The carriage—they kept a very plain but a very capacious one—brought home the girls shortly after candle-light. Lindsay ran out to assist them in alighting, and was glad to find that on hearing his name they retained a perfect recollection of him, though they were in their earliest childhood at the time of his departure for Europe. When they came into the light, he found them both very pretty. Their skins had not been tanned by exposure to the sun and wind, nor their shoulders stooped, nor their hands reddened by hard work; as had been the case with their two elder sisters. They were dressed in white frocks, blue shawls, and straw bonnets with blue ribbons; neatly, and in good taste.
The evening passed pleasantly, and Lindsay soon discovered that the daughters of his host were very charming girls. Ellen, perhaps, had a little tinge of vanity, but Lucy was entirely free from it. Diffidence prevented her from talking much, but she listened understandingly, and when she did speak, it was with animation and intelligence. Lindsay felt that he should not have liked her so well had she looked, and dressed, and talked as he remembered her elder sisters.
When he retired for the night, his bed and room were so well furnished, and looked so inviting, that he could not regret the little low apartment with no chimney and only one window, that he had occupied in the old farm-house; and he slept quite as soundly under a white counterpane as he had formerly done under a patch-work quilt.
We have no space to enter more minutely into the details of our hero's visit, nor to relate by what process he speedily became a convert to the fact that even among country-people the march of improvement adds greatly to their comfort and happiness; provided always, that they do not mistake the road, and diverge into the path of folly and pretension.
Suffice it to say, that he protracted his stay to a week, during which he broke the girls of the habit of saying "pappy," substituting the more sensible and affectionate epithet of "father." When Pharaoh announced the proper time, he made a visit to the refectory of old Binkey, whom he afterwards desired the Candyville storekeeper to supply at his charge, with materials for her cakes and beer, ad libitum, during the remainder of her life.
The visit of Edward Lindsay to Oakland was in the course of the summer so frequently repeated, that no one was much surprised when, early in October, he conducted Lucy Hilliard to Philadelphia as his bride: acknowledging to himself that he could never have made her so, had she and her family continued exactly as he had known them at the OLD FARM-HOUSE.