“No I don’t. I mean Mrs. Soapdish. Miss-es—Misses—Soap-dish—Soapdish! Stop though! what a confounded crabbed hand!” squinting over it, then glancing askance at it, and then fairly turning it upside down, after endeavoring to squint inside, as if to find the name there. “On the whole, I shouldn’t be surprised if it were ‘Soper.’ Here, take it, my good woman, and look at it yourself. If it isn’t Soapdish, it’s Soper, and one name is as good as another in Tahoo, for that’s the language the fellow has written in I verily believe,” continues he, grumbling and fumbling over his other letters.
“James Shipoker, Esq.!”
“James Shipoker, Esq.,” ejaculates the judge of the county court. “Oh, what an incorrigible ass! James Shipman you fool! Well, I can’t stand this. I’ll write to my friend, the Postmaster-General, and have you kicked out, neck and crop, you dunce you!”
“Just come and help yourselves, gentlemen! I see how it is. You wish to interrupt me to avoid paying the postage. I can see through a grindstone as well as the best of ye, especially when there’s a hole in it big enough to put John P.’s dog in. Here, boy, you come and call over the letters. See if you have any better luck!”
The store-lad fortunately could “read writen,” and after a while each one got his letter or his paper and left the post-office.
And thus endeth the second lesson. In other words, it is dinner time.
Dinner is dispatched.
The glossy dark shades begin now to stretch themselves from the golden west. The shadow of “Coit’s house” (I mean to tell a story about that also) lies strong and well-defined—a sable picture—upon the sunny green—each tree “hath wrought its separate ghost upon the”—grass. Hamble’s tall, straddling sign-post looks like a prone black giant upon the gray highway, and the long sweep of the corner-well seems like an elbow a-kimbo.
The girls and boys of the village now assemble for their usual afternoon stroll. Pleasant Pond is the point fixed upon, and accordingly we start. We turn up the green country-road leading to it, arm-in-arm. How fresh and beautiful every thing is. The wheat is goldening—the meadow grass is deepening—the pasture-fields are clovering, and the air is one incense. The distant hills are freckled with gliding shadows, and the pure pearls of clouds are dissolving as if the sky was Cleopatra’s goblet. Others are wreathing, as if to form a silver garland for the brow of Antony, whilst others are glittering in the sunlight, as if to spread a canopy of snow for the fairy barge that in old times floated along the Cydnus. The Titianesque beauty it promised in the early morning, is gloriously fulfilled—lo! it is all one bright and rich and golden glow of beauty.