 Preface of Pomona's Travels A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rutter Grange from her former handmaiden, by Frank R. Stockton. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Pomona's Travels This series of letters, written by Pomona of Rutter Grange to her former mistress, Euphemia, may require a few words of introduction. Those who have not read the adventures and experiences of Pomona in Rutter Grange should be told that she first appeared in that story as a very young and illiterate girl, fond of sensational romances, and with some out-of-the-way ideas in regard to domestic economy and the conventions of society. This romantic orphan took service in the Rutter Grange family, and as the story progressed she grew up into a very estimable young woman, and finally married Jonas, the son of a well-to-do farmer. Even after she came into possession of a husband and a daughter, Pomona did not lose her affection for her former employers. About a year before the beginning of the travels described in these letters, Jonas's father died and left a comfortable little property which placed Pomona and her husband in independent circumstances. The ideas and ambitions of this eccentric but sensible young woman enlarged with her fortune. As her daughter was now going to school, Pomona was seized with the spirit of emulation, and determined, as far as was possible, to make the child's education an advantage to herself. Some of the books used by the little girl at school were carefully and earnestly studied by her mother, and as Jonas joined with Hardy Goodwill in the labors and pleasures of this system of domestic study, the family's standard of education was considerably raised. In the quick-witted and observant Pomona the improvement showed itself principally in her methods of expression, and although she could not be called at the time of these travels an educated woman, she was by no means an ignorant one. When the daughter was old enough she was allowed to accept an invitation from her grandmother to spend the summer in the country, and Pomona determined that it was the duty of herself and husband to avail themselves of this opportunity for foreign travel. Accordingly one fine spring morning Pomona, still a young woman, and Jonas, not many years older, but imbued with a semi-pathetic complacence beyond his years, embarked for England and Scotland, to which countries it was determined to limit their travels. The letters which follow were written in consequence of the earnest desire of Euphemia to have a full account of the travels and foreign impressions of her former handmaiden. Pruned of dates, addresses, signatures, and many personal and friendly illusions, these letters are here presented as Pomona wrote them to Euphemia. End of Preface Read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter No. 1 of Pomona's travels, a series of letters to the mistress of Rudder Grange from her former handmaiden, by Frank R Stockton. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter No. 1 Wanted a Vicarage, London The first thing Joan said to me when I told him I was going to write about what I saw and heard, was that I must be careful of two things. In the first place I must not write a lot of stuff that everybody ought to be expected to know, especially people who have traveled themselves, and in the second place I must not send you my green opinions, but must wait until they were seasoned, so that I can see what they are good for before I send them. But if I do that, said I, I will get tired of them long before they are seasoned, and they will be like a bundle of old sticks that I wouldn't offer to anybody. Joan laughed at that, and said I might as well send them along green, for after all I wasn't the kind of a person to keep things until they were seasoned to see if I liked them. That's true, said I, there's a great many things, such as husbands and apples, that I like a good deal better fresh than dry. Is that all the advice you've got to give me? For the present, said he, but I dare say I shall have a good deal more as we go along. All right, said I, but be careful you don't give me any of it again. Advises like gooseberries, that's got to be soft and ripe, or else well cooked and sugared before they are fit to take into anybody's stomach. Joan was standing at the window of our sitting-room when I said this, looking out into the street. As soon as we got to London we took lodgings and a little street running out of the strand, for we both want to be in the middle of things so long as we are in this conglomerate town, as Joan calls it. He says, and I think he is about right, that it is made up of half a dozen large cities, ten or twelve towns, at least fifty villages, more than a hundred little settlements, or hamlets as they call them here, and about a thousand country houses scattered along round the edges, and over and above all these are the inhabitants of a large province, which, there being no province to put them into, are crammed into all the cracks and crevices so as to fill up the town and pack it solid. When we was in London before, with you and your husband, and we lost my baby in Kensington Gardens, we lived, you know, in a peaceful quiet street by a square crescent, where about half the inhabitants were pervaded with the solemnties of the past and the other half bowed down by the dofulness of the present, and no way of getting anywhere except by descending into a movable tomb, which is what I always think of it when we go anywhere in the underground railway. But here we can walk to lots of things we want to see, and if there was nothing else to keep us lively the fear of being run over would do it, you may be sure. But after all, Joan and me didn't come to London just to see the town. We have ideas far ahead of that. When we was in London before I saw pretty nearly all the sights, for when I've got work like that to do I don't let the grass grow under my feet, and what we want to do on this trip is to see the country part of England and Scotland. And in order to see English country life just as it is, we both agreed that the best thing to do was to take a little house in the country and live there awhile. And I'll say here that this is the only plan of the whole journey that Joan gets real enthusiastic about, for he is a domestic man, as you well know, and if anything swells his veins with fervent rapture it is the idea of living in some one place continuous, even if it is only for a month. As we wanted a house in the country we came to London to get it, for London is the place to get everything. Our landlady advised us, when we told her what we wanted, to try and get a vicarage in some little village, because she said there are always lots of vickers who want to go away for a month in the summer, and they can't do it unless they rent their houses while they are gone. And in fact some of them, she said, got so little salary for the whole year, and so much rent for their vicarage while they are gone, that they often can't afford to stay in places unless they go away. So we answered some advertisements and there was no lack of them in the papers, and three agents came to see us, but we did not seem to have any luck. Each of them had a house to let which ought to have suited us, according to their descriptions, and although we found the price is a good deal higher than we expected, Jones said he wasn't going to be stopped by that, because it was only for a little while and for the sake of experience, and experience, as all the poets and a good many of the prose writers besides tell us, is always dear. But after the agents went away, saying they would communicate with us in the morning, we never heard anything more from them, and we had to begin all over again. There was something the matter, Jones and I both agreed on that, but we didn't know what it was. But I waked up in the night and thought about this thing for a whole hour, and in the morning I had an idea. Jones, said I, when we was eating breakfast, it's as plain as A-B-C that those agents don't want us for tenants, and it isn't because they think we are not to be trusted, for we'd have to pay in advance so their money's safe, it is something else and I think I know what it is. These London men are very sharp, and used to sizing and sorting all kinds of people, as if they were potatoes being got ready for market, and they have seen that we are not what they call over here gentle folks. No Lord liares, eh? said Jones. Oh, I don't mean that, I answered him back. Lord liares don't get into parsonages, and I don't mean either that they see from our looks or manners that you used to drive horses and milk cows and work in the garden, and that I used to cook and scrub and was made of all work on a canal boat, but they do see that we are not the kind of people who are in the habit, in this country at least, of spending their evenings in the best parlours of vicarages. Do you suppose, said Jones, that they think a vicar's kitchen would suit us better? No, said I, they wouldn't put us in a vicarage at all. There wouldn't be no place there that would not be either too high or too low for us. It's my opinion that what they think we belong in is a Lord li house, where you'd shine most as headbuttler or steward, while I'd be the housekeeper or a leading lady's maid. By George, said Jones, getting up from the table, if any of those fellows would favour me with an opinion like that I'd break his head. You'd have lots of heads to break, said I, if you went through this country asking for opinions on the subject. It's all very well for us to remember that we've got a house of our own as good as most rectors have over here, and money enough to hire a minor cannon if we needed one in the house, but the people over here don't know that, and it wouldn't make much difference if they did, for it wouldn't matter how nice we lived or what we had so long as they knew we was retired servants. At this, Jones just blazed up and rammed his hands into his pockets and spread his feet wide upon the floor. Pomona, said he, I don't mind it in you, but if anybody else was to call me a retired servant I'd hold up, Jones, said I, don't waste good wholesome anger. Now, I tell you, madam, it really did me good to see Jones blaze up and get red in the face, and I am sure that if he'd get his blood boiling oftener it would be a good thing for his dispeptic tendencies and what little malaria may be left in his system. It won't do any good to flare up here, I went on to say to him. Facts fact, and we were servants and good ones too, though I say it myself, and the trouble is we haven't got into the way of altogether forgetting it, or at least acting as if we had forgotten it. Jones sat down on a chair. It might help matters a little, he said. If I knew what you was driving at. I mean just this, said I, as long as we are anxious not to give trouble or as careful of people's feelings as good manner to servants and as polite and good nature to everybody we have anything to do with, as we both have been since we came here and as it is in our nature to be, I am proud to say we're bound to be set down at least by the general run of people over here as belonging to the pick of the nobility and gentry or as well-bred servants. It's only those two classes that act as we do, and anybody can see we are not special nobles and gents. Now, if we want to be reckoned anywhere in between these two, we've got to change our manners. Will you kindly mention just how, said Joan? Yes, said I, I will. In the first place, we've got to act as if we had always been waited on and never had been satisfied with the way it was done. We've got to let people think that we think we are a good deal better than they are, and what they think about it doesn't make the least difference. And then again we've got to live in better quarters than these, and whatever they may be we must make people think that we don't think they are quite good enough for us. If we do all that, agents may be willing to let us vicarages. It strikes me, said Joan, that these quarters are good enough for us. I'm comfortable. And then he went on to say, Madam, that when you and your husband was in London you was well satisfied with just such lodgings. That's all very well, said I, for they never moved in the lower paths of society, and so they didn't have to make any change. But just went along as they had been used to go. But if we want to make people believe we belong to that class I should choose, if I had my pick out of English social varieties, we've got to bounce about as much above it as we were born below it, so that we can strike somewhere near the proper average. And what variety would you pick out, I'd like to know, said Joan, just a little red in the face, and looking as if I had told him he didn't know Timothy Haye from Oatstraw. Well, said I, it is not easy to put it to you exactly, but it's a sort of cross between a prosperous farmer without children and a poor country gentleman with two sons at college and one in the British army and no money to pay their debts with. That last is not to my liking, said Joan. But the farmer part of the cross would make it all right, I said to him, and it strikes me that a mixture like that would suit us while we are staying over here. Now, if you will try to think of yourself as part rich farmer and part poor gentleman, I'll consider myself the wife of the combination, and I'm sure we will get along better. We didn't come over here to be looked upon as if we was the bottom of a pie dish and charged as if we was the upper crust. I'm in favor of paying a little more money and getting a lot more respectfulness, and the way to begin is to give up these lodgings and go to a hotel, such as the upper middle or stop at. From what I've heard the Babylon Hotel is the one for us while we are in London. Nobody will suspect that any of the people at that hotel are retired servants. This hit Joan hard as I knew it would, and he jumped up, made three steps across the room and rang the bell so that the people across the street must have heard it, and up came the boy in green jacket and buttons, with about every other button missing, and I never knew him to come up so quick before. Boy, said Joan to him, as if he was hollering to a stubborn oz, go order me a foreign hand. With this letter is so long I must stop for the present. End of Letter Number One Read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter Two of Mimonas Travels A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her former handmaiden, by Frank R. Stockton. