“Who's there?”      

       An apologetic murmur on the other side of the door was the response.     

       “Why, father!—is that you?”      

       There were further murmurs, affirmative, deprecatory, and persistent.     

       “Wait,” said the “Rose.” She got up, unlocked the door, leaped nimbly into bed again, and said, “Come.”      

       The door opened timidly. The broad, stooping shoulders, and grizzled head, of a man past the middle age, appeared: after a moment's hesitation, a pair of large, diffident feet, shod with canvas slippers, concluded to follow. When the apparition was complete, it closed the door softly, and stood there,—a very shy ghost indeed,—with apparently more than the usual spiritual indisposition to begin a conversation. The “Rose”        resented this impatiently, though, I fear, not altogether intelligibly.     

       “Do, father, I declare!”      

       “You was abed, Jinny,” said Mr. McClosky slowly, glancing, with a singular mixture of masculine awe and paternal pride, upon the two chairs and their contents,—“you was abed and ondressed.”      

       “I was.”      

       “Surely,” said Mr. McClosky, seating himself on the extreme edge of the bed, and painfully tucking his feet away under it,—“surely.” After a pause, he rubbed a short, thick, stumpy beard, that bore a general resemblance to a badly-worn blacking-brush, with the palm of his hand, and went on, “You had a good time, Jinny?”      

       “Yes, father.”      

       “They was all there?”      

       “Yes, Rance and York and Ryder and Jack.”      

       “And Jack!” Mr. McClosky endeavored to throw an expression of arch inquiry into his small, tremulous eyes; but meeting the unabashed, widely-opened lid of his daughter, he winked rapidly, and blushed to the roots of his hair.     

       “Yes, Jack was there,” said Jenny, without change of color, or the least self-consciousness in her great gray eyes; “and 

 Prev. P 3/154 next