“If I were good enough, I think I could.”
And I says, “Cicely, you are goin' to take cold, with nothin' round your shoulders.” Says I, “The weather is very ketchin', and it looks to me as if we wus goin' to have quite a spell of it.”
And the boy overheard me, and asked me 75 questions about ketchin' the weather.
“If the weather set a trap? If it ketched with bait, or with a hook, and what it ketched? and how? and who?”
Oh my stars! what a time I did have!
The next mornin' after this Cicely wuzn't well enough to get up. I carried up her breakfast with my own hands,—a good one, though I am fur from bein' the one that ort to say it.
And after breakfast, along in the forenoon, Martha, who was makin' my dress, felt troubled in mind as to whether she had better cut the polenay kitrin' ways of the cloth, or not: and Miss Gowdey had jest had one made in the height of the fashion, to Jonesville; and so to ease Martha's mind (she is one that gets deprested easy, when weighty subjects are pressin' her down), I said I would run over cross-lots, and carry home a drawin' of tea I had borrowed, and look at the polenay, and bring back tidin's from it. And I wus goin' there acrost the orchard, when I see the boy a layin' on his back under a apple-tree, lookin' up into the sky; and says I,—
“What be you doin' here, Paul?”
He never got up, nor moved a mite. That is one of the peculiarities of the boy, you can't surprise him: nothin' seems to startle him.
He lay still, and spoke out for all the world as if I had been there with him all day.