Alice MacGowan

“ She smiled upon the boy, a sickly smile. "I fo'give yo', Virgil honey. I do so," she declared, making to lay her hands upon him once more, but the boy shrank from her touch. "I do sho'ly fo'give yo', Virgil—a boy what's ben fotched up without nair mother. Me an' yo' pappy air about to mend that. I'm a-gwine home to-morrow to Garyville to make my settin' out"—the boy shivered, Miss Pendrilla smirked, and over Ebless Frazee's enigmatic face a curious expression went—"an' you shain' be without air mother—"
"No mother!" cried the boy in a voice which broke fiercely. ”

“ To the little Virgil's mind pappy's wisdom was always adequate; and the father watched the dawning intelligence and treated the opinions of the child with a grave respect which women are apt to find infinitely amusing in the relations of men to children, but which they would do well oftener to imitate. In all except years and a little narrow experience of men and life in a mountain village the two were equal. ”

“ Frazee had said that "no wife o' his'n should ever break her back over an up-an'-down churn," that he would never allow a woman to "chop kindlin'," that it would be "a blessed time fer him—an' fer Virgil—when they had a womern's keer," the which they had sorely lacked these many years, and had accompanied these statements with what Miss Pendrilla considered the glances proper to them. It was enough at least for that young lady; she proposed coyly, yet practically, to return upon the morrow to her brother at Garyville in order to make her "settin' out o' clo'es" ”

“ The Eskimos in their ice and snow huts; the people in equatorial lands—"an' monkeys 'at sneaks in an' steals their cocoanuts"; storied wonders of Old World cities, such simple and childish accounts of these as might come down in little geographies, in primary histories, mellowed, colored, kept alive and interesting by many repetitions from lip to lip—these were the things which occupied the evenings, winter and summer. ”

“ Miss Pendrilly, she jes p'intedly tuck me fer granted. She was a-gwine to marry me—fer what I had. She didn't no mo' love me than I loved her—and the Lord He do know that that was little enough! Ez fer you, honey," the twinkling eyes dwelt fondly upon the lad, "I reckon that in her mind you had to walk a chalk line, or to git out."
"What," whispered Virgil, with eyes of wonder—"what did ye do?"
"Well, I wrote a letter to her brother. Staggart's a fa'r man. I can deal better with a man person than with a lady." ”

“ He gave little answer to her voluble deprecations, and made but the one satisfactory observation (though to even Miss Pendrilla's not oversensitive mind he made it strangely for a lover) that she would hear from him in Garyville. Then he too passed out, and was in his turn made way for. When he got home he found a pathetic little scrawl from Virgil. The lad had taken the carpetsack and gone afoot up through Little Turkey Track and to the Fur Cove to his Aunt Faithful Bushares, Ebless Frazee's sister. He would never come home, he said—not if "they" married. ”

“ Ebless Frazee, with his wonderful purple hair and whiskers, his thirty-two chiny teeth, his store clothes an' shiny boots, had been seen a-settin' on the po'ch with the tailoress of an evenin'; and the question was forever settled by his beauing her openly to meetin' to hear Mr. Polk Dillard preach of a Sunday morning.
And what of Virgil? The first time the lad had gone to see his inamorata after his father's return he was met by Mrs. Elder Dance (as he had been met before when he came upon courting expeditions) ”

“ They don't raise pearls. They gits 'em outer the bottom of the sea—outer oyshter shells. Divers goes down an' fotches 'em up. But these yere seed-pearls, I don't rightly know, less'n hit's 'at they're jes leetle weenty bits o' ones, no bigger 'n seeds. ”