“Yes, yes, I’ll fix it; but, I thought, maybe, you’d have Aunt Eunice come over till your mother’s return. Women are gossipping things, and they’d’ talk if she was to live here alone with you. I tell you, she’s handsome; and if I’s you, I’d be a little good, that is, I wouldn’t walk the lots Sundays, but go to church instead.”
“I always do, sir,” and Hugh spoke quickly, for slowly, surely, Adah Hastings was influencing him for good, and more changes than one were already apparent in him.
“That’s right,” rejoined the colonel. “Going to church is well enough for them that like it, which I can’t say I do, but I’ll see her, I’ll meet her; I’ll tell her. Good-bye, my boy. Now, I think of it, you look mighty nigh sick. Your face is as red as a beetle, and eyes kind of blood shot. The very way my wife looked. Are you sick?”
“No, not sick, but this hot weather affects my head which feels much as if there were a snare-drum inside.”
“No, that ain’t the symptom. My wife’s felt like a bumble-bee’s nest. You are all right if you’ll take an emetic, a good big one, such as will turn your stomach inside out. Good-bye—Nelly’s awful sick. Struck to her brain last night. Good-bye. I wouldn’t lose Nell for a farm, if she is a little gritty,” and wringing Hugh’s hand, the colonel hurried off, leaving Hugh to his own reflections.
“A pretty state of things, and a pretty place to bring a young lady,” he muttered, glancing ruefully round the room, and enumerating the different articles he knew were out of place. “Fish-worms, fish-hooks, fish-lines, bootjack, boot-blacking, and rifle, to say nothing of the dogs—and ME!”
The last was said in a tone as if the me were the most objectionable part of the whole, as, indeed, Hugh thought it was.
“I wonder how I do look to persons wholly unprejudiced!” Hugh said, and turning to Muggins he asked what she thought of him.
“I thinks you berry nice. I likes you berry much,” the child replied, and Hugh continued, “Yes; but how do I look, I mean? What do I look like, a dandy or a scarecrow?”
Muggins regarded him for a moment curiously, and then replied, “I’se dunno what kind of thing that dandy is, but I ’members dat yer scarecrow what Claib make out of mars’r’s trouses and coat, an’ put up in de cherry tree. I thinks dat look like Mas’r Hugh—yes, very much like!”