A British Islander | Page 5

the man was too mad to look at her, and she was so happy herself, I said, "I will let her alone."
I had forgotten all about my half-breed driver, sitting on the parade-ground in the waiting carriage. But he was enjoying himself too, when we climbed to the fort again, with a soldier lounging on the front wheel.
Well, as soon as I entered the little parlor that Mrs. Gunning called her drawing-room--ornamented with the movable knickknacks that an army woman carries around with her, you know--I saw that Captain Markley had asserted himself. If he hadn't asserted himself on that occasion, I do believe Mrs. Gunning would have been done with him forever. I never saw a man so anxious to show that he was accepted. Of course he couldn't announce the engagement until it had been sanctioned by the girl's foster-parents. But he put Juliana through the engaged drill like a veteran, and she was wonderfully meek.
I suppose one British woman knows another better than an American can. But I felt sorry for Dr. McCurdy when he saw the state of things and took his leave, and Mrs. Gunning rubbed his defeat on the raw.
"Ah, my dear friend," says she, shaking his hand, "we see that buds will match with buds. I could never find it in my heart to wed a bud to a full-blown rose."
I don't doubt that the full-blown rose, as he went down the fort hill, cursed Mrs. Gunning's cow's tail and all her cows' pedigrees. But she looked as serene as if he had pledged the young couple's health (instead of going off and leaving his wine half tasted), and took me to see her chickens' cupboard.
There were shelves with rows of cans and bottles, each can or bottle labelled "Molly," or "Lucy," or "Speckie," and so on.
"I have discovered," Mrs. Gunning says to me, "that one hen's food may be another hen's poison, so I mix and prepare for each fowl what that fowl seems to need. For instance, Lucy can bear more meal than Speckie, and the Shanghai cock had to be strongly encouraged. Though it sometimes happens," says she, casting her eye back towards the drawing-room, "that such a fellow gets pampered, and has to have his diet reduced and his spirit cooled down again."

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