“Your opinion, Sir,” he replied, with undiminished affability, “tends to relieve my apprehensions. I trust the event will justify it.
“And how does Miss Desire, this evening?” he added, saluting with doffed hat and a courtly bow, a young lady who had just come up, with the apparent intention of going in at the Woodbridge gate.
“I do but indifferent well, Sir. As well as a damsel may do in a world where gentlemen keep not their promises,” she answered, with a curtsey, so saucily deep, that the crisp crimson silk of her skirt rustled on the ground.
“Nay, but tell me the caitiff's name, and let me be myself your knight, fair mistress, to redress your wrongs.”
“Nay, 'tis yourself, Sir. Did you not promise you would come and hear me play my piano, when it came from Boston, and I have it a week already?”
“And I did not know it. Yes, now I bethink myself, Mrs. Sedgwick spoke thereof, but this convention has left me not a moment. But damsels are not political; no doubt you have heard nothing of the convention.”
“Oh, yes; 'tis that all the poor want to be rich, and to hang all the lawyers. I've heard. 'Tis a fine scheme.”
“No doubt the piano is most excellent in sound.”
“It goes middling well, but already I weary me of my bargain.”
“A little. Papa said if I would not tease him to let me go to New York this winter, he would have me a piano. I know not what came over me that I consented. I shall go into a decline ere spring. The ugly dress and the cowlike faces of the people, make me sick at heart, and give me bad dreams, and the horses neigh in better English than the farmers talk. Alack, 'tis a dreary place for a damsel! But, no doubt, I have interrupted some weighty discussion. I bid you good even, Sir,” and, once more curtsying, the girl went up the path to the house, much to her uncle Jahleel's relief, who had no taste for badinage, and wanted to get on to the store, whither, presently he was on his way, while Sedgwick's carriage rolled off toward Boston.
About a mile out of Stockbridge, the carriage passed two men standing by the roadside, earnestly talking. These men were Perez Hamlin and Abner Rathbun.
“You remember the Ice-hole,” said Perez, referring to an extraordinary cleft or chasm, of great depth, and extremely difficult and perilous of access, situated near the top of Little Mountain, a short distance from Stockbridge.