The gossip was usually kindly; sometimes it was captious, now and then it was almost malicious. Everything depends upon the medium through which the floating matter in the air is strained.
Cousin Molly Belle's best friends thought and said that she chose judiciously in marrying the clean-lived, high-minded gentleman who had loved her before she was grown and whom she loved dearly in return. Her next best friends intimated that the most popular girl in the county might have done better for herself than to take Frank Morton, as fine a fellow as ever lived, but whose share of his father's estate was a small plantation with a tolerable house upon it, a dozen "hands" and, maybe, a thousand dollars or so in bonds and stocks. The girls she had out-belled, the girls' mothers, and sundry youths to whom Mrs. Frank Morton had given the mitten in her singlehood, said openly that she had quite thrown herself away in settling down to house-keeping, poultry-raising, and home-making in an out-of-the-way farmstead, with little society except that of a man ten years older, and thirty years soberer, than herself.
What a different story I could have told to those who doubted, and those who pitied! Nowhere in all our broad and bonny State did human lives flow on more smoothly and radiantly than in the white house nestled under the great oak that was a landmark for miles around. It had but five rooms, kitchen, store-room, smoke-house, and other domestic offices being in detached buildings, as was the custom of the region and times. If there had been fifty they could not have held the happiness that streamed through the five as lavishly as the sunshine, and, like the sunshine, was newly made every day.
I was going on ten years old when my sweet mother gave a little sister to Bud and me. She had been with us but three days when Cousin Molly Belle drove over for me and the small hair trunk that meant a visit of several days when it went along. This time it signified four of the very loveliest weeks of my life, and two Adventures.
The blessèd grandchildren, at whose instance these tales of that all-so-long-ago are written with flying pen and brimming heart, and sometimes eyes so moist that the lines waver and swim upon the page, will have it—as their parents insisted before them—that "we never, never can have such good times and so many happenings as you had when you were new."
If I smile quietly in telling over to myself the simple elements and few, out of which the good times were made, and how tame the happenings would be to modern young folk, I cannot gainsay the truth that my daily life was full and rich, and that every hour had a peculiar interest.
For one thing, there was a baby at Oakholme, a bouncing boy, sturdy of limb and of lung, and so like both his parents in all the good qualities possible to a baby, as to leave nothing to be desired by the best friends aforesaid, and no room for criticism on the part of the malcontents. Out-of-doors were chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea-fowls, pigs, calves, pigeons, and a couple of colts,—all, like the baby boy, the best of their kind. What time was left on our hands after each had had its meed of attention, was more than consumed by a library such as few young planters had collected in a county where choice literature was as much household plenishing as beds, tables, and candlesticks.
It was July, and the days were at their longest according to the Warrock's Almanac that hung over Cousin Frank's desk in a corner of the dining room. They were never so short to me before.
Adventure No. 1 befell us one forenoon, as Cousin Molly Belle and I were topping and tailing gooseberries for tarts, on the side porch. Baby Carter was on the mat at our feet, bulging his eyes and swelling his cheeks in futile efforts to extort a squeak from a chinquapin whistle his father had made for him. The kind that, as you may recollect, kept the whistle in them over night, and did not shrivel up.
"It's there, old fellow, if you really know how to get it out," Cousin Frank told his son and heir. "Everything depends upon yourself."