Selected Stories of Bret Harte eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 447 pages of information about Selected Stories of Bret Harte.

Selected Stories of Bret Harte eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 447 pages of information about Selected Stories of Bret Harte.

The two remaining members of the family were less distinctive.  “Gloriana”—­pronounced as two words:  “Glory Anna”—­being the work of her father, who also named it, was simply a cylindrical roll of canvas wagon-covering, girt so as to define a neck and waist, with a rudely inked face—­altogether a weak, pitiable, manlike invention; and “Johnny Dear,” alleged to be the representative of John Doremus, a young storekeeper who occasionally supplied Mary with gratuitous sweets.  Mary never admitted this, and as we were all gentlemen along that road, we were blind to the suggestion.  “Johnny Dear” was originally a small plaster phrenological cast of a head and bust, begged from some shop window in the county town, with a body clearly constructed by Mary herself.  It was an ominous fact that it was always dressed as a boy, and was distinctly the most human-looking of all her progeny.  Indeed, in spite of the faculties that were legibly printed all over its smooth, white, hairless head, it was appallingly lifelike.  Left sometimes by Mary astride of the branch of a wayside tree, horsemen had been known to dismount hurriedly and examine it, returning with a mystified smile, and it was on record that Yuba Bill had once pulled up the Pioneer Coach at the request of curious and imploring passengers, and then grimly installed “Johnny Dear” beside him on the box seat, publicly delivering him to Mary at Big Bend, to her wide-eyed confusion and the first blush we had ever seen on her round, chubby, sunburnt cheeks.  It may seem strange that with her great popularity and her well-known maternal instincts, she had not been kept fully supplied with proper and more conventional dolls; but it was soon recognized that she did not care for them—­left their waxen faces, rolling eyes, and abundant hair in ditches, or stripped them to help clothe the more extravagant creatures of her fancy.  So it came that “Johnny Dear’s” strictly classical profile looked out from under a girl’s fashionable straw sailor hat, to the utter obliteration of his prominent intellectual faculties; the Amplach twins wore bonnets on their ninepins heads, and even an attempt was made to fit a flaxen scalp on the iron-headed Misery.  But her dolls were always a creation of her own—­her affection for them increasing with the demand upon her imagination.  This may seem somewhat inconsistent with her habit of occasionally abandoning them in the woods or in the ditches.  But she had an unbounded confidence in the kindly maternity of Nature, and trusted her children to the breast of the Great Mother as freely as she did herself in her own motherlessness.  And this confidence was rarely betrayed.  Rats, mice, snails, wildcats, panther, and bear never touched her lost waifs.  Even the elements were kindly; an Amplach twin buried under a snowdrift in high altitudes reappeared smilingly in the spring in all its wooden and painted integrity.  We were all Pantheists then—­and believed this implicitly.  It was only when exposed to the milder forces of civilization that Mary had anything to fear.  Yet even then, when Patsy O’Connor’s domestic goat had once tried to “sample” the lost Misery, he had retreated with the loss of three front teeth, and Thompson’s mule came out of an encounter with that iron-headed prodigy with a sprained hind leg and a cut and swollen pastern.

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Selected Stories of Bret Harte from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.