September 23. And my Age still going Sixteen.
It was the week before Hugh John went to college that what I am going to tell took place. September is almost always nice about Edam—with the corn standing white in stooks all down the valley, waving blonde half-way up the sides of the wide glen, and looking over into it from the heights of Kingside still as green as grass. Yes, in our part September is wonderfully quiet and windless—generally, that is. Yet withal, there is the stir of harvest about the farm-town, the merry whirr of the "reaper" over the hedge, and always the clatter of voices as the workers go homeward in the twilight. The big scythe is now only used about our house for "opening up" a field. After that the horses pull the red-and-blue "McCormick" round as neatly as a toy. The squares get less and the yellow stooks rise, as it were, out of the very ground.
This year it was a specially gay time for us all. Mr. Ex-Butcher Donnan had more customers. His wife had taken a laboratory assistant in the shape of an apple-cheeked lass, Meg Linwood, the daughter of the station-master at Bridge of Edam—honest as the day, but at first incapable in the kitchen as a crossing-sweeper of goldsmith work.
Mrs. Donnan told me of Meg's iniquities in her frank impulsive Irish way.
"There's not a thing breakable the craitur has not broke, or at least tried her best to break. And what she can't knock to flinders with one skelp, she will fall over like an applelaunche (avalanche?) and rowl out flat like so much sheet lead. I dare not show the master the tenth of her breakages, or there would be bloodshed and wounds. And yet she is the honest, well-meaning craitur too, and would not hurt a fly. Only it is the heaven's pity she has no power of her feet! Hear to that now!"
Poor Mrs. Donnan ought, of course, to have remained unmoved where she was and entertained me with a stomach-aching smile so long as I chose to stay. But, being an Irishwoman and natural, she sprang up and ran forthwith into the kitchen.
She came out with tears in her eyes.
"It's the épergne," she said, "I might have known it. The green figs is just come in, and as they are a new thing in Edam I thought to make a kind of trophy out of them. And now——!"
Mrs. Donnan's motherly eyes overflowed, good, kindly soul, without very much anger at the breaker, but with real grief for the loss of the "trophy" she had counted upon to display in her plate-glass shop window.
I patted her on one plump shoulder, and she murmured my undeserved praises—undeserved, I mean, at that moment. But I had remembered that there was in our china-closet at home a huge épergne of many storys, which Somebody had taken a prejudice against, because when loaded it shut off the entire view of the people at table, and they played at "Bo-peep" all the time around it and about—all right for us little ones who, unseen, could convey extra fruits and comfits to our plates, but abhorred by Somebody who was thus prevented from keeping a kindly, governing eye upon us. So the tall épergne was banished—a life sentence firmly expressed.