7. VII.
There was one of these little cottages, which,
for this very reason, Logoochie found great delight
in visiting. It was tenanted by a sturdy old farmer,
named Jones, and situated on the skirts of
the St. Mary's village, about three miles from the
Branch of Sweet Water, the favorite haunt of
Logoochie. Jones had a small family — consisting,
besides himself, of his wife, his sister — a lady
of certain age, and monstrous demure — and a
daughter, Mary Jones, as sweet a May-flower as
the eye of a good taste would ever wish to dwell
upon. She was young — only sixteen, and had
not yet learned a single one of the thousand arts,
which, in making a fine coquette, spoil usually a
fine woman. She thought purely, and freely said
all that she thought. Her old father loved her —
her mother loved her, and her aunt, she loved her
too, and proved it, by doing her own, and the
scolding of all the rest, whenever the light-hearted
Mary said more in her eyes, or speech, than her
aunt's conventional sense of propriety deemed
absolutely necessary to be said. This family Logoochie
rather loved, — whether it was because
farmer Jones did more smoking than any of the
neighbors, or his sister more scolding, or his wife
more sleeping, or his daughter more loving, we
say not, but such certainly was the fact. Mary
Jones had learned this latter art, if none other.
A tall and graceful lad in the settlement, named
Johnson, had found favor in her sight, and she
in his; and it was not long before they made the
mutual discovery. He was a fine youth, and quite
worthy of the maiden; but then he was of an inquiring,
roving temper, and though not yet arrived
at manhood, frequently indulged in rambles,
rather startling, even to a people whose habit in
that respect is somewhat proverbial. He had gone
in his wanderings even into the heart of the Okephanokee
Swamp, and strange were the wonders,
and wild the stories, which he gave of that region
of Indian fable — a region, about which they
have as many and as beautiful traditions, as any
people can furnish from the store house of its primitive
romance. This disposition on the part
of Ned Johnson, though productive of much disquiet
to his friends and family, they hoped to
overcome or restrain, by the proposed union with
Mary Jones — a connexion seemingly acceptable
to all parties. Mary, like most other good young
ladies, had no doubt, indeed, of her power to control
her lover in his wanderings, when once they
were man and wife; and he, like most good young
gentlemen in like cases, did not scruple to swear a
thousand times, that her love would be as a chain
about his feet, too potent to suffer him the slightest
indulgence of his rambling desires.
