Nobody seemed to think this very remarkable, or even very interesting. Uncle Henry, indeed, noted it only to say, “Seventh-grade reading!” He turned to Aunt Abigail. “Oh, Mother, don’t you suppose she could read aloud to us evenings?”
Aunt Abigail and Cousin Ann both laid down their sewing to laugh! “Yes, yes, Father, and play checkers with you too, like as not!” They explained to Betsy: “Your Uncle Henry is just daft on being read aloud to when he’s got something to do in the evening, and when he hasn’t he’s as fidgety as a broody hen if he can’t play checkers. Ann hates checkers and I haven’t got the time, often.”
“Oh, I love to play checkers!” said Betsy.
“Well, now …” said Uncle Henry, rising instantly and dropping his half-mended harness on the table. “Let’s have a game.”
“Oh, Father!” said Cousin Ann, in the tone she used for Shep. “How about that piece of breeching! You know that’s not safe. Why don’t you finish that up first?”
Uncle Henry sat down again, looking as Shep did when Cousin Ann told him to get up on the couch, and took up his needle and awl.
“But I could read something aloud,” said Betsy, feeling very sorry for him. “At least I think I could. I never did, except at school.”
“What shall we have, Mother?” asked Uncle Henry eagerly.
“Oh, I don’t know. What have we got in this bookcase?” said Aunt Abigail. “It’s pretty cold to go into the parlor to the other one.” She leaned forward, ran her fat forefinger over the worn old volumes, and took out a battered, blue-covered book. “Scott?”
“Gosh, yes!” said Uncle Henry, his eyes shining. “The staggit eve!”
At least that was the way it sounded to Betsy, but when she took the book and looked where Aunt Abigail pointed she read it correctly, though in a timid, uncertain voice. She was very proud to think she could please a grownup so much as she was evidently pleasing Uncle Henry, but the idea of reading aloud for people to hear, not for a teacher to correct, was unheard of.
The Stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,
she began, and it was as though she had stepped into a boat and was swept off by a strong current. She did not know what all the words meant, and she could not pronounce a good many of the names, but nobody interrupted to correct her, and she read on and on, steadied by the strongly-marked rhythm, drawn forward swiftly from one clanging, sonorous rhyme to another. Uncle Henry nodded his head in time to the rise and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl’s for a couplet or two. They chanted together thus:
A moment listened to the cry
That thickened as the chase drew nigh,
Then, as the headmost foes appeared,
With one brave bound, the copse he cleared.
At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out wide, and the child felt as though the deer had made his great leap there, before her eyes.
“I’ve seen ’em jump just like that,” broke in Uncle Henry. “A two-three-hundred-pound stag go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of thistledown in the wind.”
“Uncle Henry,” asked Elizabeth Ann, “what is a copse?”
“I don’t know,” said Uncle Henry indifferently. “Something in the woods, must be. Underbrush most likely. You can always tell words you don’t know by the sense of the whole thing. Go on.”
And stretching forward, free and far,
The child’s voice took up the chant again. She read faster and faster as it got more exciting. Uncle Henry joined in on
For, jaded now and spent with toil,
Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
While every gasp with sobs he drew,
The laboring stag strained full in view.
The little girl’s heart beat fast. She fled along through the next lines, stumbling desperately over the hard words but seeing the headlong chase through them clearly as through tree-trunks in a forest. Uncle Henry broke in in a triumphant shout:
The wily quarry shunned the shock
And turned him from the opposing rock;
Then dashing down a darksome glen,
Soon lost to hound and hunter’s ken,
In the deep Trossach’s wildest nook
His solitary refuge took.
“Oh my!” cried Elizabeth Ann, laying down the book. “He got away, didn’t he? I was so afraid he wouldn’t!”
“I can just hear those dogs yelping, can’t you?” said Uncle Henry.
Yelled on the view the opening pack.
“Sometimes you hear ’em that way up on the slope of Hemlock Mountain back of us, when they get to running a deer.”
“What say we have some popcorn!” suggested Aunt Abigail. “Betsy, don’t you want to pop us some?”
“I never did,” said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her. A dim notion was growing up in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn’t.
“I’ll show you,” said Uncle Henry. He reached down a couple of ears from a big yellow cluster hanging on the wall, and he and Betsy shelled them into the popper, popped it full of snowy kernels, buttered it, salted it, and took it back to the table.
It was just as she was eating her first ambrosial mouthful that the door opened and a fur-capped head was thrust in. A man’s voice said: “Evenin’, folks. No, I can’t stay. I was down at the village just now, and thought I’d ask for any mail down our way.” He tossed a newspaper and a letter on the table and was gone.
The letter was addressed to Elizabeth Ann and it was from Aunt Frances. She read it to herself while Uncle Henry read the newspaper. Aunt Frances wrote that she had been
