The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Village Watch-Tower, by
(AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

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Title: The Village Watch-Tower

Author: (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

Posting Date: August 7, 2008 [EBook #936]
Release Date: June, 1997
Last Updated: March 10, 2018

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER ***




Produced by R. McGowan, and E. P. McGowan





THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER

by Kate Douglas Wiggin


INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION

These days the name of Kate Douglas Wiggin is virtually unknown. But
if one mentions the title “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” recognition (at
least in America) is instant. Everyone has heard of Rebecca; her story
has been in print continuously since it was first published in 1903.
It is certainly Mrs. Wiggin's most famous book, and the only one of her
many books that is still in print. Everything else she wrote has slipped
into complete obscurity. Occasionally in an antique shop, one may
still find a copy of her immensely popular seasonal book, “The Birds'
Christmas Carol”, but that is about the extent of what is readily
available, even second-hand.

The Birds' Christas Carol is available as our Etext #721, Nov. 1996.

In 1904, Jack London wrote (from Manchuria!) to say that Rebecca had won
his heart. (“She is real,” he wrote, “she lives; she has given me many
regrets, but I love her.”) Some eighty years later I happened to pick
up and read “Rebecca” for the first time. The book was so thoroughly
enjoyable that when I had finished it, I began at once a search for
other works by the same author--especially for a sequel to “Rebecca”,
which seemed practically to demand one. There was never a sequel
written, but “The New Chronicles of Rebecca” was published in 1907, and
contained some further chapters in the life of its heroine. I had to be
satisfied with that, for the time being. Then, well over a year after
jotting down Mrs. Wiggin's name on my list of authors to “purchase on
sight”, I finally ran across a copy of “The Village Watch-Tower”; and it
was not even a book of which I had heard. It was first published in
1895 by Houghton, who published much of her other work at the time, and
apparently was never published again. Shortly thereafter I found a copy
of her autobiography.

Kate Douglas Wiggin (nee Smith) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
on September 28, 1856. She was raised for the most-part in Maine, which
forms a backdrop to much of her fiction. She moved to California in
the 1870s, and became involved in the “free kindergarten” movement. She
opened the Silver Street Free Kindergarten in San Francisco, the first
free kindergarten in California, and there she worked until the late
1880s (meantime opening her own training school for teachers). Her first
husband, Samuel Wiggin, died in 1889. By then famous, she returned to
New York and Maine. She moved in international social circles, lecturing
and giving readings from her work. In 1895 she married for the second
time (to George Riggs).

At her home in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate and Marin
County, she wrote her first book, “The Birds' Christmas Carol”, to raise
money for her school. The book also proved to be her means of entrance
into publishing, translation, and travel in elite circles throughout
Europe. The book was republished many times thereafter, and translated
into several languages. In addition to factual and educational works
(undertaken together with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith) she also
wrote a number of other popular novels in the early years of the 20th
century, including “Rebecca”, and “The Story of Waitstill Baxter”
 (1913). She died in 1923, on August 23, at Harrow-on-Hill, England.

Beverly Seaton observed, in “American Women Writers”, that Mrs. Wiggin
was “a popular writer who expressed what her contemporaries themselves
thought of as 'real life'” (p. 413). “The Village Watch-Tower” I think
is a perfect example of that observation; it captures vividly a few
frozen moments of rural America, right at the twilight of the 19th
century. Most of it was written in the village of Quillcote, Maine,
her childhood home--and certainly the model for the village of these
stories.

No attempt has been made to edit this book for consistency or to
update or “correct” the spelling. Mrs. Wiggin's spelling is somewhat
transitional between modern American and British spellings. The only
liberty taken is that of removing extra spaces in contractions. E.g.,
I have used “wouldn't” where the original has consistently “would
n't”; this is true for all such contractions with “n't” which appeared
inordinately distracting to the modern reader.

R. McGowan, San Jose, March 1997





THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER


Dear old apple-tree, under whose gnarled branches these stories were
written, to you I dedicate the book. My head was so close to you, who
can tell from whence the thoughts came? I only know that when all the
other trees in the orchard were barren, there were always stories to be
found under your branches, and so it is our joint book, dear apple-tree.
Your pink blossoms have fallen on the page as I wrote; your ruddy fruit
has dropped into my lap; the sunshine streamed through your leaves and
tipped my pencil with gold. The birds singing in your boughs may have
lent a sweet note here and there; and do you remember the day when the
gentle shower came? We just curled the closer, and you and I and the sky
all cried together while we wrote “The Fore-Room Rug.”

It should be a lovely book, dear apple-tree, but alas! it is not
altogether that, because I am not so simple as you, and because I have
strayed farther away from the heart of Mother Nature.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

“Quillcote,” Hollis, Maine, August 12, 1895.




CONTENTS.

     The Village Watch-Tower                 1
     Tom o' the Blueb'ry Plains             31
     The Nooning Tree                       55
     The Fore-Room Rug                      95
     A Village Stradivarius                123
     The Eventful Trip of the Midnight Cry 195





THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER.


It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house, with its
weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles. It was in the
very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost knock on the
window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare occasions
when he brought “old Mis' Bascom” a parcel from Saco.

Humble and dilapidated as it was, it was almost beautiful in the
springtime, when the dandelion-dotted turf grew close to the great stone
steps; or in the summer, when the famous Bascom elm cast its graceful
shadow over the front door. The elm, indeed, was the only object that
ever did cast its shadow there. Lucinda Bascom said her “front door 'n'
entry never hed ben used except for fun'rals, 'n' she was goin' to keep
it nice for that purpose, 'n' not get it all tracked up.”

She was sitting now where she had sat for thirty years. Her high-backed
rocker, with its cushion of copperplate patch and its crocheted tidy,
stood always by a southern window that looked out on the river. The
river was a sheet of crystal, as it poured over the dam; a rushing,
roaring torrent of foaming white, as it swept under the bridge and
fought its way between the rocky cliffs beyond, sweeping swirling,
eddying, in its narrow channel, pulsing restlessly into the ragged
fissures of its shores, and leaping with a tempestuous roar into the
Witches' Eel-pot, a deep wooded gorge cleft in the very heart of the
granite bank.

