Looey shakes his head solemn and sighs and goes to sleep very mournful,
like he has to give me up fur lost. But I can't sleep none myself.
So purty soon I gets up and puts on my shoes and sneaks through the
wood-lot and through the gap in the fence by the apple tree and into
Miss Hampton's yard.
It was a beauty of a moonlight night, that white and clear and clean you
could almost see to read by it, like all of everything had been scoured
as bright as the bottom of a tin pan. And the shadders was soft and
thick and velvety and laid kind of brownish-greeney on the grass. I
flopped down in the shadder of some lilac bushes and wondered which was
Martha's window. I knowed she would be in bed long ago, but---- Well, I
was jest plumb foolish that night, and I couldn't of kept away fur any
money. That moonlight had got into my head, it seemed like, and made
me drunk. But I would rather be looney that-a-way than to have as much
sense as King Solomon and all his adverbs. I was that looney that if I
had knowed any poetry I would of said it out loud, right up toward that
window. I never knowed why poetry was made up before that night. But the
only poetry I could think of was about there was a man named Furgeson
that lived on Market Street, and he had a one-eyed Thomas cat that
couldn't well be beat. Which it didn't seem to fit the case, so I didn't
say her.
The porch of that house was part covered with vines, but they was kind
of gaped apart at one corner. As I laid there in the shadder of the
bushes I hearn a fluttering movement, light and gentle, on that porch.
Then, all of a sudden, I seen some one standing on the edge of the porch
where the vines was gaped apart, and the moonlight was falling onto
them. They must of come there awful soft and still. Whoever it was
couldn't see into the shadder where I laid, that is, if it was a human
and not a ghost. Fur my first thought was it might be one of them ghosts
I had been running down so that very day, and mebby the same one Miss
Hampton seen on that very same porch. I thought I was in fur it then,
mebby, and I felt like some one had whispered to the back of my neck
it ought to be scared. And I WAS scared clean up into my hair. I stared
hard, fur I couldn't take my eyes away. Then purty soon I seen if it was
a ghost it must be a woman ghost. Fur it was dressed in light-coloured
clothes that moved jest a little in the breeze, and the clothes was so
near the colour of the moonlight they seemed to kind of silver into
it. You would of said it had jest floated there, and was waiting fur to
float away agin when the breeze blowed a little stronger, or the moon
drawed it.
It didn't move fur ever so long. Then it leaned forward through the gap
in the vines, and I seen the face real plain. It wasn't no ghost, it was
a lady. Then I knowed it must be Miss Hampton standing there. Away off
through the trees our camp fire sent up jest a dull kind of a glow. She
was standing there looking at that. I wondered why.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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