United States or Taiwan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some things that are suffered in this world can't be paid for, I don't care how they fix it. More than once, too, there was a line or two on a scrap of paper slipped in Aileen's letters from Gracey Storefield. She wasn't half as good with the pen as Aileen, but a few words from the woman you love goes a long way, no matter what sort of a fist she writes.
I thought, too, how we might have been ten times, twenty times, as happy if we'd only kept on steady ding-dong work, like George Storefield, having patience and seeing ourselves get better off even a little year by year. What had he come to? And what lay before us?
Storefield was pottering about in the garden with a big sun-bonnet on. She was a great woman for flowers. 'Come along in, Aileen, my dear, she said. 'Gracey's in the dairy; she'll be out directly. George only came home yesterday. Who be these you've got with ye? Why, Dick! she says, lookin' again with her sharp, old, gray eyes, 'it's you, boy, is it? Well, you've changed a deal too; and Jim too.
And I really believe if George had had the savey to crack himself up a little, and say he'd met a nice girl or two in the back country and hid his hand, Aileen would have made it up with him that very Christmas, and been a happy woman all her life. When old Mrs. Storefield came in she put us through our facings pretty brisk where we'd been, what we'd done?
Lots of pens, a big bottle of ink, and ever so much foolscap paper, the right sort for me, or I shouldn't have been here. I'm blessed if it doesn't look as if I was going to write copies again. Don't I remember how I used to go to school in old times; the rides there and back on the old pony; and pretty little Grace Storefield that I was so fond of, and used to show her how to do her lessons.
I had her out in a second or two, and she gasped and cried a bit, but soon came to, and when Mrs. Storefield came home she first cried over her as if she would break her heart, and kissed her, and then she kissed me, and said, 'Now, Dick Marston, you look here.
He never intended to follow any other life, and wouldn't go back to the Hollow or take part in any fresh cross work, no matter how good it might be. Poor old Jim! I really believe he'd made up his mind to go straight from the very hour he was buckled to Jeanie; and if he'd only had common luck he'd have been as square and right as George Storefield to this very hour.
'I'll unload the story bag before we get through; there's a lot in there yet; but I want to look at you and hear you talk just now. How's George Storefield? 'Oh! he's just the same good, kind, steady-going fellow he always was, says she. 'I don't know what we should do without him when you're away. He comes and helps with the cows now and then.
We rode up sharpish, and showed our revolvers, singing out to him to 'bail up'. He pulled up quick and stared at us. So we did at him. Then the three of us burst out laughing regular roared again. Who should it be but old George Storefield. 'Well, this is a prime joke, says he. 'I knew you were out somewhere on this road; but I never thought I should live to be stuck up by you, Dick Marston.
There's no saying it isn't; no, nor thinking what a fool, what a blind, stupid, thundering idiot a fellow's been, to laugh at the steady working life that would have helped him up, bit by bit, to a good farm, a good wife, and innocent little kids about him, like that chap, George Storefield, that came to see me last week.
Word Of The Day