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter Number Two On the Foreign Hand London When Joan gave the remarkable order mentioned in my last letter I did not correct him, for I wouldn't do that before servants without giving him a chance to do it himself, but before either of us could say another word the boy was gone. Mercy on us, I said. What a stupid blunder! You meant four-wheeler. Of course I did, he said, but I was a little mad and got things mixed, but I expect the fellow understood what I meant. You ought to have called a handsome anyway, I said, for they are a lot more stylish to go to a hotel in than in a four-wheeler. If there were six-wheelers I would have ordered one, said he. I don't want anybody to have more wheels than we have. At this moment the landlady came into the room with a sarcastic glimmer and her underdone visage, and, says she, I suppose you don't understand about the vehicles we have in London. The Foreign Hand is what the quality and coach people use when— As I looked at Joan I saw his legs tremble, and I know what that means. If I was a wanderin' dog, and saw Joan's legs tremble, the only thoughts that would fill my soul would be such as cluster around home, sweet home. Joan was too much riled by the woman's manner to be willing to let her think he had made a mistake, and he stopped her short. Look here, he said to her, I don't ask you to come here and tell me anything about vehicles. When I order any sort of a trap, I want it. When I heard Joan say trap, my soul lifted itself, and I knew there was hope for us. The stiffness melted right out of the landlady, and she began to look soft and gummy. If you want to take a drive in a Foreign Hand coach, sir, she said, there's two or three of them starts every morning from to Fowler Square, and it's not too late now, sir, if you go over there immediately. Go! said Joan, throwing himself into a chair. I said, order one to come. Where I live that sort of vehicle comes to the door for its passengers. The woman looked at Joan with a venerative uplifting of her eyebrows. I can't say, sir, that a coach will come, but I'll send the boy. They go to Dorking and Seven Oaks and Virginia Water. I want to go to Virginia Water, said Joan, as quick as lightning. Now, then, said I, when the woman had gone, what are you going to do if the coach comes? Go to Virginia Water in it, said Joan, and when we come back we can go to the hotel. I made a mistake, but I've got to stand by it or be called a greenhorn. I was in hopes the Foreign Hand wouldn't come, but in less than ten minutes there drove up to our door a four-horse coach, which, not having half enough passengers, was glad to come such a little ways to get some more. There was a man in a high hat in red coat, who was blowing a horn as the thing came round the corner, and just as I was looking into the coach and thinking we'd have it all to ourselves, for there was nobody in it, he put a ladder up against the top and says he, touching his hat, there's a seat for you, madam, right next to the coachman, and one just behind for the gentleman. And often that, on a fine morning like this, such seats as them is left vacant on account of a sudden case of croop in a Bairnette's family. I looked at the ladder and I looked at that top front seat, and I tell you, madam, I trembled in every pore, but I remembered then that all the respectable seats was on top, and the farther front the knobbier, and as there was a young woman sitting already on the box seat, I made up my mind that if she could sit there I could, and that I wasn't going to let Joan or anybody else see that I was frightened by style and fashion, though confronted by it so sudden and unexpected. So up that ladder I went quick enough, having had practice in Hamos, and sat myself down between the young woman and the coachman, and when Joan had tucked himself in behind me the horner blew his horn in a way we went. I tell you, madam, that box seat was a queer box for me. I felt as though I were sitting on the eaves of a roof with a herd of horses cavorting under my feet. I never had a bird's-eye view of horses before. Looking down on their squirming bodies, with the coachman almost standing on his tiptoes driving them, was so different from Joan's buggy and our tall gray horse, which in general we look up to, that for a good while I paid no attention to anything but the danger of falling out on top of them. But having made sure that Joan was holding on to my dress from behind, I began to take an interest in the things around me. Being as much as I thought I did about the bigness of London, I found that morning that I never had any idea of what an everlasting town it is. It is like a skein of tangled yarn. There doesn't seem to be any end to it. Going in this way from Nelson's Monument out into the country, it was amazing to see how long it took to get there. We would go out of the busy streets into a quiet rural neighborhood, or what looked like it, and the next thing we knew we'd be in another whorl of omnibuses and cabs, with people and shops everywhere. And we'd go on and through this, and then come to another handsome village with country houses, and the street would end in another busy town, and so on until I began to think there was no real country, at least in the direction we was going. It is my opinion that if London was put on a pivot and spun round in the state of Texas until it all flew apart, it was spread all over the state and settle up the whole country. At last we did get away from the houses and began to roll along on the best-made road I ever saw, with a hedge on each side and the greenest grass in the fields, and the most beautiful trees, with the very trunks covered with green leaves, and with white sheep and handsome cattle and pretty-thatched cottages, and everything in perfect order, looking as if it had just been sprinkled and swept. We had seen English country before, but that was from the windows of a train, and it was very different from this sort of thing, where we went meandering along lanes, for that is what the roads look like, being so narrow. Just as I was getting my whole soul full of this lovely rural mist, down came a shower of rain without giving the lease notice. I gave a jump in my seat, as I felt it on me, and began to get ready to get down as soon as the coachman should stop for us all to get inside. But he didn't stop, but just drove along as if the sun was shining and the balmy breezes blowing, and then I looked around and not a soul of the eight people on the top of that coach showed the lease sign of expecting to get down and go inside. They all sat there, just as if nothing was happening, and not one of them even mentioned the rain. But I noticed that each of them had on a Macintosh or some kind of cape, whereas Joan and I never thought of taking anything in the way of waterproof or umbrellas, as it was perfectly clear when we started. I looked around at Joan, but he sat there with his face as placid as a piece of cheese, looking as if he had no more knowledge that it was raining than the two Englishmen on the seat next to him. Seeing he wasn't going to let those men think he had minded the rain any more than they did, I determined that I wouldn't let the young woman, who was sitting by me, have any notion that I minded it, and so I sat still, with as cheerful a look as I could screw up, gazing at the trees with as glad some accountants as anybody could have, with water trickling down her nose, her cheeks dripping, and dew drops on her very eyelashes, while the dampness of her back was getting more and more perceptible as each second dragged itself along. Joan turned up the hood of my coat, and so let down into the back of my neck what water had collected in it, but I didn't say anything, but I set my teeth hard together and fixed my mind on Columbia, happy land, and determined never to say anything about rain until some English person first mentioned it. But when one of the flowers on my hat leaned over the brim and exuded bloody drops on the front of my coat, I began to weaken, and to think that if there was nothing better to do I might get under one of the seats. But just then the rain stopped and the sun shone. It was so sudden that it startled me, but not one of those English people mentioned that the rain had stopped and the sun was shining, and so neither did Joan or I. We was feeling mighty moist and unhappy, but we tried to smile as if we was plants in a greenhouse, accustomed to being watered and feeling all the better for it. I can't write you all about the coach-drive, which was very delightful, nor of that beautiful lake they call Virginia Water, and which I know you have a picture of in your house. They tell me it is artificial, but as it was made more than a hundred years ago it might now be considered natural. We dined at an inn, and when we got back to town, with two more showers on the way, I said to Joan that I thought we'd better go straight to the Babylon Hotel, which we intended to start out for, although it was a long way round to go by Virginia Water, we see about engaging a room, and as Joan agreed I asked the coachman if he would put us down there, knowing that he'd pass near it. He agreed to this would be an advertisement for his coach. When we got on the street where the Babylon Hotel was, he whipped up his horses so that they went almost on a run, and the horn or blew his horn until his eyes seemed bursting, and with a grand sweep and a clank and a jingle we pulled up at the front of the big hotel. Out marched the head porter in a blue uniform, and out ran two underporters with red coats, and down jumped the horn and put up his ladder, and Joan and I got down, after giving the coachman a half a crown, and receiving from the passengers a combined gaze of differentialism which had been wholly wanting before. The men in the red coats looked disappointed when they saw we had no baggage, but the great doors was flung open and we went straight up to the clerk's desk. When we was taken to look at rooms I remembered that there was always danger of Joan's tendency to thankful contentment getting the better of him, and I took the matter in hand myself. Two rooms, good enough for anybody, was shown us, but I was not going to take the first thing what's offered, no matter what it was. We settled the matter by getting a first-class room with sofas and riding-desks and everything convenient, for only a little more than we was charged for the other rooms, and the next morning we went there. When we went back to our lodgings to pack up, and I looked in the glass and saw what a smeary, bedraggled state my hat and head was in, from being rained on, I said to Joan, I don't see how those people ever let such a person as me have a room at their hotel. It doesn't surprise me a bit, said Joan, nobody but a very high and mighty person would have dared to go lording it about that hotel with her hat feathers and flowers all plastered down over her head. Most people can be upish in good clothes, but to look like a scarecrow and be upish can't be expected except from the truly lofty. I hope you're right, I said, and I think he was. We hadn't been at the Babylon Hotel, where we are now, for more than two days when I said to Joan that this sort of a thing wasn't going to do. He looked at me amazed. What on earth is a matter now, he said. Here is a room fit for a royal duke, and a house with marble corridors and palace stairs, and gorgeous smoking rooms and a post office, and a dining room pretty nigh big enough for a hall of Congress with waiters enough to make two military companies and the bills of fare all in French. If there is anything more you want, Pomona, stop there, said I. The last thing you mention is the rub. It's the dining room. It's in that resplendent hall that we've got to give ourselves a social boom or be content to fold our hands and fade away forever. Which I don't want to do yet, said Joan, so speak out your trouble. The trouble this time is you, said I, and your awful meekness. I never did see anybody anywhere as meek as you are in that dining room. A half-drowned fly put into the sun to dry would be overbearing and supercilious compared to you. When you sit down at one of those tables you look as if you was afraid of hurting the chair, and when the waiter gives you the bill of fare you ask him what the French words mean, and then he looks down on you as if he was a superior jove contemplating a hop toad, and he tells you that this one means beef and the other means potatoes and brings you the things that are easiest to get. And you look as if you was thankful from the bottom of your heart that he is good enough to give you anything at all. All the airs I put on are no good while you are so extra humble. I tell him I don't want this French thing, when I don't know what it is, and he must bring me some of the other, which I never heard of, and when it comes I eat it, no matter what it turns out to be, and try to look as if I was used to it, but generally had it better cooked. But as I said before, it is of no use. Your humbleness is too much for me. In a few days they will be bringing us cold victuals and recommending that we go outside somewhere and eat them, as all the seats in the dining room were wanted for other people. Well, said Joan, I must say I do feel a little overshadowed when I go into that dining room and see those proud and haughty waiters, some of them with silver chains and keys around their necks, showing that they are lords of the wine cellar and all of them with an air of lofty scorn for the poor beings who have to sit still and be waited on, but I'll try to do what I can. As far as I'm able I'll hold up my end of the social boom. You may think I break off my letters sudden, madam, like installments in a sensation weekly, which stops short in the most harrowing parts, so as to make certain the reader will buy the next number, but when I've written as much as I think two foreign stamps will carry, for more than five pence seems extravagant for a letter, I generally stop. End of Letter II. Read by Stabella Denton. All Libravox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit Libravox.org. Letter III of Pomonas Travels, a series of letters to the mistress of Redder Grange from her former handmaiden, by Frank R. Stockton. Read for Libravox.org into the public domain. Letter III Joan Overshadows the Waiter, London At dinner time the day when I had the conversation with Joan mentioned in my last letter, we was sitting in the dining room at a little table in a far corner, where we'd never been before. Not being considered of any importance they put us sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, instead of giving us regular seats, as I noticed most of the other people had, and I was looking around to see if anybody was ever going to come and wait on us, when suddenly I heard an awful noise. I have read about the rumblings of earthquakes, and although I had never heard any of them, I have felt a shock, and I can imagine the awfulness of the rumbling, and I had a feeling as if the building was about to sway and swing as they do in earthquakes. It wasn't all my imagining, for I saw the people at the other tables near us jump, and two waiters who was hurrying past stopped short as if they had been jerked up by a curb bit. I turned to look at Joan, but he was sitting up straight in his chair, as solemn and as steadfast as a gate-post, and I thought to myself that if he hadn't heard anything he must have been struck deaf, and I was just on the point of jumping up and shouting to him, fly before the walls and roof come down upon us, when that awful noise occurred again. My blood stood frigid in my veins, and as I started back I saw before me a waiter, his face ashy pale and his knees bending beneath him. Some people near us were half getting up from their chairs, and I pushed back and looked at Joan again, who had not moved except that his mouth was open. Then I knew what it was that I thought was an earthquake. It was Joan giving an order to the waiter. I bit my lips and sat silent. The people around kept looking at us, and the poor man who was receiving the shocks stood trembling like a leaf. When the volcanic disturbance, so to speak, was over, the waiter bowed himself as if he had been a heathen in a temple, and gasping, yes, sir, immediate, glided