'Star, Star, good and bright,
I wish you may and I wish you might
Bring somebody to me I want to see to-night.'
"If she said that twice, looking straight down the road, she told us we were sure to come. She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl when Master Fred brought her to be mistress here, though you mightn't think it to see her now, what with the cooking and the dairy-work and raising a big family of children. But if you want to know what mistress was like twenty years ago, you've only to look at our Ada.
"Now, there's a girl for you, as good as she is pretty, and getting to be a woman grown; though I remember, as though it happened yesterday, her mother's coming out one spring day to where I was nibbling grass in the door-yard, with her baby in her arms, and holding up the little thing to me, and saying, 'This is Ada, Star,—you must be good friends with Ada,' Friends! I should say so. Before that child was a year old, she used to cry to be held on my back for a ride, and when she was getting better of the scarlet fever, she kept saying, 'Me 'ant to tee ole 'Tar,' till, to pacify her, they led me to the open window of the room where she lay, and she reached her mite of a hand from the bed to stroke my nose and give me the lump of sugar she had saved for me under her pillow.
"Bless the child! And it was just so with all the rest, Tim and Martha and Fred and Jenny and baby May—there was a new baby in that house every year. Those young ones would crawl over me, and sit on me, when I was lying down in the stable; ride me, three or four at a time, without bridle or saddle, and cling to my neck and tail when there was no room left on my back. They shared their apples and gingerbread with me, and brought me goodies on a plate sometimes so that I might eat my dinner, they said, 'like the rest of the folks,' I fetched them to and from school, and trotted every day to the post-office and the Corners to do the family errands; and when our Ada was old enough to be trusted to drive, the whole lot of them would pile into the carryall, and away we would go for a long ride, through the lanes and the shady woods that border the pond, stopping a dozen times for the girls to clamber out and pick the wild posies and for the boys to skip stones or wade in the water. For I was in no hurry to go on. There was plenty of tender grass to be cropped by the roadside, and the young leaves of the maples and white birch were sweet and juicy.
"'Take good care of them, Star,' mistress used to say, standing in the door-way to see us off; 'you have a precious load, but we trust you, kind, faithful old friend,'
"And so she might. I knew I must just creep down the hills with those children behind me, and never stop for a drink at Rocky Brook, though I were ever so thirsty, because of the sharp pitch down to the watering-trough. And though from having been scared nearly to death, when I was a colt, by a wheelbarrow in the road, I always have to shy a little when I see one, our Ada will tell you, if you ask her, that in the circumstances, I behaved very well.
"She behaved well. She always chose the well-traveled roads, and gave me plenty of room to turn. Once, I remember, they all wanted to take a short cut by way of an old corduroy road; and though, if master had been driving, I should have made no objection, and, as like as not, with a little jolting and pitching, we should have got safe over, I didn't feel like taking the responsibility, with all those young ones along, of going that way; so I tried to make our Ada understand the state of my mind, and after a while she did; for she said: 'Well, Star, if you don't want to draw us over those logs, I'm not going to make you,' Now, wasn't that sensible?
"Well, if I was proud and happy to be trusted with master's family on week-days, think how I must have felt of a Sunday morning in the summer time, with mistress dressed in her silk gown, and our Ada in muslin and pink ribbons, and the boys in their best clothes, and master riding along-side on Tom or Jerry, all going to meeting together. I liked hearing the bells ring, and I liked being hitched under the maple-trees, with all the neighbors' horses to keep me company. We generally dozed while the folks were indoors, and woke up brisk and lively, and started for home in procession.
"But, dear! dear! there came a time when, with five horses on the farm, not one could be had to give the children a ride or to do a stroke of work, when master had to foot it to the Corners, and the two steers, Old Poke and Eyebright, dragged mistress and the children to meeting in the ox-cart.
"For we were all down with the epizoötic, coughing and sneezing enough to take our heads off, and so sick and low, some of us, that we couldn't stand in our stalls, and a man with a red face, Master Fred had over from Skipton Mills, pouring nasty stuff down our throats, and making us swallow big black balls of medicine that hurt as they went down—as if we hadn't enough to suffer before! But our Jenny came to the stable with a piece of pork-rind, and a bandage she'd made out of her little red-flannel petticoat, and she wanted Master Fred to put it on my neck; for, says she: 'That's what ma put on me when I had the sore throat,'—the blessed child!