Follow me, my bonny lad, For I'll not follow you.

"Wi' heart in mout', in hope and doubt, My lovers come and go: My smiles receive, my smiles deceive; Shall they not serve you so?

Heigho! the morning dew!

Heigho! the rose and rue!

Follow me, my bonny lad, For I'll not follow you."

It was a delight to hear her.

"There now, I'll give yer my token. Hold out yer hands!"

Champney, hugging his banjo under one arm, made a cup of his hands.

Carefully measuring the distance, she dropped one rosebud into them.

"Put it on yer heart now," was the next command from above. He obeyed with exaggerated gesture, to the great delight of the serenadee. "And yer goin' to keep it?"

"Forever and a day." Champney made this a.s.sertion with a hyper-sentimental inflection of voice, and, lifting the flower to his nose, drew in his breath--

"Confound you, you little fiend--" he sneezed rather than spoke.

The sneeze was answered by a peal of laughter from above and a fifteen-year-old's cracked "Haw-haw-haw" from the region of the Norway spruces. Every succeeding sneeze met with a like response--roars of laughter on the one hand and peal upon peal on the other. Even the kitchen door began to give signs of life, for Hannah and Ann made their appearance.

The strong white pepper, which Romanzo managed to procure from Hannah, had been cunningly secreted by Aileen between the imbricate petals, and then tied, in a manner invisible at night, with a fine thread of pink silk begged from Ann. It was now acting and re-acting on the lining of the serenader's olfactory organ in a manner to threaten final decapitation. Champney was still young enough to resent being made a subject of such practical joking by a little girl; but he was also sufficiently wise to acknowledge to himself that he had been worsted and, in the end, to put a good face on it. It is true he would have preferred that Romanzo Caukins had not been witness to his defeat.

The sneezing and laughter gradually subsided. He sat down again on the bench and taking up his banjo prepared, with somewhat elaborate effort, to put it into its case. He said nothing.

"Say!" came in a sobered voice from above; "are yer mad with me?"

Ignoring both question and questioner, he took out his handkerchief, wiped his face and forehead and, returning it to his pocket, heaved a sigh of apparent exhaustion.

"I say, Mr. Champney Googe, are yer mad with me?"

To Champney's delight, he heard an added note of anxiety. He bowed his head lower over the banjo case and in silence renewed his simulated struggle to slip that instrument into it.

"Champney! Are yer _rale_ mad with me?" There was no mistaking the earnestness of this appeal. He made no answer, but chuckled inwardly at the audacity of the address.

"Champ!" she stamped her foot to emphasize her demand; "if yer don't tell me yer ain't mad with me, I'll lave yer for good and all--so now!"

"I don't know that I'm mad with you," he spoke at last in an aggrieved, a subdued tone; "I simply didn't think you could play me such a mean trick when I was in earnest, dead earnest."

"Did yer mane it?"

"Why, of course I did! You don't suppose a man walks three miles in a hot night to serenade a girl just to get an ounce of pepper in his nose by way of thanks, do you?"

"I thought yer didn't mane it; Romanzo said yer was laughing at me for telling yer 'bout the lords and ladies a-making love with their guitars." The voice indicated some dejection of spirits.

"He did, did he! I'll settle with Romanzo later." He heard a soft brushing of branches in the region of the Norway spruces and knew that the youth was in retreat. "And I'll settle it with you, too, Miss Aileen Armagh-and-don't-you-forget-it, in a way that'll make you remember the tag end of your name for one while!"

This threat evidently had its effect.

"Wot yer going to do?"

He heard her draw her breath sharply.

"Come down here and I'll tell you."

"I can't. She might catch me. She told me I'd got to stay in my room after eight, and she's coming home ter-night. Wot yer going to do?"

Champney laughed outright. "Don't you wish you might know, Aileen Armagh!" He took his banjo in one hand, lifted his cap with the other and, standing so, bareheaded in the moonlight, sang with all the simulated pa.s.sion and pathos of which he was capable one of the few love songs that belong to the world, "Kathleen Mavoureen"; but he took pains to subst.i.tute "Aileen" for "Kathleen." Even Ann and Hannah, listening from the kitchen porch, began to feel sentimentally inclined when the clear voice rendered with tender pathos the last lines:

"Oh! why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart?