unevenly away. He hadn't waited on us before, and little thought, when he was going to stride proudly past our table, what a double-loaded Vesuvius was sitting in Joan's chair. I leaned over the table and said to Joan that if he would stick to that we could rent a bishopric if we wanted to, and I was so proud I could have patted him on the back. Well after that we had no more trouble about being waited on, for that waiter of ours went about as if he had his neck bared for the fatal stroke, and Joan was holding the scimitar. The head waiter came to us before we was done dinner, and asked if we had everything we wanted and if that table suited us, because if it did we could always have it. To which Joan distantly thundered that if he would see that it always had a clean tablecloth they would do well enough. Even the man who stood at the big table in the middle of the room and carved the cold meats, with his hair parted in the middle, and who looked as if he were saying to himself, as with a bland dexterity and tastefulness, he laid each slice upon its plate. Now then the socialistic movement in Paris is arrested for the time being, and here again I put an end to the hope of Russia getting to the sea through Afghanistan, and now I carefully spread contentment over the minds of all them riotous Welsh miners. Even he turned around and bowed to us as we passed him, and once sent a waiter to ask if we'd like a little bit of potted beef, which was particularly good that day. Joan kept up his rumblings, though they sounded more distant and more deep underground, and one day at luncheon an elderly woman, who was sitting alone at a table near us, turned to me and spoke. She was a very plain person, with her face all seemed and rough with exposure to the weather, like as if she had been capped into a pilot boat, and with a general appearance of being a cook with good recommendations, but at present out of a place. I might have wondered at such a person being at such a hotel, but remembering what I had been myself I couldn't say what might have happened to other people. I'm glad to see, said she, that you sent away that mutton, for if more persons would object to things that are not properly cooked, we'd all be better served. I suppose that in your country most people are so rich that they can afford to have the best of everything and have it always. I fancy the great wealth of American citizens must make their housekeeping very different from ours. Now I must say I began to bristle at being spoken to like that. I'm as proud of being an American as anybody can be, but I don't like the home of the free thrown into my teeth every time I open my mouth. There's no knowing what money Joan and I have lost through giving orders to London cab men in what is called our American accent. The minute we tell the drive of a handsome where we want to go, that place doubles its distance from the spot we start from. Now I think the great reason Joan's rumbling worked so well was that it had in it a sort of great British chest sound as if his lungs was rusty. The waiter had heard that before and knew what it meant. If he had spoken out in the clear American fashion I expect his voice would have gone clear through the waiter without his knowing it, like the person in the story, whose neck was sliced through and who didn't know it until he had sneezed and his head fell off. Yes, ma'am, I said, answering her with as much of a wearied feeling as I could put on. Our wealth is all very well in some ways, but it is a dreadful wearing on us. However, we try to bear up under it and be content. Well, said she, contentment is a great blessing in every station, though I have never tried it in yours. Do you expect to make a long stay in London? As she seemed like a civil and well-meaning woman, and was the first person who had spoken to us in a social way, I didn't mind talking to her, and told her we was only stopping in London until we could find the kind of country house we wanted, and when she asked what kind that it was, I described what we wanted and how we were still answering advertisements and going to see agents, who was always recommended exactly the kind of house we did not care for. Vicarages are all very well, said she, but it sometimes happened, and has happened to friends of mine, that when a vicar has let his house he makes up his mind not to waste his money in travelling, and he takes lodgings nearby and keeps an eternal eye upon his tenants. I don't believe any independent American would fancy that. No, indeed, said I, and then she went on to say that if we wanted a small country house for a month or two she knew of one which she believed would suit us, and it wasn't a vicarage, either. When I asked her to tell me about it she brought her chair up to our table, together with her mug of beer, her bread and cheese, and she went into the particulars about the house she knew of. It is situated, said she, in the west of England, in the most beautiful part of our country. It is near one of the quaintest little villages that the past ages have left us, and not far away are the beautiful waters of the Bristol Channel, with the mountains of whales rising against the sky on the horizon, and all about our hills and valleys and woods and beautiful moors and babbling streams, with all the loveliness of cultivated rurality merging into the wild beauties of unadorned nature. If these was not exactly her words they expressed the ideas she roused in my mind. She said the place was far enough away from the railways and the steam of travel, and among the simple peasantry, and that in the society of the resident gentry we would see English country life as it is, uncontaminated by the tourist or the commercial traveller. I can't remember all the things she said about this charming cottage, in this most supremely beautiful spot, but I sat and listened and the description held me spellbound as a snake fascinates a frog, with this difference, instead of being swallowed by the description, I swallowed it. When the old woman had given us the address of the person who had the letting of the cottage, and Joan and me had gone to our own room, I said to him, before we had time to sit down, what do you think? I think, said he, that we ought to follow that old woman's advice and go look at this house. Go and look at it, I exclaimed, not a bit of it. If we do that we are bound to see something or hear something that will make us hesitate and consider, and if we do that a way goes our enthusiasm and our rapture. I say telegraph this minute and say we'll take the house and send a letter by the next mail with a postal order in it to secure the place. Joan looked at me hard, and said he'd feel easier in his mind if he understood what I was talking about. Never mind understanding, said I. Go down and telegraph we'll take the house. There isn't a minute to lose. But, said Joan, if we find out when we get there, never mind that, said I, if we find out when we get there it isn't all we thought it was, and we're bound to do that, we'll make the best of what doesn't suit us because it can't be helped. But if we go and look at it it's ten to one we won't take it. How long are we to take it for, said Joan? A month anyway, and perhaps longer, I told him, giving a push toward the door. All right, said he, and he went and telegraphed. I believe if Joan was told he could go anywhere and stay for a month he'd choose that place from among all the most enchanting spots on the earth where he couldn't stay so long. As for me the one thing that held me was the romanticness of the place. From what the old woman said I knew there couldn't be any mistake about that, and if I could find myself the mistress of a romantic cottage near an ancient village of the olden time I would put up with most everything except dirt, and as dirt in me seldom keeps company very long even that can't frighten me. When I saw the old woman at lunch in the next day and told her what we had done she was fairly dumbfounded. Really, really, said she, you Americans are the speediest people I ever did see. Why an English person would have taken a week to consider that place before taking it. And lost it ten to one, said I. She shook her head. Well, said she, I suppose it's on account of your habits and you can't help it, but it's a poor way of doing business. Now I began to think from this that her conscious was beginning to trouble her for having given so fairy like a picture of the house, and as I was afraid she might think at her duty to bring up some disadvantages I changed the conversation and got away as soon as I could. When we once got seated at our humble board and our rural cot I wouldn't be afraid of any bugaboos, but I didn't want them brought up then. I can generally depend upon Joan, but sometimes he gets a little stubborn. We didn't see this old person any more, and when I asked the waiter about her the next day he said she was sure she had left the hotel, by which I suppose he must have meant he got his half-crown. Her fading away in this fashion made it all seem like a myth or a phantasm, but when the next morning we got a receipt for the money Joan sent, and a note saying the house was ready for our reception, I felt myself on solid ground again, and tomorrow we start, bag and baggage, for Chedcom, which is the name of the village where the house is that we have taken. I'll write to you, madam, as soon as we get there, and I hope with all my heart and soul, that when we see what's wrong with it, and there's bound to be something, that it may not be anything bad enough to make us give it up and go floating off in avoidness, like a spider web blown before a summer breeze, without knowing what's going to run up against his stick to, and what is more, probably lose the money we paid in advance. End of Letter III. Read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Letter IV of Pomonas Travels, a series of letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her former handmaiden, by Frank R. Stockton. And for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter IV. The Cottage at Chedcom. Chedcom, Somerset Shirt. Last winter Joan and I read all the books we could get about the rural parts of England, and we knew that the country must be very beautiful, but we had no proper idea of it until we came to Chedcom. I am not going to write much about the scenery in this part of the country, because perhaps you have been here and seen it, and anyway my writing would not be half so good as what you could read in books, which don't amount to anything. All I'll say is that if you was to go over the whole of England and collect a lot of smooth green hills, with sheep and deer wandering about on them, brooks with great trees hanging over them, and vines and flowers fairly crowding themselves into the water, lanes unroathed, heads gin with hawthorn, wild roses, and tall purple fox-gloves, hill-woods and copses, hills covered with heather, thatched cottages like the pictures in drawing books with roses against their walls, and thin blue smoke curling up from the chimneys, distant views of the sparkling sea, villages which are nearly covered up by greenness except their steeples, rocky cliffs all green with vines, and flowers spreading and thriving with the fervor and earnestness you might expect to find in the tropics, but not here. And then if you was to put all these points of scenery into one place not too big for your eye to sweep over and take it all in, you would have a country like that around Chedcombe. I am sure the old lady was right when she said it was the most beautiful part of England. The first day we was here we carried an umbrella as we walked through all this burdened loveliness, but yesterday morning we went to the village and bought a couple of thin Macintoshes, which will save us a lot of trouble opening and shedding umbrellas. When we got out at the Chedcombe station we found a man there with the little carriage he called a fly, who said he had been sent to take us to our house. There was also a van to carry our baggage. We drove entirely through the village, which looked to me as if a bit of the Middle Ages had been turned up by the plough, and on the other edge of it there was our house, and on the doorstep stood a lady with a smiling eye and an umbrella who turned out to be our landlady. Back of her was two other females, one of them looking like a minister's wife while the other one I knew to be a servant made by her cap. The lady, whose name was Mrs. Shutterfield, shook hands with us and seemed very glad to see us, and the minister's wife took our handbags from us and told the men where to carry our trunks. Mrs. Shutterfield took us into a little parlor on one side of the hall, and then we three sat down, and I must say I was so busy looking at the queer, delightful room with everything in it, chairs, tables, carpets, walls, pictures, and flower vases, all belonging to a bygone epic, though perfectly fresh as if just made, that I could scarcely pay attention to what the lady said. But I listened enough to know that Mrs. Shutterfield told us that she had taken the liberty of engaging for us two most excellent servants, who had lived in the house before it had been let to lodgers, and who she was quite sure would suit us very well, though, of course, we were at liberty to do what we pleased about engaging them. The one that I took for the minister's wife was a combination of cook and housekeeper, by the name of Mrs. Ponder, while the other was a maid in general named Hannah. When the lady mentioned two servants it took me a little abat, for he had not expected to have more than one, but when she mentioned the wages and I found that both put together did not cost us as much as a very poor cook would expect in America, and when I remembered we was now at work socially booming ourselves, and that it wouldn't do to let this lady think we had not been accustomed to varieties of servants, I spoke up and said we would engage the two estimable women she recommended, and was much obliged to her for getting them. Then we went over that house, downstairs and up, and of all the lavender-smelling, old-fashionedness anybody ever dreamed of, this little house has as much as it can hold. It is fitted up all through like one of your mother's bonnets, which she bought before she was married and never wore on account of a funeral in the family, but kept shut up in a box which she only opens now and then to show her descendants. In every room and on the stairs there was a general air of antiquated freshness, mingled with the odors of English breakfast-tea and recollections of the story of Cranford, which if Joan and me had been alone would have made me dance from the garret of that house to the cellar. Every sentiment of romance that I had in my soul bubbled to the surface, and I felt as if I was one of my ancestors before she emigrated to the colonies. I could not say what I thought, but I pinched Joan's arm whenever I could get a chance, which relieved me a little. And when Mrs. Ponder had come to me with a little curtsy, and asked me what time I would like to have dinner, and told me she had taken the liberty of ordering so as to have everything ready by the time I came, and Mrs. Shutterfield had gone, after begging to know what more she could do for us, and we had gone to our own room, I let out my feelings in one wild scream of delirious gladness that would have been heard all the way to the