But Lucinda Bascom could see more than the river from her favorite
window. It was a much-traveled road, the road that ran past the house
on its way from Liberty Village to Milliken's Mills. A tottering old
sign-board, on a verdant triangle of turf, directed you over Deacon
Chute's hill to the “Flag Medder Road,” and from thence to Liberty
Centre; the little post-office and store, where the stage stopped twice
a day, was quite within eyeshot; so were the public watering-trough,
Brigadier Hill, and, behind the ruins of an old mill, the wooded path
that led to the Witches' Eel-pot, a favorite walk for village lovers.
This was all on her side of the river. As for the bridge which knit
together the two tiny villages, nobody could pass over that without
being seen from the Bascoms'. The rumble of wheels generally brought
a family party to the window,--Jot Bascom's wife (she that was Diadema
Dennett), Jot himself, if he were in the house, little Jot, and grandpa
Bascom, who looked at the passers-by with a vacant smile parting his
thin lips. Old Mrs. Bascom herself did not need the rumble of wheels
to tell her that a vehicle was coming, for she could see it fully ten
minutes before it reached the bridge,--at the very moment it appeared
at the crest of Saco Hill, where strangers pulled up their horses, on
a clear day, and paused to look at Mount Washington, miles away in the
distance. Tory Hill and Saco Hill met at the bridge, and just there,
too, the river road began its shady course along the east side of the
stream: in view of all which “old Mis' Bascom's settin'-room winder”
 might well be called the “Village Watch-Tower,” when you consider
further that she had moved only from her high-backed rocker to her bed,
and from her bed to her rocker, for more than thirty years,--ever since
that july day when her husband had had a sun-stroke while painting the
meeting-house steeple, and her baby Jonathan had been thereby hastened
into a world not in the least ready to receive him.

She could not have lived without that window, she would have told you,
nor without the river, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she
could remember. It was in the south chamber upstairs that she had been
born. Her mother had lain there and listened to the swirl of the water,
in that year when the river was higher than the oldest inhabitant had
ever seen it,--the year when the covered bridge at the Mills had been
carried away, and when the one at the Falls was in hourly danger of
succumbing to the force of the freshet.

All the men in both villages were working on the river, strengthening
the dam, bracing the bridge, and breaking the jams of logs; and with the
parting of the boom, the snapping of the bridge timbers, the crashing
of the logs against the rocks, and the shouts of the river-drivers,
the little Lucinda had come into the world. Some one had gone for
the father, and had found him on the river, where he had been since
day-break, drenched with the storm, blown fro his dangerous footing time
after time, but still battling with the great heaped-up masses of logs,
wrenching them from one another's grasp, and sending them down the
swollen stream.

Finally the jam broke; and a cheer of triumph burst from the excited
men, as the logs, freed from their bondage, swept down the raging
flood, on and ever on in joyous liberty, faster and faster, till they
encountered some new obstacle, when they heaped themselves together
again, like puppets of Fate, and were beaten by the waves into another
helpless surrender.

With the breaking of the jam, one dead monarch of the forest leaped into
the air as if it had been shot from a cannon's mouth, and lodged between
two jutting peaks of rock high on the river bank. Presently another log
was dashed against it, but rolled off and hurried down the stream; then
another, and still another; but no force seemed enough to drive the
giant from its intrenched position.

“Hurry on down to the next jam, Raish, and let it alone,” cried the men.
“Mebbe it'll git washed off in the night, and anyhow you can't budge it
with no kind of a tool we've got here.”

Then from the shore came a boy's voice calling, “There's a baby up to
your house!” And the men repeated in stentorian tones, “Baby up to your
house, Raish! Leggo the log; you're wanted!”

“Boy or girl?” shouted the young father.

“Girl!” came back the answer above the roar of the river.

Whereupon Raish Dunnell steadied himself with his pick and taking a
hatchet from his belt, cut a rude letter “L” on the side of the stranded
log.

“L's for Lucindy,” he laughed. “Now you log if you git's fur as Saco,
drop in to my wife's folks and tell 'em the baby's name.”

There had not been such a freshet for years before, and there had never
been one since; so, as the quiet seasons went by, “Lucindy's log” was
left in peace, the columbines blooming all about it, the harebells
hanging their heads of delicate blue among the rocks that held it in
place, the birds building their nests in the knot-holes of its withered
side.

Seventy years had passed, and on each birthday, from the time when she
was only “Raish Dunnell's little Lou,” to the years when she was Lucinda
Bascom, wife and mother, she had wandered down by the river side, and
gazed, a little superstitiously perhaps, on the log that had been marked
with an “L” on the morning she was born. It had stood the wear and tear
of the elements bravely, but now it was beginning, like Lucinda, to show
its age. Its back was bent, like hers; its face was seamed and wrinkled,
like her own; and the village lovers who looked at it from the opposite
bank wondered if, after all, it would hold out as long as “old Mis'
Bascom.”

She held out bravely, old Mrs. Bascom, though she was “all skin, bones,
and tongue,” as the neighbors said; for nobody needed to go into the
Bascoms' to brighten up aunt Lucinda a bit, or take her the news; one
went in to get a bit of brightness, and to hear the news.

