OLD BLUFF.
AND now we come to an episode of the highest importance to five young
misses of Laurel Grove. General Townsend owned an unoccupied house
about two miles from town, at the foot of a steep hill called Old
Bluff; and it had occurred to the active mind of Mary Gray that this
would be a fine place for “camping out.”
It was April when she hinted this to Fanny Townsend, but it was May
before Fanny spoke of it to her father.
“I’m waiting till some time when you come to my house to tea,
Dandelina; and we mustn’t get to laughing, now you remember.”
Mary seated herself at the Townsend tea-table one evening with nervous
dread; for, next to Mrs. Prim, Mrs. Townsend inspired her with more
awe than any other lady in town. When she thought it time for Fanny to
speak, she touched her foot under the table, and Fanny began.
“Papa, I have something to say.”
Fanny had the feeling that she was not highly reverenced by her
family, on account of her unfortunate habit of giggling; but her face
was serious enough now. “Papa, may we girls go down to the farm next
summer,—to that house with the roses ’round it,—and camp out? The girls
all want to, and we—we’re going to call it Camp Comfort.” (The reader
will perceive that this explains the letters “C. C.”) She was sorry
next moment that she had spoken, for her mother said, just as she had
feared she might, “What will you think of next, Fanny?”
But her father seemed only amused. “Camp out? We girls? How many may ye
be? And who? Going to take your servants?”
“You’ll each need a watch-dog,” suggested Fanny’s elder brother, Jack.
“You’ll come home nights, I presume,—servants, watch-dogs and all,”
said her father.
“O no, indeed! It wouldn’t be camping out if we came home nights! And
nobody has a dog but Fanny, and we shouldn’t want any servants,” cried
Mary Gray, whose views of labor seemed to have changed materially.
“We intend to do our own work,” remarked Fanny. Whereupon everybody
laughed; and General Townsend asked again who the girls were? “Oh,
Flaxie Frizzle and Blanche Jones and I, papa; that makes three, rather
young; and then Sadie Patten and Lucy Abbott, they’re rather old; that
makes five. Sadie and Lucy will be the mothers,—I mean if you let us
go.”
“That ‘if’ is well put in,” said brother Jack.
“But what will you do for a stove?” asked General Townsend, wishing to
hear their plans, “there’s none in the house.”
“My mamma has a rusty stove, and our Henry Mann could take it to Old
Bluff,” replied Mary.
“But there’s no furniture,—not a chair or a table.”
“They have too many chairs at Major Patten’s and Mr. Jones’s; their
houses are running over with chairs.”
“Well, what about dishes?”
“Why, papa,” said Fanny eagerly, “only think what lots of dishes _we_
have, just oceans, all broken to pieces!”
“Ah, shall you eat from broken dishes?” asked Mrs. Townsend coolly.
“And perhaps you’ll sleep on the floor?”
“O no, Mrs. Townsend, our house is full of beds! Mamma has some of them
put in the stable, and Blanche Jones’s house is full of beds, and they
have to keep some of them in the attic. Everybody has everything; we’ve
talked it all over. And there’s our big express wagon, and our Henry
Mann to drive.”
Mary paused for breath.
“Yes, papa, Dr. Gray’s express wagon is very large; and we have a
push-cart, you know. So can’t we go?” coaxed Fanny, true to first
principles.
“What have _I_ to do about it, little Miss Townsend? It seems you have
already made your plans and invited your guests. How happened you to
think to ask my permission for the rent of the house.”
“Finish your supper, Frances, and do not sit there with your bread in
the air,” said Mrs. Townsend in a decided tone. “You forget that I am
to be consulted as well as your father. And that’s not all. I’ve no
idea that Dr. Gray, or Major Patten, or Mr. Jones, or Mrs. Abbott will
consent to this camping out, as you call it; so you must not set your
hearts on it, you and Flaxie.”
But it chanced that every one of the parents did consent at last; and
one morning in the latter part of June you might have seen some very
busy girls loading a push-cart and an express wagon, with the help of
their brothers and Henry Mann, while Fanny laughed almost continually,
and Mary Gray exclaimed at intervals,—
“O won’t it be a state of bliss?”