railroad station if I had not covered my head with two pillows and the corner of a blanket. After we had had dinner, which was as English as the British Lion, and much more to our taste than anything we had had in London, Joan went out to smoke a pipe, and I had a talk with Mrs. Ponder about fish, meat, and groceries, and about housekeeping matters in general. Mrs. Ponder, whose general aspect of Minister's wife began to wear off when I talked to her, mingles respectfulness and respectability in a manner I haven't been in the habit of seeing. Generally those two things run against each other, but they don't in her. When she asked what kind of wine we preferred, I must say I was struck all in a heap, for wines, to Joan and me, is like a trackless wilderness without compass or binnacle light, and we seldom drink them except made hot, with nutmeg grated in, for colic. But as I wanted her to understand that if there was any luxuries we didn't order it was because we didn't approve of them, I told her that we was total abstainers, and at that she smiled very pleasant and said that was her persuasion also, and that she was glad not to be obliged to handle intoxicating drinks, though of course she always did it without objection when the family used them. When I told Joan this he looked a little blank, for foreign water generally doesn't agree with him. I mentioned this afterwards to Mrs. Ponder, and she said it was very common in total abstaining families when water didn't agree with any one of them, especially if it happened to be the gentleman, to take a little good scotch whiskey with it, but when I told this to Joan he said he would try to bear up under the shackles of abstinence. This morning when I was talking with Mrs. Ponder about fish, and trying to show her that I knew something about the names of English fishes, I said we was very fond of whitebait. At this she looked astonished for the first time. Whitebait, said she, we always looked upon that as a belonging entirely to the nobility and gentry. At this my back began to bristle, but I didn't let her know it, and I said, in a tone of emphatic mildness, that we would have whitebait twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday. At this Mrs. Ponder gave a little courtesy, and thanked me very much, and said she would attend to it. When Joan and me came back after taking a long walk in the morning, I saw a pair of Church of England prayer books, looking as if they had just been neatly dusted, lying on the parlor table where they hadn't been before, for I had carefully looked over every book. I think that when it was born in upon Mrs. Ponder's soul that we was accustomed to having whitebait as a regular thing, she made up her mind we was all right, and that nothing but the established Church would do for us. Before she might have thought we was Wesleyans. Our maid Hannah is very nice to look at, and does her work as well as anybody could do it. And like most other English servants, she's in a state of never ending thankfulness. But as I can never understand a word she says, except thank you very much, I asked Joan if he didn't think it would be a good thing for me to try to teach her a little English. Now then, said he, that's the opening of a big subject. Right until I feel my pipe and will discourse upon it. It was just after luncheon, and we was sitting in the summer house at the end of the garden, looking out over the roses and pinks and all sorts of old, timey flowers, growing as thick as cloverheads, with an air as if it wasn't the least trouble in the world for them to blossom and flourish. Beyond the flowers was a little brook with the duck swimming in it, and beyond that was a field, and on the other side of that field was a park belonging to the Lord of the Manor, and scattered about on the side of a green hill in the park was a herd of his lordship's deer. Most of them was so light-colored that I fancied I could almost see through them, as if they were the little transparent bugs that crawl about on leaves. That isn't a romantic idea to have about deers, but I can't get rid of the notion whenever I see those little creatures walking about on the hills. At that time it was hardly raining at all, just a little mist, with the sun coming into the summer house every now and then, making us feel very comfortable and contented. Now, said Joan, when he had got his pipe well started, what I want to talk about is the amount of reformation we expect to do while we're sojourning in the kingdom of Great Britain. Reformation, said I, we didn't come here to reform anything. Well, said Joan, if we're going to busy our minds with these people's shortcomings and long-going's, and don't try to reform them, we're just worrying ourselves and doing them no good, and I don't think it will pay. Now, for instance, there's that rosy cheeked Hanna. She's satisfied with her way of speaking English, and Miss Ponder understands it and is satisfied with it, and all the people around here are satisfied with it. As for us, we know, when she comes and stands in the doorway and dimples up her cheeks, and then makes those sounds that are more like drops of molasses falling on a gong than anything else I know of, we know she is telling us, in her own way, that the next meal, whatever it is, is ready, and we go to it. Yes, said I, and as I do most of my talking with Miss Ponder, and as we shall be here for such a short time anyway, it may be as well. What I say about Hanna, said Joan, interrupting me as soon as I began to speak about a short stay, I have to say about everything else in England that doesn't suit us. As long as Hanna doesn't try to make us speak in her fashion, I say let her alone. Of course we shall find a lot of things over here that we shall not approve of. We knew that before we came, and when we find we can't withstand their manners any longer we can pack up and go home. But so far as I'm concerned, I'm getting along very comfortable so far. Oh, so am I, I said to him, and as to interfering with other people's fashions, I don't want to do it. If I was to meet the most paganish of heathens entering his temple with suitable humbleness, I wouldn't hurt his feelings on the subject of religion, unless I was a missionary and went about it in systematic. But if that heathen turned on me and jeered at me for attending our church at home, and told me I ought to go down on my marrow bones before his brazen idols, I'd wang him over the head with a frying pan or anything else that came handy. That's the sort of thing I can't stand. As long as the people here don't snort and sniff at my ways, I won't snort and sniff at theirs. Well, said Joan, that is a good rule, but I don't know that it's going to work altogether. You see, there are a good many people in this country and only two of us, and it will be a lot harder for them to keep from sniffing and snorting than for us to do it. So it's my opinion that if we expect to get along in a good humor and friendly way, which is the only decent way of living, we've got to hold up our end of the business a little higher than we expect other people to hold up theirs. I couldn't agree altogether with Joan about our trying to do better than other people, but I said that as the British had been kind enough to make their country free to us, we wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth unless it kicked. To which Joan said I sometimes got my figures of speech hind part foremost, but he knew what I meant. We've lived in our cottage two weeks, and every morning when I get up and open our windows, which has little pain set in strips of lead and hinges on one side so that it works like a door, and look out over the brook and the meadows and the thatched roofs, and see the peasant men with their short jackets and woolen caps, and the lower part of their trousers tied round with twine, if they don't happen to have leather leggings trudging to their work. My soul is filled with quelling emotions as I think that if Queen Elizabeth ever traveled along this way she must have seen these great old trees and perhaps some of these very houses, and as to the people they must have been pretty much the same, though differing a little in clothes, I dare say, but judging from Hannah, perhaps not very much in the kind of English they spoke. I declare that when Joan and me walk about through the village and over the fields, for there is a right of way, meaning a little path, through most all of them, and when we go into the old church, with its yew trees and its gravestones and its marble effigies of two of the old manor lords, both stretched flat on their backs as large as life, the gentleman with the end of his nose knocked off and with his feet crossed to show he was a crusader, and the lady with her hands clasped in front of her, as if she expected the generations who came to gaze on her tomb to guess what she had inside of them, I feel like a character in a novel. I have kept a great many of my joyful sentiments to myself, because Joan is too well contented as it is, and there is a great deal yet to be seen in England. Sometimes we hire a dog cart and a black horse named Punch, from the inn in the village, and we take long drives over roads that are almost as smooth as bowling alleys. The country is very hilly, and every time we get to the top of a hill we can see, spread about us for miles and miles, the beautiful hills and veils, and lordly residences and cottages, and steeple tops, looking as though they had been struck down here and there to show where villages had been planted. End of Letter Four Read by Cibela Denton All Librivox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit Librivox.org Letter Five of Pomona's Travels A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Redder Grange from Her Former Handmaiden by Frank R. Stockton Read for Librivox.org into the public domain Letter Number Five Pomona Takes a Lodger Chedcom This morning when Joan was out taking a walk and I was talking to Miss Ponder, and getting her to teach me how to make Devonshire-clotted cream, which we have for every meal, putting it on everything it will go on, into everything it will go into, and eating it by itself when there is nothing it will go on or into, and trying to find out why it is that widings are always brought on the table with their tails stuck through their throats, as if they had committed suicide by cutting their jugular veins in this fashion. I saw, coming along the road to our cottage, a pretty little dog-cart with two ladies in it. The horse they drove was a pony, and the prettiest creature I ever saw, being formed like a full-sized horse, only very small, and with as much fire and spirit and gracefulness as could be got into an animal sixteen hands high. I heard afterwards that he came from Exmore, which is about twelve miles from here, and produces ponies and deers of similar size and swiftness. They stopped at the door, and one of them got out and came in. Miss Ponder told me she wished to see me, and that she was Mrs. Lockie of the boardly arms in the village. The innkeeper's wife said I, to which Miss Ponder said it was, and I went into the parlor. Mrs. Lockie was a handsome-looking lady, and wearing a stylish clothes as if she was a duchess, and extremely polite and respectful. She said she would have asked Mrs. Shutterfield to come with her and introduce her, but that lady was away from home, and so she had to come by herself to ask me a very great favor. When I begged her to sit down and name it, she went on to say that there had come that morning, to the inn, a very large party in a coach in four, that was making a trip through the country, and as they didn't travel on Sunday they wanted to stay at the boardly arms until Monday morning. Now said she that puts me to a dreadful lot of trouble, because I haven't room to accommodate them all, and even if I could get rooms for them somewhere else they don't want to be separated. But there is one of the best rooms at the inn which is occupied by an elderly gentleman, and if I could get that room I could put two double beds in it and so accommodate the whole party. Now, knowing that you had a pleasant chamber here that you don't use, I thought I would make bold to come and ask you if you would lodge Mr. Poplington until Monday. What sort of person is this Mr. Poplington, and is he willing to come here? Oh, I haven't asked him yet, said she, but he is so extremely good nature that I know he will be glad to come here. He has often asked me who lived in this extremely picturesque cottage. You must have an answer now, said I. Oh, yes, said she, for if you cannot do me this favour I must go somewhere else, and where to go I don't know. Now I had begun to think that the one thing we wanted in this little home of ours was company, and that it was a great pity to have that nice bedroom on the second floor entirely wasted, with nobody ever in it. So as far as I was concerned I would be very glad to have some pleasant person in the house, at least for a day or two, and I didn't believe Joan would object. At any rate it would put a stop, at least for a little while, to his eternally saying how Corinne, our daughter, would enjoy that room, and how nice it would be if we was to take this house for the rest of the season and send for her. Now Corinne's as happy as she can be at her grandmother's farm, and her school will begin before we are ready to come home, and what is more we didn't come here to spend all our time in one place. While I was thinking of these things I was looking out of the window at the lady in the dog-cart who was holding the reins. She was pretty as a picture, and wore a great straw hat with lovely flowers in it. As I had to give an answer without waiting for Joan to come home, and I didn't expect him until lunch and time, I concluded to be neighborly, and said we would take the gentleman to oblige her. Even if the arrangement didn't suit him or us it wouldn't matter much for that little time. At which Mrs. Lockie was very grateful indeed, and said she would have Mr. Poplington's sluggage sent around that afternoon, and that he would come later. As she got up to go I said to her, is that young lady out there one of the party who came with the coach in four? Oh, no, said Mrs. Lockie, she lives with me. She is the young lady who keeps the bar. I expect I opened my mouth and eyes pretty wide, for I was never so astonished. A young lady like that, keeping the bar? But I didn't want Mrs. Lockie to know how much I was surprised, and so I said nothing about it. When they had gone and I had stood looking after them for about a minute, I remembered I hadn't asked whether Mr. Poplington would want to take his meals here, or whether he would go to the inn for them. To be sure she only asked me to lodge him, but as the inn is more than half a mile from here he may want to be boarded. But this will have to be found out when he comes, and when Joan comes home it will have to be found out what he thinks about my taking a lodger while he's out taking a walk. END OF LETTER NUMBER FIVE Read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. LETTER SIX OF PIMONAS TRAVELS A SERIES OF LETTERS TO THE MISTRESS OF RETTER GROANGE FROM HER FORMER HANDMAIDEN by Frank R. Stockton. