The acquiescent nip which Rilla gave Infant took up a world of forgiveness which Rilla never felt.
“And do you think, dear,” Infant ventured, “we’ll ever wish we hadn’t? We’ve lived so long with each other. Truman Condit and Brother Sanderson are really strangers to our ways.”
“I think,” replied Rilla, with decision, “that Brother Sanderson will never have a rose day while he lives on my farm; and when I say it is soap-boiling day it will be soap-boiling day, and Brother Sanderson will stir the soap.”
KENTUCKY
A KENTUCKY PRINCESS
Time, 1857
The perfection of summer noon, when acres of corn tassels seemed in a trance and the blueness of far-off hills suggested incense rising, was not without its effect on Miss Sally Vandewater as she rode toward General Poynton’s plantation. The turnpike, stretching its ash-colored ribbon across the greenness of the country, rang like a causeway of rock to the beat of horseshoes.
From this plantation or from that, as hill or sweep of woodland revealed them, shone marble stones in family burial lots.
Occasionally Miss Sally met girls or young men on dashing horses, and these merry people saluted her cordially in passing. But in all that blue-grass region, where each member of every comfortable family had his own gaited saddle-horse, there was not a finer animal than Miss Sally’s Pacer. Cæsar and his fortune were aboard when she mounted. Pacer was her entire capital in life, carrying her on visits among good families whereby she subsisted, and furnishing colts for her pin-money. The camel is not more to the Bedouin. Had Pacer failed Miss Sally in any point, she must have fallen into the straits of a reduced gentlewoman, instead of carrying a high head through all the best houses of the county.
She rode at a steady hand gallop through the sultry day, though a young colt whinnied behind her; increasing her speed past one pillared brick house set far up an avenue. The woods about it were close trimmed and free from underbrush, like all Kentucky woodland. Some evergreens made gloom about its eaves, but not such gloom as the reputation of the house itself. There lived a man who was said to have a chain stretched across his cellar. He bought up slaves and handcuffed them in pairs along this chain until he was ready to drive them to market, when a band of musicians was employed to lead their march, cheerfully playing “Yankee Doodle.” The house was worse than haunted. Both whites and blacks hurried past its handsome gate with abhorrence—spot of mystery and abomination on those pleasant corn lands.