There were four bedsteads, eight chairs, one old sofa, one table, one
rusty stove, a variety of old dishes,—not broken ones,—beside a vast
amount of rubbish, which the mothers thought quite useless, but which
the daughters assured them would be “just the thing for our charades.”
“I’m not going to Old Bluff to assist in such performances as charades,
so you may just count me out,” said Preston, who was to take turns with
Bert Abbott in being a nightly guest at Camp Comfort; since the parents
would not consent that the girls should spend one night there alone.
“As if boys were the least protection,” said Lucy Abbott, Preston’s
cousin.
“Still they may be useful in getting up games,” returned Sadie Patten
hopefully. “And Jack Townsend’s cornet is charming.”
“So it is; it goes so well with your harmonica. And we’ll make the boys
stir the ice cream,” said Lucy, the head housekeeper.
There was an ice-house connected with their cottage, and ice cream was
to be permitted on Sundays, and lemonade at pleasure.
“But where are the lemons?” said Mary, flying about in everybody’s way.
“Oh, we shall buy fresh lemons every morning of our grocer who comes
to our door,” said Lucy grandly. “What I want to know is, if my
hammock was packed?—Children, did you see three hammocks in that
push-cart?—Boys, I hope you’ll hang up those hammocks before we get
there! Don’t go racing now and spilling out things!—There, I don’t
believe anybody thought to put in that spider,” added she anxiously, as
the five girls had bidden good-by to their families in the cool of the
morning, and were walking in a gay procession toward their house in the
country.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven.”
Old Bluff was a steep, though not very high mountain on the Canada
side, and if it is not gone, it stands there yet, hanging defiantly
over the blue brook called the _river_ Dee, and throwing its huge
shadow from shore to shore.
Old Bluff is a stern, bareheaded peak, and few are the flowers that
dare show their faces near it. It is chiefly the hardy wintergreen and
disconsolate little sprigs of pine and spruce which huddle together
along its sides.
At the foot of this famous bluff, on the New York side, stood General
Townsend’s old-fashioned farm-house, a story and a half high, with a
white picket fence around it, and a red barn at one side. The house
many years ago had been white; and the panes of glass in the windows
were not only very small, but weather-stained and streaked with
rainbow hues. London Pride or “Bouncing Bet” grew near the broad front
door-stone, together with a few bunches of southernwood, which Dr. Gray
thought had a finer odor than any geranium. The front yard was grassy,
and the fence lined with roses of various sorts.
It was the first summer for years that this pleasant old place had been
vacant, and now it might be applied for any day; but meanwhile the
five girls, called “the quintette,” and the three attendant cavaliers,
called “the trio,” were welcome to rusticate in it, and call it a
“camp” if they chose.
After the furniture was set up, and there had been a reasonable amount
of play at hide and seek in the barn, and the first supper had been
eaten—the tablecloth proving to be too small for the table—Mary went to
one of the front “rainbow-windows” to watch for Preston.
“I mean to be a true woman.”
This was what she usually said to herself when resolved not to cry. But
there _was_ something lonesome in the thought of going to bed without
kissing her mother.
“Nobody else feels as I do, and I wouldn’t mention it for anything; but
I’d give one quarter of my pin money—one whole dollar—to see mamma and
Ethel.”
She had supposed that in camping out all care would be left behind. Her
mother had excused her from lessons and sewing, and she had looked for
“a state of bliss;” but it is forever true—and Mary was beginning to
find it so—that wherever we are, there is “something still to do and
bear.”
Homesickness was a constitutional weakness with Mary, but she disdained
the cowardice of running home; she would be a “true woman,” and crack
walnuts to please Lucy.
“Well, this is a hard-working family,” said Preston, arriving presently
in state on his bicycle, as Lucy and Sadie were engaged in putting the
supper dishes in the kitchen cupboard.
“Yes, Mr. Gray; and we allow no idlers here. Please may I ask what ails
our window shades, sir?”
