“Did she tell you to come?”

“No; but she didn’t keep me from coming.  Whenever any one of us does anything improper we always say to each other, ’It’s Georgiana’s fault.  She ought not to have taught us to be so simple and unconventional.’”

“And is she the family governess?”

“She governs the family.  There doesn’t seem to be any real government, but we all do as she says.  You might think at first that Georgiana was the most light-headed member of the family, but she isn’t.  She’s deep.  I’m shallow in comparison with her.  She calls me sophisticated, and introduces me as the elder Miss Cobb, and says that if I don’t stop reading Scott’s novels and learn more arithmetic she will put white caps on me, and make me walk to church in carpet slippers and with grandmother’s stick.”

“But you don’t seem to have stopped, Miss Sylvia.”

“No; but I’m stopping.  Georgiana always gives us time, but we get right at last.  It was two years before she could make my brother go to West Point.  He was wild and rough, and wanted to raise tobacco, and float with it down to New Orleans, and have a good time.  Then when she had gotten him to go she was afraid he’d come back, and so she persuaded my mother to live here, where there isn’t any tobacco, and where I could be sent to school.  That took her a year, and now she is breaking up my habit of reading nothing but novels.  She gets us all down in the end.  One day when she and Joe were little children they were out at the wood-pile, and Georgiana was sitting on a log eating a jam biscuit, with her feet on the log in front of her.  Joe had a hand-axe, and was chopping at anything till he caught sight of her feet.  Then he went to the end of the log, and whistled like a steamboat, and began to hack down in that direction, calling out to her:  ’Take your toes out of the way, Georgiana.  I am coming down the river.  The current is up and I can’t stop.’  ‘My toes were there first,’ said Georgiana, and went on eating her biscuit.  ’Take them out of the way, I tell you,’ he shouted as he came nearer, ‘or they’ll get cut off.’  ’They were there first,’ repeated Georgiana, and took another delicious nibble.  Joe cut straight along, and went whack right into her five toes.  Georgiana screamed with all her might, but she held her foot on the log, till Joe dropped the hatchet with horror, and caught her in his arms.  ‘Georgiana, I told you to take your toes away,’ he cried; ‘you are such a little fool,’ and ran with her to the house.  But she always had control over him after that.”

To-day I saw Sylvia enter the arbor, and shortly afterwards I followed with a book.

“When you stop reading novels and begin to read history, Miss Sylvia, here is the most remarkable history of Kentucky that was ever written or ever will be.  It is by my father’s old teacher of natural history in Transylvania University, Professor Rafinesque, who also had a wonderful botanical garden on this side of the town; perhaps the first ever seen in this country.”