Minerva's Manoeuvres: The Cheerful Facts of a "Return to Nature"Loomis, Charles Battell
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Minerva's Manoeuvres: The Cheerful Facts of a "Return to Nature"
Loomis, Charles Battell
Country life -- Fiction; Household employees -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Married people -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
“Remember that you are to dress for dinner,” said she.
“Does this look like dressing for dinner?” said I with a look at
the impossible beast in front of me.
“Well, but Cherry won’t see him, and I am sure that she is
always used to seeing men dressed for dinner.”
“If I know Cherry Paxton at all she will be glad to be free from
all conventions for a short time. I will take her into our room
and I will show her my suit all laid out on the bed and I’ll ask
her to try to realize how I’d look if I wore it, and I will be
comfortable in an outing shirt and sack coat as usual.”
Further conversation along these lines was stopped at that
moment because the beast stepped on its foot, or did something
equally absurd, that caused it to limp along on three legs for a
few yards and then stop.
I got out and looked at its hoof—somewhat gingerly, for I am not
used to horses. It did not seem to be suffering pain but it
looked at me out of its well eye and seemed to say, “This is
where I stop.”
I climbed into the cart and I tightened the reins and clucked
and applied the whip, but to no purpose. The horse looked around
at me in a languid way, but he refused to budge.
“Nice,” said I, looking at my watch. “Quarter to five, and we’ve
got at least two miles to go yet. I wonder how Pat starts him.”
“He used languages,” said Ethel suggestively.
“Thanks. So he did.”
Once more I pulled on the reins, clucked and plupped and whipped
(not viciously, but ticklingly) and once more the horse did not
move.
“To hell wid ye,” said I suddenly, and it worked like a charm.
The old beast took up his ungraceful trot, and we jolted along
to the station.
I had meant to hitch the horse on the outskirts of Egerton and
walk up to the station in style, but as we neared the
Congregational Church I saw that it lacked but two minutes of
train time, and so setting aside pride, in my anxiety to meet
our guest, I whipped him up the incline that leads to the
station, and just as we drove up to the platform the train
pulled in, and out of the drawing-room car came Cherry, pretty
and pink and smiling. She waved to us and then, when she saw our
equipage, she shook her own hands in a manner indicative of
delight, and not waiting for me to come and help her, she ran
down the steps of the car and hastened over to us.
“How lovely,” said she, kissing Ethel, but refraining from
kissing me. “Are we to go up in it?”
“Hell, yes,” said I, thinking of Pat.
Ethel frowned at me and explained to Cherry the bad influence
under which we had been.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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