United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This was Don Ricardo's youngest niece. "Ah, Reefy, Reefy," said I, "you must make haste, and be made post, and then" "What does he call her?" said Aaron. "Senora Tomassa Candalaria de los Dolores Gonzales y Vallejo," blubbered out little Reefy. "What a complicated piece of machinery she must be!" gravely rejoined Bang.
However, I will not dwell on it. We reached the town towards evening. The women were ready to weep, I saw; but we all turned in, and next morning at breakfast we were moved, I will admit some more, some less. Little Reefy, poor fellow, was crying like a child; indeed he was little more, being barely fifteen. "Oh! Mr Cringle, I wish I had never seen Miss Candalaria de los Dolores; indeed I do."
"That is to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist," he cried, shaking with laughter. The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg.
The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a series of circumstances also curious. The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike.
"God help me," said the excellent fellow, "you seem to me fitter for your mother's nursery, my poor dear boy, than to be knocked about in this coarse way here." Reefy, at this moment, fell over into his arms, in a dead faint. "You must take my berth, with the Captain's permission," said Aaron, while he and Wagtail undressed him with the greatest care, and placed him in the narrow crib.
"I jammed the corner of the bed against it," she had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms. It was early evening of a day in, the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town.
George came home along Main Street at dark on the day of his mother's death and, after going to his own room to brush his hair and clothes, went along the hallway and into the room where the body lay. There was a candle on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a chair by the bed. The doctor arose and started to go out.
Oh you lovely dear!" he muttered and thought he held in his arms not the tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to project herself out of the husk of the body of the tired-out woman. Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his arms again until after her death.
Near the edge of the table lay three or four apples left by John Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was Doctor Reefy's friend, and who had slipped the apples out of his pocket as he came in at the door. At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The grey beard he later wore had not yet appeared, but on the upper lip grew a brown mustache.
"You may say that, sir," responded wee Reefy; "but our mule was knocked up, and it was so dark and tempestuous, that we should have perished by the road if we had tried back for St Jago; so seeing a light here, the only indication of a living thing, and the stream looking narrow and comparatively quiet confound it, it was all the deeper though we shoved across."
Word Of The Day