And lots of times I gladly, gladly stayed to home with Adrian while Alice went out with her Pa. She would say so sweetly that it wuz too bad to deprive me of the pleasure of goin’ out with her Pa.
And I would say, “Don’t mention it, Alice; I am perfectly willin’ to stay to home with Adrian.” And Heaven knows I spoke the truth!
She would come home, the horses covered with sweat, and Martin and herself all fagged out; but the fagness of 20 hain’t like the fagness of——more maturer and older years.
And in the mornin’ she’d be ready for another start.
Of course some of the excursions I gladly jined in. I wuz glad enough to go to see Holyrood Palace, once the home of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots—Miss Darnley, she that wuz Stuart.
The most interestin’ queen that ever walked down the pages of history. A-walkin’ along with her big, soft eyes bent kinder downwards under that cap of hern, and her sweet face a-drawin’ men’s hearts out of their bodies to foller her to the throne, or the scaffold, as she trod onwards. Heaven pity her for her sorrow! If she wuz true or false, she atoned for her sin, poor thing! by the hardness of her fate.
Poor Mary! poor Miss Stuart that wuz! I wuz always sorry for her, and I always believed her cousin Lizabeth wuz jealous of her.
You know Lib wuzn’t very good-lookin’, and she wuz as vain as a pea-hen, and it gaulded her to have her cousin praised up so to her.
Relations are dretful mean sometimes, they’re dretful jealous of each other—cousins specially; and though they don’t make a practice of beheadin’ the ones they are jealous of, yet they stab ’em with the sharp, pizened daggers of detraction, lies, hatred, envy, mean insinuations, total incomprehension of their motives, etc., etc., etc.
So if you have to live nigh ’em, you might jest about as well have your head cut off, and done with it.