As soon as we heard the pleasant news--I suppose the news of an
engagement ought always to be called pleasant--it was decided that I
ought to speak first about it, and speak to the father. We had not been
a great while in the neighborhood, and it would look less like a bid
for the familiar acquaintance of people living on a larger scale than
ourselves, and less of an opening for our own intimacy if they turned
out to be not quite so desirable in other ways as they were in the
worldly way. For the ladies of the respective families first to offer
and receive congratulations would be very much more committing on both
sides; at the same time, to avoid the appearance of stiffness, some one
ought to speak, and speak promptly. The news had not come to us directly
from our neighbors, but authoritatively from a friend of theirs, who was
also a friend of ours, and we could not very well hold back. So, in the
cool of the early evening, when I had quite finished rasping my lawn
with the new mower, I left it at the end of the swath, which had brought
me near the fence, and said across it,
“Good-evening!”
My neighbor turned from making his man pour a pail of water on the earth
round a freshly planted tree, and said, “Oh, good-evening! How d'ye do?
Glad to see you!” and offered his hand over the low coping so cordially
that I felt warranted in holding it a moment.
“I hope it's in order for me to say how very much my wife and I are
interested in the news we've heard about one of your daughters? May I
offer our best wishes for her happiness?”
“Oh, thank you,” my neighbor said. “You're very good indeed. Yes, it's
rather exciting--for us. I guess that's all for to-night, Al,” he said,
in dismissal of his man, before turning to lay his arms comfortably
on the fence top. Then he laughed, before he added, to me, “And rather
surprising, too.”
“Those things are always rather surprising, aren't they?” I suggested.
“Well, yes, I suppose they are. It oughtn't be so in our case, though,
as we've been through it twice before: once with my son--he oughtn't
to have counted, but he did--and once with my eldest daughter. Yes,
you might say you never do quite expect it, though everybody else does.
Then, in this case, she was the baby so long, that we always thought of
her as a little girl. Yes, she's kept on being the pet, I guess, and we
couldn't realize what was in the air.”
I had thought, from the first sight of him, that there was something
very charming in my neighbor's looks. He had a large, round head, which
had once been red, but was now a russet silvered, and was not too large
for his manly frame, swaying amply outward, but not too amply, at the
girth. He had blue, kind eyes, and a face fully freckled, and the girl
he was speaking of with a tenderness in his tones rather than his words,
was a young feminine copy of him; only, her head was little, under its
load of red hair, and her figure, which we had lately noticed flitting
in and out, as with a shy consciousness of being stared at on account of
her engagement, was as light as his was heavy on its feet.