Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/262

242 watched, as with a doting mother's eye, the improvement which she believed was apparent in Joshua's coat and the gentle Milly's voice, while Jumbo Junior's adaptability to instruction pleased her beyond words. The silent, inscrutable Princess baffled her, but the Hindu's vocabulary and diction kept her in a continual glee.

"Oh, there is so muchness!" cried Ramo Bung, when he was shown the Mississippi. "Oh, be astonished beyond utterness!"

And so, when at last Steggins procured a raft and moored it to the pier by the molasses-sheds, the kind-hearted hostess wiped away the tears that came to her eyes. The boa-constrictor she was indeed glad to be rid of, for it was the one cloud on her week of happiness, but when Milly's plaintive eyes had looked their last at her, and Joshua had been dragged, whining, aboard, it was all she could do to speak. It only remained for Jumbo Junior, of his own accord, to offer her his trunk for her to break down with emotion.

"I don't know when I've had such a pleasant time," she said. "I do hope you'll get to Memphis all right; and be sure and send me word how you get along and how Joshua stood the trip. Now here's four bottles of Smiley's Embrocation for Milly's neck and feet. Be sure you rub it well in, night and morning. If I only had a bottle of aconite pills, I'd like her to have them."

Steggins took her hand with a fierce grip. "Good-by, Mis' Figtry," he said. "You treated us square, and we'll treat you square. Just as soon as I get to Memphis and sell the animals I'll send you the money. You've been a good friend to Joshua, and he'll never forget you, I know."

Ramo Bung prostrated himself before her in an elaborate salaam. "Good-by with condescension," he cried. "Bung family are in salutement to your home with excellence. There is a doubtless explosion of violent heart on my interior. Ever so much blessing come against you."

"Well," said Mrs. Noah, "now you've found the way I hope you'll come again sometime. The world ain't such a big place but that we may meet again."

Mrs. Noah sobbed as she watched the little expedition sweep away. Then, just as they were abreast of the house, a long, muffled roar came to her over the rushing waters, as Joshua lifted up his voice in mournful lament. In spite of herself she smiled through her tears.

Soon the barge was far away, rapidly diminishing in the distance. When at last it drifted out of her sight she turned to her cook-stove and brewed a pot of strong tea.

"Well," she said over the third cup, "what can't be cured must be endured. I must say this place looks like Sam Patch in a hail-storm—I guess it 'll do me good to go to spring cleanin'!"

The month of April, a year later, found Mrs. Noah Figtry home again in Duxbury, immersed in the quiet of New England life. From the quaint collection of friends that she had made in Tennessee no word had come, except a draft for two hundred and fifty dollars and a short misspelled letter from Mr. Steggins, announcing their safe arrival in Memphis and subsequent sale of the animals, and employment by Wilder's Triplex Conglomeration.

It was with a feeling of keen disappointment, then, that, returning late one Saturday night from a week's visit in Boston, she learned that Wilder's circus had been in town. It was breaking camp that very night, and would on Sunday proceed to Plymouth. Mrs. Noah, eagerly interrogating her neighbors, found scant satisfaction in their reports. The show, it was true, boasted a small menagerie, including a lion, a giraffe, and two elephants, but it was not easy to identify the animals from the meagre descriptions she received.

"I should know Joshua anywhere by a scar on his left cheek," Mrs. Noah declared, "but as for Jumbo Junior and Milly, I ain't so sure I'd recognize them, unless I met a wheezing giraffe and an elephant that volunteered to shake hands with me. But it seems strange that nobody saw that mealy-mouthed Hindu and the snake-princess. As for Mr. Steggins, he ain't the kind of man that's likely to keep any job long, and maybe he's in Terra del Fuego by this time. Howsomever, I'm determined to go over