The Youth of Jefferson: Or, a Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764Cooke, John Esten
General
The Youth of Jefferson: Or, a Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764
Cooke, John Esten
Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826 -- Fiction
In the garden is an arbor, over which flowering vines of every
description hover and bloom, full of the wine of spring. Around the
arbor extend flower plats carefully tended and fragrant with violets,
crocuses, and early primroses. Foliage of the light tender tint of May
clothes the background, and looking from the arbor you clearly discern
the distant barn rising above the trees.
In this arbor sits or rather reclines a young girl--for she has
stretched herself upon the trellised seat, with a languid and careless
ease, which betrays total abandon--an abandon engendered probably by
the warm languid air of May, and those million flowers burdening the
air with perfume.
This is Miss Belle-bouche, whom we have heard the melancholy Jacques
discourse of with such forlorn eloquence to his friend Tom, or Sir
Asinus, as the reader pleases.
Belle-bouche, Pretty-mouth, Belinda, or Rebecca--for this last was the
name given her by her sponsors--is a young girl of about seventeen,
and of a beauty so fresh and rare that the enthusiasm of Jacques was
scarcely strange. The girl has about her the freshness and innocence
of childhood, the grace and elegance of the inhabitants of that realm
of fairies which we read of in the olden poets--all the warmth, and
reality, and beauty of those lovelier fairies of our earth. Around her
delicate brow and rosy cheeks fall myriads of golden "drop curls,"
which veil the deep-blue eyes, half closed and fixed upon the open
volume in her hand. Belle-bouche is very richly clad, in a velvet
gown, a satin underskirt from which the gown is looped back, wide
cuffs and profuse lace at wrists and neck; and on her diminutive feet,
which peep from the skirt, are red morocco shoes tied with bows of
ribbon, and adorned with heels not more than three inches in height.
Her hair is powdered and woven with pearls--she wears a pearl
necklace; she looks like a child dressed by its mother for a ball, and
spoiled long ago by "petting."
Belle-bouche reads the "Althea" of Lovelace, and smiles approvingly at
the gallant poet's assertion, that the birds of the air know no such
liberty as he does, fettered by her eyes and hair. It is the fashion
for Lovelaces to make such declarations, and with a coquettish little
movement she puts back the drop curls, and raises her blue eyes to the
sky from which they have stolen their hue.
She remains for some moments is this reverie, and is not aware of the
approach of a gallant Lovelace, who, hat in hand, the feather of the
said hat trailing on the ground, draws near.
Who is this gallant but our friend of one day's standing, the
handsome, the smiling, the forlorn, the melancholy--and, being
melancholy, the interesting--Jacques.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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