Hobomok. Lydia Maria Child
disobedient to him, I wouldn't do it while my poor mother was alive, for I know it would break her heart. But there are two things more about this affair which puzzle me. Just as I came out of the hollow, I met Charles. He said he dreamed I was in danger there, and he could not help coming to see whether I was there or not. So I told him how foolish I had been, and he laughed, and said he should be my husband after all. But the strangest thing of all, is, that Englishman you saw me give a letter to, to-day, whispered in my ear never to try a trick again, for fear worse should come of it. I wonder how he knew any thing concerning it?"
"Likely as not, he followed you. Or may be Hobomok told him. But I am glad Mr. Brown dreamed about it. After all, I guess he is to be the one; and Hobomok only came that way after some stray fox or squirrel he caught sight of."
"I don't know how it was," replied Mary, with a deep sigh. "I suppose I must submit to whatever is fore-ordained for me. Folks who have the least to do with love are the best off. The longer you keep as free from it as you are now, the happier you"ll be."
"May be you don't know how free that is," rejoined Sally. "If you had half an eye for other folks' affairs, you would remember something about a young man in Plymouth who used to help me milk my cows, inasmuch as you have often heard me speak of him. Do you know I spoke to him on the beach this morning? I should have had a good opportunity to have seen him again, if it had not been for that everlasting fellow, talking about `crackling thorns;' I would not care an'he had one of them in his tongue. Howsomever, if I guess right concerning Mr. Collier, he did'nt come up to see the cattle. But I can't stop to say any more, for the cows an't milked yet; and now these new orders have come from London, and there are so many sick folks from the vessels, we shall have enough to do. So, good bye," said the roguish damsel, as she sprung over the log inclosure, into her father's farm-yard.
Chapter III
I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you;
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Beside yourself, to like of.
Tempest
Notwithstanding her increase of avocations, and the many wearisome nights she had spent in tending the sick who had come among them, there was no one more heartily rejoiced at the new order of things than Sally Oldham, whom I find mentioned in the manuscript as "a promp and jolly damsell, much given to lightnesse of speeche, but withal virtuous." The merry maiden, amid all the labours and privations necessarily attendant upon their lonely situation at Plymouth, had found means to put on the airs of rustic coquetry with considerable success; and therefore she had felt no little regret when her father's passionate and unjustifiable conduct toward the ruling elders, had subjected him to the shameful punishment referred to in the first chapter, and driven his family from their comparatively comfortable home. Her only consolation during this period was in recounting to Mary the numerous acts of gallantry she had received from her Plymouth lovers. The young man whom she had seen upon the beach, on the morning of the 28th, had a kinder remembrance than all his competitors; and when she heard that he had walked from Plymouth, with Hobomok for his guide, in the true spirit of female vanity, she judged that nothing but her own pretty face was the object of his journey. Still it seemed she had some fears about his diffidence, for when she had taken her milking-pail and quietly seated herself beside the miserable pile of logs and boughs, which she dignified with the name of a cow-house, she muttered to herself, "I wish Collier was a little easier to take a hint." Her cogitations were interrupted by a well known voice, which had become associated in Sally's mind with nought but "the crackling of thorns." "What brought you hither, Mr. Graves?" inquired the maiden.
"I thought," replied he, as he stood scratching his head with one hand, and holding out the other in token of amity, "I thought, may be, you'd repent your rashness this morning, inasmuch as husbands don't grow on every tree in these deserts."
Notwithstanding this cogent argument, well backed with humble gestures, the offered peace was rejected; and his clammy hand remained awkwardly upraised in the air, like the quivering claw of a dying lobster.
"I tell you sir," rejoined the angry damsel, "that I am weary of your unsavory discourse; and if husbands like you, grew by hundreds on the lowest boughs of the trees, they might stay there till doomsday before I'd stop to pluck 'em therefrom."
"But you'll let me take the milk across for you," continued the persevering suitor, as she stept upon a narrow board that was laid across a deep ditch. Sally, in the wickedness of her heart, held out the pail to him; but just as he was in the act of taking it, she managed by a gentle motion, to place him ancle-deep in the mud below; then turning round for an instant, with a loud and provoking laugh, she soon disappeared.
As Mr. Graves rose, and struck off the mud from his clothes, he murmured, "It is plain she is given over to a reprobate mind;" and it was noticed he never afterwards darkened Mr. Oldham's dwelling.
To Sally the day seemed to pass tardily away, for she had predicted, that the evening would bring a visit from Mr. Collier; and accordingly the manuscript states, that "the curtains of nighte were but halfe shut, when he seated himselfe beside Mr. Oldham, who was turning down many a dropp of the bottell, and burning tobacco with all the ease he could, discoursing between whiles of the dolorous beginning of the settlement, when their cups of beer ran as small as water in a sandie landie, and they were forced to lengthene out their own foode with acorns; and anon talking of the greate progress they would make with their fellowe labourers, now the summer sun had changed the earth's white-furred gowne into a green mantell."
"I must say," observed the young man, "that it is a bosom-breaking thing to me, when I think the gulf atween us and old England is too wide to leap over with a lope-staff. I am the last who would put my hand to the plough, and then look back; but I must say, could I have cast up, in the beginning, what this wilderness work would have cost us, I should have been staggered much, and very hardly have set sail."
"Why, to my thinking, Mr. Collier," replied Oldham, "England is no place now-a-days for christian folks to live within. They talk about their reformed church, but I tell you their bishops, their deans, and their deacons, are all whelps from the Roman litter; and tame 'em as you can, the nature of the beast will shew itself. It is a sad pity that king Charles (I mean no disrespect to his majesty) should suffer those black coats from the ninneversities to get upon his royal back---I trow they'll ride him to destruction. But, as I was saying, England is full of malignant enemies to the true faith; and after all, a body can as pithily practise the two great precepts of the gospel in this, as well as in any other place; which precepts I take to be mortification and sanctification."
"Nobody can doubt there is room enough to practise the first, father," interrupted Sally, who had all along been quietly knitting in the corner, and who had begun to be weary of such sober discourse.
"You talk like a prating ideot, as you are," replied her father, furiously. "What with your own hankering after French gew-gaws, and the grand stories of your Moabitish companion, you have your head clean turned from sound sense and sober godliness."
"You know, Goodman," rejoined his wife, "that howsomever gracious and obedient our children may be, there have been no small hardships during our sojourning here, both for their young hearts and limbs too. Besides, Sally is included in the covenant with her parents, and to my mind, no member of Christ's body should be wrested from his church by harsh words."
"You utter the sayings of a foolish woman," answered her angry spouse. "I'm far from being clear whether the covenant we entered into is binding. Them ruling elders there at Plymouth, brought an abundance of pragmatical zeal, and rigid separation from the Netherlands. They've clapped a vizor on their own traditions, and placed them cheek-by-jowl with revealed truth; and many an honest man will be puzzled to distinguish 'em therefrom. And still more am I in the dark whether this stray imp, laughing with every idle fellow she meets, (the better for her that she meets few of them)"---Just at that moment, recollecting the discomfiture of Mr. Graves, his natural propensity to fun overcame his resentment,