“I—I didn’t think you’d cry—that you’d be so sorry,” I heard myself saying, at last, in despondent self-defence.
Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once more with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which youth knows only once.
“Why, Andrew, boy,” she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all at once, “didn’t you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?”
And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me.
MY AUNT SUSAN
I HELD the lamp, while Aunt Susan cut up the Pig.
The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this great event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher’s to set in train the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and hours afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the village street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at the Four Corners, while the grocer’s hired man obligingly sharpened our carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile in the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for the smudge in the smoke-barrel.
From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours to a swifter pace, by paying visits to the wood-shed to have still another look at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small icicles in the crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared. My emotions as I viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended legs, its bland and pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness underneath, were much mixed. Although I was his elder by seven or eight years, we had been close friends during all his life—or all except a very few weeks of his earliest sucking pig-hood, spent on his native farm. I had fed him daily; I had watched him grow week by week; more than once I had poked him with a stick as he ran around in his sty, to make him squeal for the edification of neighbors’ boys who had come into our yard, and would now be sharply ordered out again by Aunt Susan.