“And why do you ask me that, Jacob Creecy? You know as well as I do where she is. She’s down in the meadow.”
“And where’s Mell?”
“Down there, too. They ain’t nobody else to keep Sukey out the corn.”
“Ain’t, hey? Ha! ha! ha! That’s all you know about it! Where does you keep your senses, anyhow, Alvirey? Out o’ doors? Because, I ain’t never had the good luck to find any of ’em at home, yet, as often as I’ve called! This very minute there’s somebody else down in the meadow long side o’ Mell.”
“Why, who, Jacob? Who can it be?”
“You wouldn’t guess in a month o’ Sundays, Alvirey. Not you! Guessing to the point ain’t in your line. It’s that chap what’s staying over at the Guv’ner’s, who looks like he had the title-deeds of the American continent stuffed loose in his vest-pocket.”
“You don’t say so! Lor’! Jacob, what does he want down there with Mell?”
“What does he want? If you had a single grain of sense, Alvirey, you’d know without any telling. He wants to make a fool of her! That’s what a man generally has in view when he runs after a woman. But, I am a thinking, that chap won’t make no fool out of Mell, for Mell’s got a long head, like her old daddy, and a tongue of learning to back it! Just you keep on a saying nothing. You never missed getting things into a mess yet, as I knows on, ’cept when you let ’em alone. I’ll shut down on him right away, and then I’ll be blarsted if Mell can’t take care of herself! Don’t be nowise uneasy, Alvirey. Mell takes after her old dad.”
Alvirey did not return immediately to her churning. She craned her neck and got on her tiptoes, and gazed curiously after her husband as his stout figure rolled heavily to the edge of the breezy woodland, and thence 253 beyond to the newly cleared grounds, and onward still to that narrow path among the pines, whose turf-margined and daisy-dotted track was a covert way to the meadow. Presently, through its mazy windings and the medium of a hazy summer atmosphere, Mr. Creecy came in sight of a youthful Jersey, sedately cropping some tender blades of grass on the enticing borderland of a promising cornfield, and a young girl not far away seated on an old stump in a shady nook under a clump of trees. Her costume consisted principally of an airy muslin frock, nebulous in figure, and falling about her in simple folds, and a white sun-bonnet, which was a bonnet and something more—to be explicit, an artistic elaboration of tucks and puffs and piled-on embroideries, beneath which peeped forth a face as prodigal of blooming sweets as a basket heaped with spring flowers.
At her feet lounged in careless fashion a young man. He was lithe and straight, and had that striking cast of countenance which catches the observant eye on first sight. This look of distinction, which in him was as marked in form as in feature, has been called, not inaptly, thoroughbredness. A self-made man never has it. All that a man may do will not put it upon himself, but his son possesses it as an heritage.