My mother had lamented that I took life so much to heart. It took itself to my heart now, uninvited. I was headstrong and headlong, hot in love, and honest in hatred; with a brain full of absurd fancies, all of which were beloved by their author. I had browsed at will in my father's library, poring by the hour over books twenty years too old for me, yet, by mental cuticular absorption, taking in and assimilating much that contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent references to characters I had known in print, were gibberish and vanity of vanities to my new associates. My very plays were unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, and Christiana and her children.
Not one of the four had an intellectual ambition. Mary 'Liza's scholarship did not excite their envy because she was quiet and inoffensive. Proficiency in her studies was "one of her ways." I was talkative and aggressive, and needed taking down. They set themselves systematically about the performance of the duty. The work was done deftly and discreetly, out of the sight and hearing of our elders. Young and raw as I was, I was too wise to tell tales on them. By the time I was four years old that lesson was rubbed into my consciousness by the gruesome rhyme:—
"Tell-tale tit!
Your tongue shall be slit,
And every dog in our town
Shall have a little bit!"
This apparently tedious preamble yet leads by an air-line to the first Agricultural Fair ever held at Powhatan Court House. The date was October fifteenth, and all the gentlemen and ladies in the county were entreated to send exhibits of plantation products and feminine handiwork. Enthusiasm ran from homestead to homestead with the speed and heat of a March fire in pine woods. Cattle, tobacco, grain, vegetables, fruit, flowers, bedquilts, poultry, bees, knitting, embroideries,—nothing was talked of but the finest specimens of these that would be "in strong and beauteous order ranged," upon the important day.
Madeline Pemberton had "done" a chair-cover in cross-stitch that her mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of shell-pattern, openwork stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there would not be a knot or a dropped stitch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing and embroidery were taught by governesses then. Sarah Hobson had pieced a crib quilt containing one thousand and twelve tiny squares. I was supposed to be left out in the cold. I would not knit, and to sew I was ashamed because I did it so badly. Nobody paid any attention to me when comparing notes and queries touching the great show.
Yet I nursed an ambition of my own to which no one was privy except Spotswoode, a gray-headed, and proverbially taciturn field-hand, without whose knowledge and coöperation the purpose could not have been carried out.
Wandering, one July afternoon, on the outskirts of a corn-field—the same in which I once lost Musidora—I happened upon a "volunteer" mangel-wurzel beet that had sprung up in a fence corner, a quarter of a mile away from any of its kindred. Attracted by the beauty of the translucent, red-veined leaves, I called to Spotswoode who was ploughing between the corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif, then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling tuber by my kind field-hand. He knew that it was to be sent to the Fair in the fulness of time, and believed with me that "not another beet there could hold a candle to it."
As the air thickened and heated with rumors of the prodigies to be revealed on the fifteenth to the lasting honor of Old Powhatan, it was harder and harder to keep what I knew to myself. I had purposed not to reveal the secret until my father's wagons were in loading with other mammoth esculents and his finest corn and tobacco. Then—so ran the programme—I would march up, bearing my beet with me. It was to be dug up and cleaned by Spotswoode on the evening of the fourteenth, and kept safely in hiding for me. I could depend upon his literal obedience, albeit he never had an original idea.
Temptation befell, and overcame me, on the afternoon of October thirteenth, a date I was not likely, thenceforward, to forget. All six of us girls were gathered in the porch, listening to, and relating, stories of what this one had raised, and that one had made. Mr. Pemberton had a seven-hundred-pound pig, and Mr. Hobson a rooster more beautiful than a bird of Paradise. The syrup of Mrs. Hobson's preserves was as clear as spring water, and Mrs. Pemberton's water melon-rind sweetmeats had as good as taken the prize.
Paulina Hobson sat on the top step of the porch. She was very fair, and her hair was nearly as white as her skin. She was fourteen years old, and wore a grass-green lawn frock. Her eyes were of a paler green, she had a nasty laugh, and her teeth were not good.