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To see the face of a simple-hearted child, eager but serene, determined but lovingly gentle, surrounded and glorified by such splendid physical womanhood, was a rare sight. Reuben Miller's eyes filled with tears often as he secretly watched his daughter, and said to himself, "Oh, what is to be her fate! what man is worthy of the wife she will be?"
He was, as Reuben remarked, well fitted to be an intermediary between us, for he was taller though not so broad as I was, and broader though not so tall as the adventurer. His face was long, thin, and hollow-cheeked, with a pair of great thatched eyebrows and deep sunken melancholy eyes, which lit up upon occasion with a sudden quick flash of fiery enthusiasm.
"This evening," said the chairman of the committee of arrangements, "this evening, fellow-citizens, there will be a grand display of fireworks on the village green, superintended by the inventor and manufacturer, our public-spirited townsman, Mr. Reuben Pettingill." Night closed in, and an immense concourse of people gathered on the village green.
Reuben Johnson leaned on his hoe, and, looking up at the sun, wondered whether, as in the Biblical story, it had not been stationary for several hours. He was sure it was never so long in descending to the horizon. "Wake up, Rube," sharply called his Uncle Peter, smartly hoeing another row a few paces behind him, "doan be idlin' your time; de sun am foah hours high yit."
"Out for a spoag, eh?" "Come, get along, man, and let's have no more botherment," cried one of the impatient passengers. Two or three miles farther down the road Reuben was holding in his horse, in order to cross a river, when he thought that, in the comparative silence of his springless wagon, he heard Robbie speaking behind him. "It's donky weather, this," Robbie was saying.
'To them and to the justice of our cause. How like ye the news, young sirs? Has the wine lost its smack on account of it? Are ye disposed to flinch from the standard of the Lord? 'For my own part I shall see the matter through, said I. 'And I shall bide where Micah Clarke bides, quoth Reuben Lockarby.
My brother Reuben is not dead, albeit he has in truth been smitten by the plague. Joseph found him yesterday in the pest house just beyond Clerkenwell; and he is in a fair way to recover, if his mind can but be set at rest. "Oh what news this will be for our parents! for the girls! for Gertrude! Oh how we have mourned and wept together; and now we shall rejoice with full hearts!"
And as little did she forget how strange her mother's face was and how her voice trembled, when she said: "Do you know that you once had a little brother, whose name was Reuben, and he died because he sat on these stone steps and caught cold? You do not want to die and leave your mother, Berta?" Brother Reuben soon became just as living to his brothers and sisters as to his mother.
Later in the day Reuben went to make his adieus to the Elderkins. The old Squire was seated in his door busied with the "Weekly Courant," which had just come in. You'll find him up-stairs with his cigar and his Spanish, I'll venture."
It brought two hundred dollars, which, in addition to the price of the farm, and the store and its stock, gave Reuben just nineteen hundred dollars to put in the Savings Bank. "And I am to be counted at least two thousand more, father dear, so you are not such a very poor man after all," said Draxy, laughing and dancing around him. Now Draxy Miller's real life began.
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