The Lady of the Aroostook | Page 4

Lydia's boxes and bags into the boot, and left
two or three light parcels for her to take into the coach with her.
Miss Maria went down to the gate with her father and niece. "Take the
back seat, father!" she said, as the old man offered to take the middle
place. "Let them that come later have what's left. You'll be home
to-night, father; I'll set up for you. Good-by again, Lyddy." She did not
kiss the girl again, or touch her hand. Their decent and sparing adieux
had been made in the house. As Miss Maria returned to the door, the
hens, cowering conscience-stricken under the lilacs, sprang up at sight
of her with a screech of guilty alarm, and flew out over the fence.
"Well, I vow," soliloquized Miss Maria, "from where she set Lyddy
must have seen them pests under the lilacs the whole time, and never
said a word." She pushed the loosened soil into place with the side of
her ample slipper, and then went into the house, where she kindled a
fire in the kitchen stove, and made herself a cup of Japan tea: a variety
of the herb which our country people prefer, apparently because it
affords the same stimulus with none of the pleasure given by the
Chinese leaf.

II.
Lydia and her grandfather reached Boston at four o'clock, and the old
man made a bargain, as he fancied, with an expressman to carry her
baggage across the city to the wharf at which the Aroostook lay. The
expressman civilly offered to take their small parcels without charge,
and deliver them with the trunk and large bag; but as he could not
check them all her grandfather judged it safest not to part with them,
and he and Lydia crowded into the horse-car with their arms and hands
full. The conductor obliged him to give up the largest of these burdens,
and hung the old-fashioned oil-cloth sack on the handle of the brake
behind, where Mr. Latham with keen anxiety, and Lydia with shame,
watched it as it swayed back and forth with the motion of the car and
threatened to break loose from its hand-straps and dash its bloated bulk
to the ground. The old man called out to the conductor to be sure and
stop in Scollay's Square, and the people, who had already stared
uncomfortably at Lydia's bundles, all smiled. Her grandfather was
going to repeat his direction as the conductor made no sign of having

heard it, when his neighbor said kindly, "The car always stops in
Scollay's Square."
"Then why couldn't he say so?" retorted the old man, in his high nasal
key; and now the people laughed outright. He had the nervous
restlessness of age when out of its wonted place: he could not remain
quiet in the car, for counting and securing his parcels; when they
reached Scollay's Square, and were to change cars, he ran to the car
they were to take, though there was abundant time, and sat down
breathless from his effort. He was eager then that they should not be
carried too far, and was constantly turning to look out of the window to
ascertain their whereabouts. His vigilance ended in their getting aboard
the East Boston ferry-boat in the car, and hardly getting ashore before
the boat started. They now gathered up their burdens once more, and
walked toward the wharf they were seeking, past those squalid streets
which open upon the docks. At the corners they entangled themselves
in knots of truck-teams and hucksters' wagons and horse-cars; once
they brought the traffic of the neighborhood to a stand-still by the
thoroughness of their inability and confusion. They wandered down the
wrong wharf amidst the slime cast up by the fishing craft moored in the
dock below, and made their way over heaps of chains and cordage, and
through the hand-carts pushed hither and thither with their loads of fish,
and so struggled back to the avenue which ran along the top of all the
wharves. The water of the docks was of a livid turbidity, which teemed
with the gelatinous globes of the sun-fish; and people were rowing
about there in pleasure-boats, and sailors on floats were painting the
hulls of the black ships. The faces of the men they met were red and
sunburned mostly,--not with the sunburn of the fields, but of the sea;
these men lurched in their gait with an uncouth heaviness, yet gave
them way kindly enough; but certain dull-eyed, frowzy-headed women
seemed to push purposely against her grandfather, and one of them
swore at Lydia for taking up all the sidewalk with her bundles. There
were such dull eyes and slattern heads at the open windows of the
shabby houses; and there