The wife
would come out, her face ablaze from the oven, with an anxious
charge about that butter; the old man would hail her from the
barn to know "ef she'd thought toh look in th' mail yes'rday;"
and one or the other was sure to add, "Jes' time for breakfast,
Lois." If she had no baskets to stop for, she had "a bit o'
business," which turned out to be a paper she had brought for the
grandfather, or some fresh mint for the baby, or "jes' to inquire
fur th' fam'ly."
As to the amount that cart carried, it was a perpetual mystery to
Lois. Every day since she and the cart went into partnership,
she had gone into town with a dead certainty in the minds of
lookers-on that it would break down in five minutes, and a
triumphant faith in hers in its unlimited endurance. "This cart
'll be right side up fur years to come," she would assert,
shaking her head. "It 's got no more notion o' givin' up than me
nor Barney,--not a bit." Margret had her doubts,--and so would
you, if you had heard how it creaked under the load,--how they
piled in great straw panniers of apples: black apples with yellow
hearts, scarlet veined,--golden pippin apples, that held the
warmth and light longest,--russet apples with a hot blush on
their rough brown skins,--plums shining coldly in their delicate
purple bloom,--peaches with the crimson velvet of their cheeks
aglow with the prisoned heat of a hundred summer days.
I wish with all my heart somebody would paint me Lois and her
cart! Mr.
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