CHAPTER II.
A MOTE IN THE EYE.
In Pompeii, eighteen hundred years ago, people—a good many people, were dreadfully afraid of dogs; so much so that many of the householders in that famous old city put Cave Canem on their front-door-sills, as a friendly piece of advice to all comers-in and goers-out. Just how their feelings were affected towards the domestic cow, we are left to conjecture; but now, after eighteen hundred years, and in less famous localities, people—a good many people—are still afraid of dogs, and without a nice sense of discernment in their fears, include cows, putting the two together as beasts that want “discourse of reason.”
Now, this is unrighteous judgment; for even a cow should be looked at fairly, even if she does show the cloven hoof. There are cows and cows, as well as men and men. Suke, the young Jersey, would not toss her horns at a butterfly, much less hurt a baby. She was sagacity itself, and granting she did not know the buttered side of bread, which is likely, she did know, to a moral certainty, where she got her grass and how.
Early the next morn, Suke began to low, and hoping to be heard by virtue of insistence, kept it up until nightfall, by which time she had bellowed herself hoarse. Suke could make nothing out of it, and no doubt dropped to sleep, theorizing on the perversity of remote contingencies, and wondering why it was that she had spent all the long hours of that breezy summer day in the lot, and the companion of her outings in the house.
The late afternoon found Mell in dainty attire, seated on the front porch, gazing wistfully in the direction of the Bigge House. He had not found her in the meadow in the morning, perhaps, he would seek for her in the little house on the hill, in the evening. It could not be that he had avoided paying her any attention that could be noticed by others; she had sometimes thought so, but then it could not be. She dismissed the idea; it was too uncomplimentary to herself, and too defamatory towards him.
But the slow hours dragged on; he came not. Mell sat alone. At ten o’clock she crept sadly into bed—into bed, but not into the profound slumber of youth and a mind at ease. Far into the night, her unquiet thoughts were yet heaving to and fro; advancing as restless billows of the sea, retreating as vaporous cloud-mists in the sky. Her snow-white bed—a feathered nest—erst so well suited to light-hearted repose, had changed its flexible lines of comfort into rigid lines of care.
Dropping to sleep at last, Mell dreamed she had made the world all over, from pole to pole, after a new model and on a modern plan, and having fitted it up expressly for her own needs, found it ever so much pleasanter, and a great improvement on the old.
It was upon the same old world, however, she opened her eyes the next morning, and into one of its most worrying days, holding, indeed, more than its share of disappointment and worry.
But when the third day was drawing to its weary close, and her longing 259 heart longed still unsatisfied, existence had become a burden almost insupportable to poor Mell. For the third time she donned her prettiest dress. He must come to-day. Out again upon the little porch, with a book in her hand, and trying to read, Mell was oppressed with a sense of extreme isolation, a wasting famine of the heart, a parching thirst of the eye. In her despairing loneliness, incapable of any other occupation, she scanned eagerly every passer by; brooded deeply on many passing thoughts. This lonely waiting, in a small waste corner of the great wide universe, for a girl of Mell’s ambitious turn of mind, was, in truth, hard. It was lowest pauperism to her panting spirit—panting to achieve not little things but great. Humble strife in a little world, amid work-a-day environment, and among everyday people, had no charms for Mell. Such living was, in a word, unbearable.
And over there across that beauteous valley, in the enchanted halls of the unattainable, life was a delightful series of interesting events, redolent of delicate sentiments and sweet-smelling savors, spiced with novelty, brimful of pleasure, amusing, absorbing, far-reaching, all-embracing; in brief, a ceaseless symposium, purged of every ugly, common or narrow element, as roseate and as captivating to the fancy, as hand-painted satin framed in mosaic.