OUSE THAT WAS A WEDDING FEE

It was September, the sad month of the year before I heard the
promised story of the house that was a wedding fee; for it was Aunt
Jane's whim that, as a dramatic sequence, a visit to the house should
follow the telling of the tale, and it was hard to find a convenient
time for the happening of both events. Meanwhile, I was tantalized by
the memory of that half-seen house at the end of the long avenue, and
again and again I tried by adroit questions to draw from Aunt Jane the
story about which my imagination hovered like a bee about a flower.

"Well," she finally remarked with smiling resignation, "I see there
ain't any peace for me till that story's told. Ain't that Johnny Amos
goin' by on horseback? Holler to him, child, and ask him to stop here
on his way back and hitch old Nelly to the buggy for me. Tell him I'll
dance at his weddin' if he'll do that favor for me.

"And now, while we're waitin' for Johnny to come, I'll tell all I can
ricollect about that old house. Fetch my basket o' cyarpet-rags, and
we'll sit out here on the porch. Here's a needle for you, too, child.
If I can sew and talk at the same time, I reckon you can sew and
listen. Jest mix your colors any way you please. I never made a
cyarpet except the hit-or-miss kind."

I took my needle and began to sew, first a black, then a red, then a
blue strip, but Aunt Jane showed no haste to begin her story.

"Goin' back sixty years," she remarked meditatively, "is like goin' up
and rummagin' around in a garret. You don't know what you'll lay your
hands on in the dark, and you can't be certain of findin' what you
went after. I'm tryin' to think whereabouts I'd better begin so as to
git to that old house the quickest."

"No, Aunt Jane, please take the long, roundabout way," I urged.

"Well," she laughed, "come to think about it, it don't make much
difference which way I take, for if I start on the short road, it'll
be roundabout before I git through with it. You know my failin',
child. Well, I reckon the old church is as good a startin'-place as
any. You ricollect me p'intin' it out to you the day we went to town,
and tellin' you about Martin Luther and the bell. That buildin' was
put up when Brother Wilson was pastor of the Presbyterian church.
Before his time they'd been without a preacher for a good while, and
things was in a run-down and gone-to-seed sort o' condition when he
come up from Tennessee to take the charge.