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Updated: June 3, 2025
"He must have a name of his own," said Captain Pennel. "Come here, sonny," he called to the child, who was playing just beside the door. The child lowered his head, shook down his long black curls, and looked through them as elfishly as a Skye terrier, but showed no inclination to come. "One thing he hasn't learned, evidently," said Captain Pennel, "and that is to mind."
Pennel found the stuff gown of her own dyeing and spinning so respectable for most purposes, that it figured even in the meeting-house itself, except on the very finest of Sundays, when heaven and earth seemed alike propitious.
"This is a pretty self-willed youngster," said Miss Ruey, as they rose from the exercises, "and I shouldn't think he'd been used to religious privileges." "Perhaps not," said Zephaniah Pennel; "but who can say but what this providence is a message of the Lord to us such as Pharaoh's daughter sent about Moses, 'Take this child, and bring him up for me'?"
Captain Kittridge has just brought down our new one, and I'm going to take you over to Eagle Island, and we'll take our dinner and stay all day; mother says so." "Oh, how nice!" said the little girl, running cheerfully for her sun-bonnet. At the house-door they met Mrs. Pennel, with a little closely covered tin pail. "Here's your dinner, children; and, Moses, mind and take good care of her."
Whatever may have been the result of this state of things in regard to Mara, it is certain that Moses succeeded in convincing the common fame of that district that he and Sally were destined for each other, and the thing was regularly discussed at quilting frolics and tea-drinkings around, much to Miss Emily's disgust and Aunt Roxy's grave satisfaction, who declared that "Mara was altogether too good for Moses Pennel, but Sally Kittridge would make him stand round," by which expression she was understood to intimate that Sally had in her the rudiments of the same kind of domestic discipline which had operated so favorably in the case of Captain Kittridge.
"Cap'n Pennel, you're gettin' to make an idol of that 'ere child," said Miss Ruey. "We have to watch our hearts. It minds me of the hymn, "'The fondness of a creature's love, How strong it strikes the sense, Thither the warm affections move, Nor can we call them hence."
Why, she paints pictur's. Mis' Pennel was a-showin' on me a blue-jay she painted, and I was a-thinkin' whether she could brile a bird fit to be eat if she tried; and she don't know the price of nothin'," continued Mrs. Kittridge, with wasteful profusion of negatives. "Well," said the Captain, "the Lord makes some things jist to be looked at. Their work is to be putty, and that ar's Mara's sphere.
I s'pose you think 'cause you're young and middlin' good-lookin' that you have feelin's and I hasn't; well, you're mistaken, that's all. I don't believe there's one person in the world that would go farther or do more to save Mara Pennel than I would, and yet I've been in the world long enough to see that livin' ain't no great shakes neither.
Pennel when her adopted nursling came into this state. Was he a boy? an immortal soul? a reasonable human being? or only a handsome goblin sent to torment her? "What shall we do with him, father?" said she, one Sunday, to Zephaniah, as he stood shaving before the little looking-glass in their bedroom. "He can't be governed like a child, and he won't govern himself like a man."
"So you like the Bible and Roman history?" he said to her, making a little aside for her, while a brisk conversation was going on between Captain Kittridge and Captain Pennel on the fishing bounty for the year. "Yes, sir," said Mara, blushing in a very guilty way. "And which do you like the best?" "I don't know, sir; I sometimes think it is the one, and sometimes the other."
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