“I should get lonesome, I s'pose,” she was wont to say, “if it wa'n't
for the way this house is set, and this chair, and this winder, 'n' all.
Men folks used to build some o' the houses up in a lane, or turn 'em
back or side to the road, so the women folks couldn't see anythin' to
keep their minds off their churnin' or dish-washin'; but Aaron Dunnell
hed somethin' else to think about, 'n' that was himself, first, last,
and all the time. His store was down to bottom of the hill, 'n' when he
come up to his meals, he used to set where he could see the door; 'n'
if any cust'mer come, he could call to 'em to wait a spell till he got
through eatin'. Land! I can hear him now, yellin' to 'em, with his mouth
full of victuals! They hed to wait till he got good 'n' ready, too.
There wa'n't so much comp'tition in business then as there is now, or
he'd 'a' hed to give up eatin' or hire a clerk. ... I've always felt to
be thankful that the house was on this rise o' ground. The teams hev to
slow up on 'count o' the hill, 'n' it gives me consid'ble chance to see
folks 'n' what they've got in the back of the wagon, 'n' one thing 'n'
other. ... The neighbors is continually comin' in here to talk about
things that's goin' on in the village. I like to hear 'em, but land!
they can't tell me nothing'! They often say, 'For massy sakes, Lucindy
Bascom, how d' you know that?' 'Why,' says I to them, 'I don't ask no
questions, 'n' folks don't tell me no lies; I just set in my winder,
'n' put two 'n' two together,--that's all I do.' I ain't never ben in a
playhouse, but I don't suppose the play-actors git down off the platform
on t' the main floor to explain to the folks what they've ben doin',
do they? I expect, if folks can't understand their draymas when the're
actin' of 'em out, they have to go ignorant, don't they? Well, what do I
want with explainin', when everythin' is acted out right in the road?”

There was quite a gathering of neighbors at the Bascoms' on this
particular July afternoon. No invitations had been sent out, and none
were needed. A common excitement had made it vital that people should
drop in somewhere, and speculate about certain interesting matters well
known to be going on in the community, but going on in such an underhand
and secretive fashion that it well-nigh destroyed one's faith in human
nature.

The sitting-room door was open into the entry, so that whatever breeze
there was might come in, and an unusual glimpse of the new foreroom rug
was afforded the spectators. Everything was as neat as wax, for Diadema
was a housekeeper of the type fast passing away. The great coal stove
was enveloped in its usual summer wrapper of purple calico, which, tied
neatly about its ebony neck and portly waist, gave it the appearance
of a buxom colored lady presiding over the assembly. The kerosene lamps
stood in a row on the high, narrow mantelpiece, each chimney protected
from the flies by a brown paper bag inverted over its head. Two plaster
Samuels praying under the pink mosquito netting adorned the ends of
the shelf. There were screens at all the windows, and Diadema fidgeted
nervously when a visitor came in the mosquito netting door, for fear a
fly should sneak in with her.

On the wall were certificates of membership in the Missionary Society; a
picture of Maidens welcoming Washington in the Streets of Alexandria, in
a frame of cucumber seeds; and an interesting document setting forth the
claims of the Dunnell family as old settlers long before the separation
of Maine from Massachusetts,--the fact bein' established by an obituary
notice reading, “In Saco, December 1791, Dorcas, daughter of Abiathar
Dunnell, two months old of Fits unbaptized.”

“He may be goin' to marry Eunice, and he may not,” observed Almira
Berry; “though what she wants of Reuben Hobson is more 'n I can make
out. I never see a widower straighten up as he has this last year. I
guess he's been lookin' round pretty lively, but couldn't find anybody
that was fool enough to give him any encouragement.”

“Mebbe she wants to get married,” said Hannah Sophia, in a tone that
spoke volumes. “When Parson Perkins come to this parish, one of his
first calls was on Eunice Emery. He always talked like the book o'
Revelation; so says he, 'have you got your weddin' garment on, Miss
Emery?' says he. 'No,' says she, 'but I ben tryin' to these twenty
years.' She was always full of her jokes, Eunice was!”

“The Emerys was always a humorous family,” remarked Diadema, as she
annihilated a fly with a newspaper. “Old Silas Emery was an awful
humorous man. He used to live up on the island; and there come a freshet
one year, and he said he got his sofy 'n' chairs off, anyhow!” That was
just his jokin'. He hadn't a sign of a sofy in the house; 't was his
wife Sophy he meant, she that was Sophy Swett. Then another time, when
I was a little mite of a thin runnin' in 'n' out o' his yard, he caught
holt o' me, and says he, 'You'd better take care, sissy; when I kill you
and two more, thet'll be three children I've killed!' Land! you couldn't
drag me inside that yard for years afterwards. ... There! she's got
a fire in the cook-stove; there's a stream o' smoke comin' out o'
the kitchen chimbley. I'm willin' to bet my new rug she's goin' to be
married tonight!'

“Mebbe she's makin' jell',” suggested Hannah Sophia.

“Jell'!” ejaculated Mrs. Jot scornfully. “Do you s'pose Eunice Emery
would build up a fire in the middle o' the afternoon 'n' go to makin' a
jell', this hot day? Besides, there ain't a currant gone into her house
this week, as I happen to know.”

“It's a dretful thick year for fol'age,” mumbled grandpa Bascom,
appearing in the door with his vacant smile. “I declare some o' the
maples looks like balls in the air.”

“That's the twentieth time he's hed that over since mornin',” said
Diadema. “Here, father, take your hat off 'n' set in the kitchen door
'n' shell me this mess o' peas. Now think smart, 'n' put the pods in the
basket 'n' the peas in the pan; don't you mix 'em.”

The old man hung his hat on the back of the chair, took the pan in his
trembling hands, and began aimlessly to open the pods, while he chuckled
at the hens that gathered round the doorstep when they heard the peas
rattling in the pan.

“Reuben needs a wife bad enough, if that's all,” remarked the Widow
Buzzell, as one who had given the matter some consideration.

“I should think he did,” rejoined old Mrs. Bascom. “Those children 'bout
git their livin' off the road in summer, from the time the dand'lion
greens is ready for diggin' till the blackb'ries 'n' choke-cherries
is gone. Diademy calls 'em in 'n' gives 'em a cooky every time they go
past, 'n' they eat as if they was famished. Rube Hobson never was any
kind of a pervider, 'n' he's consid'able snug besides.”

“He ain't goin' to better himself much,” said Almira. “Eunice Emery
ain't fit to housekeep for a cat. The pie she took to the pie supper at
the church was so tough that even Deacon Dyer couldn't eat it; and the
boys got holt of her doughnuts, and declared they was goin' fishin' next
day 'n' use 'em for sinkers. She lives from hand to mouth Eunice Emery
does. She's about as much of a doshy as Rube is. She'll make tea that's
strong enough to bear up an egg, most, and eat her doughnuts with it
three times a day rather than take the trouble to walk out to the meat
or the fish cart. I know for a fact she don't make riz bread once a
year.”

