I have no talent at describing
female charms, else fain would I depict the progress of this little
Dutch beauty: how her blue eyes grew deeper and deeper, and her
cherry lips redder and redder, and how she ripened and ripened, and
rounded and rounded, in the opening breath of sixteen summers,
until, in her seventeenth spring, she seemed ready to burst out of
her bodice, like a half-blown rosebud.
Ah, well-a-day! Could I but show her as she was then, tricked out
on a Sunday morning in the hereditary finery of the old Dutch
clothespress, of which her mother had confided to her the key! The
wedding dress of her grandmother, modernized for use, with sundry
ornaments, handed down as heirlooms in the family. Her pale brown
hair smoothed with buttermilk in flat, waving lines on each side of
her fair forehead. The chain of yellow, virgin gold that encircled
her neck; the little cross that just rested at the entrance of a
soft valley of happiness, as if it would sanctify the place. The--
but pooh! it is not for an old man like me to be prosing about
female beauty; suffice it to say, Amy had attained her seventeenth
year.
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