I believed her literally. I saw daylight for my injured friend, and immediately set forth to find him. He was sitting alone under the trees, on the lawn, and welcomed the little girl tripping over the grass to keep him company. On his knee I eagerly gave him my delightful news, and saw his face illumined by it. I was perfectly happy—and so, he assured me, was he!
That evening my aunt observed an unwonted excitement in my face and manner—and after feeling my pulse and hot cheeks decided I was better off in bed, and sent me to my room, which happened to be in a distant part of the house. To reach it I had to go through a long, narrow, dark hall. I always traversed this hall at night with bated breath. Tiny doors were let into the wall near the floor, opening into small apertures then known by the obsolescent name of "cuddies." I was afraid to pass them. So far from the family, nobody would hear me if I screamed. Suppose something were to jump out at me from those cuddies!
In the middle of this fearsome place I heard quick steps behind. Before I could run or scream, strong fingers gripped my shoulders and shook me, and a fierce whisper hissed in my ear—"You little devil!"
It was the poetess—the lady who wrote verses on the moon! "Old True" had suffered no grass to grow under his feet!
He left early next morning and so did we—my aunt perceiving that the excitement of the gay house-party was not good for me.
I learned there were other things besides hot roast apples to be avoided. Fingers might be burned by meddling with people's love affairs.
We were not the only guests who left the hospitable, gay, noisy, sleep-forbidding house. Our host had an eccentric sister whom we all addressed as "Cousin Betsey Michie," and who had left her own home expressly to spend a few weeks here with my aunt, to whom she was much attached. When "Cousin Betsey" discovered our intended departure, she ordered her maid "Liddy" to pack her trunk,—a little nail-studded box covered with goatskin,—and insisted upon claiming us as her guests for the rest of the season.
"Cousin Betsey" was to me a terrible old lady,—large, masculine, "hard-favored," and with a wart on her chin. I wondered what I should do, were she ever to kiss me,—which she never did,—and had made up my mind to keep away from her as far as possible. I owed her nothing, I reasoned, as she was not really my cousin. She used strong language, and was intolerant of all the singing, dancing, and midnight rides of the young people. Her room was immediately beneath mine. But the night before, lying awake after my startling interview with the poetess, I had heard the galloping horses of the party returning from a midnight visit to "Edgeworth," and the harsh voice of Cousin Betsey calling to her sister: "Maria, Maria! Don't you dare get out of bed to give those scamps supper—a passel of ramfisticated villains, cavorting all over the country like wild Indians."
A peal of musical laughter, and "Oh, Cousin Betsey!" was the answer of a merry horsewoman below.
As we heard much about Johnsonian English from Cousin Betsey, it was reasonable to suppose, my aunt thought, that the startling word was classic.