“Bless the boy, he goes so fast that the flies are blown away before they have a chance to get in,” she would say after one of his raids, as she put the netting back and picked up the books and papers, and sometimes things of more value which Sherry’s bushy tail had brushed from the table in his rapid transit through her rooms. Neither Paul nor Sherry could do wrong, and she waited anxiously for his coming to Oak City in the summer, and said good-bye to him with a lump in her throat when he went away.
Once by special invitation she spent a week with the Ralstons in Boston. “The tiredest week she ever knew,” she said to Mrs. Atwater after her return. “Kept me on the go all the time,—to Bunker Hill Monument, up which I clum every step,—then to Mt. Auburn and Harvard, where Paul is to go to college; then to the Old South Church, and the Picture Gallery, and if you’ll b’lieve it,” she added in a whisper, “they wanted me to go to a play at the Boston Museum Theatre, where they said everybody went, church members and all.”
“I hope you resisted,” Mrs. Atwater said in an awful tone of voice.
“No, I didn’t. I went,” Miss Hansford replied. “’Twas ‘Uncle Tom’ they played, and I was that silly that I cried when little Eva died, and I wanted to kill Legree. ’Twas wrong, I know, and I mean to confess it next class meetin’.”
“You or’to,” Mrs. Atwater said, with a great deal of dignity as she left the house.
Miss Hansford did confess it in a speech so long and so descriptive of the play that the people sitting in judgment upon her forgot their censure in the interest with which they listened to her.
“I’ve made a clean breast of it, and you can do what you like,” she said, as she finished and sat down.
They did nothing except to express disapproval of such things in general and to hope the offense would not be repeated, as it was a bad example for the young when a woman of her high religious principles went to a theatre. Paul, who happened to be in Oak City, was sitting by her, his face a study as he listened to what was a revelation to him. In a way they were censuring Miss Hansford, and just before the close of the meeting he startled them all by rising to his feet and saying: “You needn’t blame her. I teased her to go, and it isn’t wicked either to see ‘Uncle Tom.’ Everybody goes,—father and mother and everybody,—and they are good and pray every day.”
No one could repress a smile at the fearlessness of the boy in defending Miss Hansford, whose eyes were moist as she laid her hand on his head and whispered: “Hush, Paul; you musn’t speak in meeting.”
“Why not?” he answered aloud. “The rest do, and I’m going to stand up for you through thick and thin.”