“Mebbe her folks likes buttermilk bread best; some do,” said the Widow
Buzzell. “My husband always said, give him buttermilk bread to work on.
He used to say my riz bread was so light he'd hev to tread on it to
keep it anywheres; but when you'd eat buttermilk bread he said you'd got
somethin' that stayed by you; you knew where it was every time. ... For
massy sake! there's the stage stoppin' at the Hobson's door. I wonder if
Rube's first wife's mother has come from Moderation? If 't is, they must
'a' made up their quarrel, for there was a time she wouldn't step foot
over that doorsill. She must be goin' to stay some time, for there's a
trunk on the back o' the stage. ... No, there ain't nobody gettin' out.
Land, Hannah Sophia, don't push me clean through the glass! It beats me
why they make winders so small that three people can't look out of 'em
without crowdin'. Ain't that a wash-boiler he's handin' down? Well, it's
a mercy; he's ben borrowin' long enough!”

“What goes on after dark I ain't responsible for,” commented old Mrs.
Bascom, “but no new wash-boiler has gone into Rube Hobson's door in the
daytime for many a year, and I'll be bound it means somethin'. There
goes a broom, too. Much sweepin' he'll get out o' Eunice; it's a slick
'n' a promise with her!”

“When did you begin to suspicion this, Diademy?” asked Almira Berry.
“I've got as much faculty as the next one, but anybody that lives on
the river road has just got to give up knowin' anything. You can't keep
runnin' to the store every day, and if you could you don't find out much
nowadays. Bill Peters don't take no more interest in his neighbors than
a cow does in election.”

“I can't get mother Bascom to see it as I do,” said Diadema, “but for
one thing she's ben carryin' home bundles 'bout every other night for
a month, though she's ben too smart to buy anythin' here at this store.
She had Packard's horse to go to Saco last week. When she got home, jest
at dusk, she drove int' the barn, 'n' bimeby Pitt Packard come to git
his horse,--'t was her own buggy she went with. She looked over here
when she went int' the house, 'n' she ketched my eye, though 't was half
a mile away, so she never took a thing in with her, but soon as't was
dark she made three trips out to the barn with a lantern, 'n' any fool
could tell 't her arms was full o' pa'cels by the way she carried the
lantern. The Hobsons and the Emerys have married one another more 'n
once, as fur as that goes. I declare if I was goin' to get married I
should want to be relation to somebody besides my own folks.”

“The reason I can hardly credit it,” said Hannah Sophia, “is because
Eunice never had a beau in her life, that I can remember of. Cyse
Higgins set up with her for a spell, but it never amounted to nothin'.
It seems queer, too, for she was always so fond o' seein' men folks
round that when Pitt Packard was shinglin' her barn she used to go out
nights 'n' rip some o' the shingles off, so 't he'd hev more days' work
on it.”

“I always said 't was she that begun on Rube Hobson, not him on her,”
 remarked the Widow Buzzell. “Their land joinin' made courtin' come
dretful handy. His critters used to git in her field 'bout every other
day (I always suspicioned she broke the fence down herself), and then
she'd hev to go over and git him to drive 'em out. She's wed his onion
bed for him two summers, as I happen to know, for I've been ou' doors
more 'n common this summer, tryin' to fetch my constitution up. Diademy,
don't you want to look out the back way 'n' see if Rube's come home
yet?”

“He ain't,” said old Mrs. Bascom, “so you needn't look; can't you see
the curtains is all down? He's gone up to the Mills, 'n' it's my opinion
he's gone to speak to the minister.”

“He hed somethin' in the back o' the wagon covered up with an old linen
lap robe; 't ain't at all likely he 'd 'a' hed that if he'd ben goin' to
the minister's,” objected Mrs. Jot.

“Anybody'd think you was born yesterday, to hear you talk, Diademy,”
 retorted her mother-in-law. “When you 've set in one spot's long's I
hev, p'raps you'll hev the use o' your faculties! Men folks has more 'n
one way o' gettin' married, 'specially when they 're ashamed of it. ...
Well, I vow, there's the little Hobson girls comin' out o' the door
this minute, 'n' they 're all dressed up, and Mote don't seem to be with
'em.”

Every woman in the room rose to her feet, and Diadema removed her
murderous eye from a fly which she had been endeavoring to locate for
some moments.

“I guess they 're goin' up to the church to meet their father 'n'
Eunice, poor little things,” ventured the Widow Buzzell.

“P'raps they be,” said old Mrs. Bascom sarcastically; “p'raps they be
goin' to church, takin' a three-quart tin pail 'n' a brown paper bundle
along with 'em. ... They 're comin' over the bridge, just as I s'posed.
... Now, if they come past this house, you head 'em off, Almiry, 'n' see
if you can git some satisfaction out of 'em. ... They ain't hardly old
enough to hold their tongues.”

An exciting interview soon took place in the middle of the road, and
Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had penetrated
the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. She had been
vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness which almost dazzle
the beholder.

“That's about the confirmingest thing I've heern yet!” she ejaculated,
as she took off her shaker bonnet. “They say they're goin' up to their
aunt Hitty's to stay two days. They're dressed in their best, clean to
the skin, for I looked; 'n' it's their night gownds they've got in the
bundle. They say little Mote has gone to Union to stop all night with
his uncle Abijah, 'n' that leaves Rube all alone, for the smith girl
that does his chores is home sick with the hives. And what do you s'pose
is in the pail? _Fruit_ _cake_,--that's what 't is, no more 'n' no less!
I knowed that Smith girl didn't bake it, 'n' so I asked 'em, 'n' they
said Miss Emery give it to 'em. There was two little round try-cakes,
baked in muffin-rings. Eunice hed took some o' the batter out of a
big loaf 'n' baked it to se how it was goin' to turn out. That means
wedding-cake, or I'm mistaken!”

