This was Mrs. Chanter's first spin behind Pilot; it should be her last, she resolved, as she clung terrified to the low railing of the beach wagon. It was a bright June morning, and Pilot was "feelin' extry good," as John Tucker had intimated to Kitty; he flung the miles behind him in a nonchalant rapture that was all his own. Once Mrs. Chanter opened her lips to cry out, but a glance at her husband's face of delight closed them again. After all, the children were all grown!
"Thank you, Kitty!" cried Mr. Chanter, as they dismounted at the edge of the Lancaston woods. "Thank you, my dear! this has been a wonderful, wonderful treat; hasn't it, Susan?"
"Wonderful!" echoed Mrs. Chanter, dryly. "Next time I'll have Podasokus, please, Kitty; or if he has left us, then that nice old woolly thing: Crummles, is he? No more Pilot for me, my dear!"
Kitty laughed and sped away, leaving the worthy couple to gaze admiringly after her for a moment before they turned into the wood, hand in hand.
"Glorious girl!" said the Reverend Timothy. "Glorious horse!"
"He'll break her neck some day!" said his Susan.
Joy of the road on a June morning! Elms arching overhead, in long feathery arcades, or giving way to groups of singing pines, and clusters of white birches that rustled and whispered together like Nausicaa and her maidens. Under these, stretches of gray stone wall along which the chipmunks whisked, trying in vain to keep pace with Pilot's flying feet; stretches, again, of stump fence, the silver-bleached bones of ancient giants, with sturdy new growth of fir and hemlock pushing up between their locked skeleton-arms. Between fence or wall and the white ribbon of road, a strip of green a few yards wide, sown thick with the jewels of early summer. Ferns of every variety, from the lady-fern which Kitty always thought so like Mother, in the pale green dresses she loved, to towering plumes of ostrich fern and tumbled masses of Osmunda regalis. There was maiden-hair, too, Kitty knew, hiding in the crannies of the stone wall, but that could not be seen from the road. The cinnamon roses were out, sweet and untidy as Herrick's tempestuously-petticoated girl; "Virgin's Bower" flung its white-starred veil over rock and tangle. Kitty, flashing quick glances, as she sped along, saw and loved it all. The world held no tears any more; how should it, on a day like this?
"My heart leaps up when I behold, Pilot!" cried the girl. "Can't you hear it, Beloved? And oh—and oh—and Oh! pearl of Poppets, do you see whom we are overhauling? Do you see, Pilot? If my middle name is not Clotho"——
Melissa and Bobby were walking slowly along the road. Bobby had come over for the Anniversary Supper, of course. It was one of Melissa's free afternoons (the library was open only three days in the week); it was all perfectly simple. Bobby came pretty often nowadays, and Sister Lissy happened to be passing the station about train time. They were near the village now. The two were deep in talk, and paid no heed to the approaching wheels. Melissa, who hardly knew a baseball from a football, was listening with bated breath and kindling eyes to a highly technical description of yesterday's game.
"Binks got base on balls, you see, and walked; then Joyce threw to third to put out Bacon, but Hodges fumbled, so Bacon ran home, and Binks went to second, and then I got in a three-bagger and made a home-run."