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Patricia was excited, and felt that she was having a frolic, and even Arabella's glum face could not quiet her; indeed, the more she looked at her, the more inclined was she to laugh. Arabella felt aggrieved. "The idea of laughing at me," she thought, "when I should think I might laugh at her for inviting me to ride in a sleigh that is only a pung!"
True, Anne could not help a little pang when she contrasted her plain black tam and shapeless, tight-sleeved, homemade gray-cloth coat with Diana's jaunty fur cap and smart little jacket. But she remembered in time that she had an imagination and could use it. Then Diana's cousins, the Murrays from Newbridge, came; they all crowded into the big pung sleigh, among straw and furry robes.
The two-horse pung or the single-horse pod, shod with steel shoes an inch thick, was closely packed with the accumulated farm wealth whole pigs, perhaps a deer or two, firkins of butter, casks of cheese, four cheeses in each cask, bags of beans, pease or corn, skins of mink, fox, and fisher-cat that the boys had trapped, birch brooms that the boys had made, yarn that their sisters had spun, and stockings and mittens that they had knitted in short, anything that a New England farm could produce that would sell to any profit in a New England town.
"Yes, sometimes; but then we haven't any pungs. I don't know what they are. Maybe they are a sort of hackney or chariot?" "We have no hackney coaches here, as yet, my lord, but Mr. Hancock and the governor and a few of our citizens have coaches. A pung is not at all like a coach. It is, instead, a sort of box on runners." "Oh, indeed, how interesting!"
"I dunno's I ever knew anybody so took up as he is with that concert, an' goin' to the vestry to sing to-night, an' all. He said he'd call here an' ride 'long o' you, an' I told him there'd be plenty o' room, for you'd take the pung." If Heman felt any surprise at her knowledge of his purpose, he did not betray it. He poured out his shaving-water, and looked about him for an old newspaper.
Now " his voice took on an added depth of that strange new quality she shivered under "Matt'll be over here in a minute to tell you he's lost his horse an' can't go. You want me to harness up an' take him an' you in the old pung, or you want to stay here with me?" Stella touched his cheek with her finger in a way she had, and he remembered and bent and kissed her. "All right," he said.
He talked about things she never knew he had the slightest interest in: theosophy and feminism and Americanization. She couldn't help wondering whether he was trying to convince her of his mental soundness. But he certainly was amazing. Dick received this in silence. He understood. It was true. Raven did fill the time from a racing impetuosity, only slackened when Jerry appeared with the pung.
I must be off at once!" Reaching for the lantern his hand trembled as he lighted it. "Wait here," he commanded, "till I hitch Dexter to the pung; or no, you'd better come with me and give a hand. There is no time to lose." Dan obeyed without a word and held the lantern while Stephen harnessed the horse. "Where's Midnight?" Stephen asked, as he deftly drew the reins through the terrets.
For the first few miles it remained very dark, however. Had it not been for the snow they could not have seen objects beside the road at all. There was a lantern in the back of the pung and that flung a stream of yellow light behind them; but Uncle Henry would not have the radiance of it shot forward. "A light just blinds you," he said. "I'd rather trust to the roans' sense."
The town was snow-covered, too, and the frozen river, and wherever one went, the air was full of the gay jingle-jangle of countless sleighbells, while the streets were thronged with a motley collection of equipages, from the luxuriously upholstered double sleigh with its swaying robes and floating plumes, down to the shapeless home-made "pung" with its ragged, unlined buffalo skin snugly tucked in about the shawled and veiled grandma, who smilingly awaited her good man while he purchased the week's supply of groceries.
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