Our Pirate Hoard: 1891Janvier, Thomas A. (Thomas Allibone)
General
Our Pirate Hoard: 1891
Janvier, Thomas A. (Thomas Allibone)
United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Gregory Wilkinson seemed to find himself quite comfortable in our little
home, and settled down there into a sort of permanency. We were glad to
have him stay with us, for he was a first-rate fellow, and always good
company in his pleasant, quiet way, and he told us two or three times
that he was enjoying himself. He told me a great many more than two or
three times that he considered Susan to be a wonderfully fine woman;
indeed, he told me this at least once every day, and sometimes oftener.
He was greatly struck--just as everybody is who lives for any length
of time in the same house with Susan--by her capable ways, and by her
unfailing equanimity and sweetness of temper. Even when the colored girl
fell down the well, carrying the rope and the bucket along with her,
Susan was not a bit flustered. She told me just where I would find the
clothes-line and a big meat-hook; and when, with this hastily-improvised
apparatus, we had fished the colored girl up and got her safely on
dry land again, she knew exactly what to do to make her all right and
comfortable. As Gregory Wilkinson observed to me, after it was all over,
from the way that Susan behaved, any one might have thought that hooking
colored girls up out of wells was her regular business.
As to making Susan angry, that simply was impossible. When things went
desperately wrong with her in any way she would just come right to me
and cry a little on my shoulder. Then, when I had comforted her, she
would chipper up and be all right again in no time. Gregory Wilkinson
happened to come in one day while a performance of this sort was going
on, and for fear that he should think it odd Susan explained to him that
it was a habit of hers when things very much worried her and she felt
like being ugly to people. (The trouble that day was that the colored
girl, who had a wonderful faculty for stirring up tribulation, had
broken an India china teacup that had belonged to Susan's grandmother,
and that Susan had thought the world of.) That evening, while we were
sitting on the veranda smoking, and before Susan, who was helping clear
the supper-table, had joined us, Gregory Wilkinson said to me, with
oven, more emphasis than usual, that Susan was the finest woman he had
ever known; and he added that he was very sorry that when he was my ago
he had not met and married just such another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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