After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 | Page 3

the window.
"I've found it, Georgiana!" I called out.
She appeared, looking relieved, but not exactly forgiving.
"Where!"
My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth.
"Where did you find it?" she repeated, imperiously.
"What do you want to know for?" I said, savagely.
"Let me see it!" she demanded.
My clasp on it suddenly tightened.
"Let me see it!" she repeated, with genuine fire.
"What do you want to see it for?" I said.
She turned away.
"Here it is," I said, and held it up.
She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched.
"Did the pigs get it?"
"The wrens. It was merely a change of post-office."
"I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the letters."
Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when they were looking and I was not; but women--all women--now and then hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves. Sylvia, for instance. She grew peevish with me the other day because my garden failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her whim. And yet for days Sylvia has been helping herself with such lack of stint that the poor clipped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass sympathetically by them, and say, "If you don't keep her away, we'd as well be weeds!"
The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the passage of the Greatest Common Divisor--far more dreadful than the passage of the Beresina--her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement, and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her sentimental being up to the highest pitch. Feeling herself to be naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires that she shall be continually played upon--if not by one person, then by another. Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies; and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end. The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the teeth of all known estimates of mortality. How unlike Georgiana!
I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when they are rarest. Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its shining leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness! You must hunt to find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it all--there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia! I am afraid Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape.
I caught some one taking a grape the other evening--a sort of green grape. Sylvia has been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her escort on the evening of her Commencement--him of the duck trousers and webbed feet. On one occasion I have observed her walking along the borders of my garden in his company and have overheard her telling him that he could come in and get flowers whenever he wished. I wish I might catch him once.
To cap the climax, after twilight on the evening in question, I strolled out to my arbor for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana. Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling! deep in the shadow of the vines. He had his arm around her and was kissing her.
"Upon my honor!" I said; and striding over to him I thrust my hand under his coattails, gripped him by the seat of his ducks, dragged him head downward to the front fence and dropped him out into the street.
"Let me catch you in here kissing anybody again!" I said.
He had bit me viciously on one of my calves--which are sizable--as I had dragged him along; so that, I had been forced to stoop down and twist him loose by screwing the end of his spongy nose. I met him on the street early the next morning, and it wore the hue of a wild plum in its ripeness. I tapped it.
"Only three persons know of your misbehavior last night," I said. "If you ever breathe it to a soul that you soiled that child by your touch, the next time I get hold of you it will not be your nose: it will be your neck!"
My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen