shing dishes just the same.
Seemed as if I couldn't bear to have the world just the same now
you was gone away. Well, I heard someone coming down the street,
and who do you think it was? Why, Hanford Weston. He came right up
to the gate and stopped. I don't know's he ever spoke two words to
me in my life except that time he stopped the big boys from
snow-balling me and told me to run along quick and git in the
school-house while he fit 'em. Well, he stopped and spoke, and he
looked so sad, seemed like I knew just what he was feeling sad
about, and I told him all about you getting married instead of
your sister. He looked at me like he couldn't move for a while and
his face was as white as that marble man in the cemetery over
Squire Hancock's grave. He grabbed the gate real hard and I
thought he was going to fall. He couldn't even move his lips for a
while. I felt just awful sorry for him. Something came in my
throat like a big stone and my eyes got all blurred with the
moonlight. He looked real handsome. I just couldn't help thinking
you ought to see him. Bimeby he got his voice back again, and we
talked a lot about you. He told me how he used to watch you when
you was a little girl wearing pantalettes. You used to sit in the
church pew across from his father's and he could just see your big
eyes over the top of the door. He says he always thought to
himself he would marry you when he grew up. Then when you began to
go to school and was so bright he tried hard to study and keep up
just to have you think him good enough for you. He owned up he was
a bad speller and he'd tried his level best to do better but it
didn't seem to come natural, and he thought maybe ef he was a good
farmer you wouldn't mind about the spelling. He hired out to his
father for the summer and he was trying with all his might to get
to be the kind of man t'would suit you, and then when he was
plowing and planning all what kind of a house with big columns to
the front he would build here comes the coach driving by and _you_
in it! He said he thought the sky and fields was all mixed up and
his heart was going out of him. He couldn't work any more and he
started out after supper to see what it all meant.

"That wasn't just the exact way he told it, Marsh, it was more
like poetry, that kind in our reader about "