“You here, Little Bill!” she exclaimed on entering, “I am very glad to find you, for I have been alone all the morning. Everybody is away—in the fields, I suppose—and I don’t like being alone.”
“Was you ever in love, Elise?” asked the boy with a solemn countenance.
The girl laughed heartily, and blushed a little.
“What a strange question, Billie,” she said; “why do you ask?”
“Well, it’s not easy to explain all at once; but—but I want to know if you want to be married?”
Elise laughed again, and, then, becoming suddenly grave, asked seriously why Billie put such foolish questions.
“Because,” said Little Bill, slowly, and with an earnest look, “Jenkins is very anxious to know if you are fond of him, and he actually says that he’s afraid to ask you to marry him! Isn’t that funny? I said that even I would not be afraid to ask you, if I wanted you—How red you are, Elise! Have you been running?”
“O no,” replied the girl, sheltering herself under another laugh; “and what did he say to that?”
“He said a great many things. I will try to remember them. Let me see—he said: ‘I haven’t got the heart of a Mother Carey’s chicken,’—(he didn’t tell me who Mother Carey is, but that’s no matter, for it was only one of her chickens he was speaking of);—‘I could stand afore a broadside without winkin’,’—(I give you his very words, Elise, for I don’t quite understand them myself);—‘I could blow up a magazine,’ he went on, ‘or fight the French, as easy as I could eat my breakfast, a’most, but to ask a pure an’ beautiful angel like Elise’—yes, indeed, you needn’t shake your head; he said these very words exactly—‘a pure an’ beautiful angel like Elise to marry me, a common seaman, why, I hasn’t got it in me. Yet I’m so fond o’ that little gal that I’d strike my colours to her without firin’ a single shot.’ Now, do you understand all that, Elise? for I don’t understand the half of it.”
“O yes, I understand a good deal of it, though some of it is indeed puzzling, as you say. But how did you come to recollect it all so well, Little Bill?”