"This is fine," he kept saying to himself, "the boy knew what was best," and he smiled more than once over at Jasper, who was pointing out this and that to Polly. Jasper nodded back again.
"Don't let him bother you to see everything, Polly," called Grandpapa. "Take my advice—it's a nuisance to try to compass the whole place on the first visit." But Polly laughed back, and the advice went over her head, as he very well knew it would.
"Was anything ever more beautiful?" exclaimed Mother Fisher, drawing in long breaths of delight. The little doctor leaned back in his seat, and beamed at her over his big glasses. She began to look rested and young already. "This journey is the very thing," he declared to himself, and his hard-worked hand slipped itself over her toil-worn one as it lay on her lap. She turned to him with a smile.
"Adoniram, I never imagined anything like this," she said simply.
"No more did I," he answered. "That's the good of our coming, wife."
"Just see those beautiful green trees, so soft and trembling," she exclaimed, as enthusiastically as Polly herself. "And what a perfect arch!" And she bent forward to glance down the shaded avenue. "Oh, Adoniram!"
"What makes the trunks look so green?" Polly was crying as they rumbled along. "See, Jasper, there isn't a brown branch, even. Everything is green."
"That's what makes it so pretty," said Jasper. "I don't wonder these oaks in the Scheveningsche Boschjes—O dear me, I don't know how to pronounce it in the least—are so celebrated."
"Don't try," said Polly, "to pronounce it, Jasper. I just mark things in my Baedeker and let it go."
"Our Baedekers will be a sight when we get home, won't they, Polly?" remarked Jasper, in a pause, when eyes had been busy to their utmost capacity.