The stylistic analysis of the text "Dave in Love" by Steele Rudd

PLOUGHING and sowing all over. A hundred acres of the plain-land under wheat and light showers falling every week. Dad’s good luck was continuing. Yet we were sharing other misfortunes freely enough. The children were all down with measles, Sarah with face-ache, Joe with a broken rib—a draught-horse broke it for him (Joe had sandy-blight, and one morning approached the wrong end of a horse with the winkers), and Dave was the victim of a fatal malady.

Dave was always the unlucky one. When he wasn’t bitten by a snake or a dog he was gored by a cow or something. This time it was a woman. Dave was in love. And such love! We could see it working in him like yeast. He became affable—smiled all day long and displayed remarkable activity. He didn’t care how hard he worked or whose work he performed. He did anything—everything, and without help. He developed a passion for small things—trifles he had hitherto regarded with contempt, purchased silk handkerchiefs and perfume and conversation-lollies at the store, and secreted them in the pockets of his Sunday coat, which he left hanging in his room. Sarah would find them when dusting the coat and hawk them to Mother, and they’d spend an hour rejoicing and speculating over the discovery. Sarah never allowed any dust to settle on Dave’s Sunday coat.

Dave went out every night. It amused Joe. He would be on pins and needles till supper was ready, then he’d bolt his food and rush off to saddle a horse, and we wouldn’t see him again till breakfast-time next morning.

For more than a year Dave rushed off every night. “Damme! look at that horse!” Dad used to say, when he’d be at the yard. Then he’d think hard, and begin again when he met Mother. “This night-work’ll have t’ stop, or there won’t be a horse about the place fit t’ ride. What the devil the fellow wants chasing round the country for every night I don’t know, I’m sure.” (Dad knew well enough.)

“Well”—Mother would say good-naturedly, “you were just as bad y’self once, Father.”

“Never, woman!”—with virtuous indignation. “I never left a horse hanging to a fence night after night to starve.”

But there the matter always ended, and Dave continued his courting without interruption.

It was Fanny Bowman, of Ranger’s Rise, Dave was after. She was twenty, dark, fresh-complexioned, robust and rosy—a good rider, good cook, and a most enterprising flirt.

Tom Black, Tom Bell, Joe Sibly, and Jim Moore all had sought her affections unsuccessfully. And young Cowley climbed into a loft one night and would have hanged himself with the dog-chain because of her inconstancy, only a curlew screeched “so awfully sudden” just outside the door that he rushed out and fell down sixteen steps and “injured himself internally”.

Fanny Bowman was a dairymaid—mostly neat and natty and nice. But there were times when she didn’t look so nice. She had frequently to go into the yard and milk fifteen and twenty cows before breakfast; and a glimpse at her then—especially in wet weather, with a man’s hat on, her skirts gathered round her waist, bare-footed, slush over her ankles, slush on her arms and smeared on her face—wasn’t calculated to quicken a fellow’s pulse. But then it wasn’t at such times that Dave passed judgment on her, any more than the city swell would judge his Hetty while her hair was on the dresser and her teeth in a basin.

Some Sundays Dave used to bring Fanny to spend the afternoon at our place, and Jack Gore very often came with them. Jack Gore was Bowman’s man—a superior young fellow, so Bowman boasted—one that could always be depended upon. He took his meals with the family and shared the society of their friends; went to church with them, worked his own horse in their plough, and was looked upon as one of the family.

Dave didn’t look upon him as one of the family, though. He was the fly in Dave’s ointment. Dave hated him like poison.