Chaney Creek. In childhood he had trotted her to Banbury Cross and back a
hundred times, beguiling the tedium of the journey with kisses and the
music of bells. When the little girl was old enough to go to school, the
big boy carried her books and gave her the rosiest apple out of his
dinner-basket. He fought all her battles and wrote all her compositions;
which latter, by the way, never gained her any great credit. When she was
fifteen and he twenty he had his great reward in taking her twice a week
during one happy winter to singing-school. This was the bloom of
life--nothing before or after could compare with it. The blacking of shoes
and brushing of stiff, electric, bristling hair, all on end with frost and
hope, the struggling into the plate-armor of his starched shirt, the tying
of the portentous and uncontrollable cravat before the glass, which was
hopelessly dimmed every moment by his eager breath,--these trivial and
vulgar details were made beautiful and unreal by the magic of youth and
love. Then came the walk through the crisp, dry snow to the Widow
Barringer's, the sheepish talk with the old lady while Susie "got on her
things," and the long, enchanting tramp to the "deestrick school-house."

There is not a country-bred man or woman now living but will tell you that
life can offer nothing comparable with the innocent zest of that old style
of courting that was done at singing-school in the starlight and
candlelight of the first half of our century. There are few hearts so
withered and old but they beat quicker sometimes when they hear, in
old-fashioned churches, the wailing, sobbing or exulting strains of
"Bradstreet" or "China" or "Coronation;" and the mind floats down on the
current of these old melodies to that fresh young day of hopes and
illusions--of voices that were sweet, no matter how false they sang--of
nights that were rosy with dreams, no matter what Fahrenheit said--of
girls that blushed without cause, and of lovers who talked for hours about
everything but love.