Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"Bosher, Kate Langley
General
Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"
Bosher, Kate Langley
Children -- Juvenile fiction; Orphans -- Juvenile fiction
"Not for pants." And Miss Bray's voice was so shrill it sounded like a
broken whistle. "I'm responsible for no man's pants. When a man can't
take care of his pants, he shouldn't have them. Besides, you shouldn't
have left yours in the woodhouse when working in a Female Orphan
Asylum." And she glared so at him that the poor male thing withered, and
blushed real beautiful.
He's a pretty young man, and I felt sorry for him when Miss Bray snapped
so. I certainly did.
"My overalls are my working-pants," he said, real meek-like, and his
voice was trembling so I thought he was going to cry. "It's very strange
that in a place like this a man's clothes are not safe. I thought--"
"Well, you had no business thinking. Next time keep your pants on." And
Miss Bray, who's good on a bluff, pretended like she had been truly
injured, and the poor little painter sat down.
Presently his face changed, as if a thought had come into his mind from
a long way off, and he said, in another kind of voice:
"I beg your pardon, Miss Bray. I believe I know who done it. It's a
friend of mine who tries to be funny every now and then, and calls it
joking. I'll choke his liver out of him!" And he settled himself on the
woodpile to wait until dark before he went home.
If anybody thinks that wedding was slumpy, they think wrong. It was
thrilly. When the bride and groom and the bridesmaids came in, all the
girls were standing in rows on either side of the walk, making an aisle
in between, and they sang a wedding-song I had invented from my heart.
It was to the Lohengrin tune, which is a little wobbly for words, but
they got them in all right, keeping time with their hands. These are the
words:
1
Here comes the Bride,
God save the Groom!
And please don't let any chil-i-il-dren come,
For they don't know
How children feel,
Nor do they know how with chil-dren to deal.
2
She's still an old maid,
Though she would not have been
Could she have mar-ri-ed any kind of man.
But she could not.
So to the Humane
She came, and caus-ed a good deal of pain.
3
But now she's here
To be married, and go
Away with her red-headed, red-bearded beau.
Have mercy, Lord,
And help him to bear
What we've been doing this many a year!
And such singing! We'd been practising in the back part of the yard, and
humming in bed, so as to get the words into the tune; but we hadn't let
out until that night. That night we let go.
There's nothing like singing from your heart, and, though I was the
minister and stood on a box which was shaky, I sang, too. I led.
The bride didn't think it was modest to hold up her head, and she was
the only silent one. But the bridegroom and bridesmaids sang, and it
sounded like the revivals at the Methodist church. It was grand.
And that bride! She was Miss Bray. A graven image of her couldn't have
been more like her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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