So I ground my way quickly through the snow, choosing the middle of the street, because it was less worn, and helped me better to work off my unusual excitement.
My master's cottage stood on the same street with his smithy. In fact, this Main Street was, as its name indicated, the principal thoroughfare of Warren; the real village life all centred here; and it contained, besides the stores and the church, the dwellings of the more prosperous inhabitants. The smithy being at one end, on the outskirts, as it were, of the social and gay life, Mr. Bray had been able to rent it for a low sum, although more pleasantly situated than any other building on the street. Here the land made a slight ascent, giving a more extended view of the valley and distant hills than at any other point. The business character of this street mingled oddly in summer with the rural life around it. At several right-angles, green and mossy lanes, arched by venerable elms, seemed to be offering their crooked elbows to lead it back to the simple pastoral life from which it sprang.
Bordering these sequestered paths, which were dignified by the title of streets, were cottages surrounded by small inclosures, whose proprietors cultivated vegetables, hens, pigs, and cows,—these last being, quite unconsciously, the true surveyors of Warren; for, in direct obedience to pathways they had worn when traversing the fields to and from their homes, chewing the quiet cud of meditation, had the buildings been erected. Outside these lanes, again, were the larger land-owners, whose farms formed the outer circle of our life.
Annie Bray was fond of penetrating beyond these various circles of social existence, and wandering far off to the woods and hills, whose ring of emerald, studded now and then with the turquoise of some forest-lake, inclosed us as in a basin.
As I entered the kitchen of the cottage, Mrs. Bray, a stout woman of forty, the oracle of her sex in the village as to matters of domestic economy and dress,—which last was of a more costly and varied material than the others could afford, abounding in many-colored prints, and a stuff gown for Sunday wear,—made her appearance, her apron covered with flour, an incrustation of dough on each particular finger, which it always destroyed my appetite to see.
"Well, Sandy, I'm glad you've come. You've jest sp'iled Sary Ann. There she sets a-nid-nid-noddin' on that stool, and won't stir to bed till she sees Sandy."
There, by the stove, sat the blacksmith's blue-eyed daughter, a proof that God sometimes interferes with hereditary botch-work, and makes a child fresh and fair, letting her, like a delicate flower in noisome marsh or stagnant water, draw pure, nourishing juices out of elements poisonous to anything less impregnated with Himself.
To be sure, through ignorance of the nature of the child intrusted to them, the blacksmith and his wife blundered with her tender soul and beautiful body. One of their most heinous crimes against her, in my estimation, had been in the bestowal of the name of Sary Ann,—a filial compliment paid by Mrs. Bray to the mother who bore her. Then they dressed her in the brightest of red or orange, so that Nature, which had tinted her complexion brightly, though delicately, seemed forever to be put to shame by the brazen garments which infolded her. They called her 'sp'iled,' when her innocent eyes filled with tears at her father's oaths or her mother's coarse scolding; and though her tender beauty touched the rough smith with a kind of awe, he often said, "Such pootty gals a'n't of much use. I mistrust if Sary Ann will ever 'arn her livin'."
Anxious as I was to get to my class this evening, I could not neglect my little friend; so, going hurriedly to her, I said, as I bent over the head which at every breath of sleep waved like a pale golden flower on its stalk,—
"Good night, Annie. To-morrow evening I'll be home earlier, and then we can have our lesson together."