He said, with a brief glance at the old gray stone building of the farmhouse, from whose mossy-tiled roof and small diamond-paned casements the reflected glow of the sky was fading fast:
“Good-by, old place! And if so-be as I must stick to soldiering all my life; I carry from you the two things a soldier needs the most,—supposing him a cavalryman!... a good horse and a sweet wife!”
Nelly’s tears broke forth at that, but the bright drops were more of joy than sorrow. She urged as he took the bridle, and told her to sit fast:
“You’re quite, quite sure you’ll never repent it?”
“As sure,” he said, walking with measured pace beside the now moving horse, and with a stern ignoring of the pale oval patch that showed against the darkness of the kitchen, above the muslin blind, “as that she will, come her dying day.... Why, I am damned if I’ll put up wi’ this!”
A nervous little shriek from Nelly, caused as much by the sudden appearance of the piggy man, starting up like a frowsy gnome or kobold under Blueberry’s very nose, as by the resulting swerve which had nearly unseated her, provoked the objurgation.
The kobold danced a dance of triumph, accompanying his saltatory exercises upon the voice; and the burden of his song was that the soger and his lass, who had said they were wedded and could produce no bit of scrawly paper to prove their tale true, had got the dirty kick-out, and he, Jason, was main glad of it, that he were!
Dealing separately with the feminine offender, duly visited by express judgment from the skies, for trifling with the affections of a piggy man, he reverted, as the incensed soldier strove to control the restive horse, and Nelly clung in terror to the saddle and Blueberry’s mane alternately, to a kind of recitative....
“She—be—an—Arr!”
Thus sang Jason, solemnly gamboling in the muck and litter, close to the edge of the oleaginous and strongly-smelling brown duck-pond previously described, which, reinforced by the oozings from many pigsties, and diluted by the melting of recent snows, filled the hollow it occupied to the very brim.