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. LETTER NUMBER SIX PIMONA EXPOWNS AMERICANISMS CHEDCUM SUMMERSET SHIR. When Joan came home and I told him a gentleman was coming to live with us, he thought at first I was joking, and when he found out that I meant what I said he looked very blue and stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground, considering. He's not going to take his meals here, is he? I don't think he expects that, said I, for Mrs. Lockie only spoke of lodging. Oh well, said Joan, looking as if his clouds was clearing off a little. I don't suppose it will matter to us if that room is occupied over a Sunday, but I think the next time I go out for a stroll I'll take you with me. I didn't go out that afternoon, and sat on pins and needles until half past five o'clock. Joan wanted me to walk with him, but I wouldn't do it, because I didn't want our lodger to come here and be received by Miss Ponder. At half past five there came a cart with the gentleman's luggage, as they call it here, and I was glad Joan wasn't at home. There was an enormous leather portmanteau which looked as if it had been dragged by a boy too short to lift it from the ground, half over the world, a hat-box, also of leather, but not so draggy-looking, a bundle of canes and umbrellas, a leather dressing case, and a flat round bathing-tub. I had the things taken up to the room as quickly as I could, for if Joan had seen them he'd think the gentleman was going to bring his family with him. It was nine o'clock and still broad daylight when Mr. Poplington himself came, carrying a fishing-rod put up in parts in a canvas bag, a fish-basket, and a small valise. He wore leather leggings and was about sixty years old, but a wonderful good walker. I thought, when I saw him coming, that he had no rheumatism whatever, but I found out afterward that he had a little one in one of his arms. He had white hair and white side whiskers and a fine red face, which made me think of a strawberry partly covered with Devonshire-clotted cream. Joan and I was sitting in the summer-house, he's smoking his pipe, and we both went to meet the gentleman. He had a bluff way of speaking, and said he was much obliged to us for taking him in, and after saying that it was a warm evening, a thing which I hadn't noticed, he asked to be shown to his room. I sent Hannah with him, and then Joan and I went back down to the summer-house. I didn't know exactly why, but I wasn't in as good spirits as I had been, and when Joan spoke he didn't make me feel any better. It seems to me, said he, that I see signs of weakening in the social boom. That man considered us exactly as we considered our lodging-housekeeper in London. Now it doesn't strike me that the sample person you was talking about, who is in a cross between a rich farmer and a poor gentleman, would go into the lodging-house business. I couldn't help agreeing with Joan, and I didn't like it a bit. The gentleman hadn't said anything or done anything that was out of the way, but there was a benign atloftiness about him which grated on the inmost fibers of my soul. I'll tell you what we'll do, said I, turning sharp on Joan, we won't charge him ascent. That'll take him down, and show him what we are. We'll give him the room as a favour to Mrs. Lockie, considering her in the light of a neighbour and one who sent us a cucumber. All right, said Joan, I like that way of arranging the business. Up goes the social boom again. Just as we was going up to bed, Miss Ponder came to me and said that the gentleman had called down to her and asked if he could have a new laid egg for his breakfast, and she asked if she should send Hannah early the next morning to see if she could get a perfectly fresh egg from one of the cottages. I thought, ma'am, that perhaps she might eject to buying things on Sunday. I do, I said. Does that Mr. Poplington expect to have his breakfast here? I only took him to Lodge. Oh, ma'am, said Miss Ponder. They always takes their breakfast when they has their rooms. Ponder and Luncheon is different, and he may expect to go to the inn for them. Indeed, said I, I think he may, and if he breakfasts here he can take what we've got. If the eggs are not fresh enough for him he can try and get along with some bacon. He can't expect that to be fresh. Knowing that English people take their breakfast late, Joan and I got up early, so as to get through before our lodger came down. But bless me, when we went to the front door to see what sort of a day it was, we saw him coming in from a walk. One morning said he, and in fact there was only a little drizzle of rain, which might stop when the sun got higher, and he stood near us and began to talk about the trout in the stream, which to my utter amazement he called a river. Do you take your license by the day or week, he said to Joan? License, said Joan, I don't fish. Really, exclaimed Mr. Poplington, oh, I see you are a cycler. No, said Joan, I'm not that either, I'm a pervader. Really, said the old gentleman, what do you mean by that? I mean that I pervade the scenery, sometimes on foot and sometimes in a trap. That's my style of rural pleasuring. But you do fish at home, I said to Joan, not wishing the English gentleman to think my husband was a city man, who didn't know anything about sport. Oh, yes, said Joan, I used to fish for perch and sunfish. Sunfish, said Mr. Poplington, I don't know that fish at all. What sort of a fly do you use? I don't fish with any flies at all, said Joan, I bait my hook with worms. Mr. Poplington's face looked as if he had poured liquid shoe-blacking on his meat, thinking it was Worcestersauce. Fancy, worms, I'd never take a rod in my hands if I had to use worms. Never used a worm in my life. There's no sort of science in worm-fishing. There's double sport, said Joan, for first you've got to catch your worm. Then again I hate shams, if you have to catch fish there's no use cheating them into the bargain. Cheat! cried Mr. Poplington. If I had to catch a whale I'd fish for him with a fly. But you Americans are strange people. Worms indeed. We don't all use worms, said Joan. There's lots of fly-fishers in America. They use all sorts of flies. If we are to believe all the Californians tell us, some of the artificial flies out there must be as big as crows. Really! said Mr. Poplington, looking hard at Joan, with a little twinkling in his eye, and when gentlemen fish who don't like to cheat the fishes, what size of worms do they use? Well, said Joan, in the far west I've heard that the common black snake is the favorite bait. He's six or seven feet long, and fishermen that use him don't have to have any line. He's bait and line all in one. Mr. Poplington laughed. I see you're a fond of a joke, said he, and so am I, but I'm also fond of my breakfast. I'm with you there, said Joan, and we all went in. Mr. Poplington was very pleasant and chatty, and of course asked a great many questions about America. The all-English people I've met want to talk about our country, and it seems to me that what they do know isn't any better, considering as useful information, than what they don't know. But Mr. Poplington has never been to America, and so he knows more about us than those Englishmen who come over to write books, and only have time to run around the outside of things and get themselves tripped up on our ragged edges. He said he had met a good many Americans and liked them, but he couldn't see for the life of him why they do some things English people don't do, and don't do things that English people do do. For instance, he wondered why we don't drink tea for breakfast. Miss Ponder had made it for him, knowing he'd want it, and he wonders why Americans drink coffee when such good tea as that was comes in their reach. Now, if I had considered Mr. Poplington as a lodger, it might have nettle me to have him tell me I didn't know what was good, but remembering that we was giving him hospitality and not bored, and didn't intend to charge him a cent, but was just taking care of him out of neighborly kindness, I was rather glad to have him find a little fault, because that would make me feel as if I was soaring still higher above him the next morning when I should tell him there was nothing to pay. So I took it all good-natured and said to him, well, Americans like to have the very best things that can be got out of every country. We're like bees flying over the whole world looking into every blossom to see what sweetness there is to be got out of it. From the lily of France we sip their coffee. From the national flower of India, whatever it is, we take their chutney sauce. And as to those big apple tarts, baked in a deep dish, with a cup in the middle to hold up the upper crust, and so full of apples, and so delicious with Devonshire-clotted cream on them, that if there was any one place in the world they could be had, I believe my husband would want to go and live there forever. They are what we extract from the Rose of England. Mr. Poplington laughed like anything at this, but said there was a great many other things that he could show us and tell us about which would be very well worth sipping from the Rose of England. After breakfast he went to church with us, and as we was coming home, for he didn't seem to have the least idea of going to the inn for his luncheon, he asked if we didn't find the services very different from those in America. Yes, I said, there are about as different from Quaker services as a squirting fountain is from a corked bottle. The Methodists and Unitarians and Reformed Dutch and Campbellites and Hardshell Baptists have different services too, but in the Episcopal Churches things are all pretty much the same as they did this morning. You forget, sir, that in our country there are religions to suit all sizes of minds. We haven't any national religion any more than we have a national flower. But you ought to have, said he, you ought to have an established church. You may be sure we'll have it, said Joan, as soon as we can agree as to which one it ought to be. End of Letter No. 6, read by Stabella Denton. All Libravox files are in the public domain. For more information please visit Libravox.org. Letter No. 7 of Pomonas Travels, a series of letters to the mistress of Redder Grange, from her former handmaiden, by Frank R. Stockton. Read for Libravox.org into the public domain. Letter No. 7, The Hayfield, Chedcombe, Somersetshire. Last Sunday afternoon Mr. Poplington asked us if we would not like to walk over to a ruined abbey about four miles away, which he said was very interesting. It seemed to me that four miles there and four miles back was a pretty long walk, but I wandered to see the abbey, and I wasn't going to let him think that a young American woman couldn't walk as far as an elderly English gentleman. So I agreed, and so did Joan. The abbey is a wonderful place, and I never thought of being tired while wandering in the rooms in the garden, where the old monks used to live and preach, and give food to the poor, and keep house without women, which was pious enough, but must have been untidy. But the thing that surprised me the most was what Mr. Poplington told us about the age of the place. It was not built all at once, and it's part ancient and part modern, and you needn't wonder, madam, that I was astonished when he said that the part called Monard was finished just three years before America was discovered. When I heard that, I seemed to shrivel up as if my country was a newborn babe alongside of a bearded patriarch. But I didn't stay shriveled long, for it can't be denied that a newborn babe has a good deal more to look forward to than a patriarch has. It is amazing how many things in this part of the country we'd never have thought of if it hadn't have been for Mr. Poplington. At dinner he told us about Exmor and the Lorna Dune country, and the wild deer hunting that can be had nowhere else in England, and lots of other things that made me feel we must be up and doing if we wanted to see all we ought to see before we left Chedcombe. When I went upstairs I said to Joan that Mr. Poplington was a very different man from what I thought he was. He's just as nice as he can be, and I'm going to charge him for his room and his meals and for everything he's had. Joan laughed and asked me if that was the way I showed people I liked them. We intended to humble him by not charging him anything, I said, and make him feel as if he had been depending on our bounty, but now I wouldn't hurt his feelings for the world, and I'll make his bill out in the morning myself. Women always do that sort of thing in England. As you asked me, madam, to tell you everything that happened on our travels, I'll go on about Mr. Poplington. After breakfast on Monday morning he went over to the inn and said he would come back and pick up his things. But when he did come back he told us that those coach and four people had determined not to leave Chedcombe that day, but was going to stay and look at the sights in the neighborhood, and that they would want the room for that night. He said this had made him very angry, because they had no right to change their minds that way after having made definite arrangements in which other people besides themselves was concerned, and he said so very plainly to the gentleman who seemed to be at the head of the party. I hope it will be no inconvenience to you, madam, he said, to keep me another night. Oh, dear no, said I, and my husband was saying this morning that he wished you was going to stay with us for the rest of our time here. Really, exclaimed Mr. Poplington, then I'll do it. I'll go to the inn this minute and have the rest of my luggage brought over here. If this is any punishment to Mrs. Lockie, she deserves it, for she shouldn't have told those people they could stay longer without consulting me. In less than an hour there came a van to our cottage with the rest of his luggage. There must have been over a dozen boxes and packages besides things tied up and strapped, and as I saw them being carried up one at a time I said to Mrs. Ponder, the now our country we'd have two or three big trunks which we could take about without any trouble. Yes, ma'am, she said, but I could see by her face that she didn't believe luggage would be luggage, unless you could lug it, but was too respectful to say so. When Mr. Poplington got settled down in our spare room he blossomed out like a full-blown friend of the family, and accordingly began to give us advice. He said we should go as soon as we could and see Exmore in all that region of the country, and that if we didn't mind he'd like to go with us, to which we answered, of course, we should like that very much, and asked him what he thought would be the best way to go. So we had ever so much to talk about that, and although we all agreed it would be nicer not to take a public coach, but travel private, we didn't find it easy to decide as to the manner of travel. We all agreed that a carriage and horses would be too expensive, and Joan was rather in favor of a dog cart for us if Mr. Poplington would like to go on horseback, but the old gentleman said it would be too much riding for him, and if we took a dog cart he'd have to take another one. But this wouldn't be a very sociable way of traveling and none of us liked it. Now, exclaimed Mr. Poplington, striking his hand on the table, I'll tell you exactly how we ought to go through that country, we ought to go on cycles. By cycles, I said, try cycles if you like, he answered, but that's the way to do it. It'll be cheap, and we can go as we like and stop when we like. We'll be as free and independent as the stars and stripes, and more