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The Mettle of the Pasture

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she has made me that I can remember. It was an orphan, and you wouldn't have it in your asylum, and my mother was in a peculiar mood, I suppose. She amused herself with the idea of making me such a present. But Anna, watch that calf, and see if thereby does not hang a tale. I am sure, in some mysterious way, my destiny is bound up with it. Calves do have destinies, don't they, Anna?" "Oh, don't ask _me_, Harriet! Inquire of their Creator; or try the market-house." It was at the end of this visit that Harriet as usual imparted to Miss Anna the freshest information regarding affairs at home: that Isabel had gone to spend the summer with friends at the seashore, and was to linger with other friends in the mountains during autumn; that her mother had changed her own plans, and was to keep the house open, and had written for the Fieldings--Victor's mother and brothers and sisters--to come and help fill the house; that everything was to be very gay. "I cannot fathom what is under it all," said Harriet, with her hand on the side gate at leaving. "But I know that mother and Isabel have quarrelled. I believe mother has transferred her affections--and perhaps her property. She has rewritten her will since Isabel went away. What have I to do, Anna, but interest myself in other people's affairs? I have none of my own. And she never calls Isabel's name, but pets Victor from morning till night. And her expression sometimes! I tell you, Anna, that when I see it, if I were a bird and could fly, gunshot could not catch me. I see a summer before me! If there is ever a chance of my doing _anything_, don't be shocked if I do it;" and in Harriet's eyes there were two mysterious sparks of hope--two little rising suns. "What did she mean?" pondered Miss Anna. IV "Barbee," said Judge Morris one morning a fortnight later, "what has become of Marguerite? One night not long ago you complained of her as an obstacle in the path of your career: does she still annoy you with her attentions? You could sue out a writ of habeas corpus in your own behalf if she persists. I'd take the case. I believe you asked me to mark your demeanor on the evening of that party. I tried to mark it; but I did not discover a great deal of demeanor to mark." The two were sitting in the front office. The Judge, with nothing to do, was facing the street, his snow-white cambric handkerchief thrown across one knee, his hands grasping the arms of his chair, the newspaper behind his heels, his straw hat and cane on the floor at his side, and beside them the bulldog--his nose thrust against the hat. Barbee was leaning over his desk with his fingers plunged in his hair and his eyes fixed on the law book before him--unopened. He turned and remarked with dry candor: "Marguerite has dropped me." "If she has, it's a blessed thing." "There was more depth to her than I thought." "There always is. Wait until you get older." "I shall have to work and climb to win her." "You might look up meantime the twentieth verse of the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis." Barbee rose and took down a Bible from among the law books: it had been one of the Judge's authorities, a great stand-by for reference and eloquence in his old days of pleading. He sat down and read the verse and laid the volume aside with the mere comment: "All this time I have been thinking her too much of a child; I find that she has been thinking the same of me." "Then she has been a sound thinker." "The result is she has wandered away after some one else. I know the man; and I know that he is after some one else. Why do people desire the impossible person? If I had been a Greek sculptor and had been commissioned to design as my masterwork the world's Frieze of Love, it should have been one long array of marble shapes, each in pursuit of some one fleeing. But some day Marguerite will be found sitting pensive on a stone--pursuing no longer; and when I appear upon the scene, having overtaken her at last, she will sigh, but she will give me her hand and go with me: and I'll have to stand it. That is the worst of it. I shall have to stand it--that she preferred the other man." The Judge did not care to hear Barbee on American themes with Greek imagery. He yawned and struggled to his feet with difficulty. "I'll take a stroll," he said; "it is all I can take." Barbee sprang forward and picked up for him his hat and cane. The dog, by what seemed the slow action of a mental jackscrew, elevated his cylinder to the tops of his legs; and presently the two stiff old bodies turned the corner of the street, one slanting, one prone: one dotting the bricks with his three legs, the other with his four. Formerly the man and the brute had gone each his own way, meeting only at meal time and at irregular hours of the night in the Judge's chambers. The Judge had his stories regarding the origin of their intimacy. He varied these somewhat according to the sensibilities of the persons to whom they were related--and there were not many habitues of the sidewalks who did not hear them sooner or later. "No one could disentangle fact and fiction and affection in them. "Some years ago," he said one day to Professor Hardage, "I was a good deal gayer than I am now and so was he. We cemented a friendship in a certain way, no matter what: that is a story I'm not going to tell. And he came to live with me on that footing of friendship. Of course he was greatly interested in the life of his own species at that time; he loved part of it, he hated part; but he was no friend to either. By and by he grew older. Age removed a good deal of his vanity, and I suppose it forced him to part with some portion of his self-esteem. But I was growing older myself and no doubt getting physically a little helpless. I suppose I made senile noises when I dressed and undressed, expressive of my decorative labors. This may have been the reason; possibly not; but at any rate about this time he conceived it his duty to give up his friendship as an equal and to enter my employ as a servant. He became my valet--without wages--and I changed his name to 'Brown.' "Of course you don't think this true; well, then, don't think it true. But you have never seen him of winter mornings get up before

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