“There ain't no gittin' round that,” agreed the assembled company, “now
is there, Mis' Bascom?”

Old Mrs. Bascom wet her finger, smoothed the parting of her false front,
and looked inscrutable.

“I don't see why you're so secret,” objected Diadema.

“I've got my opinions, and I've had 'em some time,” observed the good
lady. “I don't know 's I'm bound to tell 'em and have 'em held up to
ridicule. Let the veal hang, I say. If any one of us is right, we'll all
know to-morrow.”

“Well, all any of us has got to judge from is appearances,” said
Diadema, “and how you can twist 'em one way, and us another, stumps me!”

“Perhaps I see more appearances than you do,” retorted her
mother-in-law. “Some folks mistakes all they see for all there is. I was
reading a detective story last week. It seems there was an awful murder
in Schenectady, and a mother and her two children was found dead in one
bed, with bullet holes in their heads. The husband was away on business,
and there wasn't any near neighbors to hear her screech. Well, the
detectives come from far and from near, and begun to work up the case.
One of 'em thought 't was the husband,--though he set such store by his
wife he went ravin' crazy when he heard she was dead,--one of 'em laid
it on the children,--though they was both under six years old; and one
decided it was suicide,--though the woman was a church member and
didn't know how to fire a gun off, besides. And then there come along
a detective younger and smarter than all the rest, and says he, 'If
all you bats have seen everything you can see, I guess I'll take a look
around,' says he. Sure enough, there was a rug with 'Welcome' on it
layin' in front of the washstand, and when he turned it up he found
an elegant diamond stud with a man's full name and address on the gold
part. He took a train and went right to the man's house. He was so taken
by surprise (he hadn't missed the stud, for he had a full set of 'em)
that he owned right up and confessed the murder.”

“I don't see as that's got anything to do with this case,” said Diadema.

“It's got this much to do with it,” replied old Mrs. Bascom, “that
perhaps you've looked all round the room and seen everything you had
eyes to see, and perhaps I've had wit enough to turn up the rug in front
o' the washstand.”

“Whoever he marries now, Mis' Bascom'll have to say 't was the one she
meant,” laughed the Widow Buzzell.

“I never was caught cheatin' yet, and if I live till Saturday I shall be
seventy-one years old,” said the old lady with some heat. “Hand me Jot's
lead pencil, Diademy, and that old envelope on the winder sill. I'll
write the name I think of, and shut it up in the old Bible. My hand's
so stiff to-day I can't hardly move it, but I guess I can make it plain
enough to satisfy you.”

“That's fair 'n' square,” said Hannah Sophia, “and for my pat I hope it
ain't Eunice, for I like her too well. What they're goin' to live on is
more 'n I can see. Add nothin' to nothin' 'n' you git nothin',--that's
arethmetic! He ain't hed a cent o' ready money sence he failed up four
years ago, 'thout it was that hundred dollars that fell to him from his
wife's aunt. Eunice'll hev her hands full this winter, I guess, with
them three hearty children 'n' him all wheezed up with phthisic from
October to April!... Who's that coming' down Tory Hill? It's Rube's
horse 'n' Rube's wagon, but it don't look like Rube.”

“Yes, it's Rube; but he's got a new Panama hat, 'n' he 's hed his linen
duster washed,” said old Mrs. Bascom. ... “Now, do you mean to tell me
that that woman with a stuck-up hat on is Eunice Emery? It ain't, 'n'
that green parasol don't belong to this village. He's drivin' her into
his yard!... Just as I s'posed, it's that little, smirkin' worthless
school-teacher up to the Mills.--Don't break my neck, Diademy; can't you
see out the other winder?--Yes, he's helpin' her out, 'n' showin' her
in. He can't 'a' ben married more'n ten minutes, for he's goin' clear up
the steps to open the door for her!”

“Wait 'n' see if he takes his horse out,” said Hannah Sophia. “Mebbe
he'll drive her back in a few minutes. ... No, he's onhitched! ...
There, he's hangin' up the head-stall!”

“I've ben up in the attic chamber,” called the Widow Buzzell, as she
descended the stairs; “she's pulled up the curtains, and took off her
hat right in front o' the winder, 's bold as a brass kettle! She's come
to stay! Ain't that Rube Hobson all over,--to bring another woman int'
this village 'stid o' weedin' one of 'em out as he'd oughter. He ain't
got any more public sperit than a--hedgehog, 'n' never had!”

Almira drew on her mitts excitedly, tied on her shaker, and started for
the door.

“I'm goin' over to Eunice's,” she said, “and I'm goin' to take my bottle
of camphire. I shouldn't wonder a mite if I found her in a dead faint on
the kitchen floor. Nobody need tell me she wa'n't buildin' hopes.”

“I'll go with you,” said the Widow Buzzell. “I'd like to see with my
own eyes how she takes it, 'n' it'll be too late to tell if I wait
till after supper. If she'd ben more open with me 'n' ever asked for my
advice, I could 'a' told her it wa'n't the first time Rube Hobson has
played that trick.”

“I'd come too if 't wa'n't milkin' but Jot ain't home from the Centre,
and I've got to do his chores; come in as you go along back, will you?”
 asked Diadema.

Hannah Sophia remained behind, promising to meet them at the post-office
and hear the news. As the two women walked down the hill she drew the
old envelope from the Bible and read the wavering words scrawled upon it
in old Mrs. Bascom's rheumatic and uncertain hand,--

_the_ _milikins_ _Mills_ _Teecher._


“Well Lucindy, you do make good use o' your winder,” she exclaimed, “but
how you pitched on anything so onlikely as her is more'n I can see.”

