Miss Peck

“ My dear, you can make anything of that girl.'
Miss Peck was given to romancing and enthusiasm, but the contrast between her opinion and that expressed by Mrs. Fordyce made Gladys smile. She did not feel herself as yet very particularly drawn towards her guest, whose reserve of manner was sometimes as trying as her outspokenness on other occasions.
'I am glad you like her, Miss Peck. I confess that sometimes I do not know what to make of her. But, you see, she is the only one who can be of any use to me; she knows all about working girls and their ways. ”

“ At first he looked upon Miss Peck as a pretty young woman, but after she became his religious teacher, he regarded her in that light, that every one will those whom they know to be their superiors. It was soon seen, however, that the young man not only respected and reverenced Georgiana for the incalculable service she had done him, in awakening him to a sense of duty to his soul, but he had learned to bow to the shrine of Cupid. ”

“ I cannot speak to one without the other’s being jealous, and to tell the truth, (though I am sure you will not repeat it,) I was awoke just now by the screams of my two daughters, Partridge and Speckle, who had had their ears boxed by Mrs. Cockielockie, for saying that they knew I wished she was dead! If I do wish it, they need not have told her so, and now I shall never hear the last of it. If I could but get away for a time, it might blow over, or Mrs. Cockielockie might be gone.”
“Well, my dear sir,” said Miss Peck, interrupting him, “why cannot you come with me to the Queen? ”

“ The poor ladies, I know, never look out of window or get a breath of air till the middle of the day in summer, and I believe they have no rick-pen to go to, and are obliged to wait till Betsy Chopper chooses to get up and feed them. The Queen may very likely not be as late as Betsy Chopper; but it is ten to one if she is as early as old David, so there can be no occasion to hurry oneself.”
So Miss Peck walked on in a leisurely manner, picking her way along the dirty lane, as well as the darkness would allow, and every now and then stopping a minute or two to rest her poor legs by turns. ”

“ I must try it, and you must help me, dear Miss Peck, for Mrs. Fordyce won't. She [Pg 208] doesn't approve at all of my having invited Christina Balfour down here.'
'My dear, the world never does approve of anything done out of the conventional way,' said Miss Peck, with a quiet touch of bitterness. 'I think you have a very noble aim, and the heart of an angel; only there will be mountains of difficulty in the way.'
'We must overcome them,' answered Gladys quickly. ”

“ My name is Miss Peck, and I and my friend Mr. Cockielockie are on our way to Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, to tell her that the stars are all falling out of the sky.”
“And I think, Mrs. Daddles,” interrupted Cockielockie, “that you cannot do better than come along with us, and then you will have an opportunity of laying your melancholy case before Her Majesty, who very likely will order Mrs. Topknot and Jem the carter’s heads to be sent to her immediately ”

“ Miss Peck therefore, being, as I have said, very much out of sorts, sat upon her perch with one eye shut, and the other scowling down upon Miss Spangle, who slept just beneath her; and her sufferings from cramp and chills were so uncommonly acute, that she [20] could obtain no ease except by continually twitching her legs up and down, flapping her wings, shaking herself violently, and making a very unpleasant noise in her throat, as if she were choking. ”

“ When she is going with other boys, as she must, she is thinking of you all the time, and wishing your red head was in place of that of the kid who is buying ice-cream soda for her. When she walks about the streets she is thinking of when you were with her at the same place. And when you are permitted to pass an hour with her she will convince you in a minute that you are all the world to her, and that the other ducks are not in it. I can tell by her eyes, boy, and her mouth, and her whole face, that she is a thoroughbred. ”

“ Wilful,” she added, “that I am ready always to devote my poor services to the good of the public without looking for any reward, which, indeed, in this wicked world, so full of selfish Cock-a-doodles, and all kinds of malice and hatred, one would certainly look for in vain.”
“Very true, indeed, my dear Miss Peck,” interrupted Wilful, who, being fond of talking himself, was always very impatient of Miss Peck’s discourses; “very true, indeed; but allow me to [28] hint that it is not quite the thing for a young person like yourself to be travelling about the world alone ”

“ Peck appeared to hesitate as to her course and then solved the problem by going neither way. She dropped on one of the benches and looked up at me.
“I thought you said he’d come back.”
“Young Nettlepoint? Yes, I see he didn’t. Miss Mavis then has given him half her dinner.”
“It’s very kind of her! She has been engaged half her life.”
“Yes, but that will soon be over.”
“So I suppose—as quick as ever we land. Every one knows it on Merrimac Avenue,” Mrs. Peck pursued. “Every one there takes a great interest in it.”
“Ah of course—a girl like that has many friends.” ”

“ There was an open grating above, Wilful knew, but he [17] could not reach it, so he had nothing for it but to scratch the door gently, and call Miss Peck as loud as he dared, without disturbing Cock-a-doodle. Now Miss Peck, luckily for Wilful, seldom slept well. She was subject to spasms in her left leg, which made her restless, and was besides apt to fancy that somebody else had got a warmer corner than she had, so that she was continually shifting her place. ”

“ It seemed as though she were too languid even to look with attention at any one or anything.
"This is the girl, Sophrony," Miss Peckham repeated more sharply.
"Oh, yes," murmured the strange woman, as though awakened from a brown study. "Yes. Quite a pretty little girl."
"Pretty is as pretty does," scoffed Miss Peckham. "At any rate, she's healthy. Ain't you, Janice Day?" ”

“ You are all dressed up, and have got a clean shirt on, and your shoes blacked, and I notice your pants are not raveled out so at the bottoms of the legs behind. You are not in love are you?”
“Well, I should smile,” said the boy, as he looked in a small mirror on the counter, covered with fly specks. “A girl got mashed on me, and Ma says it is good for a boy who hasn’t got no sister, to be in love with a girl, and so I kind of tumbled to myself and she don’t go no where without I go with her. I take her to dancing school, and everywhere, and she loves me like a house afire. ”

