However we may spend our Sabbath, it is different from the other
days of the week. I have often thought the little creatures of field
and woods knew the difference. They run or sing with more gladness
and a less business-like air. The friskiest lambs, measuring strength
with each other by stiff-legged jumps, are followed by gentle bleats
from their mothers, and come back after a frolic to meditate and
switch their tails. The fleecy roll of a lamb's tail, and the dimples
which seem to dint its first coat, the pinkness of its nose, and the
drollery of its eye, are all worth watching under a cloudless Sunday
sky.
As the carriage and wagon rolled along the 'pike, they met other
vehicles full of people driving for an outing, or going to afternoon
Sunday-school held in schoolhouses along the various by-roads.
Mrs. Tracy leaned forward every time a buggy passed the wagon, and
scanned its occupants until they turned towards the right to pass
Grandma Padgett.
The first messenger they met entered on the 'pike from a cross-road
some distance ahead of them, but was checked in his canter toward
Greenfield by Zene, who stopped the wagon for a parley. Mrs. Tracy
was half irritated by such officiousness, and Grandma Padgett herself
intended to call Zene to account, when he left the white and gray and
came limping to the carriage at the rider's side. However, the news
he helped to bring, and the interest he took in it, at once excused
him. This man, scouring the country north and south since early
morning, had heard nothing of the show-wagon.
It might be somewhere in the woods, or jogging innocently along a
dirt road. It was no longer an object to the searchers. He believed
the woman and child had left it, intending to rejoin it at some
appointed place when all excitement was over. He said he thought he
had the very woman and child back here a piece, though they might
give him the slip before he could bring anybody to certainly identify
them.
“My little one 'give me the slip'!” exclaimed Mrs. Tracy indignantly.
The man said his meaning was, she might be slipped off by her keeper.
“Where have you got them?” inquired Grandma Padgett.
“He saw 'em goin' into Sunday-school, marm,” explained Zene.
“There's a meetin'-house over yonder three or four mile,” pointing
with his whip.
“It's the unlikeliest place that ever was,” said the messenger,
polishing his horse's wet neck. “And I suppose that's what the woman
thought when she slipped in there. If I hadn't happened by in the
nick of time I wouldn't mistrusted. She didn't see me. She was goin'
up the steps, with her back to the road, and the meetin'-house sets a
considerable piece from the fence. They was all singin' loud enough
to drown a horse's feet in the dust.”
“And both were like the descriptions you had?” said Mrs. Tracy.
“So nigh like that I half-pulled up and had a notion to go in and
see for myself. Then, thinks I, you better wait and bring-the ones
that would know for sure. There ain't no harm in that.”
Before the mother could speak again, Grandma Padgett told the man to
turn back and direct them, and Zene to fall behind the carriage with
his load. He could jog leisurely in the wake of the carriage, to
avoid getting separated from it: that would be all he need attempt.
She took up her whip to touch Hickory and Henry.
After turning off on the by-road, Grandma Padgett heard Zene
leisurely jogging in the wake of the carriage, and remembered for a
moment, with dismay, the number of breakable things in his load. He
drove all the way to the meeting-house with the white and gray
constantly rearing their noses from contact with the hind carriage
curtains; up swells, when the road wound through stump-bordered
sward, and down into sudden gullies, when all his movables clanged
and rumbled, as if protesting against the unusual speed they had to
endure. Zene was as anxious to reach the meeting-house as the man who
cantered ahead.
They drew up to where it basked on the rising ground, an old brown
frame with lichens crusting the roof. There were two front doors, a
flight of wooden steps leading up to each, and three high windows
along the visible side. All these stood open letting out a pleasant
hum, through which the cracked voice of an old man occasionally
broke. No hump of belfry stood upon its back. The afternoon sun was
the bell which called that neighborhood together for Sunday-school.
And this unconscious duty performed, the afternoon sun now brightened
the graves which crowded to the very fence, brought out the glint and
polish of the new marble headstones, or showed the grooved names in
the old and leaning slate ones. Some graves were enclosed by rails,
and others barely lifted their tops above the long grass. There were
baby-nests hollowing into the turf, and clay-colored piles set head
and foot with fresh boards. And on all these aunt Corinne looked with
an interest which graves never failed to rouse in her, no matter what
the occasion might be.
[Illustration: THE FIRST MESSENGER.]
The horses switched their tails along the outside of the fence. One
backed his vehicle as far as his hitching-strap would let him,
against the wheels of another's buggy, that other immediately
responding by a similar movement. Some of them turned their heads and
challenged Hickory and Henry and the saddle-horse with speaking
whinneys. “Whe-hee-hee-hee! You going to be tied up here for the
grass-flies to bite too? Where do you come from, and why don't you
kick your folks for going to afternoon meeting in hot June time?”
The pilot of the caravan had helped take horse-thieves in his time,
and he considered this a similar excursion. He dismounted swiftly,
but with an air of caution, and as he let down the carriage steps,
said he thought they better surround the house.
But Mrs. Tracy reached the ground as if she did not see him, and ran
through the open gate with her black draperies flowing in a rush
behind her. Robert Day and aunt Corinne were anxious to follow, and
the man tied Grandma Padgett's horses to a rail fence across the
road, while some protest was made among the fly-bitten row against
the white cover of Zene's moving-wagon.
Although Bobaday felt excited and eager as he trotted up the grass
path after Mrs. Tracy, the spirit of the country Sunday-school came
out of doors to meet him.
There were the class of old men and the class of old women in the
corner seats each side of the pulpit, and their lesson was in the Old
Testament. The young ladies listened to the instruction of the smart
young man of the neighborhood, and his sonorous words rolled against
the echoing walls. He usually taught the winter district and singing
schools. The young girl who did for summer schoolmiss, had a class of
rosebud children in the middle of the meetinghouse, and they crowded
to Her lap and crawled up on her shoulders, though their mothers, in
the mothers' class, shook warning heads at them. Scent of cloves,
roses and sweetbrier mingled with the woody smell of a building shut
close six days out of seven. Two rascals in the boys' class, who,
evading their teacher's count, had been down under the seats kicking
each other with stiff new shoes, emerged just as the librarian came
around with a pile of books, ready to fight good-naturedly over the
one with the brightest cover. The boy who got possession would never
read the book, but he could pull it out of his jacket pocket and
tantalize the other boy going home.
The Sunday-school was a wholesome, happy place, even for these young
heathen who were enjoying their bodies too much to care particularly
about their souls. And when the superintendent stood up to rap the
school to order for the close of the session, and line out one of
Watts's sober hymns, there was a pleasant flutter of getting ready,
and the smart young man of the neighborhood took his tuning-fork from
his vest pocket to hit against his teeth so he could set the tune. He
wore a very short-tailed coat, and had his hair brushed up in a high
roach from his forehead, and these two facts conspired to give him a
brisk and wide awake appearance as he stepped into the aisle holding
a singing book in his hand.
But no peaceful, long-drawn hymn floated through the windows and
wandered into the woods. The twang of the tuning-fork was drowned by
a succession of cries. The smart young man's eyebrows went up to meet
his roach while he stood in the aisle astonished to see a lady in
trailing black clothes pounce upon a child strange to the
neighborhood, and exclaim over, and cover it with kisses.