It was a day of unusual excitement at the Rambo farm-house. On the farm, it is true, all
things were in their accustomed order, and all growths did their accustomed credit to the
season. The fences were in good repair; the cattle were healthy and gave promise of the
normal increase, and the young corn was neither strangled with weeds nor assassinated
by cut-worms. Old John Rambo was gradually allowing his son, Henry, to manage in his
stead, and the latter shrewdly permitted his father to believe that he exercised the ancient
authority. Leonard Clare, the strong young fellow who had been taken from that shiftless
adventurer, his father, when a mere child, and brought up almost as one of the family, and
who had worked as a joiner's apprentice during the previous six months, had come back
for the harvest work; so the Rambos were forehanded, and probably as well satisfied as it
is possible for Pennsylvania farmers to be.
In the house, also, Mrs. Priscilla Rambo was not severely haunted by the spectre of any
neglected duty. The simple regular routine of the household could not be changed under
her charge; each thing had its appropriate order of performance, must be done, and WAS
done. If the season were backward, at the time appointed for whitewashing or soap-
making, so much the worse for the season; if the unhatched goslings were slain by
thunder, she laid the blame on the thunder. And if--but no, it is quite impossible to
suppose that, outside of those two inevitable, fearful house-cleaning weeks in each year,
there could have been any disorder in the cold prim, varnish-odored best rooms, sacred to
company.
It was Miss Betty Rambo, whose pulse beat some ten strokes faster than its wont, as she
sat down with the rest to their early country dinner. Whether her brother Henry's
participated in the accelerated movement could not be guessed from his demeanor. She
glanced at him now and then, with bright eyes and flushed cheeks, eager to speak yet
shrinking from the half magisterial air which was beginning to supplant his old familiar
banter. Henry was changing with his new responsibility, as she admitted to herself with a
sort of dismay; he had the airs of an independent farmer, and she remained only a
farmer's daughter,--without any acknowledged rights, until she should acquire them all, at
a single blow, by marriage.
Nevertheless, he must have felt what was in her mind; for, as he cut out the quarter of a
dried apple pie, he said carelessly:
"I must go down to the Lion, this afternoon. There's a fresh drove of Maryland cattle just
come."
"Oh Harry!" cried Betty, in real distress.
