The drive from Bucksport to Ellsworth was delightful; not the beginning of it, where twelve persons were crowded into a nine-passenger coach; where Blanch, looking like a wilted flower, sat wedged between two large, determined women; where my neighbor was a restless man who was constantly trying to get something out of the coat-pocket next me; and an aesthetic man, who insisted on looking past my nose at the prospect; and a tobacco-chewing man, as his breath in my face fully testified: all this was not delightful. But after we had entreated the driver, and been assisted to a perch on the coach-roof, then it was glorious.
Then we got airy tosses instead of dislocating jolts; saw the road unwind, turn by turn, from the woods; saw how the grating brake was put to the wheel while we crept over the brow of a steep pitch, then let go while we spun down the lower part and flew over the level.
The afternoon sun was behind us, and gilded the hills; but the hollows were full of transparent dusk with the crowding, overhanging woods. As we came up out of them, our horses strained forward to trample on a giant shadow-coach, with four shadow-horses, a shadow-driver, and two fly-away shadow-women in advance of every thing else.
Presently the boughs ceased to catch at our veils, the woods thinned and withdrew, houses appeared and multiplied, and we came out on to a long steep hill dipping to a river, whence another long steep hill rose at the other side. And built up and down, and to right and left, was a pretty town with all its white houses rose-red in the sunset. Well might it blush under our faithful eyes!
"Blanch," I said, "behold a town where, sixteen years ago, a Catholic priest almost won the crown of martyrdom. On the hill opposite, toward the south, stood the Catholic church that was burned, and the Catholic school-house that was blown up with gunpowder. There is the cottage where the priest lived. One August evening, when the sky was like a topaz with sunset, and the new moon was out, he baptized me there, and a little while after they broke his windows with stones. Further up the hill is the house from which, one rainy Saturday night, a mob of masked men dragged him. Ah well! that story is yet to be told."
II.
HE AND SHE.
The next morning early, we started on our last day's journey, and were driven through a rough country, the road dwindling till it seemed likely to imitate that avenue which narrowed till it turned into a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. At five o'clock, we stopped at a farm-house, which was also post-office; and there we got a man to take us to our journey's end.
"May be you'll take this letter with you," the postmaster said. "It's for Miss Smith."
Mrs. is never heard in that region.
I took that letter, and gazed at it a moment in wrathful silence. There was my annunciatory epistle written to Sally Smith more than a fortnight before!