You astonish them moreover with
your stories of various parts of the world which they have never
visited. They tell you of the haunts of rabbits, and great snake
stories, as you sit in the dusk after supper under the old oaks; and you
delight them in turn with some marvellous tale of South-American
reptiles out of Peter Parley's books.
In all this your new friends are men of observation; while Frank and
yourself are comparatively men of reading. In ciphering, and all
schooling, you find yourself a long way before them; and you talk of
problems, and foreign seas, and Latin declensions, in a way that sets
them all agape.
As for the little country girls, their bare legs rather stagger your
notions of propriety; nor can you wholly get over their out-of-the-way
pronunciation of some of the vowels. Frank however has a little
cousin,--a toddling, wee thing, some seven years your junior, who has a
rich eye for an infant. But, alas, its color means nothing; poor Fanny
is stone-blind! Your pity leans toward her strangely, as she feels her
way about the old parlor; and her dark eyes wander over the wainscot, or
over the clear, blue sky, with the same sad, painful vacancy.
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