so, for they can't always flap when they like and stop flapping when they choose. Have you ever tried it, madam? I replied that I had, a little, because my daughter had a tricycle, and I had ridden on it for a short distance and after sundown, but as for regular travel in the daytime I couldn't think of it. At this, Joan nearly took my breath away by saying that he thought the bicycle idea was a capital one, and that for his part he'd like it better than any other way of traveling through a pretty country. He also said he believed I could work a tricycle just as well as not, and that if I got used to it I would think it fine. I stood out against those two men for about half an hour and then I began to give in a little and think that it might be nice to roll along on my own little wheels over their beautiful, smooth roads and stop and smell the hedges and pick-flowers whenever I felt like it, and so it ended in my agreeing to do the ex-more country on a tricycle while Mr. Poplington and Joan went on bicycles. As to getting the machines, Mr. Poplington said he would attend to that. There was people in London who hired them to excursionists, and all he had to do was send an order and they would be on hand in a day or two, and so that matter was settled and he wrote to London. I thought Mr. Poplington was a little old for that sort of exercise, but I found he had been used to doing a great deal of cycling in the part of the country where he lives, and besides he isn't as old as I thought he was, being not much over fifty. The kind of air that keeps a country always green is wonderful in bringing out early red and white in a person. Something happens wonderfully well, madam, said he, coming in after he'd been to post his letter in a red iron box, let into the side of the Wesleyan Chapel, doesn't it? Now here we're not able to start on our journey for two or three days, and I have just been told that the great hay-making in the big meadow to the south of the village is to begin tomorrow. They make the hay there only every other year, and they have a grand time of it. We must be there, and you shall see some of our English country customs. We said we'd be sure to be in for that sort of thing. I wish, madam, you could have seen that great hayfield. It belongs to the Lord of the Manor, and must have been twenty or thirty acres in it. They've been three or four days cutting the grass on it with the machine, and now there's been nearly two days with hardly any rain, only now and then some drizzling, and a good strong wind, which they think here is better for the haymaking than sunshine, though they don't object to a little sun. All the people in the village who had good legs to carry them to that field went to help make hay. It was a regular holiday, and as hay is clean, nearly everybody was dressed in good clothes. Early in the morning some twenty regular farm-labours began raking the hay at one end of the field, stretching themselves nearly the whole way across it, and as the day went on more and more people came, men and women, high and low. All the young women and some of the older ones had rakes, and the way they worked them was amazing to see, but they turned over the hay enough to dry it. As to schoolgirls and boys, there was no end of them in the afternoon, for school led out early. Some of them worked, but most of them played and cut up monkey shines on the hay. Even the little babies was brought on the field, and nigh soft beds made for them under the trees at one side. When Jones saw real farm-work going on, with a chance for everybody to turn in to help, his farmer blood boiled within him, as if he was a war-horse and sniffed the smoke of battle, and he got himself a rake and went to work like a good fellow. I never saw so many men at work in a hay-field at home, but when I looked at Joan raking I could see why it was it didn't take so many men to get in our hay. As for me I raked a little, but looked about a great deal more. Near the middle of the field was two women working together, raking as steadily as if they had been brought up to it. One of these was young and handsomer even than Miss Dick, which was the name of the bar-lady. To look at her it made me think of what I had read of Queen Marie Antoinette and her court-ladies playing the part of milk-maids. Her straw hat was trimmed with delicate flowers, and her white muslin dress and pale blue ribbons made her the prettiest picture I ever saw out of doors. I could not help asking Mrs. Lockie who she was, and she told me that she was the chambermaid at the end, and the other was the cook. When I heard this I didn't make any answer, but just walked off a little way and began raking and thinking. I have often wondered why it is that English servants are so different from those we have, or to put it in a strictly confidential way between you and me, madam, why the chambermaid at the boardly arms, as she is, is so different from me, as I used to be when I first lived with you. Now that young chambermaid with the pretty hat is, as far as appearances go, as good a woman as I am, and if Joan was a bachelor and intended to marry her I would think it was as good a match as if he had married me. But the difference between us two is that when I got to be the kind of woman I am I wasn't willing to be a servant, and if I had always been the kind of young woman that chambermaid is I never would have been a servant. I kept a sharp eye on the young women in the domestic service over here, having a fellow feeling for them, as you can well understand, madam, and since I have been in the country I've watched the poor folks and seen how they live, and it's just as plain to me as can be that the young women who are maids and waitresses over here are the kind who would have tried to be shop girls and dressmakers and even school teachers in America, and many of the servants we have would be working in the fields if they lived over here. The fact is the English people don't go to other countries to get their servants. Their way is like a factory consuming its own smoke. The surplus young women, and there must always be a lot of them, are used up in domestic service. Now if an American poor girl is good enough to be a first class servant, she wants to be something else. Sooner than go out to service she will work twice as hard in a shop, or even go into a factory. I have talked a good deal about this to Joan, and he says I'm getting to be a philosopher, but I don't think it takes much philosophizing to find out how this case stands. If house service could be looked upon in the proper way, it wouldn't take long for American girls, who have to work for their living, to find out that it's a lot better to live with nice people, and cook and wait on the table, and do all those things which come natural to women the world over, than to stand all day behind a counter under the thumb of a floor walker, or grind their lives out like slaves among a lot of steam engines and machinery. The only reason the English have better house servants than we have is that here any girl who has to work is willing to be a house servant, and very good house servants they are, too. Letter No. 8 Joan teaches young ladies how to rake. I will now finish telling you about the great haymaking day. Toward the end of the afternoon a lot of boys and girls began playing a game which seemed to belong to the hayfield. Each one of the bigger boys would twist up a rope of hay and run after a girl, and when he had thrown it over her neck he could kiss her. Girls are girls the whole world over, and it was funny to see how some of them would run like mad to get away from the boys, and how dreadfully troubled they would be when they was caught, and yet after they had been kissed and the boys had left them they would walk innocently back to the players as if they never dreamed that anybody would think of disturbing them. At five o'clock everybody, farmhands, ladies, gentlemen, school children and all, took tea together. Some were seated at long tables made of planks, with benches at the sides, and others scattered all over the grass. Miss Ponder and our maid Hannah helped to serve the tea and sandwiches, and I was glad to see that Hannah wore her pointed white cap and her black dress, for I had on my woollen traveling suit, and I didn't want too much cart before the hoarseness in my domestic establishment. After tea the work and the games began again, and as I think it is always proper for people to do what they can best, I turned in and helped clear away the tea things, and after that I sat down by a female person in black silk, and I am sure I didn't know whether she was the lady of the manor, or somebody else, till I heard some H words come out in her talk, and then I knew she was the latter, and she told me ever so much about the people in the village and why the rector wasn't there, on account of a dispute about the altar-cloths, and she was just beginning to tell me about the doctor's wife sending her daughters to a school that was much too high-priced for his practice. When I happened to look across the field, and there, with the barlady at the inn, with her hat trimmed with pink and the Marie-Antoinette chambermaid, with her hat trimmed with blue, was Joan, and they was all three raking together, as comfortable and confiding as if they had been singing hymns out of the same book. Now, I thought I had been sitting still long enough, and so I snipped off the rest of the doctor's story, and got myself across that field with pretty long steps. When I reached the happy three I didn't say anything, but went round in front of them and stood there, throwing a sarcastic and disdainful glance upon their farming. Joan stopped working and wiped his faith with his handkerchief, as if he was hot and tired, but hadn't thought of it until just then, and the two girls they stopped to. He's teaching us to rake, ma'am, said Miss Dick, revolving her green-gauge eyes in my direction, and really, ma'am, it's wonderful to see how good he does it. You Americans are so awful clever! As for the one with the blue trimmings, she said nothing, but stood with her hands folded on her rake, and her chiseled features steeped in amique residedness, though much too high colored, as though it had just been borne in upon her that this world is all a fleeting show, for man's illusion given, and such felicity as culling, fragrant hay by the side of that manly form must Ian be a foregone by her, that I could have taken a handle of a rake and given her such a punch among her blue ribbons, that her classic features would have frantically twined themselves around one resounding howl. But I didn't. I simply remarked to Joan, with a statuette's quagidity, that it was six o'clock, and I was going home, to which he said he was going to, and we went. I thought, said I, as we proceeded with rapid steps across the field, that you didn't come to England for the purpose of teaching the inhabitants. Joan laughed a little. That young lady put it rather strong, he said. She and her friend was merely trying to rake as I did. I think they got on very well. Indeed, said I, I expect with flashing eye, but the next time you go into the disciple business I recommend that you take boys who really need to know something about farming, and not fine as fiddle young women that you might as well be ballet dancing with as raking with, for all the hankering after knowledge they have. Oh! said Joan, and that was all he did say, which was very wise in him, for considering my state of feelings his case was all like a fish-hook in your finger. The more you pull and worry at it, the harder it is to get out. That evening, when I was quite cooled down, and we was talking to Mr. Poplington about the hay-making and the free and easy way in which everybody came together, he was a good deal surprised that we should think there was anything uncommon in that, coming from a country where everybody was free and equal. Joan was smoking his pipe, and when it draws well and he's had a good dinner, and I haven't had anything particular to say, he often likes to talk slow and preach little sermons. Yes, sir, said he after considering the matter a little while. According to the Constitution of the United States, we are all free and equal, but there's a good many things the Constitution doesn't touch on, and one of them is the sorting out and sizing up of the population. Now you people over here are like the metal types that the printers use. You've got all your letters on one end of you, and you know just where you belong, and if you happen to be knocked into pee and mixed all up in a pile, it is easy enough to pick you out and put you all in your proper cases, but it's different with us. According to the Constitution, we're like a lot of carpet tacks, one just the same as another, though in fact we're not alike, and it would not be easy if we got mixed up, say in a hayfield, to get ourselves sorted all out again according to the breadth of our heads and the sharpness of our points. So we don't like to do too much mixing, don't you see? To which Mr. Poplington said he didn't see, and then I explained to him that what Joan meant was that, and though our country was all equally free, it didn't do for us to be as freely equal as the people are sometimes over here, to which Mr. Poplington said, really, but he didn't seem to be standing in the glaring sunlight of commencement. But the shade is often pleasant to be in, and he wound up by saying, as he bid us good night, that he thought it would be a great deal better for us, if we had classes at all, to have them marked out plain and stamped so there could be no mistake, to which I said that if we did that the most of the mistakes would come in the sorting, which, according to my reading of books and newspapers, had happened to most countries that keep up aristocracies. I don't know that he heard all that I said, for he was going upstairs with his candle at the time, but when Joan and me got upstairs in our own room I said to him, and he always hears everything I say, that in some ways the girls that we have for servants at home would have some advantages over those we find here, to which Joan said, yes, and seem to be sleepy. CHEADCOM There is still another day of hay making, but we couldn't wait for that, because our cycles had come from London and we was all anxious to be off, and you would have laughed, madam, if you could have seen a start. Mr. Poplington went off well enough, but Joan's bicycle seemed a little gay and hard to manage, and he frisked about a good deal at starting, but Joan had bought a bicycle long ago when the things first came out, and on days when the roads was good he used to go to the post office on it, and he said that if a man had ever ridden on top of a wheel about six feet high he ought to be able to balance himself on the pair of small wheels which they use nowadays. So after getting his long legs into working order he went very well, though with a snaky movement at first, and then I started. Each one of us had a little handbag hung on our machine, and Mr. Poplington said we needn't take anything to eat, for there was ends to be found everywhere in England. Hannah started me off nicely by pushing my tricycle until I got it going, and Miss Ponder waved her handkerchief from the cottage door. When Hannah left me I went along rather slow at first, but when I got used to the proper motion I began to do better, and was very sure it wouldn't