Mistress Pat Read Online Free

particular? I’m asking ye.”
    â€œI’m not old enough to have beaus yet,” said Cuddles, “but just you wait till I am. It must be thrilling, Judy, to have someone tell you he loves you.”
    â€œOuld Tom Drinkwine did be telling me that onct upon a time but niver a thrill did I be faling,” said Judy reflectively.

CHAPTER 2
    â€œAll the months are friends of mine but apple month is the dearest,” chanted Pat.
    It was October at Silver Bush and she and Cuddles and Judy picked apples in the New Part of the orchard every afternoon…which wasn’t so very new now, since it was all of twenty years old. But the Old Part was very much older and the apples in it were mostly sweet and fed to the pigs. Sometimes Long Alec Gardiner thought it would be far better to cut it down and get some real good out of the land but Pat couldn’t be made to hear reason about it. She loved the Old Part far better than the New. It had been planted by Great-grandfather Gardiner and was shadowy and mysterious, with as many old spruce trees as apple trees in it, and one special corner where generations of beloved cats and kittens had been buried. Besides, as Pat pointed out, if you cleared away the Old Part it would leave the graveyard open to all the world, since the Old Part surrounded it on three sides. This argument had weight with Long Alec. He was proud, in his way, of the old family burial plot, where nobody was ever buried now but where so many greats and grands of every degree slept…for the Gardiners of Silver Bush came of old P. E. Island pioneer stock. So the Old Part was spared and in spring it was as beautiful as the New Part, when the gnarled trees were young and bridal again for a brief space in the sweet spring days and the cool spring nights.
    It was such a mellow and dreamy afternoon and Silver Bush seemed mellow and dreamy, too. Pat thought the old farm had a mood for every day in the year and every hour in the day. Now it would be gay…now melancholy…now friendly…now austere…now gray…now golden. Today it was golden. The Hill of the Mist had wrapped a scarf of blue haze about its brown shoulders and was mysteriously lovely still, in spite of the missing Lombardy. Behind it a great castle of white cloud, with mauve shadows, towered up. There had been a delicate, ghostly rain the night before and the scent of the little hollow in the graveyard, full of frosted ferns, was distilled on the air. How green the pastures were for autumn! The kitchen yard was full of the pale gold of aspens and the turkey house was almost lost in a blaze of crimson sumacs. The white birches which some forgotten bride had planted along the Whispering Lane, that led from Silver Bush to Swallowfield, were amber, and the huge maple over the well was a flame. When Pat paused every few minutes just to look at it she whispered,
    â€œâ€˜The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
    Of bugles going by!’”
    â€œWhat might ye be whispering to yersilf, Patsy? Sure and ye might be telling us if it’s inny joke. It seems to be delighting ye.”
    Pat lifted eyebrows like little slender wings.
    â€œIt was just a bit of poetry, Judy, and you don’t care much for poetry.”
    â€œOh, oh, po’try do be all right in its place but it won’t be kaping the apples if there’s a hard frost some av these nights. We’re a bit behind wid the picking as it is. And more work than iver to look forward to, now that yer dad has bought the ould Adams place for pasture and going into the livestock business.”
    â€œBut he’s going to have a hired man to help him, Judy.”
    â€œOh, oh, and who will be looking after the hired man I’m asking ye. He’ll be nading a bite to ate, I’m thinking, and mebbe a bit av washing and minding done. Not that I’m complaining av the work, mind ye. But ye can niver tell about an outsider. It’s been