Blue Ridge Mountains -- Juvenile fiction; North Carolina -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Juvenile fiction
As you may have guessed, we got here alive. I was really very much
surprised. Between shivers and shudders I enjoyed the ride tremendously.
We had two days and a half of it, sleeping at night in inns where my
uncle and aunt were welcomed very warmly, and where everybody marveled
over me very much as they did in the old days when Mother McBirney first
took me over and carried me with her everywhere to exhibit me so lovingly
and triumphantly.
Only this time there were differences; very great differences. I soon
realized that to be the daughter of the house of Knox was no small
matter, and though I had insisted on keeping to my homespun, and still do
think it very nice, I was a trifle worried about it. But my riding suit
is well cut, and it fits like a dream, and the homespun is almost as soft
as camel’s hair, and the color of it, a bottle green, becomes me very
well. I was wearing the little dark green Alpine hat you brought me from
Switzerland, and that was becoming too.
Yet, girl-o’-my-heart, I felt frightened and insignificant enough when,
having passed by way of many charming old towns and wide plantations, we
came at last to the long, shady road which they told me belonged to the
Knox estate. The part we passed through was all in fine old trees, not
so near together but that the sun could make bright carpets in between
them. Here and there, where the ground lifted, we could see the
plantations, now of course in their autumn bareness, stretching in three
directions.
I have always loved to read about princes and princesses who have
wandered, poor and forlorn, in strange lands, and who finally return to
their royal homes and live happy ever after amid a loving people. I
think that is the nicest sort of a story in the world, and I often have
played, when it was cold and windy in my little loft on Tennyson
Mountain, and when Jim teased me, and all the family was looking at
something in a different way from what I was able to do, that I was a
lost princess and that by and by I would come into my own.
But I never really thought it anything but a silly, silly dream. I
played with it as I used, a few years before, to play with paper dolls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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