Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

"Get me my watch-glass from the work bench," said Gilbert, his hands trembling with expectation. But this revealed only a single word and date,—"Poppea—1850."

"Poppea! what's that, a place?" asked 'Lisha, turning the locket this way and that in the hope of finding more.

"It's a woman's name if I remember rightly, and I think I've met it in Mr. Plutarch's book or some history. The wife of one of the Cæsars or some one of importance. I'll look it up to-morrow. Anyway, the picture is done on ivory like the one of Miss Felton's mother that she wears in a brooch. Some said it was only made of tea-cup china, so one day, when she was waiting for me to weigh a package, I made bold to ask, and she said, 'No, Mr. Gilbert, it is painted on ivory and is a work of art.' So I judged only the well-to-do can lay claim to this sort, which carries out what I say, as I did before, the lady baby has been kidnapped. Now lets us turn in. You go in my room and I'll take the shake-down on the lounge and keep a watch on the lady baby."

'Lisha, pulling himself stiffly to his feet to obey, stumbled over the corner of the buffalo-robe that had been pushed under the table and remained unnoticed.

"I wonder if this thing has anything to tell on the subject," he said, spreading it wrong side up on the floor and scrutinizing the patched and faded lining slowly.

"Look here, Gilbert! Just look at that patch there in the northeast corner, that piece of felt with moon and star figgers on it! 'Long about Christmas, Dr. Morewood was up at the farm in a sleigh from the stable at Westboro, his own being in the shop for new irons. He'd throwd the robe over his horse, and it slipping off, it got trampled, so he asked mother to take a stitch in it. But the hole being big, she threw in a hasty patch made from the end of an old table cover that had been in our setting room since I was knee high to a toad. What you're looking at is that patch."

"You'd reckon the party that brought the child had a team from Beers's stable then," said Gilbert, now all eagerness. "If so, why didn't we hear the rumble of it on the ice, and how would they account for the robe when they got back?"

"As for the team, it might have been a sleigh with hushed bells; we fellows up our way often fix them like that when we want to take the girls out riding on the sly and the old folks asleep. As for their going back, yer running on too fast; that's to be found to-morrow. That we've got a clew right here's enough for you now. One o'clock! Great snakes! it's to-morrow right now, and me due up home to milk at six and you to pack up the first mail down. Say, Gilbert, don't you want me to stop at Mis' Pegrim's as I go up and hustle her down for the day until this child business is settled up? You'll have your hands overflowin', what with her and it and all the people that'll be in ponderin' and advisin'."

"Well," replied Gilbert, his hands working nervously, as he twisted and untwisted the long beard from which the lady baby had pulled the pin, "under the circumstances, I guess it'll be best, and I'd be obliged if you'd hook up and fetch her yourself. 'Tisn't necessary for her to stop and talk to every fence post on the way, either. As to the locket, that's most likely her mother's picture; we'll keep quiet about it, lest, being valuable, it's wrongly claimed."

Soon comfortable snores sounded from the inner room. Gilbert, wrapping a quilt about him, lay down upon the lounge without undressing. Sleep would not come; instead, scenes and people of long ago flitted through the room as across a stage; the wind from chimney, keyholes, and window-sash supplying speech. Presently the light of the old moon, that would loiter in the west until after sunrise, crept in the window through the geraniums and reaching out long fingers toward the cradle, seemed to Gilbert's burning eyes to draw it from him. Getting up, he looked at the child, rosy with sleep, still clasping Marygold's faded doll, turned the cradle once more into the shadow, and kneeling by it with his arms clasped over the hood, half thought, half whispered, "I can't tell how or why, only that a child is here, but if to make up for my home-staying, as he wrote, this is that other wrong for me to right at my own door,—I thank Thee, Lord!" Then quickening the dying fire, Gilbert finished his vigil before it in Mary's rocking-chair.