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At one lonely house a little girl was stationed at the gate to question travelers. About sunset one day she saw a tall, gawkish boy come riding along the road, astride of one of the rough, wild, South Carolina ponies. His bare legs were almost long enough to meet under the pony; he wore a torn wide-brimmed hat which napped about his face.
It seems to me I cannot wait for the night, yet my teeth rattle and my hands tremble and I am all in a shake whenever I think of it; if I can but keep from being mute as a stock-fish, and gawkish, for I am all alive with fear that I shall be both, and shame us all!
Geoffrey had never gazed on a naked woman except idealised in marble or on canvas. The secret of Venus had been for him, as for many men, an inviolate Mecca towards which he worshipped. Glimpses he had seen, visions of soft curves, mica glistenings of creamy skin, but never the crude anatomical fact. An overgrown embryo she seemed, a gawkish ill-moulded thing.
At last I came out upon the main road; and you will be pleased to imagine to yourself the figure of a tall, gaunt, gawkish young man, dressed in a good suit of black cloth, with shirt and cravat like snow, striding solemnly along, without shoe or stocking; for about this time I was twelve miles from home, and blisters had already risen upon my feet, in consequence of the dew having got into my shoes, which at the best were enough to cut up any man; I had therefore to strip and carry my shoes one in my pocket, and another stuffed in my hat; being thus with great reluctance compelled to travel barefoot: yet I soon turned even this to account, when I reflected that it would enhance the merit of my pilgrimage, and that every fresh blister would bring down a fresh blessing.
Had he said good-night? He could not be sure. Nothing was present to him but a sense of gawkish confusion, following on a wild impulse which both ashamed and alarmed him, he stood in a bumpkin attitude, biting his lips. A hansom came crawling by, and the driver called his attention "Keb, sir?" At once he stepped forward, sprang on to the footboard, and stood there looking foolish.
"Oh, dear! one might think I wanted to marry them at a minute's notice!" said my uncle at these words. "Just like a woman's exaggerations! Perhaps you would have liked me to have introduced her to him before my last voyage, when she was a lass of fourteen, thin, awkward, and gawkish, as you all are at that age."
"'Deed, mistress," said the girl, "I was thinkin' there wasn't a sheet at one of them to match mine for whiteness. I'd 'a been ashamed to be seen in the like of theirs." Bridget may have been a gawk, but she did two things which were not gawkish. Putting the eighty greasy notes into the foot of an old stocking, she sewed them up in the ticking of her bed, and then christened her baby Peter.
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