Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/157

1857.]

open your eyes, Polder! You think I am going to tell you about some of my Minnesota experiences; how I used to scamper over the prairies on my Indian pony, and lie in wait for wild turkeys on the edge of an oak opening. That is pretty sport, too, to creep under an oak with low-hanging boughs, and in the silence of a glowing autumn-day linger by the hour together in a trance of warm stillness, watching the light tracery of shadow and sun on that smooth sward, only now and then roused by the fleet rush of a deer through the wood, or the brisk chatter of a plume-tailed squirrel, till one hears a distant, sharp, clucking chuckle, and in an instant more pulls the trigger, and upsets a grand old cock, every bronzed feather glittering in the sunshine, and now splashed with scarlet blood, the delicate underwing ground into down as he rolls and flutters; for the first shot rarely kills at once with an amateur; there's too much excitement. Splendid sport, that! but I'm not going into it second-hand. I promised to tell you a story, now the skipper's fast, and the night is too warm to think of sleep down in that wretched bunk;—what another torture Dante might have lavished on his Inferno, if he'd ever slept in a fishing-smack! No. The moonlight makes me sentimental! Did I ever tell you about a month I spent up in Centreville, the year I came home from Germany? That was turkey-hunting with a vengeance!

You see, my pretty cousin Peggy married Peter Smith, who owns paper-mills in Centreville, and has exiled herself into deep country for life; a circumstance I disapprove, because I like Peggy, and manufacturers always bore me, though Peter is a clever fellow enough; but madam was an old flame of mine, and I have a lingering tenderness for her yet. I wish she was nearer town. Just that year Peggy had been very ill indeed, and Kate, her sister, had gone up to nurse her. When I came home Peggy was getting better, and sent for me to come up and make a visitation there in June. I hadn't seen Kate for seven years,—not since she was thirteen; our education intervened. She had gone through that grading process and come out. By Jupiter! when she met me at the door of Smith's pretty, English-looking cottage, I took my hat off, she was so like that little Brazilian princess we used to see in the cortége of the court at Paris. What was her name? Never mind that! Kate had just such large, expressive eyes, just such masses of shiny black hair, just such a little nose,—turned up undeniably, but all the more piquant. And her teeth! good gracious! she smiled like a flash of lightning,—dark and sallow as she was. But she was cross, or stiff, or something, to me for a long time. Peggy only appeared after dinner, looking pale and lovely enough in her loose wrapper to make Peter act excessively like a young married man, and to make me wish myself at an invisible distance, doing something beside picking up Kate's things, that she always dropped on the floor whenever she sewed. Peggy saw I was bored, so she requested me one day to walk down to the poultry-yard and ask about her chickens; she pretended a great deal of anxiety, and Peter had sprained his ankle.

"Kate will go with you," said she.

"No, she won't!" ejaculated that young woman.

"Thank you," said I, making a minuet bow, and off I went to the farm-house. Such a pretty walk it was, too! through a thicket of birches, down a little hill-side into a hollow full of hoary chestnut-trees, across a bubbling, dancing brook, and you came out upon the tiniest orchard in the world, a one-storied house with a red porch, and a great sweet-brier bush thereby; while up the hill-side behind stretched