"Forgive me! I'm not really laughing—it's just a form—form of the Peckerwood's nature-worship," he answered as he took my hand in his warm one for a second. "Let's go finish up with old sheep mother," he added as he began to pad swiftly away up the path, drawing me after him.
"Yes, I am growing inside," I assured myself as I for the second night fell asleep on the soft bosom of my family tradition of four posts.
One of the most bromidic performances that human beings indulge in anywhere from their thirty-fifth to eightieth years is to sigh, look wise, and make this remark: "If I could only begin life over again, knowing what I do now!"
I'm never going to be impressed by that again, and I'm going to answer straight out from the shoulder, "Well, it would be a great strain to you if you found yourself doing it."
That was about what my entry into life at Elmnest, Riverfield, Harpeth, was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just having been sprouted off the cosmic. I know what I mean, but it doesn't sound as if I did. This is the way most of it happened to me in my first six weeks of life in the rustic.
How did I know that when you cleaned up a house that hadn't been cleaned up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to that realization for a sunshiny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning ceremony had been first observed? Just how were the ability to speak French in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addcock's mind as a barbarian?
"Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and help you beat and sun the beds the first sunshiny day and then turn to with our buckets and mops and brooms. Now you've gone and done the wrong thing by all this polishing before a single bed had been beat and aired." As she spoke Mrs. Addcock surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking moment of my muscular strength, assisted by Polly Corn-tassel and sometimes Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on invading the horrors of his kitchen.
"Oh, my dear Mrs. Addcock, won't you and Mrs. Tillett please forgive me for being so ignorant and help me do it to-day?" I pleaded as I picked up a small Tillett, who was peeping soft wooing at me from where he balanced himself on uncertain and chubby legs against his mother's skirts.
"Well, in this case there is just nothing else to do, but turn to on the beds now, wrong end first, but next year you'll know," she answered me with indulgent compromise in her voice. "And I guess we'll find some broom and mop work yet to be done. Come on, Mrs. Tillett. I guess Nancy can mind the baby all right while we work."
"Oh, he ain't no trouble now except he wants to find out all about the world by tasting of it. Don't let him eat a worm or sech, and he'll be all right," answered the beaming young mother of the toddler. "And, Miss Nancy, I was jest going to tell you that I have got a nice pattern of a plain kind of work dress if you would like to use it," she added as she pointedly did not look at my peasant's smock that hung in such lovely long lines that I found myself pausing much too often before one of the mirrors in the big living-room to admire them. Mrs. Tillett's utility costume was of blue checked gingham and had no lines at all except top and bottom, with a belt in between. Both ladies wore huge gingham aprons, and I must say that they looked like the utility branch of the feminine species while I may have resembled the ornamental. But they were dear neighbors, and the Tillett baby and I had a very busy and happy day with the Golden Bird and his busy family while the two missionaries did over every bed in Elmnest, even invading the living-room and shaking out the cushions of the old couch in the very face of one of the charges of Xerxes' army. I put his babykins in a big feed-basket in a nest of hay, and the two lamb twins came and licked him every now and then by way of welcome into my barn nursery. The fine young sheep mother was now in blooming health, and the valuable progeny were growing by the hours, most of which they spent at the maternal fount, opposite each other and both small tails going like a new variety of speedometer.