"You goin' to see the sunrise, too, father?" she asked. "I made Sereno come. He's awful mad at bein' waked up."
"Hattie," he said, in a whisper, "don't you tell. I jest come out to see how 'twas here, before I go. I'm goin' home,--I'm goin' _now_."
"Why, father!" said Hattie; but she peered more closely into his face, and her tone changed. "All right," she added, cheerfully. "Sereno'll go and harness up."
"I don't mean to breakup your stayin' here, nor your mother's. You tell her how 'twas. I'm goin' to walk."
Hattie turned and whispered to her husband for a moment. Then she took her father's hand.
"I'll slip into the tent and put you up somethin' for your breakfast and luncheon," she said. "Sereno's gone to harness; for, pa, you must take one horse, and you can send Luke back with it Friday, so's we can get the things home. What do we want of two horses down here, at two and ninepence a day? I guess I know!"
So Eli yielded; but before his wife appeared, he had turned his back on the sea, where the rose of dawn was fast unfolding. As he jogged homeward, the dusty roadsides bloomed with flowers of paradise, and the insects' dry chirp thrilled like the song of angels. He drove into the yard just at the turning of the day, when the fragrant smoke of many a crackling fire curls cheerily upward, in promise of the evening meal.
"What's busted?" asked Luke, swinging himself down from his load of fodder-corn, and beginning to unharness Doll.
"Oh, nothin'," said Eli, leaping, from the wagon as if twenty years had been taken from his bones. "I guess I'm too old for such jaunts. I hope you didn't forgit them cats."
"The land o' gracious!" said Mrs. Lothrop Wilson, laying down her "drawing-in hook" on the rug stretched between two chairs in the middle of the kitchen, and getting up to look from the window. "If there ain't Lucindy comin' out o' the Pitmans' without a thing on her head, an' all them little curls a-flyin'! An' the old Judge ain't cold in his grave!"
"I guess the Judge won't be troubled with cold, any to speak of, arter this," said her husband from the window, where he sat eating his forenoon lunch of apple-pie and cheese. He was a cooper, and perhaps the pleasantest moment in his day was that when he slipped out of his shop, leaving a bit of paper tacked on the door to say he was "on errands," and walked soberly home for his bite and sup. "If he ain't good an' warm about now, then the Scriptur's ain't no more to be depended on than a last year's almanac."