“Just because 't was onlikely. A man's a great sight likelier to do an
onlikely thing than he is a likely one, when it comes to marryin'. In
the first place, Rube sent his children to school up to the Mills 'stid
of to the brick schoolhouse, though he had to pay a little something to
get 'em taken in to another deestrick. They used to come down at night
with their hands full o' 'ward o' merit cards. Do you s'pose I thought
they got 'em for good behavior, or for knowin' their lessons? Then aunt
Hitty told me some question or other Rube had asked examination day.
Since when has Rube Hobson 'tended examinations, thinks I. And when I
see the girl, a red-and-white paper doll that wouldn't know whether to
move the churn-dasher up 'n' down or round 'n' round, I made up my
mind that bein' a man he'd take her for certain, and not his next-door
neighbor of a sensible age and a house 'n' farm 'n' cow 'n' buggy!”

“Sure enough,” agreed Hannah Sophia, “though that don't account for
Eunice's queer actions, 'n' the pa'cels 'n' the fruit cake.”

“When I make out a case,” observed Mrs. Bascom modestly, “I ain't one to
leave weak spots in it. If I guess at all, I go all over the ground
'n' stop when I git through. Now, sisters or no sisters, Maryabby Emery
ain't spoke to Eunice sence she moved to Salem. But if Eunice has ben
bringin' pa'cels home, Maryabby must 'a' paid for what was in 'em; and
if she's ben bakin' fruit cake this hot day, why Maryabby used to be
so font o' fruit cake her folks were afraid she'd have fits 'n' die.
I shall be watchin' here as usual to-morrow morning', 'n' if Maryabby
don't drive int' Eunice's yard before noon I won't brag any more for a
year to come.”

Hannah Sophia gazed at old Mrs. Bascom with unstinted admiration. “You
do beat all,” she said; “and I wish I could stay all night 'n' see how
it turns out, but Almiry is just comin' over the bridge, 'n' I must
start 'n' meet her. Good-by. I'm glad to see you so smart; you always
look slim, but I guess you'll tough it out's long 's the rest of us. I
see your log was all right, last time I was down side o' the river.”


“They say it 's jest goin' to break in two in the middle, and fall into
the river,” cheerfully responded Lucinda. “They say it's just hanging'
on by a thread. Well, that's what they 've ben sayin' about me these
ten years, 'n' here I be still hanging! It don't make no odds, I guess,
whether it's a thread or a rope you 're hangin' by, so long as you
hang.”

* * *


The next morning, little Mote Hobson, who had stayed all night with his
uncle in Union, was walking home by the side of the river. He strolled
along, the happy, tousle-headed, barefooted youngster, eyes one moment
on the trees in the hope of squirrels and birds'-nests, the next on the
ground in search of the first blueberries. As he stooped to pick up a
bit of shining quartz to add to the collection in his ragged trousers'
pockets he glanced across the river, and at that very instant Lucinda's
log broke gently in twain, rolled down the bank, crumbling as it went,
and, dropping in like a tired child, was carried peacefully along on the
river's breast.

Mote walked more quickly after that. It was quite a feather in his cap
to see, with his own eyes, the old landmark slip from its accustomed
place and float down the stream. The other boys would miss it and say,
“It's gone!” He would say, “I saw it go!”

Grandpa Bascom was standing at the top of the hill. His white locks were
uncovered, and he was in his shirt-sleeves. Baby Jot, as usual, held
fast by his shaking hand, for they loved each other, these two. The
cruel stroke of the sun that had blurred the old man's brain had spared
a blessed something in him that won the healing love of children.

“How d' ye, Mote?” he piped in his feeble voice. “They say Lucindy's
dead. ... Jot says she is, 'n' Diademy says she is, 'n' I guess she is.
... It 's a dretful thick year for fol'age; ... some o' the maples looks
like balls in the air.”

Mote looked in at the window. The neighbors were hurrying to and fro.
Diadema sat with her calico apron up to her face, sobbing; and for the
first morning in thirty years, old Mrs. Bascom's high-backed rocker was
empty, and there was no one sitting in the village watch-tower.




TOM O' THE BLUEB'RY PLAINS.


The sky is a shadowless blue; the noon-day sun glows fiercely; a cloud
of dust rises from the burning road whenever the hot breeze stirs the
air, or whenever a farm wagon creaks along, its wheels sinking into the
deep sand.

In the distance, where the green of the earth joins the blue of the sky,
gleams the silver line of a river.

As far as the eye an reach, the ground is covered with blueberry bushes;
red leaves peeping among green ones; bloom of blue fruit hanging in full
warm clusters,--spheres of velvet mellowed by summer sun, moistened with
crystal dew, spiced with fragrance of woods.

In among the blueberry bushes grow huckleberries, “choky pears,” and
black-snaps.

Gnarled oaks and stunted pines lift themselves out of the wilderness of
shrubs. They look dwarfed and gloomy, as if Nature had been an untender
mother, and denied them proper nourishment.

The road is a little-traveled one, and furrows of feathery grasses grow
between the long, hot, sandy stretches of the wheel-ruts.

The first goldenrod gleams among the loose stones at the foot of the
alder bushes. Whole families of pale butterflies, just out of their
long sleep, perch on the brilliant stalks and tilter up and down in the
sunshine.

Straggling processions of wooly brown caterpillars wend their way in
the short grass by the wayside, where the wild carrot and the purple
bull-thistle are coming into bloom.

The song of birds is seldom heard, and the blueberry plains are given
over to silence save for the buzzing of gorged flies, the humming of
bees, and the chirping of crickets that stir the drowsy air when the
summer begins to wane.

It is so still that the shuffle-shuffle of a footstep can be heard in
the distance, the tinkle of a tin pail swinging musically to and fro,
the swish of an alder switch cropping the heads of the roadside weeds.
All at once a voice breaks the stillness. Is it a child's, a woman's, or
a man's? Neither yet all three.

     “I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,
     An' hear the whis-sle of the jol-ly
     --swain.”

Everybody knows the song, and everybody knows the cracked voice. The
master of this bit of silent wilderness is coming home: it is Tom o' the
blueb'ry plains.

