She kept the house for her family, and herself ready
to answer every hail from the steamer; but in her
mellow English content, which was not stupid or sodden,
but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather
than the archbishop, whose nature expressed itself
in a motto on one of the palace walls, “Blessed
be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings every day.”
When the range, warming to its work, had made her
kitchen-parlor a little too hot to hold us, she hospitably
suggested the river shore as cooler, where she knew
a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she
presently followed when the steamer’s whistle
sounded, and held her boat for us to get safely in.
The most nervous of our party offered the reflection,
as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul
the pausing steamer, that she must find the ferry
business very shattering to the nerves, and she said,
“Yes, but it’s nothing to a murder case
I was on, once.”
“Oh, what murder, what murder?” we palpitated
back; and both of us forgot the steamer, so that it
almost ran us down, while our ferrywoman began again:
“A man shot a nurse—There! Throw
that line, will you?”
But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her,
in his distraction let her drop her oar and throw
the line herself, and then we scrambled aboard without
hearing any more of the murder.
This is the climax I have been working up to, and
I call it a fine one; as good as a story to be continued
ever ended an instalment with.
* * * *
*
The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York,
on the first day, as I had dimly foreboded they would.
In fact, if there had been no lure, I might have gone
in search of temptation, for in a world where sins
are apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that
if one loves beauty he can practise an aesthetic virtue
by sinning in that sort. So I made myself a pretence
of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to Doncaster
I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event
with that of Saratoga. I had no association with
the place save horse-racing, and having missed Ascot
and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit of
knowledge—I said to myself, “Not mere
amusement”—and set out for Doncaster
unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since
learned, from divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster
is the Danum of Antoninus and the Dona Ceaster of
the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of
the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous
Watling Street which from the earliest Saxon time has
crossed the British continent from sea to sea, and
seems to impress most of the cities north and south
into a conformity with its line, like a map of the
straightest American railway routes.
