[Continued.]

CHAPTER XXII.

Mary returned to the house with her basket of warm, fresh eggs, which she set down mournfully upon the table.  In her heart there was one conscious want and yearning, and that was to go to the friends of him she had lost,—­to go to his mother.  The first impulse of bereavement is to stretch out the hands towards what was nearest and dearest to the departed.

Her dove came fluttering down out of the tree, and settled on her hand, and began asking in his dumb way to be noticed.  Mary stroked his white feathers, and bent her head down over them till they were wet with tears.  “Oh, birdie, you live, but he is gone!” she said.  Then suddenly putting it gently from her, and going near and throwing her arms around her mother’s neck,—­“Mother,” she said, “I want to go up to Cousin Ellen’s.” (This was the familiar name by which she always called Mrs. Marvyn.) “Can’t you go with me, mother?”

“My daughter, I have thought of it.  I hurried about my baking this morning, and sent word to Mr. Jenkyns that he needn’t come to see about the chimney, because I expected to go as soon as breakfast should be out of the way.  So, hurry, now, boil some eggs, and get on the cold beef and potatoes; for I see Solomon and Amaziah coming in with the milk.  They’ll want their breakfast immediately.”

The breakfast for the hired men was soon arranged on the table, and Mary sat down to preside while her mother was going on with her baking,—­introducing various loaves of white and brown bread into the capacious oven by means of a long iron shovel, and discoursing at intervals with Solomon, with regard to the different farming operations which he had in hand for the day.

Solomon was a tall, large-boned man, brawny and angular; with a face tanned by the sun, and graven with those considerate lines which New England so early writes on the faces of her sons.  He was reputed an oracle in matters of agriculture and cattle, and, like oracles generally, was prudently sparing of his responses.  Amaziah was one of those uncouth over-grown boys of eighteen whose physical bulk appears to have so suddenly developed that the soul has more matter than she has learned to recognize, so that the hapless individual is always awkwardly conscious of too much limb; and in Amaziah’s case, this consciousness grew particularly distressing when Mary was in the room.  He liked to have her there, he said,—­“but, somehow, she was so white and pretty, she made him feel sort o’ awful-like.”

Of course, as such poor mortals always do, he must, on this particular morning, blunder into precisely the wrong subject.

“S’pose you’ve heerd the news that Jeduthun Pettibone brought home in the ‘Flying Scud,’ ‘bout the wreck o’ the ‘Monsoon’; it’s an awful providence, that ‘ar’ is,—­a’n’t it?  Why, Jeduthun says she jest crushed like an egg-shell";—­and with that Amaziah illustrated the fact by crushing an egg in his great brown hand.