“ Say, what’s good for a black eye?”
The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home, “What do you think your Pa’s object was in passing himself off for a single man at Oconomowoc,” asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the boy’s father.
“That’s what beats me. Aside from Ma’s hay fever she is one of the healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an orphan, don’t it, to have such kitteny parents.” ”

“ You’d a dide to see me and my chum drink that lather. It looked just like soap suds with nutmaig in it, but by gosh it got in its work sudden. At first I was afraid when the girls hugged me, but after I had drank a couple of shaving cups full of the ’aignogg’ I wasn’t afraid no more, and I hugged a girl so hard she catched her breath and panted and said, ‘O, don’t.’ Then I kissed her, and she is a great big girl, bigger’n me, but she didn’t care. Say, did you ever kiss a girl full of aignogg? If you did it would break up your grocery business. ”

“ The old man had missed the boy around the grocery, and with no one to keep his blood circulating, and his temperature occasionally soaring above the normal, he had failed in health, and had read with mixed feelings of joy, fear and resentment that the Bad Boy and his dad had arrived home, and he knew it could not be long before the boy would blow in, and he was trying to decide whether to meet the boy cheerfully and with a spirit of resignation, or to meet him with a club, whether to give him the glad hand, or form himself into a column of fours to drive him out when he came. ”

“ You can’t play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps. Ma passed the pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn’t do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn’t know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn’t feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa. He has been fuller’n a goose ever since New Year’s day. I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year’s. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. ”

“ However, in the lane they came to a standstill immediately, from not being agreed as to which was the right way to turn, Wilful maintaining that the way to the left led to the Queen’s house, and Miss Peck being equally positive that they ought to go to the right.
“Really, Miss Peck,” said the former, “I do wonder at a person of your talent being so uncommonly silly. Do not you know that all the blue butchers live [30] down the lane to the right ”

“ At home he is awful fraid of rheumatic, and he never sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off’n him, and he stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking him about being a nold batch, that he was not sure as he could always hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the charming ladies of the Sunny South, I pulled his coat and said, ’Pa how do you spose Ma’s hay fever is to-night. ”

“ As a girl, and indeed all through her long and happy life, she was the very spirit of healthful, normal womanhood,—full of an irrepressible and infectious gayety, a miracle of buoyant life, charming in manner, unselfish, helpful, and showing in her every act and thought the promptings of a beautiful and spotless soul.
It was of this admirably mated pair that William Hickling Prescott, their second son, was born, at Salem, on the 4th of May, 1796. The elder Prescott had not yet acquired the ample fortune which he afterward possessed ”

“ The grocery man laughed, and when the boy had got the pepper washed off, and had resumed his rutabaga, he said:
“That seals your fate. No man ever trifles with the feelings of the bold buccanneer of the Spanish main, without living to rue it. I will lay for you, old man, and don’t you forget it. Pa thought he was smart when he got me to put tar on my lip, to bring my moustache out, and to-day he lays on a bed of pain, and to-morrow your turn will come. ”

“ The grocery man's eyes had begun to stick out as the bad boy continued, as though the statistics had never been brought to his attention before, but he was bound to stand by his old friend Solomon, and he said, “Well, Solomon's wives must have been different from our wives of the present day.”
“Not much,” said the boy, as he see he was paralizing the grocery man. “Women have been about the same ever since Eve. She got mashed on the old original dude, and it stands to reason that Solomon's wives were no better than the mother of the human race. ”

“ No, Annie,” he went on, “I can understand why Brother Peck is not the success with women, and feminine temperaments like me, that his virtues entitle him to be. What we feminine temperaments want is a prophet, and Brother Peck doesn't prophesy worth a cent. He doesn't pretend to be authorised in any sort of way; he has a sneaking style of being no better than you are, and of being rather stumped by some of the truths he finds out. ”

“ She told me that if I went on so I should be good for nothing, and might as well be boiled at once; and the last thing she said to me, before she disappeared, and I fear was boiled herself, was, ‘Cockie, mind your crows.’ To tell the truth, however, now, my dear Miss Peck, I am afraid of waking the ladies in the yew-tree. Mrs. Cockielockie would make such a fuss, and then the old woman might be disturbed, for though she is very deaf, I have heard the cat say that she 14always hears when you most wish she should not ”

“ He lays it all to Ma, and says if she would stay at home and let people run their own baby shows, there would be more comfort in the house. Ma came in with a shawl over her head, and a bowl full of something that smelled frowy, and after she had told us what the result of her visit was, she sent me after vaseline to rub Pa’s legs. Pa says that he has demonstrated that if a man is cool and collected, in case of fire, and goes deliberately at work to save himself, he will come out all right. ”

“ When my chum and I run away to Pewaukee, Ma thought we had gone off to be piruts, and she told Pa it was a duty he owed to society to go and get us to come back, and be good. She told him if he would treat me as an equal, and laugh and joke with me, I wouldn’t be so bad. She said kicking and pounding spoiled more boys than all the Sunday schools. ”

“ Say, you are unreasonable. Do you think I will go off and leave you to die here under the counter of bloodpoisoning, like a dog that has eaten a loaded sausage? Never! I am going to nurse you through this thing, and bring you out as good as new. I know how you feel towards me. Dad felt the same way towards me, down in Florida, the time he got skun. You old people don't seem to appreciate a boy that tries to teach you useful nollig.”
“What about your dad getting skun in Florida? I never heard about it,” said the old groceryman, as he took a hand mirror and looked at his burned face. ”