Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/49

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SEED TIME.
41

papa's notice, that they enjoy a meed of peace no other animals in the stable possess, and behind them we youngsters have many a pleasant amble and comfortable confab.

"Are you girls coming down to tea this evening or to-morrow morning?" asks Jack, putting his head in at the door. "The governor is just coming up the carriage drive.


CHAPTER V.

"Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding mannerly-modest as a measure full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs fell into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sinks into his grave."

Jack and I went to see a wedding this morning that began yesterday, and was only finished to-day. It was not a mannerly-modest one though; far from it. We make a rule of attending all the weddings and funerals we can, but school hours are a sad hindrance to me, and Jack often has to go by himself. We always watch the mourners with great attention, and have, after careful study of their countenances, made up our minds that it is almost always those who care least who are most demonstrative, and that dry-eyed grief is far more deep and deadly than a tempest of sobs and cries and wails. Not that poor people as a rule regret their dead very passionately; their hard, dull, working lives are so heavy to bear, that a little more or less misery matters but little. You will even see a mother with many children taking some comfort from the thought that the Lord has "provided" for the little ones taken away from her.

But I am forgetting all about yesterday's wedding. It was at a convenient hour, nine o'clock. So, having watched papa safely into the stables, we were soon across the lawn and churchyard,