United States -- History -- Constitutional period, 1789-1809 -- Fiction
"The boy," went on Deb, using now her own and now Jacqueline's
remembered words,--"the boy did not want to work all his life long in
the tobacco-fields, working from morning to night, with his hands, at
the thing he hated. He wanted books, he wanted to learn, and to work
with his mind in the world beyond the Three-Notched Road. The older he
grew the more he wanted it. And Jacqueline said that the mind finds a
way, and that the boy got books together, and he studied hard. You see,
Jacqueline knows, for when she was a little girl, she used to stay
sometimes with Cousin Jane Selden on the Three-Notched Road. And Cousin
Jane Selden's farm was next to where the boy lived. There was just a
little stream between them. There were no children at Cousin Jane
Selden's, and Jacqueline was lonely. And she used to sit under the apple
tree on the bank of the little stream and send chip boats down it, just
as Miranda and I do. Only she didn't have Miranda, and she was all by
herself. And she could see the boy working on the other side of the
stream, and there wasn't any shade in the tobacco-field, and Jacqueline
was so sorry for him. And one day he came down to the stream for water
and they talked to each other. And Jacqueline told Cousin Jane Selden,
and Cousin Jane Selden did not mind. She said she was sorry for the boy,
and that she had given his father a piece of her mind,--only he wouldn't
take it. So Jacqueline used to see the boy often and often, for she
always played under the apple tree by the stream, and he had a little
time to rest every day at noon, and he would come down to the shade on
his side of the stream, and Jacqueline told him all about Fontenoy. And
he told Jacqueline what he was going to do when he was a man, and he
asked her if she had ever read Cæsar, and she had not, and he told her
all about it. And Jacqueline told him fairy tales, but he said they were
not true, and that a harp could not sing by itself, nor a hen lay golden
eggs, nor a beanstalk grow a mile. He said he did not like lies,--which
wasn't very polite. He was older, you see, than Jacqueline, ever so much
older. But she knew how to dance, and she was taking music lessons, and
so she seemed older, and he liked Jacqueline very much. What is the
matter, Uncle Edward?"
"Nothing. Go on, child."
"Then the summer was over, and Jacqueline came back to Fontenoy. But the
next summer, when she went to Cousin Jane Selden's, there was the boy
working in the tobacco on the other side of the stream. And Jacqueline
called to him from under the apple tree. And then the month that she was
to stay with Cousin Jane Selden went by, and she came back to Fontenoy.
And the next summer she didn't go to the Three-Notched Road, but one day
the boy came to Fontenoy."
"Ah!" said the Major.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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