“Mom, you needn’t be afraid, my pardner wouldn’t hurt a hair of your head.”
She didn’t move a mite, but jest held her clothes, what she had on, round her, and looked at me kinder skairt. And I spoke up some louder, thinkin’ mebby she wuz deef; sez I—
“He is a deacon in the Jonesville meetin’-house, mom, and though fraxious a good deal of the time, a likely man.”
But jest at this junkter Martin come up behind me, and told me that it wuz a picter. I wuz dumbfoundered, but so it wuz. The artist, Wiertz by name, made quite a number considerable like it; dretful curous and surprisin’, but it is a sight to see ’em.
The meetin’-house of St. Gudale, with its stained glass winders, wuz extremely interestin’ to see; it is most a thousand years old, but no one would mistrust it. It looks fur better than our meetin’-house, that hain’t over fourteen years old, if it is that. But, then, it cost more.
Martin and Josiah and Al Faizi driv out to see the battlefield of Waterloo, only about six milds away. They went in a English coach with a half a dozen horses, and a bugle a-caracolin’ high and clear. I never see Josiah in better sperits.
I would have gone, too, but Alice wuzn’t well, nor Adrian nuther, and I stayed with ’em; and I wuz glad of a chance to rest my lower legs.
I spoze they had a number of emotions as they stood on that field where the Star of Austerlitz sot. I did, where I wuz a-layin’ down or a-settin’ to home. Truly to a feelin’ heart, who contemplates what high ambitions tottled over that day, and what powerful interests wuz involved, they may say truly that they carry the battlefield of Waterloo in their hearts.
I thought on’t a sight. I had read what Victor Hugo said about that battle, and Alfred Tennyson and others had said about the Duke of Wellington, a-praisin’ him up, and I had numerous feelin’s and emotions, very powerful ones, indeed, very; but I took good care of the children all the same.
There wuz one place in Brussels that I wanted to see as much as any other place I could look on offen my tower, and that wuz where Charlotte Brontë had spent those years, those quiet but dretful tragic years of her life.