The fear of ridicule was strong in my heart, but other and more powerful feelings were beating there. My visiters were vulgar but honest people, and I could not treat them coldly while the sweet impulses and affectionate associations their coming had given rise to were swarming in my bosom. They might be rude, but had they not lately trod the places of my childhood? Their faces were coarse and inanimate, but they were familiar ones, and as such I welcomed them; for they brought to my heart sweet thoughts of a happy home. I went forward and shook hands with them all, notwithstanding a glimpse I caught of Maria as she paused on the stairs, her roguish eyes absolutely laughing with merriment as she witnessed the scene. An hour went by, and the Johnsons were still sitting in Colonel M.’s hall. I had gained all the information regarding my friends which they could communicate. It was drawing near the dinner hour, and, in truth, I had become exceedingly anxious for my visiters to depart. But there sat Mrs. Johnson emitting a continued current of very small talk about her currant bushes, her luck in making soap, and the very distressing mortality that had existed among her chickens—she became pathetic on this subject—six of her most promising fledglings had perished under an old cart during a thunder-storm, and as many goslings had been dragged lifeless from her husband’s mill-dam, where they had insisted upon swimming before they were sufficiently fledged. The account was very touching; peculiarly so from a solemn moral which Mrs. J. contrived to deduct from the sad and untimely fate of her poultry—which moral, according to the best of my memory, was, that if the chickens had obeyed their mother and kept under the parent wing, the rain had not killed them, and if the goslings had not put forth their swimming propensities too early, they might, that blessed moment, have been enjoying the coolness of the mill-dam in all the downy majesty of half-grown geese. Mrs. Johnson stopped the hundredth part of a second to take breath and branched off into a dissertation on the evils of disobedience in general, and the forwardness and docility of her two boys in particular. Then, drawing all her interesting topics to a focus, she took boys, geese, chickens, currant bushes, &c., &c., and bore them rapidly onward in the stream of her inveterate loquacity. One might as well have attempted to pour back the waters rushing from her husband’s mill-dam, when the flood-gates were up, as to check the motion of her unmanageable tongue. The clatter of his whole flour establishment must have been a poetical sound compared to the incessant din of meaningless words that rolled from it. Another good hour passed away, and the volubility of that tongue was increasing, while my politeness and patience, it must be owned, were decreasing in an exact ratio.