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The further a young couple can git from the old folks on both sides the better for everybody concerned. And besides, Annie wasn't the kind of a gyirl to git along with Dick's mother. A gyirl with the kind o' raisin' Annie'd had wasn't any fit daughter-in-law for a particular, high-steppin' woman like Old Lady Elrod.
If the children was playin' 'Jinny, Put the Kittle on, Dick would git kissed ten times to any other boy's once; and if it was 'Drop the Handkerchief, every little gyirl in the ring'd be droppin' it behind Dick to git him to run after her, and that was the only time Dick ever did any runnin'. All he had to do was jest to sit still, and the gyirls did the runnin'. It was that way all his life; and folks used to say there was jest one woman in the world that Dick couldn't make a fool of, and that was his cousin Penelope, the old Squire's brother's child.
I sat holding my breath; but, all regardless of my suspense, she dropped the thread of the story and followed memory in one of her capricious backward flights. "I ricollect a sermon I heard when I was a gyirl," she said. "It ain't often, I reckon, that a sermon makes much impression on a gyirl's mind. But this wasn't any ordinary sermon or any ordinary preacher.
Always made me think of Abraham and the rest o' the old patriarchs to see him come walkin' into church with them nine young ones at his heels, makin' so much racket you couldn't hear the sermon. He was mighty proud of his sons; but after Bob was born he wanted a daughter; and when they all kept turnin' out boys, he got crazier and crazier for a gyirl.
It wasn't jest her looks, for she always was as pretty as a picture, but she was as nice-mannered, well-behaved a gyirl as you'd want to see. There was jest as much difference betwixt her then and what she used to be as there is betwixt a tame fox and a wild one.
"Things went on this way for two or three years, Annie goin' and comin' and gittin' prettier all the time, and Dick waitin' on her whenever she was at home and carryin' on between times with every gyirl in the neighborhood. At last she come home for good, and Dick dropped all the others in a hurry and set out in earnest to git Annie.
She got better lookin' all the time, but she was as steady and sober as if she'd been sixty years old. It seems right queer to talk about dignity in a pore gyirl who'd made the misstep she'd made, but I reckon it was jest that that made us all come to treat her as if she was as good as anybody.
I stood up before the glass jest before I went out to the gate where Abram was, waitin' for me, and I looked as pretty as a pink, if I do say it. 'Self-praise goes but a little ways, my mother used to tell me, when I was a gyirl; but I reckon there ain't any harm in an old woman like me tellin' how she looked when she was a bride more'n sixty years ago."
Old Man Bob had the house fixed up inside and out. They sent up to Louisville for the cakes and things, and the weddin' cake was three feet high. There was a solid gold ring in it, and the bridesmaids cut for it; and every gyirl there had a slice o' the bride's cake to carry home to dream on that night. Annie's weddin' dress was white satin so heavy it stood alone, so they said.
"That blessed gyirl" the old lady called her a girl by a sort of figure of speech perhaps "that blessed gyirl's the kindest creetur you ever saw comes here every day, most, to cheer a body up with somethin' or nuther." Miss Martha blushed, and said "she came because Rocky Hollow looked so much like a place she used to know at the East. Mr. and Mrs. Pearson were the kindest people.
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