"The cat is well," said Susan, gravely—"that is, as well as could be expected. She has quite a family. We have lots of chickens—you must have seen some of them in the front yard as you came in. And pigs—a pen full of them, but a little too big to suit you. They are too heavy and dirty to take in your arms, and all the curl is gone out of their tails."
"So sorry!" said Miss Josey, with the most melancholy of pouts on her lip, and with a funny reminder of Laura Keene when she uses the same expression to the discarded Pomander in "Peg Woffington."
"But we have something else that you will like," Susy continued, determined to atone for any disappointment in the pigs and their terminations. "We have got a calf—a nice red-and-white spotted calf, only about a week old."
"Oh, that is the thing!" cried the merry girl. "We will go at once and have a look at the calf. Does it hook?"
"Hook?—you stupid thing!" laughed Susy. "Why it is only a week old, I tell you; and of course it hasn't any horns. But come along!" and down from a convenient peg she pulled a couple of sun-bonnets, her mother's and her own, sticking one on the gypsy head of Josey and the other on her own refractory curls. "But stop—we have something else that you have not thought of"—and she pulled down the head of her cousin and whispered in her ear.
"Cherries! oh good gracious!" absolutely yelled the young lady. "Quick—get me some boy's-trousers and a step-ladder! No, you needn't mind the trousers, as long as it is only you, Susy, who is going to help me pick; but the step-ladder—don't forget the step-ladder!" and away she went, flying out of the house, her hand in that of Susan, and the whole movement more suggestive than anything else, of two young colts turned out in a clover-field for a summer-day frolic.
Five minutes afterwards, a subterranean observer, could such a person have been possible, would have seen Miss Josey most unromantically astride of a limb, half way up the big Tartarean cherry tree overhanging the smoke-house, appropriating those pulpy little purple globes at a most luxurious rate, and staining her cherry lips and her white fingers very nearly of the same color. Susy stood below, laughing and clapping her hands at mad Joseph's position, and eating, by way of sympathy, the few clusters thrown down to her by the busy fingers.
But we cannot linger upon this picture, pleasant as it is—nor yet upon the adventures of Josey among the pigs, chickens, cats, with the calf (which managed to "butt" her over, even if it could not "hook"), and among all and singular the belongings and appliances connected with that cozy little retreat in the country village. Then what a supper followed, with the flaky white tea-biscuit made by Aunt Betsey's own hands, with the fresh cream equally divided between the cherries and the strawberries, and the scent of the roses stolen by the slight evening breeze and thrown in at the windows. Then an hour of moonlight, but only an hour, for the young girl was wearied out by the changes of scene that had kept her excited during the day, and the broken rest of the night before. Long hours earlier than Tom Leslie heard the whistle of his train, braking-up at Suspension Bridge, Josephine was nestling among the white sheets and cool pillows of her pleasant chamber, nodded at by the vines at the window and just lovingly kissed by one glint of the moon that stole in upon her privacy—sleeping such a sleep as wealth and power turn wearily upon their pillows and pray for without hope.