The fear of ridicule was strong in my heart, but other and more powerful feelings were beating there. My visiters were vulgar but honest people, and I could not treat them coldly while the sweet impulses and affectionate associations their coming had given rise to were swarming in my bosom. They might be rude, but had they not lately trod the places of my childhood? Their faces were coarse and inanimate, but they were familiar ones, and as such I welcomed them; for they brought to my heart sweet thoughts of a happy home. I went forward and shook hands with them all, notwithstanding a glimpse I caught of Maria as she paused on the stairs, her roguish eyes absolutely laughing with merriment as she witnessed the scene.
An hour went by, and the Johnsons were still sitting in Colonel M.’s hall. I had gained all the information regarding my friends which they could communicate. It was drawing near the dinner hour, and, in truth, I had become exceedingly anxious for my visiters to depart. But there sat Mrs. Johnson emitting a continued current of very small talk about her currant bushes, her luck in making soap, and the very distressing mortality that had existed among her chickens—she became pathetic on this subject—six of her most promising fledglings had perished under an old cart during a thunder-storm, and as many goslings had been dragged lifeless from her husband’s mill-dam, where they had insisted upon swimming before they were sufficiently fledged. The account was very touching; peculiarly so from a solemn moral which Mrs. J. contrived to deduct from the sad and untimely fate of her poultry—which moral, according to the best of my memory, was, that if the chickens had obeyed their mother and kept under the parent wing, the rain had not killed them, and if the goslings had not put forth their swimming propensities too early, they might, that blessed moment, have been enjoying the coolness of the mill-dam in all the downy majesty of half-grown geese. Mrs. Johnson stopped the hundredth part of a second to take breath and branched off into a dissertation on the evils of disobedience in general, and the forwardness and docility of her two boys in particular. Then, drawing all her interesting topics to a focus, she took boys, geese, chickens, currant bushes, &c., &c., and bore them rapidly onward in the stream of her inveterate loquacity. One might as well have attempted to pour back the waters rushing from her husband’s mill-dam, when the flood-gates were up, as to check the motion of her unmanageable tongue. The clatter of his whole flour establishment must have been a poetical sound compared to the incessant din of meaningless words that rolled from it. Another good hour passed away, and the volubility of that tongue was increasing, while my politeness and patience, it must be owned, were decreasing in an exact ratio.
Maria had dressed for dinner, and I caught a glimpse of her bright face peeping roguishly over the banisters. Mrs. M. came into the hall, looked gravely toward us, and walked into the garden with a step rather more dignified than usual.
“Dear me, is that the lady you are staying with?” said Mrs. Johnson, cutting short the thread of her discourse, “how sorry I am that I didn’t ask her how she did, she must think we country people hav’n’t got no bringing up.”
Without replying to Mrs. Johnson, I seized the opportunity to inquire at what house they stayed, and innocently proposed calling on them after dinner.
“Oh,” said the little man, with a most insinuating smile, “we calculate to put up with you. Didn’t think we were the kind o’ people to slight old friends—ha?”
“With me—old friends!” I was thunderstruck, and replied, I fear with some lack of politeness, that Colonel M. did not keep a hotel.
“Wal, I guess I knowd that afore, but I’d jist as lives pay him my money as any body else.”
This was too much—I cast a furtive look at the banister; Maria’s handkerchief was at her mouth, and her face sparkled all over with suppressed mirth. Before I could answer Mr. Johnson’s proposition, Colonel M. came into the ball, and the modest little gentleman very coolly informed him of the high honor intended his house.
Colonel M. glanced at my burning face—made his most solemnly polite bow, and informed my tormentor that he should entertain any visiter of mine with great pleasure.