Oh! why art thou silent, Aileen Mavoureen?"

Without so much as another glance at the little figure in the window, he ran across the lawn and up the lane to the highroad.

IX

On his way to The Greenbush he overtook Joel Quimber, and without warning linked his arm close in the old man's. At the sudden contact Joel started.

"Uncle Jo, old chap, how are you? This seems like home to see you round."

"Lord bless me, Champ, how you come on a feller! Here, stan' still till I get a good look at ye;--growed, growed out of all notion. Why, I hain't seen ye for good two year. You warn't to home last summer?"

"Only for a week; I was off on a yachting cruise most of the time.

Mother said you were up on the Bay then at your grandniece's--pretty girl. I remember you had her down here one Christmas."

The old man made no definite answer, but cackled softly to himself: "Yachting cruise, eh? And you remember a pretty girl, eh?" He nudged him with a sharpened elbow and whispered mysteriously: "Devil of a feller, Champ! I've heerd tell, I've heerd tell--chip of the old block, eh?" He nudged him knowingly again.

"Oh, we're all devils more or less, we men, Uncle Jo; now, honor bright, aren't we?"

"You've hit it, Champ; more or less--more or less. I heerd you was a-goin' it strong: primy donny suppers an' ortermobillies--"

"Now, Uncle Jo, you know there's no use believing all you hear, but you can't plunge a country raised boy into a whirlpool like New York for four years and not expect him to strike out and swim with the rest.

You've got to, Uncle Jo, or you're n.o.body. You'd go under."

"Like 'nough you would, Champ; I can't say, fer I hain't ben thar. Guess twixt you an' me an' the post, I won't hev ter go thar sence Aurory's sold the land fer the quarries. I hear it talked thet it'll bring half New York right inter old Flamsted; I dunno, I dunno--you 'member 'bout the new wine in the old bottles, Champ?--highflyers, emigrants, Dagos and Polacks--Come ter think, Mis' Champney's got one on 'em now. Hev you seen her, Champ?"

Champney's hearty laugh rang out with no uncertain sound. "Seen her! I should say so. She's worth any 'primy donny', as you call them, that ever drew a good silver dollar out of my pockets. Oh, it's too good to keep! I must tell you; but you'll keep mum, Uncle Jo?"

"Mum's the word, ef yer say so, Champ." They turned from The Greenbush and arm in arm paced slowly up the street again. From time to time, for the next ten minutes, Augustus Buzzby and the Colonel in the tavern office heard from up street such unwonted sounds of hilarity and so long continued, that Augustus looked apprehensively at the Colonel who was becoming visibly uneasy lest he fail to place the joke.

When the two appeared at the office door they bore unmistakable signs of having enjoyed themselves hugely. Augustus Buzzby gave them his warmest welcome and seated Uncle Joel in his deepest office chair, providing him at the same time with a pipe and some cut leaf. The Colonel was in his glory. With one arm thrown affectionately around young Googe's neck, he expatiated on the joy of the community as a whole in again welcoming its own.

"Champney, my dear boy,--you still permit me the freedom of old friendship?--this town is already looking to you as to its future deliverer; I may say, as to a Moses who will lead us into the industrial Canaan which is even now, thanks to my friend, your honored mother, beckoning to us with its promise of abundant plenty. Never, in my wildest dreams, my dear boy, have I thought to see such a consummation of my long-cherished hopes."

It was always one of Champney's prime youthful joys to urge the Colonel, by judiciously applied excitants, to a greater flowering of eloquence; so, now, as an inducement he wrung his neighbor's hand and thanked him warmly for his timely recognition of the new Flamsted about to be.

"Now," he said, "the thing is for all of us to fall into line and forge ahead, Colonel. If we don't, we'll be left behind; and in these times to lag is to take to the backwoods."