The poor old green-cloth curtains were tearing away from the gentle
clasp of Sadie Patten’s tack-nails, and leaning over from the tops of
the windows as if already tired of the sun and wanting a little rest.
“Well, let’s see your hammer.”
“No, I’m using it, I’m a young lady now and do as I please,” cried
Mary, springing up from the kitchen hearth, and scattering her walnuts
broadcast, “catch me if you can.”
“Is that so? Well, then, now for a race from here to the sweet-apple
tree. One, two, three, begin!” And Preston started off at the top of
his speed, Mary just before him, her face aglow, her hair streaming in
the wind. As she skimmed over the ground, shouting and laughing, she
seemed for all the world like a little girl, and not in the least like
a young lady. She was soon caught and obliged to surrender the hammer,
whereupon Preston nailed the curtains neatly, and went whistling about
the house, giving finishing touches here and there to the rickety
furniture.
“O thank you. You’ve been a great help. Now, in return, you shall have
a spring-bed to sleep on, the only one we have in the house,” said
Lucy, with a mischievous glance at Sadie.
The spring-bed did not fit the bedstead, and the chances were that it
might fall through in the night.
“You’re too tremendously kind, too self-sacrificing,” said Preston,
suspecting at once that something was wrong.
But he had his revenge. The bedstead was extremely noisy, and the
roguish youth, unable to sleep himself on account of mosquitoes,
rejoiced to think that he was probably keeping his cousin Lucy awake.
“Good morning, Preston, I hope you rested well,” said she, as they all
met next morning in the front yard.
“O very.—it’s _so_ quiet in the country,” returned he demurely. “Did
you ever _hear_ anything so quiet?”
“Never; except possibly a saw-mill,” said Sadie Patten. “Lucy and I
wondered if you could be alive, you were so still!”
“It _was_ sort of frightful. No sound broke the awful silence, save the
warning voice of the mosquito.—By the way, girls, why don’t you call
this spot Mosquito Ranch?”
“I’ll tell you what we used to call it at our house,—we always called
it ‘Down to the Farm,’” remarked little Fanny.
“It ought to be Rose Villa,” said Lucy. “Just see our rose-tree that
reaches almost to the eaves. We measured it yesterday, and it’s seven
feet high.”
“That will do for a tree,” said Preston, plucking one of the pure,
white roses and thrusting it into his button-hole; “but you can’t eat
roses, you know.”
He had built a fire in the kitchen stove, but the young ladies seemed
to have forgotten entirely that there was such a thing in the world as
breakfast.
“O, yes, we must prepare our simple morning meal,” said cousin Lucy.
“Girls, where’s my blue-checked apron? Preston, we’ve heard there are
lovely trout in that brook across the field. Not the _river_-brook.”
“Have you, really? Then I go a-fishing; I’d rather do that than
starve.—No, Fan, you needn’t come, I won’t have anybody with me but
Flaxie.”
Very proud was Mary that she could be trusted to keep silence in
the presence of the wise and wary trout. It was beautiful there by
the brook-side, in the still June morning, sitting and watching the
“shadowy water, with a sweet south wind blowing over it.” There was no
house within half a mile, and perhaps the Peck family and the Brown
family—the nearest neighbors—were still asleep, for there was no
sound, except the “song-talk” of the birds, and the whisper of the wind
through the trees. It was a very light whisper, reminding Preston of
the words,—
“And then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.”
Mary’s breath was a “noiseless noise,” too; it hardly stirred the folds
of her buff print dress; it was the very “sigh” of “silence,” and
Preston thought he should tell her so, and praise her when they got
home; but it happened that he forgot it.
The trout came, as they usually did when he called for them; but it
must be confessed that they were never eaten. Lucy put them in the
spider, Sadie salted, Fanny turned, and finally Blanche Jones burned
them. The “morning meal” was as “simple” as need be, with cold bread
and butter, cold tongue, and muddy, creamless coffee, the milk having
turned sour. In the midst of their repast, the young campers were
surprised by a loud peal of the door-bell.