[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
LAST WORDS.
At last all the preparations were made, and Dolly's modest wardrobe packed to the very last article, so that her bureau drawers looked mournfully empty.
It was a little hair trunk, with "D. C." embossed in brass nails upon one end, that contained all this young lady's armor—a very different affair from the Saratoga trunks of our modern belles. The pink brocade with its bunches of rose-buds; some tuckers of choice old lace that had figured in her mother's bridal toilet; a few bits of ribbon; a white India muslin dress, embroidered by her own hands;—these were the stock in trade of a young damsel of her times, and, strange as it may appear, young ladies then were stated by good authority to have been just as pretty and bewitching as now, when their trunks are several times as large.
Dolly's place and Aunt Debby's had been properly set down on Hiel's stage-book for the next morning at six o'clock; and now remained only an evening of last words.
So Dolly sits by her father in his study, where from infancy she has retreated for pleasant quiet hours, where even the books she never read seem to her like familiar friends from the number of times she has pondered the titles upon their backs. And now, though she wants to go, and feels the fluttering eagerness of the young bird, who has wings to use and would like to try the free air, yet the first flight from the nest is a little fearful. Boston is a long way off—three long days—and Dolly has never been farther from Poganuc than she has ridden by her father's side in the old chaise; so that the very journey has as much importance in her eyes as fifty years later a modern young lady will attach to a voyage to England.