“Do not I?”—(Then half turning
away in a lowered voice)—“nor you
me!”
“I” repeat I, positively laughing
in my scorn of this accusation. “I hint!
I imply! why, I could not do it, if I
were to be shot for it! it is not in me!”
He does not immediately answer; still, he is looking
aside, and his color changes.
“Ask mother, ask the boys, ask Barbara,”
cry I, in great excitement, “whether I ever
could wrap up any thing neatly, if I wished
it ever so much? Always, always, I have
to blurt it out! I hint!”
“Hint! no!” he repeats, in a tone of vexed
bitterness. “Well, no! no one could accuse
you of hinting! Yours is honest, open cut
and thrust!”
“If it is,” retort I, bluntly, still speaking
with a good deal of heat, “it is your own fault!
I have no wish to quarrel, being such near neighbors,
and—and—altogether—of
course I had rather be on good terms than bad ones!
When you let me—when you leave me
alone—I almost— sometimes
I quite like you. I am speaking seriously!
I do”
“You do not say so?” again turning his
head aside, and speaking with the objectionable intonation
of irony.
“At home,” pursue I, still chafing under
the insult to my amiability, “I never was reckoned
quarrelsome—never! Of course I was
not like Barbara—there are not many like
her—but I did very well. Ask any
one of them—it does not matter which—they
will all tell you the same— whether I did
not!”
“You were a household angel, in fact?”
“I was nothing of the kind,” cry I, very
angry, and yet laughing: the laughter caused
by the antagonism of the epithet with the many recollected
blows and honest sounding cuffs that I have, on and
off, exchanged with Bobby.
The sun has quite gone now: sulky and feeble,
he has shrunk to his cold bed in the west, and the
victor-mist creeps, crawls, and soaks on unopposed.
“Good-night!” cry I, suddenly. “I
am going!” and I am as good as my word.
With the triple agility of health, youth, and indignation,
I scurry away through the melancholy grass, and the
heaped and fallen leaves, home.
Ding-dong bell! The Christmas bells are ringing.
Christmas has come— Christmas as it appears
on a Christmas card, white and hard, and beset with
puffed-out, ruffled robins. Only Nature is wise
enough not to express the ironical wish that we may
have a “merry one.” For myself, I
have but small opinion of Christmas as a time of jollity.
Solemn— blessed, if you will—but
no, not jovial. At no time do the dead so clamor
to be remembered. Even those that went a long
time ago, the regret for whose departure has settled
down to a tender, almost pleasant pain; whom at other
times we go nigh to forget; even they cry out loud,
“Think of us!”