take me long to catch up with Joan, who was still worm-fencing his way along the road. When I got entirely away from the houses and began to smell the hedges and grassy banks so close to my nose, and feel myself gliding along over the smooth white road, my spirits began to soar like a bird, and I almost felt like singing. The few people I met didn't seem to think it was anything wonderful for a woman to ride a tricycle, and soon I began to feel as proper as if I was walking on a sidewalk. Once I came very near, tangling myself up with the legs of a horse who was pulling a cart. I forgot that it was the proper thing in this country to turn to the left, and not to the right, but I gave a quick twist to my helm and just missed the cartwheel, but it was a close scratch. This turning to the right, instead of to the left, was a mistake Joan made two or three times when he began to drive me in England, but he got over it, and since my grazing the cart it's not likely I shall forget it. As I breathed a sigh of relief after escaping this danger I took in a breath full of the scent of wild roses that nearly covered a bit of hedge, and my spirits rose again. I had asked Joan and Mr. Poplington to go ahead, because I knew I could do a great deal better if I worked along by my self for a while, without being told what I ought to do and what I ought to do. There is nothing that bothers me so much as to have people try to teach me things when I am puzzling them out for myself. But now I found that although they could not be far ahead I couldn't see them, on account of the twists in the road in the high hedges, and so I put on steam and went along at a fine rate, sniffing the breeze like a charger of the battlefield. Before very long I came to a place where the road forked, but the road to the left seemed like a lane leading to somebody's house, so I kept on in what was plainly the main road, which made a little turn where it forked. Looking out ahead of me to see if I could catch sight of the two men I could see, not a sign of them, but I did see that I was on the top of a long hill that seemed to lead on down and on down with no end to it. I had hardly started down this hill when my tricycle became frisky and showed signs of wanting to run, and I got a little nervous, for I didn't fancy going fast down a slope like that. I put on the brake, but I don't believe I managed it right, for I seemed to go faster and faster, and then as the machine didn't need any working I took my feet off the pedals, with an idea I think, though I can't now remember, that I would get off and walk down the hill. In an instant that thing took the bit in its teeth and away it went, wildly tearing down hill. I was never so much frightened in all my life. I tried to get my feet back on the pedals, but I couldn't do it, and all I could do was to keep that flying tricycle in the middle of the road. As far as I could see ahead there was not anything in the way of a wagon or a carriage that I could run into, but there was such a stretch of slope that it made me fairly dizzy. Just as I was having a little bit of comfort from thinking that there was nothing in the way, a black woolly dog jumped out into the road some distance ahead of me and stood there barking. My heart fell like a bucket into a well with the rope broken. If I steered the least bit to the right or left I believe I would have bounded over the hedge like a glass bottle from the railroad train and come down on the other side in shivers and splinters. If I didn't turn I was making a beeline for the dog, but I had no time to think what to do, and in an instant that black woolly dog faded away like a reminiscence among the buzzing wheels of my tricycle. I felt a little bump but was ignorant of further particulars. I was now going at what seemed like a speed of ninety or a hundred miles an hour, with the wind rushing in between my teeth like water over a mill-dam, and I felt sure that if I kept on going down that hill I should be whirling through space like a comet. The only way I could think of to save myself was to turn into some level place where the thing would stop, but not across road did I pass, but presently I saw a little house standing back from the road, which seemed to hump itself a little at that place, so as to be nearly level, and over the edge of the hump it dipped so suddenly that I could not see the rest of the road at all. Now, thought I to myself, if the gate of that house is open I'll turn into it, and no matter what I run into it would be better than going over the edge of that ride beyond and down the awful hill that must be on the other side of it. As I swooped down to the little house and reached the level ground I felt I was going a little slower, but not much. However I steered my tricycle round at just the right instant, and through the front gate I went like a flash. I was going so fast and my mind was wound up on account of the necessity of searing straight that I could not pay much attention to things I passed, but the scene that showed itself in front of me as I went through that little garden gate I could not help seeing and remembering. From the gate to the door of that house was a path paved with flagstones, the door was open and there must have been a low step before it. The back of the door was a hall which ran through the house and this was paved with flagstones. The back door of the hall was open and outside of it was a sort of arbor with vines, and on one side of this arbor was a bench with a young man and a young woman sitting on it, holding each other by the hand and looking into each other's eyes. The arbor opened out onto a piece of green grass with flowers of mixed colors on the edges of it, and at the back of this bit of lawn was a lot of clothes hung out on clothes lines. Of course I could not have seen all those things at once, but they came upon me like a single picture, for in one tick of a watch I went over that flagstone path and into that front door and through that house and out of that back door and past that young man and that young woman, and head and heels both foremost at once dashed slam bang into the midst of all that looming hanging out on the lines. I heard the minglement of a groan and a scream, and in an instant I was enveloped in a white, wet cloud of sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, and underwear. Some of the things stuck so close to me, and others I grabbed with such a wild clutch that nearly all the weeks wash, lines and all came down on me, wrapping me up like an apple in a dumpling, but I stopped. There was not anything in this world that would have been better for me to run into than those lines full of wet clothes. Where the tricycle went to I didn't know, but I was lying on the grass kicking, and trying to get up and get my head free so that I could see and breathe. At last I did get on my feet, and throwing out my arms so as to shake off the sheets and pillowcases that were clinging all over me, I shook some of the things partly off my face, and with one eye I saw that couple on the bench, but only for a second. With a yell of horror and with a face wider than the linen I was wrapped in, that young man bounced up from the bench, dashed past the house, made one jump, clean over the hedge into the road, and disappeared. As for the young woman, she just flopped over and went down in a faint on the floor. As soon as I could do it I got myself free from the clothesline and staggered out on the grass. I was trembling so much I could scarcely walk, but when I saw that young woman looking as if she was dead on the ground I felt I must do something, and seeing a pail of water standing nearby I held it over her face and poured it down on her a little at a time, and it wasn't long before she began to squirm, and then she opened her eyes and her mouth just at the same time, so that she must have swallowed about as much water as she would have taken at a meal. This brought her to, and she began to cough and splutter and look around wildly, and then I took her by the arm and helped her up on the bench. Don't you want a little something to drink? I said. Tell me where I can get you something. She didn't answer, but she began looking from one side to the other. Is he swallowed? She said in a whisper, with her eyes starting out of her head. Swallowed, said I. Who? Davy, she said. Oh, your young man, said I. He is all right unless he heard himself jumping over the hedge. I saw him run away just as fast as he could. And the spirit, said she, I looked hard at her. What has happened to you, said I? How did you come to fate? She was getting quieter, but she looked wildly out of her eyes and kept her back turned toward the bit of grass, as if she was afraid to look in that direction. What happened to you, said I again, for I wanted to know what she thought about my sudden appearance. It took some little time for her to get ready to answer, and then she said, Was you frightened, lady? Did you have to come in here? I'm sorry you found me swooned. I don't know how long I was swooned. Davy and me was sitting here talking about having the bands called, and it was a sorry talk, lady, for the vicar. He's told me four times I should not marry Davy, because he says he is a radical. But for all that Davy and me once the bands called all the same. But not knowing how we was to have it done, for the vicar, he's so set against Davy. And Davy, he had just got done saying to me that he was going to marry me, vicar or no vicar, bands or no bands, come what might, when that very minute, with an awful hiss, something flashed in front of us, dazzling my eyes so that I shut them and screamed. And then, when I opened them again, there in the yard back of us, was a great white spirit, twice as high as the cowstable, with one eye in the middle of its forehead turning around like a firework. I don't remember anything after that, and I don't know how long I was lying here when you came and found me, lady, but I know what it means. There is a curse on our marriage, and Davy and me will never be man and wife. And then she fell to groaning and moaning. I felt like laughing when I thought how much like a church ghost I must have looked, standing there in solid white with my arms stretched out, but the poor girl was in such a dreadful state of mind that I sat down beside her and began to comfort her by telling her just what had happened, and that she ought to be very glad that I had found a place to turn into, and had not gone on down the hill and dashed myself into little pieces at the bottom. But it wasn't easy to cheer her up. Oh, Davy's gone, said she. He'll never come back for fear of the curse. He'll be off with his uncle to see. I'll never lay eyes on Davy again. Just at that moment I heard somebody calling my name, and looking through the house I saw Joan at the front door and two men behind him. As I ran through the hall I saw that the two men with Joan was Mr. Poplington and a young fellow with a pale face and trembling legs. Is this Davy? said I. Yes, said he. Then go back to your young woman and comfort her, I said, which he did, and when he was gone, not madly rushing into his loved one's arms, but shuffling along in a timid way as if he was afraid the ghost hadn't gone yet, I asked Joan how he happened to think I was here, and he told me that he and Mr. Poplington had taken the road to the left when they reached the fork, because that was the proper one, but they had not gone far before he thought I might not know which way to turn, so they came back to the fork to wait for me. But I had been closer behind them than they had thought, and I must have come to the fork before they turned back. So after waiting a while and going back along the road without seeing me, they thought that I must have taken the right-hand road, and they came that way, going down the hill very carefully. After a while Joan found my hat in the road, which up to that moment I had not missed, and then he began to be frightened and they went on faster. They passed the little house, and as they was going down the hill they saw ahead of them a man running as if something had happened, so they let out their bicycles and soon caught up to him. This was Davy, and when they stopped him and asked if anything was the matter, he told them that a dreadful thing had come to pass. He had been working in the garden of a house about half a mile back when suddenly there came an awful crash, and a white animal sprang out of the house with a bit of a cotton mill fastened to its tail, and then, with a great peel of thunder, it vanished, and a white ghost ran up out of the ground with its arms stretching out longer and longer, reaching to clutch him by the hair. He was not afraid of anything living, but he couldn't abide spirits, so he laid down his spade and left the garden, thinking he would go and see the sexton and have him come and lay the ghost. Then Joan went on to say that, of course, he could not make head or tail out of such a story as that, but when he heard that an awful row had been kicked up in a garden he immediately thought, that as like as not, I was in it, and so he and Mr. Poplington ran back, leaving their bicycles against the hedge, and bringing the young man with them. Then I told my story, and Mr. Poplington said it was a mercy I was not killed, and Joan didn't say much, but I could see that his teeth was grinding. We all went into the backyard, and there, on the other side of the clothes which was scattered all over the ground, we found my tricycle jammed into a lot of gooseberry bushes, and when it was dragged out we found that it was not heard a bit. Davey and his young woman was standing in the arbor looking very sheepish, especially Davey, for she had told him what it was that had scared him. As we was going through the house, Joan taking my tricycle, I stopped to say good-bye to the girl. Now that you see there has been no curse and no ghost, said I, I hope you will soon have your bands called, and that you and your young man will be married all right. Thank you very much, ma'am, said she, but I'm awful fearful about it. Davey may say what he pleases, but my mother will never let me marry him if the vickers against it, and Davey wouldn't have been here today if she hadn't gone to town, and the vickers a hard man and a strong Tory, and he'll be again it, I fear. When I went out into the front yard I found Mr. Poplington and Joan sitting on a little stone bench, for they was tired, and I told him about that young woman and Davey. Hmph! said Mr. Poplington. I know the vicker of the parish. He is the Reverend Osmond Green. He's a good conservative, and perfectly right in trying to keep that poor girl from marrying a wretched radical. I looked straight at him and said, Do you mean, sir, to put politics before matrimonial happiness? No, I don't, said he, but a girl can't expect matrimonial happiness with a radical. I saw that Joan was about to say something here, but I got ahead of him. I will tell you what it is, sir, if you think it is wrong to be a radical, the best thing you can do is write to your friend, that vicker, and advise him to get those two young people married as soon as possible, for it is as easy to see that she is going to rule the roost, and if anybody can get his radicalistics out of him, she will be the one to do it. Mr. Poplington laughed, and said that as the man looked as if he was a fit subject to be henpecked, it might be a good way of getting another