I've heard Master Fred say my back was covered with
river-grass, and I trembled all over with the fright and the hard pull.
"But, dear me, all that happened long ago when master was courting old
Tim Bunce's daughter Martha, down Stony Creek Road. How that girl did
take to me! She used to say she knew the sound of my hoofs on the road,
of a still night, when we were a mile away; and she'd say over a little
rhyme she'd got hold of somehow:--
'Star, Star, good and bright,
I wish you may and I wish you might
Bring somebody to me I want to see to-night.'
"If she said that twice, looking straight down the road, she told us we
were sure to come. She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl when Master Fred
brought her to be mistress here, though you mightn't think it to see her
now, what with the cooking and the dairy-work and raising a big family
of children. But if you want to know what mistress was like twenty years
ago, you've only to look at our Ada.
"Now, there's a girl for you, as good as she is pretty, and getting to
be a woman grown; though I remember, as though it happened yesterday,
her mother's coming out one spring day to where I was nibbling grass in
the door-yard, with her baby in her arms, and holding up the little
thing to me, and saying, 'This is Ada, Star,--you must be good friends
with Ada,' Friends! I should say so.
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