I will now finish telling you about the great hay-making day. Toward
the end of the afternoon a lot of boys and girls began playing a game
which seemed to belong to the hayfield. Each one of the bigger boys
would twist up a rope of hay and run after a girl, and when he had
thrown it over her neck he could kiss her. Girls are girls the whole
world over, and it was funny to see how some of them would run like mad
to get away from the boys, and how dreadfully troubled they would be
when they was caught, and yet, after they had been kissed and the boys
had left them, they would walk innocently back to the players as if
they never dreamed that anybody would think of disturbing them.
At five o'clock everybody--farm hands, ladies, gentlemen,
school-children, and all--took tea together. Some were seated at long
tables made of planks, with benches at the sides, and others scattered
all over the grass. Miss Pondar and our maid Hannah helped to serve the
tea and sandwiches, and I was glad to see that Hannah wore her pointed
white cap and her black dress, for I had on my woollen travelling suit,
and I didn't want too much cart-before-the-horseness in my domestic
establishment.
After tea the work and the games began again, and as I think it is
always better for people to do what they can do best, I turned in and
helped clear away the tea-things, and after that I sat down by a female
person in black silk--and I am sure I didn't know whether she was the
lady of the manor or somebody else until I heard some h-words come out
in her talk, and then I knew she was the latter--and she told me ever
so much about the people in the village, and why the rector wasn't
there, on account of a dispute about the altar-cloths, and she was just
beginning to tell me about the doctor's wife sending her daughters to a
school that was much too high-priced for his practice, when I happened
to look across the field, and there, with the bar lady at the inn, with
her hat trimmed with pink, and the Marie Antoinette chambermaid, with
her hat trimmed with blue, was Jone, and they was all three raking
together, as comfortable and confiding as if they had been singing
hymns out of the same book.
Now, I thought I had been sitting still long enough, and so I snipped
off the rest of the doctor story and got myself across that field with
pretty long steps. When I reached the happy three I didn't say
anything, but went round in front of them and stood there, throwing a
sarcastic and disdainful glance upon their farming. Jone stopped
working, and wiped his face with his handkerchief, as if he was hot and
tired, but hadn't thought of it until just then, and the two girls they
stopped too.
"He's teaching us to rake, ma'am," said Miss Dick, revolving her
green-gage eyes in my direction, "and really, ma'am, it's wonderful to
see how good he does it. You Americans are so awful clever!"
As for the one with the blue trimmings, she said nothing, but stood
with her hands folded on her rake, and her chiselled features steeped
in a meek resignedness, though much too high colored, as though it had
just been borne in upon her that this world is all a fleeting show, for
man's illusion given, and such felicity as culling fragrant hay by the
side of that manly form must e'en be foregone by her, that I could
have taken a handle of a rake and given her such a punch among her blue
ribbons that her classic features would have frantically twined
themselves around one resounding howl--but I didn't. I simply remarked
to Jone, with a statuesque rigidity, that it was six o'clock and I was
going home; to which he said he was going too, and we went.
[Illustration: "THERE, WITH THE BAR LADY AND THE MARIE ANTOINETTE
CHAMBERMAID, WAS JONE"]
"I thought," said I, as we proceeded with rapid steps across the field,
"that you didn't come to England for the purpose of teaching the
inhabitants."
Jone laughed a little. "That young lady put it rather strong," he said.
"She and her friend was merely trying to rake as I did. I think they
got on very well."
"Indeed!" said I--I expect with flashing eye--"but the next time you go
into the disciple business I recommend that you take boys who really
need to know something about farming, and not fine-as-fiddle young
women that you might as well be ballet-dancing with as raking with, for
all the hankering after knowledge they have."
"Oh!" said Jone, and that was all he did say, which was very wise in
him, for, considering my state of feelings, his case was like a
fish-hook in your finger--the more you pull and worry at it the harder
it is to get out.
That evening, when I was quite cooled down, and we was talking to Mr.
Poplington about the hay-making and the free-and-easy way in which
everybody came together, he was a good deal surprised that we should
think that there was anything uncommon in that, coming from a country
where everybody was free and equal. Jone was smoking his pipe, and when
it draws well and he's had a good dinner and I haven't anything
particular to say, he often likes to talk slow and preach little
sermons.
"Yes, sir," said he, after considering the matter a little while,
"according to the Constitution of the United States we are all free and
equal, but there's a good many things the Constitution doesn't touch
on, and one of them is the sorting out and sizing up of the population.
Now, you people over here are like the metal types that the printers
use. You've all got your letters on one end of you, and you know just
where you belong, and if you happen to be knocked into 'pi' and mixed
all up in a pile it is easy enough to pick you out and put you all in
your proper cases; but it's different with us. According to the
Constitution we're like a lot of carpet-tacks, one just the same as
another, though in fact we're not alike, and it would not be easy if we
got mixed up, say in a hayfield, to get ourselves all sorted out again
according to the breadth of our heads and the sharpness of our points,
so we don't like to do too much mixing, don't you see?" To which Mr.
Poplington said he didn't see, and then I explained to him that what
Jone meant was that though in our country we was all equally free, it
didn't do for us to be as freely equal as the people are sometimes over
here, to which Mr. Poplington said, "Really!" but he didn't seem to be
standing in the glaring sunlight of convincement. But the shade is
often pleasant to be in, and he wound up by saying, as he bid us
good-night, that he thought it would be a great deal better for us, if
we had classes at all, to have them marked out plain, and stamped so
that there could be no mistake; to which I said that if we did that the
most of the mistakes would come in the sorting, which, according to my
reading of books and newspapers, had happened to most countries that
keep up aristocracies.
I don't know that he heard all that I said, for he was going up-stairs
with his candle at the time, but when Jone and me got up-stairs in our
own room I said to him, and he always hears everything I say, that in
some ways the girls that we have for servants at home have some
advantages over those we find here; to which Jone said, "Yes," and
seemed to be sleepy.
_Letter Number Nine_