He is more than common tall, with a sandy beard, and a mop of tangled
hair straggling beneath his torn straw hat. A square of wet calico drips
from under the back of the hat. His gingham shirt is open at the throat,
showing his tanned neck and chest. Warm as it is, he wears portions of
at least three coats on his back. His high boots, split in foot and leg,
are mended and spliced and laced and tied on with bits of shingle rope.
He carries a small tin pail of molasses. It has a bail of rope, and
a battered cover with a knob of sticky newspaper. Over one shoulder,
suspended on a crooked branch, hangs a bundle of basket stuff,--split
willow withes and the like; over the other swings a decrepit,
bottomless, three-legged chair.


I call him the master of the plains, but in faith he had no legal claim
to the title. If he owned a habitation or had established a home on any
spot in the universe, it was because no man envied him what he took; for
Tom was one of God's fools, a foot-loose pilgrim in this world of
ours, a poor addle-pated, simple-minded, harmless creature,--in village
parlance, a “softy.”

Mother or father, sister or brother, he had none, nor ever had, so far
as any one knew; but how should people who had to work from sun-up to
candlelight to get the better of the climate have leisure to discover
whether or no Blueb'ry Tom had any kin?

At some period in an almost forgotten past there had been a house on
Tom's particular patch of the plains. It had long since tumbled
into ruins and served for fire-wood and even the chimney bricks had
disappeared one by one, as the monotonous seasons came and went.

Tom had settled himself in an old tool-shop, corn-house, or rude
out-building of some sort that had belonged to the ruined cottage. Here
he had set up his house-hold gods; and since no one else had ever wanted
a home in this dreary tangle of berry bushes, where the only shade came
from stunted pines that flung shriveled arms to the sky and dropped dead
cones to the sterile earth, here he remained unmolested.

In the lower part of the hut he kept his basket stuff and his collection
of two-legged and three-legged chairs. In the course of evolution they
never sprouted another leg, those chairs; as they were given to him,
so they remained. The upper floor served for his living-room, and was
reached by a ladder from the ground, for there was no stairway inside.

No one had ever been in the little upper chamber. When a passer-by
chanced to be-think him that Tom's hermitage was close at hand, he
sometimes turned in his team by a certain clump of white birches and
drove nearer to the house, intending to remind Tom that there was a
chair to willow-bottom the next time he came to the village. But at
the noise of the wheels Tom drew in his ladder; and when the visitor
alighted and came within sight, it was to find the inhospitable host
standing in the opening of the second-story window, a quaint figure
framed in green branches, the ladder behind him, and on his face a kind
of impenetrable dignity, as he shook his head and said, “Tom ain't ter
hum; Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle.”

There was something impressive about his way of repelling callers; it
was as effectual as a door slammed in the face, and yet there was a sort
of mendacious courtesy about it. No one ever cared to go further;
and indeed there was no mystery to tempt the curious, and no spoil to
attract the mischievous or the malicious. Any one could see, without
entering, the straw bed in the far corner, the beams piled deep with
red and white oak acorns, the strings of dried apples and bunches of
everlastings hanging from the rafters, and the half-finished baskets
filled with blown bird's-eggs, pine cones, and pebbles.

No home in the village was better loved than Tom's retreat in the
blueberry plains. Whenever he approached it, after a long day's tramp,
when he caught the first sight of the white birches that marked the
gateway to his estate and showed him where to turn off the public road
into his own private grounds, he smiled a broader smile than usual, and
broke into his well-known song:

     “I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,
     An' hear the whis-sle of the jol-ly
     --swain.”

Poor Tom could never catch the last note. He had sung the song for more
than forty years, but the memory of this tone was so blurred, and his
cherished ideal of it so high (or so low, rather), that he never managed
to reach it.

Oh, if only summer were eternal! Who could wish a better supper than
ripe berries and molasses? Nor was there need of sleeping under roof nor
of lighting candles to grope his way to pallet of straw, when he might
have the blue vault of heaven arching over him, and all God's stars for
lamps, and for a bed a horse blanket stretched over an elastic couch of
pine needles. There were two gaunt pines that had been dropping their
polished spills for centuries, perhaps silently adding, year by year,
another layer of aromatic springiness to poor Tom's bed. Flinging his
tired body on this grateful couch, burying his head in the crushed sweet
fern of his pillow with one deep-drawn sigh of pleasure,--there, haunted
by no past and harassed by no future, slept God's fool as sweetly as a
child.

Yes, if only summer were eternal, and youth as well!

But when the blueberries had ripened summer after summer, and the gaunt
pine-trees had gone on for many years weaving poor Tom's mattress, there
came a change in the aspect of things. He still made his way to the
village, seeking chairs to mend; but he was even more unkempt than of
old, his tall figure was bent, and his fingers trembled as he wove the
willow strands in and out, and over and under.

There was little work to do, moreover, for the village had altogether
retired from business, and was no longer in competition with its
neighbors: the dam was torn away, the sawmills were pulled down;
husbands and fathers were laid in the churchyard, sons and brothers and
lovers had gone West, and mothers and widows and spinsters stayed on,
each in her quiet house alone. “'T ain't no hardship when you get used
to it,” said the Widow Buzzell. “Land sakes! a lantern 's 's good 's a
man any time, if you only think so, 'n' 't ain't half so much trouble to
keep it filled up!”

But Tom still sold a basket occasionally, and the children always
gathered about him for the sake of hearing him repeat his well-worn
formula,--“Tom allers puts two handles on baskets: one to take 'em up by,
one to set 'em down by.” This was said with a beaming smile and a wise
shake of the head, as if he were announcing a great discovery to an
expectant world. And then he would lay down his burden of basket stuff,
and, sitting under an apple-tree in somebody's side yard, begin his task
of willow-bottoming an old chair. It was a pretty sight enough, if one
could keep back the tears,--the kindly, simple fellow with the circle of
children about his knees. Never a village fool without a troop of babies
at his heels. They love him, too, till we teach them to mock.

When he was younger, he would sing,

     “Rock-a-by, baby, on the treetop,”

and dance the while, swinging his unfinished basket to and fro for a
cradle. He was too stiff in the joints for dancing nowadays, but
he still sang the “bloomin' gy-ar-ding” when ever they asked him,
particularly if some apple-cheeked little maid would say, “Please, Tom!”
 He always laughed then, and, patting the child's hand, said, “Pooty
gal,--got eyes!” The youngsters dance with glee at this meaningless
phrase, just as their mothers had danced years before when it was said
to them.

