“A likely way to begin the Sabbath,” pa reproved them. “Brush yourselves off now, and get calmed down before we start. It will be a pleasant sight, seeing you two standing up hymn-singing, after the way you’ve been carrying on.”
However, when fifteen minutes later the party started off down the mountain side, the two boys looked like perfect models. Hi was allowed to sit on the front seat with pa; Jim, Azalea and Mrs. McBirney sat behind. Ma wore her one white dress and her black bonnet with the green ribbon, and Azalea had on her new white dress with the cat stitching in blue; and her white hat with its blue ribbons was the very hat of hats for her to wear. Pa McBirney felt secretly proud of his family, but it wouldn’t have been his way to give them a notion of that. However, ma, who knew most of the things that pa thought, could tell that he was well pleased. He showed Hi all the landmarks—the little broken branches that looked like two birds sitting side by side on a gaunt live-oak limb that reached over their path; the “cannon,” a huge prone log which had once fallen across the road, and had been sawed in such a manner that it looked like a gigantic gun ready to be fired at them; the “haunted house” where a family of white-faced, queer folk lived, who ran in and drew down the shades when they saw anyone coming; and the “spy glass,” a curious opening through miles of woodland, through which a person could look down the mountain side and away across the valley, where the cotton and the corn grew in their rich fields and the silver streams wound in and out.
“I tell you, we that live in a place like this are likely to forget our blessings,” remarked Mr. McBirney. “Every way you turn, it’s sightly and a comfort to the eye. If I had to live where it was all dirt and noise and folks crowding on top of one another, seems like I’d want to die.”
“Wouldn’t you, just!” murmured ma sympathetically.
“But here we are, off pleasuring, on as pretty a day as God ever dropped down on his footstool.”
Ma agreed with him, and began to “tune up,” as pa put it, humming under her breath. She had her old song book in her hand—the book with the square notes, such as the mountain people always used at their “singings.” She explained to Azalea that the shape of the notes indicated their names. For example, no matter what key “do” might be in, it could be told for “do” by its shape. “Sol” would have another shape; “re” yet another. In this manner no one need be confused by four or even six sharps.
“And it’s a custom with us, Azalea,” she explained, “to sing the tune through by note first. After we’ve done that, and everybody has got the tune fixed in his head, so to speak, we go through and sing the words.”
“You’ll have to tell Hi about the singing,” said Azalea.
“It seems mighty queer to me how you-all don’t know about singings,” ma replied. “It ain’t nothing but all the folks getting together and singing. They do it once a year you know—come from all over the countryside. There now, look yonder! See them wagons coming from all parts? They’re all off for Rutherford Plain where the old Friendly Meeting House is. That was built before the war, all of great oak beams and boards, and it don’t belong to no one denomination, but folks of whatever belief meet there and give praise and worship.”
“Ain’t it nice?” sighed Azalea contentedly. It was very sweet to her to be riding along there, the daughter of people who were so much thought of as the McBirneys—she who had been a wanderer, and often a hungry, neglected child, in clothes she was ashamed of, and the companion of people she had been unable to respect. Everyone had a pleasant word for Ma and Pa McBirney, and almost everyone seemed to know about her and to ask if she was their new daughter. They said they were pleased to meet her, and when they knew about Hi—and the McBirneys were quick to tell—they said they were pleased to meet him too, and that they’d like mighty well to do him a good turn if the chance offered. There was so much talking of this kind to do, that after all, Hi did not get his description of the singing, and it was only when he had reached the grove around Friendly Church that he began to understand what a happy occasion it really was.