Flint | Page 3

too, and as cheerful as a squirrel--just listen to her!"
With this the girl stands still, and we listen. The waitress in the next room, apparently in the blithest of spirits, is setting the tea-table to the accompaniment of her favorite tune, sung in a high, sharp, nasal voice, and emphasized by the slapping down of plates.
"Tell me one thing--tell me trooly; Tell me why you scorn me so. Tell me why, when asked the question, You will always answer 'No'-- No, sir! No, sir! No-o-o, sir--No!"
The voice is lost in the pantry. Smiles dawn upon all our faces.
"A beautiful illustration of the power of imagination!" says Dr. Cricket. "Ellen is contentedly doing the housework because she fancies herself an heiress haughtily repulsing a host of suitors. It is the same spirit which keeps the poet cheerful in his garret, or a young Napoleon in his cellar, where he dines on a crust and fancies himself an emperor."
"Steep an illustration and apply it over the affected part!" drawls Ben.
The Doctor prepares to be angry; but Winifred, scenting the battle and eager to keep the peace, claps her hands and cries out, "Excellent!" with that pretty enthusiasm which makes the author of a remark feel that there must have been more in his observation than he himself had discovered.
"There, Ben, if you are wise you will act on this clever suggestion of Dr. Cricket's, and travel off to the land of fancy, where you can make the weather to suit yourself, where fogs never fall, and fish always bite, and sails always fill with breezes from the right quarter, and whiff about at a convenient moment when you want to come home--oh, I say!" she adds with a joyful upward inflection, "there's the sun, and I am going for the mail."
"I'll go with you," volunteers Master Ben.
"Thank you, but Mr. Marsden said that I might drive his colt in the sulky."
"Not the colt!" we all cry in chorus.
"The colt," she answers with decision.
"Not in the sulky?"
"Yes, in the sulky."
"Surely, Professor Anstice--" I begin; but before I have time for more, Winifred is out of the room, and reappears, after ten minutes, strangely transformed by her short corduroy skirt and gaiters, her cap and gauntleted gloves, to a Lady Gay Spanker. I do not like to see her so; but then I am fifty years old, and I live in Massachusetts. Perhaps my aversion to the sporting proclivities of the modern woman is only an inheritance of the prejudices of my ancestors, who thought all worldly amusements sinful, and worst of all in a woman. Even the Mayflower saints and heroes had their cast-iron limitations, and we can't escape from them, try as we will. We may throw over creed and catechism; but inherited instinct remains. The shadow of Plymouth Rock is over us all.
Just here I look up to see Winifred spin along the road before the house, seated in a yellow-wheeled sulky, behind the most unmanageable colt on this side of the Mississippi, as I verily believe. Of course Mr. Marsden is very glad to have the breaking process taken off his hands; but if I were Professor Anstice I don't think I should like to have my daughter take up the profession of a jockey. I must admit, however, that she looks well in that tight-fitting jacket, with the bit of scarlet at her throat, and her hair rippling up over the edges of her gray cap.
I wonder why I chronicle all this small beer about Winifred Anstice and old Marsden's colt. I suppose because nothing really worth noting has occurred, and it is not for nothing that a diary is called a commonplace book. I find that if I wait for clever thoughts and important events, my journal shows portentous gaps at the end of the week, and I promised myself that I would write something in it every day while I was at Nepaug. For my part, I enjoy the old-fashioned diary,--a sort of almanac, confessional, receipt-book, and daily paper rolled together; so I will just go on in my humdrum way. As it is only for myself, I need not fear to be as garrulous and egotistical as I please. Besides, a journal is such a good escape-valve for one's feelings! Having written them out, one is so much less impelled to confide them, and confidences are generally a mistake--yes, I am sure of it. They only intensify feelings, and at my age that is not desirable. At twenty, we put spurs into our emotions. At fifty, we put poultices onto them.
CHAPTER II
MINGLED YARN
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
The road from the station at South East to Nepaug Beach was long and dusty, tedious enough to the traveller at