the
door, called her to the window, and Tom, the mocking-bird, which had
been comparatively quiet since he found his master snugly cared for, now
began to hop about, fly in the air, and sing again:

"Sweet--sweet--sweetie! come see! come see!"

Vesta saw Meshach's wiry, deliberate colored man step down and turn the
horses' heads, and there dropped from the carriage, without using the
carriage-step, at a leap and a skip, a young female object whose head
was invisible in an enormous coal-scuttle bonnet of figured blue chintz.
However quick she executed the leap, Vesta observed that the arrival had
forgotten to put on her stockings.

Before Vesta could turn from the window this singular object had darted
up the dark stairs of the old storehouse and thrown herself on the
delirious man's bed:

"Uncle, Uncle Meshach! air you dead, uncle? Wake up and kiss your
Rhudy!"

She had kissed her uncle plentifully while awaiting the same of him, and
the attack a little excited him, without recalling his mind to any
sustained remembrance, though Vesta heard the words "dear child," before
he turned his head and chased the wild poppies again. Then the young
female, ejaculating,

"Lord sakes! Uncle don't know his Rhudy!" pulled her black apron over
her head and had a silent cry--a little convulsion of the neck and not
an audible sigh besides.

"She weeps with some refinement," Vesta thought; and also observed that
the visitor was a tall, long-fingered, rather sightly girl of, probably,
seventeen, with clothing the mantuamaker was guiltless of, and a hoop
bonnet, such as old people continued to make in remembrance of the
high-decked vessels which had brought the last styles to them when their
ancestors emigrated with their all, and forever, from a land of _modes_.
The bonnet was a remarkable object to Vesta, though she had seen some
such at a distance, coining in upon the heads of the forest people to
the Methodist church. It resembled the high-pooped ship of Columbus,
which he had built so high on purpose, the girls at the seminary said,
so as to have the advantage of spying the New World first; but it also
resembled the long, hollow, bow-shaped Conestoga wagons of which Vesta
had seen so many going past her boarding-school at Ellicott's Mills
before the late new railroad had quite reached there. As she had often
peered into those vast, blue-bodied wagons to see what creatures might
be passengers in their depths, so she took the f