Tory vote. But, said he, I should think it would go against your conscience, being naturally opposed to the conservatives, to help even by one vote. Oh, my conscience is all right, I said, when politics runs against the matrimonial altar, I stand up for the altar. Well, said he, I'll think of it. When we started off walking down the hill, Joan holding on to my tricycle. When we got to level ground, with about two miles to go before we would stop for luncheon, Joan took a piece of thin rope out of his pocket, he always carries some sort of cord in case of accidents, and he tied it to the back part of my machine. Now, said he, I'm going to keep a hold of the other end of this, and perhaps your tricycle won't run away with you. I didn't much like going along this way, as if I was a cow being taken to market, but I could see that Joan had been so troubled and frightened about me that I couldn't make any objection. And in fact, after I got started it was a comfort to think that there was a tie between Joan and me that was stronger, when hilly roads came into the question, than even the matrimonial tie. Letter No. 10 Pomona Slides Backward Down the Slope of Centuries Chedcombe, Somersetshire The place we stopped at on the first night of our cycle trip is named Porlock, and after the walking and the pushing and the strain on my mind when going down even the smallest hill, for fear Joan's rope would give way, I was glad to get there. The road into Porlock goes down a hill, the steepest I have seen yet, and we all walked down, holding our machines as if they had been fiery coarsers. This hill-road twists and winds so you can only see part of it at a time, and when we was about half way down we heard a horn blowing behind us, and looking around there came the male coach at full speed, with four horses, with a lot of people on top. As this raging coach passed by it nearly took my breath away, and as soon as I could speak I said to Joan, don't you ever say anything in America about having the roads made narrower so that it won't cost so much to keep them in order, for in my opinion it's often the narrow road that leadeth to destruction. When we got into the town and my mind really began to grapple with old Porlock I felt as if I was sliding backward down the slope of the centuries and liked it. As we went along Mr. Poplington told us about everything, and said that this queer little town was a fishing village and seaport in the days of the Saxons, and that King Harold was once obliged to stop there for a while, and that he had passed his time making war on the neighbors. Mr. Poplington took us to a tavern called the Ship Inn, and I simply went wild over it. It is over two hundred years old and two stories high, and everything I ever read about the hostilities of the past I saw there. The queer little door led into a queer little passage paved with stone. A pair of little stairs led out of this into another little room, higher up, and on the other side of the passage was a long, mysterious hallway. We had our dinner in a tiny parlor, which reminded me of a chapter in one of those old books, where they used F instead of S, and were the first word of the next page at the bottom of the one you were reading. There was a fireplace in the room with a window one side of it, through which you could look into the street. It was not cold, but it had begun to rain hard, and so I made the dampness an excuse for a fire. This is an antique indeed, I said when we were at the table. You are right there, said Mr. Poplington, who was doing his best to carve a duck, and was a little cross about it. When I sat before the fire that evening, and Joan was asleep on a set tea of the days of yore, and Mr. Poplington had gone to bed, being tired, my soul went back to the olden time, and looking out through the little window in the fireplace, I fancied I could see William the Conqueror and the King of the Danes sneaking along the little street under the eaves of the thatched roofs, until I was so worked up that I was on the point of shouting, fly, O Saxon, the door opened and the maid who waited on us at the table put her head in. I took this for a sign that the curfew-bell was going to ring, and so I woke up Joan and we went off to bed. But all night long the heroes of the past flocked about me. I had been reading a lot of history, and I knew them all the minute my eyes fell upon them. Charlemagne and Canute set on the end of the bed, while Alfred the Great climbed up one of the posts until he was stopped by Hannibal's legs, who had them twisted about the post to keep himself steady. When I got up in the morning I went downstairs into the little parlor, and there was the maid down on her knees clearing the hearth. What is your name? I said to her. Jane, please, she said. Jane what? said I. Jane Puttle, please, said she. I took a carving-knife from off the table, and standing over her, I brought it down gently on top of her head. Rise, Sir Jane Puttle, said I, to which the maid gave a smothered gasp, and, would you believe it, madam, she crept out of the room on her hands and knees. The cook waited on us at breakfast, and I truly believed that the landlord and his wife breathed a sigh of relief when we left the ship in, for their sordid souls had never heard of nighthood, but all knew about assassination. That morning we left Porlock by a hill which, compared with the one we came into it by, was like the biggest pyramid of Egypt by the side of a haycock. I don't suppose in the whole civilized world there is a worse hill with a road on it than the one we went up by. I was glad we had to go up it instead of down it, though it was very hard to walk, pushing the tricycle, even when helped. I believe it would have taken my breath and turned me dizzy even to take one step face forward down such a hill, and gaze into the dreadful depths before me, and yet they drive coaches and fores down that hill. At the top of the hill is this notice. To cyclers, this hill is dangerous. If I had thought of it I should have looked for the cyclers' graves at the bottom of it. The reason I thought about this was that I had been reading about one of the mountains in Switzerland, which is one of the highest and most dangerous, and with the poorest view where so many alpine climbers have been killed that there is a little graveyard nearly full of their graves at the foot of the mountain. How they could walk through that graveyard and read the inscriptions on the tombstones, and then go and climb that mountain is more than I can imagine. In walking up this hill and thinking that it might have been in front of me when my tricycle ran away, I could not keep my mind away from the little graveyard at the foot of that Swiss mountain. End of Letter 10. Read by Cibela Denton. All LibriVox files are in the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Number eleven of Pomona's Travels, a series of letters to the mistress of Redder Grange from her former handmaiden, by Frank R. Stockton. Read for LibriVox.org into the public domain. Letter number eleven. On the Moors. Chedcombe, Somersetshire. On the third day of our cycle-trip we journeyed along a lofty road, with the wild moor on one side and the tossing sea on the other, and at night reached Linton. Linton is a little town on a jetting crag, and far down below it on the edge of the sea was another town named Linnmouth, and there is a car with a wire rope to it, like an elevator, which they call the lift, which takes people up and down from one town to another. Here we stopped at a house very different from the ship in, for it looked as if it had been built the day before yesterday. Everything was new and shiny, and we had our supper at a long table with about twenty other people, just like a boarding house. Some of their ways reminded me of the backwoods, and I suppose there is nothing more modern than backwoodsism, which naturally hasn't the least alloy of the past. When the people got through with their cups of coffee or tea, mostly the last, two women went around the table, one with a big bowl for us to lean back and empty our slops into, and the other with the tea or coffee to fill up the cups. A gentleman with a baldish head, who was sitting opposite us, began to be sociable as soon as he heard us speak to the waiters, and asked questions about America. After he got through with about a dozen of them, he said, Is it true, as I have heard, that what you call native-born Americans deteriorate in the third generation? I had been answering most of the questions, but now Joan spoke up quick. That depends, says he, on their original blood. When Americans are descended from Englishmen they steadily improve, generation after generation. The baldish man smiled at this, and said there was nothing like having good blood for a foundation. But Mr. Poplington laughed, and said to me that Joan had served him right. The country about Linton is wonderfully beautiful, with rocks and valleys and velvet lawns running into the sea, and woods and ancestral mansions, and we spent the day seeing all this, and also going down to Linmouth, where the little shops lie high and dry on the sand when the tide goes out, and the carts drive up to them and put goods on board, and when the tide rises the ships sail away, which is very convenient. I wanted to keep along the coast, but the others didn't, and the next morning we started back to Chedcombe by a roundabout way, so that we might see Exmore in the country where Lorna Dune and John Redd cut up their didos. I must say I like the story a good deal better before I saw the country where the things happened. The mind of man is capable of soaring, which nature weakens at when she sees what she is called upon to do. If you want a real first-class, tooth-on-edge Dune valley, the place to look for it is in the book. We went rolling along on the smooth hard roads, which are just as good here as if they was in London, and all around us was stretched out on the wild and desolate moors, with the winds screaming and whistling over the heather, nearly tearing the clothes off our backs, while the rain beat down on us with a steady pelting, and the ragged sheep stopped to look at us as if we was the three witches and they was Macbeth's. The very thought that I was out in a wild storm on a desolate moor filled my soul with a sort of triumph, and I worked my tricycle as if I was spurring my steed to battle. The only thing that troubled me was the thought that if the water that poured off my Macintosh that day could have run into our cistern at home, it would have been a glorious good thing. John did not like the fierce blast and the inspirating rain, but I knew he'd stand it as long as Mr. Poplington did, and so I was content, although if we had been overtaken by a covered wagon I should have trembled for the result. That night we stopped in the little village of Simon's Bath at somebody's arms. After dinner Mr. Poplington, who knew some people in the place, went out, but Joan and me went to bed as quick as we could for we was tired. The next morning we was wakened by a tremendous pounding at the door. I didn't know what to make of it, for it was too early and too loud for hot water, but we heard Mr. Poplington calling to us, and Joan jumped up to see what he wanted. Get up, said he, if you want to see a sight that you never saw before. We'll start off immediately and breakfast at Exford. The hope of seeing a sight was enough to make me bounce at any time, and I never dressed or packed a bag quicker than I did that morning, and Joan wasn't far behind me. When we got downstairs we found our cycles waiting ready at the door, together with the stablemen and the stable-boy and the boy's helper and the cook and the chambermaid and the waiters and the other servants waiting for their tips. Mr. Poplington seemed in a fine humor, and he told us he had heard the night before that there was to be a stag-hunt that day, the first of the season. In fact it was not one of the regular meats, but what they called a by-meat, and not known to everybody. We will go on to Exford, said he, straddling his bicycle, for though the meat isn't to be there, there is where they keep the hounds and horses, and if we make good speed we shall get there before they start out. The three of us travelled abreast, Mr. Poplington in the middle, and on the way he told us a good deal about stag-hunts. What I remember best, having to go so fast, and having to mind my steering, was that after the hunting season began they hunted stags until a certain day, I forget what it was, and then they let them alone and began to hunt the does, and after that particular day of the month, when the stags heard the hounds coming they paid no attention to them, knowing very well it was the does turn to be chased, and that they would not be bothered, and so they let the female members of their families take care of themselves, which shows the un-gentlemenliness extends itself even into nature. When we got to Exford we left our cycles at the inn and followed Mr. Poplington to the hunting stables, which are nearby. I had not gone a dozen steps from the door before I heard a great barking, and the next minute there came around the corner a pack of hounds. They crossed the bridge over the little river, and then they stopped. We went up to them, and while Mr. Poplington talked to the men, the whole of that pack of hounds gathered about us as gentle as lands. They were good big dogs, white and brown. The head huntsman, who had them in charge, told me there was a thirty-couple of them, and I thought that sixty dogs was pretty heavy odds against one deer. Then they moved off as orderly as if they had been children in a kindergarten, and we went to the stables and saw the horses, and then the master of the hounds and a good many other gentlemen in red coats, in all sorts of traps, rode up, and their hunters were saddled, and the dogs barked and the men cracked their whips to keep them together, and there was a bustle and liveliness to a degree I can't write about, and Joan and I never thought about going into breakfast until all those horses, some led and some ridden, and the men and the hounds, and even the dust from their feet, had disappeared. I wanted to go and see the hunt start off, but Mr. Poplington said it was two or three miles distant, and out of our way, and that we'd better move on as soon as possible so as to reach Chedcombe that night, but he was glad, he said, that we had had a chance to see the hounds and the horses. As for himself, I could see he was a little down in the mouth, for he had said he was very fond of hunting, and that if he had known of this meat he would have been there with a horse in his hunting clothes. I think he hoped somebody would lend him a horse, but nobody did, and not being able to hunt himself, he disliked seeing other people doing what he could not. Of course Joan and me could not go to the hunt by ourselves, so after we'd had our tea and toast and bacon we started off. I will say here that when I was at the ship in I had tea for my breakfast, for I couldn't bring my mind to order coffee, a drink the Saxons must never have heard of, in such a place, and since that we have been drinking it, because Joan said there was no use fighting against established drinks, and that anyway he thought good tea was better than bad coffee. End of Letter Number 11, read by Cibella Denton. All LibraBox files are in the public domain. For more information, please