to-day with word that she would thank me
in person, and to-night I went over in a state of rather senseless
eagerness.

Her mother and sister had gone out, and she sat on the dark porch
alone. The things of Thoreau's have interested her, and she asked
me to tell her all I knew of him, which was little enough. Then
of her own accord she began to speak of her father and Audubon--of
the one with the worship of love, of the other with the worship
of greatness. I felt as though I were in a moonlit cathedral; for
her voice, the whole revelation of her nature, made the spot so
impressive and so sacred. She scarcely addressed _me_; she was
communing with them. Nothing that her father told her regarding
Audubon appears to have been forgotten; and, brought nearer than
ever before to that lofty, tireless spirit in its wanderings through
the Kentucky forests, I almost forgot her to whom I was listening.
But in the midst of it she stopped, and it was again kitten and yarn.
I left quite as abruptly. Upon my soul, I believe that Georgiana
doesn't think me worth talking to seriously.

VII

July has dragged like a log across a wet field.

There was the Fourth, which is always the grandest occasion of the
year with us. Society has taken up Sylvia and rejected Georgiana;
and so with its great gallantry, and to her boundless delight,
Sylvia was invited to sit with a bevy of girls in a large furniture
wagon covered with flags and bunting. The girls were to be dressed
in white, carry flowers and flags, and sing "The Star-spangled
Banner" in the procession, just before the fire-engine. I wrote a
note to Georgiana, asking whether it would interfere with Sylvia's
Greatest Common Divisor if I presented her with a profusion of
elegant flowers on that occasion. Georgiana herself had equipped
Sylvia with a truly exquisite silken flag on a silver staff; and
as Sylvia both sang and waved with all her might, not only to keep
up the Green River reputation in such matters, but with a mediaeval
determination to attract a young man on the fire-engine behind,
she quite eclipsed every other miss in the wagon, and was not even
hoarse when persuaded at last to stop. So that several of the
representatives of the other States voted afterwards in a special
congress that she was loud, and in no way as nice as they had
fancied, and that they ought never to recognize her again except
in church and a funerals.

And then the month brought dow