THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE UNDER DIFFICULTIES; AND WHAT CAME OF IT
"Mr. Geer!"
Mr. Geer was unquestionably asleep.
This certainly did not indicate a sufficiently warm appreciation of Mrs. Geer's social charms; but the enormity of the offence will be greatly modified by a brief review of the attending circumstances. If you will but consider that the crackling of burning wood in a huge Franklin stove is strongly soporific in its tendencies,—that the cushion of a capacious arm-chair, constructed and adjusted as if with a single eye to a delicious dose, nay, to a long succession of doses, is a powerful temptation to a sleepy soul,—that the regular, and, it must be confessed, somewhat monotonous click, click, click of Mrs. Geer's knitting-needles only served to measure, without disturbing the silence,—and, lastly, that they had been husband and wife for thirty years,—you will not cease to wonder that Mr. Geer
"was glorious,
O'er all the ills of life victorious."
To most men, an interruption at such a time would have been particularly annoying; but when Mrs. Geer spoke in that way, Mr. Geer, asleep or awake, always made a point of hearing; so he roused himself, and turned his round, honest face and placid blue eyes on the partner of his bosom, who went on,—
"Mr. Geer, our Ivy will be seventeen, come fall."
"Possible?" replied Mr. Geer. "Who'd 'a' thunk it?"
Mr. Geer, as you may infer, was eminently a free-thinker, or rather, a free-actor, in respect of irregular verbs. In fact, he tyrannized over all parts of speech: wrested nouns and verbs from their original shape, till you could hardly recognize their distorted faces; and committed that next worst sin to murdering one's mother, namely,—murdering one's mother-tongue, with an abandon that was absolutely fascinating. Having delivered his opinion thus sententiously, he at once subsided, closed his placid eyes, and retired into his inner world of—thought, perhaps.
"Mr. Geer!"
This time he fairly jumped from his seat, and cast about him scared, blinking eyes.
"Mr. Geer, how can you sleep away your precious time so?"
"Sleep? I—I—am sure, I was never wider awake in my life."
"Well, then, tell me what I said."
"Said? Eh,—eh,—something about Ivy, wasn't it?"
And Mr. Geer nervously twitched up the skirts of his coat, and replaced his awry cushion, and began to think that perhaps, after all, he had been asleep. But Mrs. Geer was too much interested in the subject of her own cogitations to pursue her victory farther; so she answered,—
"Yes, and what is a-going to become of her?"
"Lud, lud! What's the matter?" asked Mr. Geer, wildly.
"Matter? Why, she'll be seventeen, come fall, and doesn't know a thing."
"O Lud! that all? That a'n't nothin'."
And Mr. Geer settled comfortably down into his arm-chair once more. He felt decidedly relieved. Visions of smallpox, cholera, and throat-distemper, the worst evils that he could think of and dread for his darling, had been conjured up by his wife's words; and when he found the real state of the case, a great burden, which had suddenly fallen on his heart, was as suddenly lifted.
"But I tell you it is something," continued Mrs. Geer, energetically. "Ivy is 'most a woman, and has never been ten miles from home in her life, and to no school but our little district"–
"And she's as pairk a gal," interrupted Mr. Geer, "as any you'll find in all the ten miles round, be the other who she will."
"She's well enough in her way," replied Mrs. Geer, in all the humility of motherly pride; "and so much the more reason why she shouldn't be let go so. There's Mr. Dingham sending his great logy girls to Miss Porter's seminary. (I wonder if he expects they'll ever turn out anything.) And here's our Ivy, bright as a button, and you full well able to maintain her like a lady, and have done nothing but turn her out to grass all her life, till she's fairly run wild. I declare it's a shame. She ought to be sent to school to-morrow."
"Nonsense, Sally! nonsense! I a'n't a-goin' lo have no such doin's. Sha'n't go off to school. What's the use havin' her, if she can't stay at home with us? Let Mr. Dingham send his gals to Chiny, if he wants to. All the book-larnin' in the world won't make 'em equal to our Ivy with only her own head. I don't want her to go to gettin' up high-falutin' notions. She's all gold now. She don't need no improvin'. Sha'n't budge an inch. Sha'n't stir a step."
"But do consider, Mr. Geer, the child has got to leave us some time. We can't have her always."
"Why can't we?" exclaimed Mr. Geer, almost fiercely.
"Sure enough! Why can't we? There a'n't nobody besides you and me, I suppose, that thinks she's pairk. What's John Herricks and Dan Norris hangin' round for all the time?"
"And they may hang round till the cows come home! Nary hair of Ivy's head shall they touch,—nary one on em!"
Just at this juncture of affairs, the damsel in question bounded into the room.
"Come here, Ivy," said the old man; "your mother's been a-slanderin' you; says you don't know nothin'."
Ivy knelt before him, rested her arms on his knees, and turned upon him a pair of palpably roguish eyes.
"Father, it is an awful slander. I do know a sight."
"Lud, child, yes! I knew you did. No more you don't want to marry John Herricks, do you?"
"Oh, Daddy Geer! O—h—h!"
"Nor Dan Norris? nor none of 'em?"
"Never a one, father."
"Nor don't you ever think of gettin' married and slavin' yourself out for nobody. I'm plenty well able to take care of you, as long as I live. You'll never live so happy as you do at home; and you'll break my heart to go away, Ivy."
"I'll never go, papa." (She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable.) "Indeed, I never will. I'll never be married, as long as I live."
"No more you sha'n't, good child, good child!"
And again Farmer Geer betook himself to the depths of his arm-chair, with the complacent consciousness of having faithfully discharged his parental duties. "She should not go to school. She would not be married. She had said she would not, and of course she would not."
"Of course I shall not," mused Ivy, as she lay in her white bed. "What could put it into poor papa's head? Marry John Herricks, with his everlasting smirk, and his diddling walk, and take care of all the Herricks' sisters and mothers and aunts, and the Herricks' cows and horses and pigs—and—hens—and—and"–
But Ivy had kept her thoughts on her marriage longer than ever before in her life; and ere she had finished the inventory of John Herricks's personal property and real estate, the blue eyes were closed in the sweet, sound sleep of youth and health.
Mrs. Geer, in her estimate of her daughter's attainments, was partly right and partly wrong. Ivy had never been "finished" at Mrs. Porter's seminary, and was consequently in a highly unfinished condition. "Small Latin and less Greek" jostled each other in her head. German and French, Italian and Spanish, were strange tongues to Ivy. She could not dance, nor play, nor draw, nor paint, nor work little dogs on footstools.
What, then, could she do?
Imprimis, she could climb a tree like a squirrel. Secundo, she could walk across the great beam in the barn like a year-old kitten. In the pursuit of hens' eggs she knew no obstacles; from scaffold to scaffold, from haymow to haymow, she leaped defiant. She pulled out the hay from under the very noses of the astonished cows, to see if, perchance, some inexperienced pullet might there have deposited her golden treasure. With all four-footed beasts she was on the best of terms. The matronly and lazy old sheep she unceremoniously hustled aside, to administer consolation and