“I’m been looking for you to send arter me to come and live ’long o’ you. Why ain’t you sent afore this? Don’t like to be a-losing so much time.”
“Why, Billy, I had no idea you wished to come and live with us,” returned Rose, in surprise.
“Well, you might a-known it, then! You always knowed I liked you and him.”
“I thought you refused to go out to service?”
“I ’fused all them there” said Billy, chucking his thumb contemptuously over his shoulder, pointing in the direction of the village—“think I’m agoin’ to live in a bake-oven, like them there red brick houses?”
“But you might have gone to the country.”
“Yes, but you know most all on ’em were so ill-looking—I mean the people, and for that matter the houses too—and then they kept pigs, as made an onpleasant fragrance, and childun, as made werry onpleasant noises. And some places, the missus was either ugly in her temper, or her face, or in both, which is dreadful. And in other places the master was always a-interfering with the dinner or the dishcloths, in a very misbecoming manner. Some on ’em were not nice in their ways; and what ’couragement would it be to me to put on a clean apron every day, with a nice stiff crease ironed down in the middle of it, to sarve people as wa’n’t clean themselves? So the long and the short of it is, ma’am, that I’m come to live ’long o’ you.”
Now, Rosalie was so gentle-hearted that she did not speak her thought, and say—“But we did not send for you, Billy.” Yet, nevertheless, Billy guessed it, for he answered as if she had spoken—
“Well, what o’ that? Here I am. And here’s my trunk and bundle. I paid a man twenty-five cents to help me to bring them over. I reckon I can stay, if I ’gree to stay on your own terms,” said Billy, betraying piteous anxiety nevertheless.
Gentle and truthful Rosalie hastened to set his fears at rest. “Indeed, Billy, we shall be delighted to have you. You will be an invaluable acquisition to us. I am only very much surprised that you should have given us the preference.”