Her pink calico dress, newly starched and ironed, had looked so pretty to
her when she had started from home, that she had not been able to bear the
thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded, mud-stained
riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting against the
saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze morocco shoes.
On her hands she had drawn white half-hand mittens of home-knit; and on her
head she wore an enormous white scoop-bonnet, lined with pink and tied under
her chin in a huge muslin bow. Her face, hidden away under the
pink-and-white shadow, showed such hints of pearl and rose that it seemed
carved from the inner surface of a sea-shell. Her eyes were gray, almond
shaped, rather wide apart, with an expression changeful and playful, but
withal rather shrewd and hard; her light brown hair, as fine as unspun silk,
was parted over her brow and drawn simply back behind her ears; and the lips
of her little mouth curved against each other, fresh, velvet-like, smiling.
On she rode down the avenue of the primeval woods; and Nature seemed
arranged to salute her as some imperial presence; with the waving of a
hundred green boughs above on each side; with a hundred floating odours;
with the swift play of nimble forms up and down the boles of trees; and all
the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies.
Then one of those trifles happened that contain the history of our lives, as
a drop of dew draws into itself the majesty and solemnity of the heavens.
From the pommel of the side-saddle there dangled a heavy roll of home-spun
linen, which she was taking to town to her aunt's merchant as barter for
queen's-ware pitchers; and behind this roll of linen, fastened to a ring
under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied up in a large
blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever she fidgeted in the
saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often did because he was clumsy
and because the road was obstructed by stumps and roots, the string by which
this bundle was tied slipped a little through the lossening knot and the
bundle hung a little lower down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into
the broader public road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the
travelling began to be really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet
against the loop of a root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle
slipped noiselessly from the saddle to the earth.
She did not see it. She indignantly gathered the reins more tightly in her
hand, pushed back her bonnet, which now hung down over her eyes like the
bill of a pelican, and applied her little switch of wild cherry to the
horse's flank with such vehemence that a fly which was about to alight on
that spot went to the other side. The old horse himself--he bore the
peaceable name of William Penn--merely gave one of the comforting switches
of his bob-tail with which he brushed away the thought of any small
annoyance, and stopped a moment to nibble at the wayside cane mixed with
purple blossoming peavine.