"Oh, yes'm. Misc Somers, she's a good reader. She reads the Old Testamins. The names thar is mos' too long for me, but I reads the Psalms an' the Ploverbs right well."

"Very well, then, we will read verse about, so that Mr. Milburn can hear both our voices and his favorite minister's, too. You'll come, papa?"

"Yes, if I can. We have had a love-feast at Teackle Hall this morning, and your sister from Talbot is down, but I think I can get off."

"Lord sakes!" Rhoda said, looking at Mr. Tilghman candidly; "you ain't a minister now? Not a minister of the Gospil?"

"Unworthily so, Miss Rhoda."

"Well, I don't see how you was old enough to be convicted and learn it all, unless you was a speretual merikle. Misc Somers see one of 'em at Jinkotig. They called him the enfant phrenomeny. He exhorted at five year old, and at seven give his experyins."

"Rare, Miss Rhoda," the rector said, hardly able to keep his reverence in amus.e.m.e.nt at her impetuosity.

"Oh, he made a wild excitemins, Aunt Vesty. The women give each other their babies to hold while they tuk turns a-shouting. 'Yer, Becky, hold my baby while I shout!' says one. 'Now, Nancy, hold mine while I shout!'

To see that little boy up thar tellin' of his experyins was meriklus, an' made an excitemins like the high tides on Jinkotig that drowns' em out. But, Aunt Vesty, that little phrenomeny was a dwarf, twenty year old, an' Misc Somers found it out and told about it."

"I'll be bound Mrs. Somers knows!" exclaimed the Judge.

"That she do," continued Rhoda, earnestly, with a slight sniffle of a well-modelled nose and a dimpling that argued to Vesta something to come. "Misc Somers says you held one of them babies, Jedge, to let its mother shout, and pretended to be under a conviction; an' that you backslid right thar and was a-whisperin' to the other mother. Lord sakes! Misc Somers finds it all out."

"Well," said the Judge, finding the laugh against him, "I never did better electioneering than that day. By holding that baby five minutes I made a vote, and the mother will hold it twenty years before she will make a vote."

"Misc Somers says, Jedge, you hold the women longer than thar babies; but I told her you was in sech conviction you didn't know one from the other. 'Oh,' she says, 'he's sly and safe when he gits over yer on the Worcester side.' Misc Somers, she's dreadful plain."

William Tilghman, during the continuation of this colloquy, looked with interest on the two young ladies: Vesta, the elder by two or three years, and richly endowed with the lights of both beauty and accomplishments; the maid from the ocean side, plainer, and with no ornament within or without; but he could foresee, under Vesta's fostering, a graceful woman, with coquetry and fascination not wholly latent there; and, as his eyes met Rhoda's, he interpreted the look that at a certain time of life almost every maiden casts on meeting a young man--"Is he single?" She shot this look so archly, yet so strong, that the arrow wounded him a very little as it glanced off. He smiled, but the consciousness was restored a moment that he was a young man still, as well as a priest. Love, which had closed a door like the portal of a tomb against him, began to come forth like a glow-worm and wink its lamp athwart the dark.

"She must come to Sunday-school," he thought, "if she stays in Princess Anne. We will polish her."

The mocking-bird, not being satisfied with any lull in the conversation, "pearted up," as he saw Vesta withdraw, and cried,

"'Sband! 'Sband! Meee--shack! Mee-ee-ee-shack! See me! see me! Gents!

gents! gents! genten! Sweet! sweetie! sweetie! Hoo! hoo! See! see!

Vesty, she! Ha! ha!"

He flew in the air over his stirring master, as if doubting that all was well since the strange lady, who had been so quiet all the morning, was gone.

"That bird almost speaks," said William Tilghman; "I have spent many an hour teaching them, but never could make one talk like that."

"Maybe you had too much to teach to it," Rhoda Holland said; "it ain't often they can speak, and they mustn't have much company to learn well.

Uncle Meshach haint had no company but that bird for years. I reckon the bird got mad and lonesome, and jest hooted words at him."

"What is it saying now?" Tilghman asked. "See! it is almost convulsive in its attempts to say something."

The gray bird, as impressive as a poor poet, seemed nearly in a state of epilepsy to bring up some burden of oppressive sound, and, as they watched it, almost tipsy with the intoxicant of speech, fluttering, driving, and striking in the air, it suddenly brought out a note liquid as gurgling snow from a bird-cote spout:

"L-l-lo-love! love! love! Ha! ha! L-l-love!"

"Well done, old bachelor!" Judge Custis remarked, in spite of his f.a.gged face, for good resolution and yesterday's unbracing had left him somewhat limp and haggard still. "He brings out 'love' as if he had made a vow against it, but the confession had to come. Many a monk would sing the same if instinct could find a daring word in his chorals. These mockers of Maryland were celebrated in the British magazines a hundred years ago, and I recall some lines about them."

He then recited:

"'His breast whose plumes a cheerful white display, His quivering wings are dressed in sober gray, Sure all the Muses this their bird inspire, And he alone is equal to a choir.

