answered, in her slow, careful English, “but if it is anything like to-day, I am sure I shall like it very much. I never really knew about Thanksgiving before.”
“Oh, didn’t you?” asked the boy, trying not to stare at his self-possessed little companion, whose cadenced voice and quaint ways, as well as her unusual appearance, might have given him some excuse. “I suppose of course your people don’t keep Thanksgiving,” he added, awkwardly.
“Father and Mother Waring always had the good dinner and the church service,” Stella answered, “but somehow I never understood about the family part. I suppose because I was only a little girl then; or else because they don’t have families out in Dakota! I mean, there are so many lonely ones whose families are back east, with the old houses and the old names and all the old things,” the girl persisted, greatly to Ethan’s secret amusement at her unexpected point of view.