University of Virginia Library

3. III.
PARSON DODD'S SUNDAY-MORNING CALL.

The mere loss of horse and buggy was nothing. But O,
his clothes! Parson Dodd even hoped to see the vehicle
upset or smashed, and his garments, or at least some portion
of them, flung out on the roadside. But nothing of
the kind occurred, as far as he could see. Of all his fine

where. Miners were on the mountain. The ruined hut had
been repaired; the old shaft had been re-opened; and Guy, in
his executive capacity, had made acquaintance with that hitherto
unprofitable bore. And now was heard the sound of
sharpening the drills at the forge, and once more the mountain
resounded with the thunder of the blast. Among all the
prominent members of the association great enthusiasm prevailed.
Money was abundant, poured in as priming to the
pump which was expected soon to pour out again inexhaustible
golden supplies. Except in the coldest of the weather, the
work of the miners went on; penetrating inch by inch,
slowly and laboriously, the stubbornest azoic stone. Daily it
was anticipated that the drills would strike through, or that
the blasts would blow through, into the subterranean chambers
of coin; during which time the Biddikin mansion
glowed with warmth, and flowed with plenty, so that the
doctor grew fat, and not even poor little Job went hungry.

With the workmen at the summit, or with the men and
women of the association who filled with new magnetic life
the rooms of the old house, Guy spent his days and nights.
Here, in the half-spiritual yet intensely human elements of
a nondescript society, he found something which his soul
craved. He was much with Christina. Whether or not he
loved her, she was fast becoming necessary to him. When
he went uncomforted from Lucy, the smiles, the radiance, the
spiritual gifts, of the seeress were his consolation. Thus unconsciously
Lucy drove him to her rival. And she was forapproach.

“I can stand in the rye up to my neck, while
I call for help, and explain my situation.” So he advanced,
wading through the high, nodding grain, which his hands
parted before him: a wretched being, but hopeful; and
with light fancies still bubbling on the current of his darker
reflections.

“Gin a body meet a body coming through the rye,”
thought he.

A Sunday-morning stillness pervaded farm and dwelling.
A quail whistled on the edge of the field, “More wet!
more wet!” which sounded to Parson Dodd much like a
mocking allusion to his own recent passage of the river.
Glossy swallows were twittering about the eaves of the barn;
and enviable doves, happy in their feathers, were cooing
on the sunny side of the old shed-roof.

In the midst of this scene of perfect rural tranquillity,
the barn door was opened. The parson's heart beat fast;
somebody was leading out a horse. It was a woman!

A woman with a masculine straw hat on her head. She
was followed by another woman, also in a straw hat,
bringing a horse-collar. Then came a third woman, similarly
covered, carrying a harness. The horse's halter and
afterward his head were passed through the collar, which
was then turned over on his neck and pressed back against
his breast; the harness was put on and buckled; and then,
— horrible to tell! — a fourth straw-hatted woman appeared,
and held up the shafts of an old one-horse wagon,
while the other three backed the animal into them, and
hooked the traces.

“My luck!” said the parson, through teeth chattering
with excitement, if not with cold. “Not a man on the
place! All women! And there 's another somewhere.
Why did n't I think? It 's the house of the Five Sisters!”

The five Misses Wiretop, spinsters, known to all the
country round about. They were rather strong-minded,
and very strong-bodied; they kept this house, and wore
straw hats, and tilled their few ancestral acres, and dispensed
with man's assistance (except occasional aid in
seed-time and harvest), and went regularly to church, and
were very respectable.

“They are getting ready for church now,” thought Parson
Dodd. “They go to Selwyn's. I always see them there.
They are going to hear me preach!”

No doubt they would have been glad to do anything for
him that lay in their power; for though they did not
think much of men generally, they had a regard for parsons,
and for Parson Dodd in particular; he knew that
from the serious, reverential glances turned up at him ever
from the Five Sisters' pew. “Yet it is n't myself they
care for,” thought he, “it 's my cloth.” And here he was
without his cloth!

He asked himself, moreover, what they could do for him,
even if he should make his wants known to them. Of
course there were no male garments in their house; and
the most he could expect of them was an old lady's gown.
He fancied himself in that!

He reasoned, however, that these sisters and their horse
might help him to recover his garments and his mare.
So he advanced still nearer, and was about calling out to
them over the top of the grain, when the Sabbath stillness
was broken by a sharp voice, —

“Stop, you sir! Stop, there!”

He did stop, as if he had been shot at. Turning his
eyes in the direction of the voice, he saw the fifth sister,
with one sleeve of her Sunday gown on, and with one
naked arm, leaning her head out of a chamber window,
and gesticulating violently.

“Git out o' that rye! git out o' that rye! right straight
out! Do you hear, you sir? Do you hear?”

Parson Dodd must have been deaf not to have heard.
But how could he obey? Instead of getting out of the
rye, he crouched down in it until only the shining top of his
bald crown was visible, like a saucer turned up in the sun.

“Madam!” he shouted back, “I beg of you —”

But the sharp voice interrupted him: “Don't you know
no better? Can't a poor woman raise her little patch of
rye, but some creatur' must come tramp, tramp through
it? Don't you know what a path is for? There 's the
lane; why did n't you come up the lane?”

Poor Dodd would have been only too glad to explain
why. But now rose a clamor of female voices, as the four
sisters at the barn ran down to the end of the house, between
it and the field, to learn what was the matter.

“In the rye!” said the sister at the window, pointing.
“Some creatur' tryin' to hide, — don't ye see him? Looks
like a man. What ye want? Why don't ye come out?
Scroochin' down there! Who be ye, anyhow?”

“Ladies,” said poor Dodd, putting up his chin timidly,
and looking over the grain with a very piteous expression,
“don't you know me?”

But that was a very absurd question. Certainly they
did not know him without his wig. Where were those
wavy brown locks, which looked so interesting in the
preacher's desk, especially to the female portion of his congregation?
Could any one be expected to recognize in
that shorn and polished pate the noble head and front of
the bachelor parson? No, he must proclaim himself.

“Ladies! good friends! don't be alarmed, I entreat. I
have met with a —”

He was going to say misfortune. But just then he met
with something else, which interrupted him.

The Five Sisters kept, as a protection to their loneliness,
a very large dog. One of them, learning that there was a
creatur' in the rye, had, before learning what that creatur'
was, whistled for Bruce. Bruce had come. He perceived
a rustling, or caught a gleam of the inverted saucer, and
made a dash at the field, leaping upon the dilapidated boundary-wall.
His deafening yelps from that moment drowned
every other sound. He could n't be called off even by her
who had set him on. Terror at the sight of a naked man
(few sights are more terrifying to an unsophisticated dog)
rendered him wholly wild and unmanageable. There he
stood on the wall, formidable, bristling with rage and
fright, and intercepting every word of the poor, gasping
wretch in the grain with his furious barking.

I am very sorry to say that Dodd was about as badly
frightened as the dog. He crouched, shrank away, and
finally retreated, the brute howling and yelping after
him, and the exasperated spinsters screaming to him to
take the path, and not trample down the rye, — did n't he
know what a path was for?

So ended Parson Dodd's Sunday-morning call on the
Five Sisters.