Oh! she was a lovely girl,
So pretty and so fair,
With gentle, love-lit _eyes_,
And wavy, dark brown hair.
I loved the gentle girl,
But, oh! I heaved a sigh
When first she told me she could see
Out of only _one_ eye.
But soon I thought within myself
I'd better save my tear and sigh
_To bestow upon an older person I know
Who has more than one eye_.
She is brave and intelligent
Too. She is witty and wise.
She'll accomplish more now than _another person_ I know
Who has _two_ eyes.
Ah, you need not pity _her_!
_She_ needs not your tear and sigh.
She'll make good use, I tell you,
Of her _one_ remaining eye.
In the home where we are hastening,
In our eternal Home on High,
See that _you_ be not rivalled
By the girl with only _one_ eye.[*]
[*]Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote
that she had "composed" this poem. It is known to be the work of
another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and
produced a version of her own. J. L. A.
Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in
the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days
ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age--a boy,
enormously fat--whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her
mother had been decoyed by the general. Further to satirize the
similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of
yellow ribbon.
Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she
has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on
the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling
elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby's daughter. There is a
real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy's true place in
nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated
with thick tissues of blubber. If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she
seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in
deep.
Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open
letter in her hand.
"Oh, read it!" she cried, her face kindling with glory.
It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the
Louisville _Journal_ accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and
assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of
Kentucky poetesses. The title of the poem was, "My Lover Kneels to
None but God."
"I infer from this," I said, gravely, "that your lover is a Kentuckian."
"He is," cried Sylvia. "Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!"
"Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I continued, mildly, "upon having
such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover
ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion."
"Never!" cried Sylvia. "I would spurn him as chaff!"
"Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued, further,
"you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something
new to parse."
Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.
"Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's
say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in
Virgil and Homer. And if he could do that then, think what he must he
able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!"
I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr.
Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was
based upon the fact that he could not parse it.
There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.
This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time
during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the
collar over his head and was gone. Whither and how long no one knew;
but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to
the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs.
Walters's house--poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such
deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head.
Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney. Glancing down this,
he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a
hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to
produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and
friendly a passage. His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at
the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove
of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but
in Mrs. Walters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is
not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could
white it, and he dripping with soot. Here the ground beneath him was
of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently
resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter. In the course of
his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he
must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that
so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.
It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having
left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom. She
threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a
snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted
outward.
"Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank
with bewilderment. Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been
her bed. Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded
with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes
blazing green with defiance.
She slammed and locked the door.
"Run for the sheriff!" she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought
her market basket; and she followed him as he fled.
"What is it, Mrs. Walters?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and
bringing the handcuffs.
"There's somebody in my bed!" she cried, wringing her hands. "I
believe it's the devil."
"It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing; for by this time we were
all gathered together.
"What a dear 'coon!" said the sewing-girl.
"Oh, Mrs. Walters! You are like Little Red Riding-hood!" said Sylvia.
"I can't arrest a 'coon, madam!" exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck
at being made ridiculous.
"Then arrest the carpenter!" cried poor, unhappy, excited Mrs. Walters,
bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder.
And among us all Georgiana was the only comforter. She laid aside her
own work for that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her
desperately wounded neighbor, and at nightfall, over the bed, now
peaceful and snowy once more, she spread a marvellous priceless quilt
that she had long been making to exhibit at the approaching World's
Fair in New York.
"Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtime, "it seems to
me that things happen in order to show you off."
"Only think!" Georgiana replied; "she will never get into bed again
without a shiver and a glance at the chimney. I begrudge her the quilt
for one reason: it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in
it."
"Did she tell you that she had had those bedclothes ever since her
marriage?"
"Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very
long."
"How long should you think?"
"Oh, well--about a minute."
"And yet she certainly has the clearest possible idea of Mr. Walters.
I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as
perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers."
"Or perhaps wish to."