“Ho! Ho! Well, there’s naught like a sober mind to recommend a young fellow, and I’m glad to see it cropping up in your field, Father Joseph. Well, we’ll make a neighborly call upon the widow, and while you talk about Parson Chauncey’s notions of immersion and Mr. Ainsworth’s psalmody I’ll e’en say a word of a lighter sort to the young gentlewomen.”
“Have your jest, Will, have your jest,” returned the younger brother coolly, “but I know somewhat you don’t.”
“Think you do, I dare say! A wise man in his own conceit is Joe Bradford.”
But seeing that his brother, instead of being teased, was holding himself very quiet and peeping through the branches of the young maples crowding down to the brink of the little river Plymouth modestly calls The Town Brook, William stepped softly behind him, and with something of the guilty joy of Actæon, looked upon almost as fair a sight as he did.
No prettier spot was then, or until very lately, to be found in the dear old town which is mother of us all, than Holmes’s Dam, or as it then was called Jenney’s Mill, where in the midst of a dense wood The Town Brook, rushing toward the sea, found itself at a very early date impeded by a dam, more or less artificial and effectual according to the owner, but always sufficient to turn the big wheel of the gristmill first erected by Stephen Dean, husband of that Betty Ring who inherited so little of her mother’s great estate, and afterward carried on by burly John Jenney, who sat as Assistant at the council board when Duxbury wrung consent for separate identity from the mother town. And now John slept, although not with his English fathers, and his widow jointly with her son Samuel administered the mill and ground the grain not only of Plymouth, but of Duxbury, Sandwich, and several other towns. With so wide a custom the miller’s was a flourishing business, and might have been still more so had it been more carefully carried on, but alas! John Jenney was a shipowner, and aspired to setting up salt-works at Clark’s Island, and in fact had a soul above the pottles of meal by which he was supposed to live; and when his widow succeeded to his estate the customers complained that they were forced to share their grain with rats and mice, and that the miller’s widow was too easy tempered to be very efficient. Now, however, that the oldest son was married and the daughters were grown up, things went better, and the mill became a popular resort for the young people, especially in hot weather.
But all this time the governor’s sons are peeping through the boscage, and we peeping with them see four young girls, their kirtles of blue and white homespun linen drawn about their knees, while with bare feet they comfortably paddle in a little pool formed by a bend of the stream, floored with beach sand and bordered by a grassy bank, whereon the four damsels sit, and chat with all the sweet volubility of blackbirds. The rays of the morning sun sifting through the branches of the young oaks overhead dance merrily upon heads of gold and brown, and the flaxen locks that curl around Susan Jenney’s head, while her eyes, blue as the blossom of the flax, gleam beneath as she says,—
“We wouldn’t do this to-night, girls, would we?”
“I dare say the lads wouldn’t say nay, if we asked them to a wading match,” replied her sister Sally with a twinkling laugh, while Abby, older than the rest, looked sharply among the bushes, saying,—
“Who knows but we’re spied upon! I feel a creep up my back.”