Oh, sweet musician! thou dost far excel The soothing song of pleasing Philomel: Sweet is her song, but in few notes confined, But thine, thou mimic of the feathery kind!

Runs thro' all notes: thou only know'st them all, At once the copy and th' original!'"

"That's magnificins!" Rhoda exclaimed, with quiet delight; "who is 'fellow Mil,' Jedge?"

"Oh, that's the British nightingale. These American mocking-birds surpa.s.s them as one of our Eastern Sh.o.r.e clippers outsails all the naval powers of Europe."

"I've hearn 'The British Nightingale,'" Rhoda said, with a flash of her eyes; "he was a blind man with green specticklers that sang at Nu-ark, ''ome, sweet 'ome'--that's the way he plonounced it--an' it affected of him so, he had to drink a whole tumbler of water, an' Misc Somers, spying around to see if he was the rale nightingale, she found it was gin in that gla.s.s, and told about it."

Rhoda made even the minister laugh, as she indented her cheeks and cast a sheep's glance at him and the Judge. He marvelled that such forest English could be resented so little by his mind, but he thought,

"Never mind, she may have had no more lessons than the bird, whose difficulty is even beautiful. But see! Mr. Milburn is wide awake. My friend, how do you feel?"

"Better, better!" murmured Milburn. "I cannot lie here any more. There is money, _money_, gentlemen, dependent on my getting about."

He started up with the greatest resolution and confidence, and fell upon his head before he had left the coverlets.

"No, no!" said the Judge, as he and Tilghman picked Milburn up and arranged him as before. "Your will is matched this time, my brave son-in-law! You are back in the hut you have consumed, among the fires thereof, and the avenging blast of Na.s.sawongo furnace burns in your veins and cools you in the mill-pond alternately. Lie there and repent for the injury you have done a spotless one!"

If Meshach heard this it was never known, but the unconscious or impulsive utterance strengthened the impression with Tilghman and Rhoda that Vesta's marriage was not altogether voluntary, and produced on both a feeling of deeper sympathy and respect for her.

"Judge," the young minister said, "do good for evil, if evil there has been! I have given him my hand sincerely; perhaps you can relieve his mind of some business care."

"Mr. Milburn," the Judge said, when he saw the resinous eyes roll towards him again out of that swarthy face, now pale with weakness, "I am out of a job now, and can work cheap. Let me do any errand for you."

A look of petulance, followed by one of inquiry, came up from Milburn's eyes, and he pressed his head between his wrists, as if to bring back the blood that might propel his judgment. They heard him mutter,

"No business prudence--yet plausible, persuasive--might do it well."

The Judge spoke now, with some firmness:

"Milburn, there is no use of your rebelling. Here you are and here you will lie till nature does her restoration, a.s.sisted by this medicine I have brought you. You must undergo calomel, and this quinine must set on its work of several weeks to break up the regularity of these chills. In the meantime, as your interests are also Vesta's, and Vesta's are mine, let me serve her, if not you."

The positive tone influenced the weakened system of the patient. He looked at all three of the observers, and said to Tilghman, "William, I might send you but for your calling; leave me with the Judge a little while, both you and Rhoda."

Rhoda took the Conestoga bonnet from the top of the Entailed Hat box, and arrayed herself in it, to the rector's exceeding wonder.

"Let's you and me go take a little walk," she said, putting her hand in his arm with a quiet confidence in which was a spark of Meshach's will.

"I ain't afraid of Princess Anne people, if they are proud. Mise Somers says King Solomons was no better than a lily outen the pond, and said so himself."

The young man, sincere as his humility was, blushed a little at the idea of walking through his native town with that bonnet at his side, he being of one of the self-conscious, high-viewing families of the old peninsula--his grand-uncle the staff-officer of Washington, and messenger from Yorktown to Congress with the news, "Cornwallis has fallen;" but it was his chivalric sense, and not his piety, which immediately dispelled the last touch of c.o.xcombry, when he felt that a lady had requested him.

"With happiness, Miss Holland;" and he did not feel one shrinking thought again as he ran the gantlet of the idle fellows of the town, many of them his former vagrant playmates. Rhoda was perfectly happy. He would have taken her to his grandmother's, with whom he kept house, but that aristocratic old dowager might say something, he considered, to destroy Rhoda's confidence in her elegant appearance and easy vocabulary; and they walked past Teackle Hall, where Vesta saw them, and opened the door and made them come in and eat a little. Rhoda at first showed some uneasiness under this great pile of habitation, but Vesta was so natural and gracious that the shyness wore off, and, at a fitting moment, the bride said:

"Rhoda, my dear, there is a bonnet up-stairs I expect to wear this winter, and I want to try it on you, whom I think it will particularly become."

Rhoda's quiet eyes flashed as she saw the new article and heard Vesta praise it, upon her head. The old bonnet had received a cruel blow, in spite of Mrs. Somers.