The Choir Invisible

Her pink calico dress, newly starched and ironed, had looked so pretty to

her when she had started from home, that she had not been able to bear the

thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded, mud-stained

riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting against the

saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze morocco shoes.

On her hands she had drawn white half-hand mittens of home-knit; and on her

head she wore an enormous white scoop-bonnet, lined with pink and tied under

her chin in a huge muslin bow. Her face, hidden away under the

pink-and-white shadow, showed such hints of pearl and rose that it seemed

carved from the inner surface of a sea-shell. Her eyes were gray, almond

shaped, rather wide apart, with an expression changeful and playful, but

withal rather shrewd and hard; her light brown hair, as fine as unspun silk,

was parted over her brow and drawn simply back behind her ears; and the lips

of her little mouth curved against each other, fresh, velvet-like, smiling.

On she rode down the avenue of the primeval woods; and Nature seemed

arranged to salute her as some imperial presence; with the waving of a

hundred green boughs above on each side; with a hundred floating odours;

with the swift play of nimble forms up and down the boles of trees; and all

the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies.

Then one of those trifles happened that contain the history of our lives, as

a drop of dew draws into itself the majesty and solemnity of the heavens.

From the pommel of the side-saddle there dangled a heavy roll of home-spun

linen, which she was taking to town to her aunt's merchant as barter for

queen's-ware pitchers; and behind this roll of linen, fastened to a ring

under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied up in a large

blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever she fidgeted in the

saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often did because he was clumsy

and because the road was obstructed by stumps and roots, the string by which

this bundle was tied slipped a little through the lossening knot and the

bundle hung a little lower down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into

the broader public road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the

travelling began to be really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet

against the loop of a root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle

slipped noiselessly from the saddle to the earth.

She did not see it. She indignantly gathered the reins more tightly in her

hand, pushed back her bonnet, which now hung down over her eyes like the

bill of a pelican, and applied her little switch of wild cherry to the

horse's flank with such vehemence that a fly which was about to alight on

that spot went to the other side. The old horse himself--he bore the

peaceable name of William Penn--merely gave one of the comforting switches

of his bob-tail with which he brushed away the thought of any small

annoyance, and stopped a moment to nibble at the wayside cane mixed with

purple blossoming peavine.