"Give him a tall letter!" said he. "And you must be spry about it. He'll be glad to hear from his little girl, I reckon. See, the stage 'll be along by four o'clock, and now it's——"—he stepped to the door and looked out on the tall pine-tree across the road,—that was his sun-dial,—"it's just two o'clock now, Jenny. Work away!" So saying, he went off as tired, after the exertion he had made, as if he had shod all the Dalton horses since daybreak.
She had just two hours for doing the greatest piece of work she had done in her short life. And consciously it was the greatest work. Every stroke of that pen, every straight line and curve and capital, seemed to require as much deliberation as the building of a house; and how her brain worked! Fly to and fro, O swallows, from your homes beneath the eaves of the blacksmith's old stone shop in the shade of the far-spreading walnut,—stretch forth your importunate necks and lift aloft your greedy voices, O young ones in the nests!—the little girl who has so often stood to watch you is sitting in the shadow within there, blind and deaf to you, and unaware of everything in the great world except the promotion of her father "in the war," and the letter he will be sure to get, because the blacksmith is going to send it along with his letter to his son.
She was doing her work well. Any one who had ever seen the girl before must have asked with wonder what had happened to her,—it was so evident that something had happened which stirred heart and soul to the depths.
So, even so, unconsciously, love sometimes works out the work of a lifetime, touches the key-note of an anthem of everlasting praise,—does it with as little ostentation as the son of science draws yellow gold from the quartz rock which tells no tale on the face of it concerning its "hid treasure." So, wisely and without ostentation, work the true agents, the apostles of liberty in this world.
"O dear papa! my dear papa!" she wrote, "Ezra has come home, and he says you are promoted! But he couldn't tell for what it was, or where you were, or anything. And O, it seems as if I couldn't wait a minute, I want to hear so all about it." When she had written thus far the spirit of the mother seemed to stir in the child. She sat and mused for a moment. Her eyes flashed. Her right hand moved nervously. Strange that her father had not sent some word by Ezra; but then he didn't know, of course, that Ezra was coming. Ay! that was a lucky thought. What she had written seemed to imply some blame. So, with many a blot and erasure, her loving belief that all was right must make itself evident.
At the end of the two hours she found herself at the bottom of the page the blacksmith had spread before her. Twice he had come into the shop and assured himself that the work was going on, and smiled to see the progress she was making. The third time he came he was under considerable excitement.
"Ready!" he shouted. "The stage 'll be along now in ten minutes."
She did not answer, she was so busy, and so hard at work, signing her name to the sheet that was covered with what looked like hieroglyphics.
When she had made the last emphatic pen-stroke, she turned towards him, flushed and smiling. "There!" she said.
He looked over her shoulder.