Towards sunset I took it sadly down.  On top of the nest lay Georgiana’s old scarlet emery-bag stuck full of her needles!  She had divined what all the writing meant and would not have it.  Instead she sent me this emblem not only of her forgiveness but of her surrender.  When a man expects a woman to scold him and she does not, he either gets to be a little afraid of her morally or he wants to take her in his arms.  Henceforth, if Georgiana were removed to another planet, I would rather worship her there simply as my evening or morning star than coexist with any earthly woman.  One thought besets me:  did she realize that perhaps she herself was the cause of my misdemeanors with Sylvia?  Has she the penetration to discover that when a woman is engaged to a man she cannot deny him all things except at her own peril?

This proof of her high-mindedness and the enchanting glimpses of her face that she has vouchsafed me since, goaded me yesterday morning to despatch a reckless note:  “Will you come to the arbor for a little while tonight?  I have never dared ask this before, but you know how I have desired it.  It is so much more private there.  Write on the back of this paper one word, ‘Yes.’  There is a pencil in the nest.”

The shutters were nearly closed, but I caught sight of the curve of a shoulder and the movement of a busy hand.  As I pushed the note up I said: 

“Read it at once.  I am waiting.”

A hand came out and took in the note, then the pencil; then note and pencil were put back.  On the former was written, “Yes.”

I think I must have done a dozen things in five minutes, and then I started aimlessly off to town.  On the way I met Georgiana.

“Good God, Georgiana!” I exclaimed.  “You here!”

“Where else?” said she.  “And why not?”

“I thought I just saw you at the window—­” And then my awful soul within me said:  “H-sh-sh-sh!  Not a word of this to a human being!”

After supper last night I called old Jack and Dilsy into the garden, and led them around it, giving orders; thence to the arbor, where I bade them sit down.

In the year of 1805 Mr. Jefferson, as president of the Philosophical Society, ordered excavations to be made at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky for the skeletons of extinct animals.  My father, who was interested in antiquities, had had much correspondence with Mr. Jefferson in regard to earlier discoveries at that spot; and when this expedition was undertaken he formed one of the explorers.  Jack, his servant, at that time a strapping young fellow, had been taken along as one of the negroes who were to do the digging.

The wonders then unearthed have always been the greenest spot in old Jack’s memory; so that they have been growing larger ever since.  Whenever I wish to hear him discourse with the dogmatic bluster of a sage who had original information as to geological times, I set Jack to talking about the bones of the Mastodon-Maximus, the name of which he gets from me, with a puzzled shake of his head, about regularly once a year.  It is my private opinion that old Jack believes Big Bone Lick to have been the place where the Ark settled, and these to have been the bones of animals that had been swept out by Noah on landing.