Summer waned. In the moist places the gentian uncurled its blue fringes;
purple asters and gay Joe Pye waved their colors by the roadside; tall
primroses put their yellow bonnets on, and peeped over the brooks to see
themselves; and the dusty pods of the milkweed were bursting with their
silky fluffs, the spinning of the long summer. Autumn began to paint the
maples red and the elms yellow, for the early days of September brought
a frost. Some one remarked at the village store that old Blueb'ry Tom
must not be suffered to stay on the plains another winter, now that he
was getting so feeble,--not if the “_se_leckmen” had to root him out
and take him to the poor-farm. He would surely starve or freeze, and his
death would be laid at their door.

Tom was interviewed. Persuasion, logic, sharp words, all failed to move
him one jot or tittle. He stood in his castle door, with the ladder
behind him, smiling, always smiling (none but the fool smiles always,
nor always weeps), and saying to all visitors, “Tom ain't ter hum; Tom's
gone to Bonny Eagle; Tom don' want to go to the poor-farm.”

November came in surly.

The cheerful stir and bustle of the harvest were over, the corn was
shocked, the apples and pumpkins were gathered into barns. The problem
of Tom's future was finally laid before the selectmen; and since the
poor fellow's mild obstinancy had defeated all attempts to conquer it,
the sheriff took the matter in hand.

The blueberry plains looked bleak and bare enough now. It had rained
incessantly for days, growing ever colder and colder as it rained. The
sun came out at last, but it shone in a wintry sort of way,--like a duty
smile,--as if light, not heat, were its object. A keen wind blew the
dead leaves hither and thither in a wild dance that had no merriment in
it. A blackbird flew under an old barrel by the wayside, and, ruffling
himself into a ball, remarked despondently that feathers were no sort of
protection in this kind of climate. A snowbird, flying by, glanced in
at the barrel, and observed that anybody who minded a little breeze like
that had better join the woodcocks, who were leaving for the South by
the night express.

The blueberry bushes were stripped bare of green. The stunted pines and
sombre hemlocks looked in tone with the landscape now; where all was
dreary they did not seem amiss.

“Je-whilikins!” exclaimed the sheriff as he drew up his coat collar.
“A madhouse is the place for the man who wants to live ou'doors in the
winter time; the poor-farm is too good for him.”

But Tom was used to privation, and even to suffering. “Ou'doors” was the
only home he knew, and with all its rigors he loved it. He looked over
the barren plains, knowing, in a dull sort of way, that they would
shortly be covered with snow; but he had three coats, two of them with
sleeves, and the crunch-crunch of the snow under his tread was music
to his ears. Then, too, there were a few hospitable firesides where he
could always warm himself; and the winter would soon be over, the birds
would come again,--new birds, singing the old songs,--the sap would
mount in the trees, the buds swell on the blueberry bushes, and the
young ivory leaves push their ruddy tips through the softening ground.
The plains were fatherland and mother-country, home and kindred, to
Tom. He loved the earth that nourished him, and he saw through all the
seeming death in nature the eternal miracle of the resurrection. To him
winter was never cruel. He looked underneath her white mantle, saw the
infant spring hidden in her warm bosom, and was content to wait. Content
to wait? Content to starve, content to freeze, if only he need not be
carried into captivity.

The poor-farm was not a bad place, either, if only Tom had been a
reasonable being. To be sure, when Hannah Sophia Palmer asked old Mrs.
Pinkham how she liked it, she answered, with a patient sigh, that
“her 'n' Mr. Pinkham hed lived there goin' on nine year, workin' their
fingers to the bone 'most, 'n' yet they hadn't been able to lay up a
cent!” If this peculiarity of administration was its worst feature, it
was certainly one that would have had no terrors for Tom o' the blueb'ry
plains. Terrors of some sort, nevertheless, the poor-farm had for him;
and when the sheriff's party turned in by the clump of white birches and
approached the cabin, they found that fear had made the simple wise. Tom
had provished the little upper chamber, and, in place of the piece of
sacking that usually served him for a door in winter, he had woven a
defense of willow. In fine, he had taken all his basket stuff, and,
treating the opening through which he entered and left his home
precisely as if it were a bottomless chair, he had filled it in solidly,
weaving to and fro, by night as well as by day, till he felt, poor fool,
as safely intrenched as if he were in the heart of a fortress.

The sheriff tied his horse to a tree, and Rube Hobson and Pitt Packard
got out of the double wagon. Two men laughed when they saw the pathetic
defense, but the other shut his lips together and caught his breath.
(He had been born on a poor-farm, but no one knew it at Pleasant River.)
They called Tom's name repeatedly, but no other sound broke the silence
of the plains save the rustling of the wind among the dead leaves.

“Numb-head!” muttered the sheriff, pounding on the side of the cabin
with his whip-stock. “Come out and show yourself! We know you're in
there, and it's no use hiding!”

At last in response to a deafening blow from Rube Hobson's hard fist,
there came the answering note of a weak despairing voice.

“Tom ain't ter hum,” it said; “Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle.”

“That's all right!” guffawed the men; “but you've got to go some more,
and go a diff'rent way. It ain't no use fer you to hold back; we've got
a ladder, and by Jiminy! you go with us this time!”

The ladder was put against the side of the hut, and Pitt Packard climbed
up, took his jack-knife, slit the woven door from top to bottom, and
turned back the flap.

The men could see the inside of the chamber now. They were humorous
persons who could strain a joke to the snapping point, but they felt,
at last, that there was nothing especially amusing in the situation.
Tom was huddled in a heap on the straw bed in the far corner. The vacant
smile had fled from his face, and he looked, for the first time in his
life, quite distraught.

“Come along, Tom,” said the sheriff kindly; “we 're going to take you
where you can sleep in a bed, and have three meals a day.”

     “I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,”

sang Tom quaveringly, as he hid his head in a paroxysm of fear.

“Well, there ain't no bloomin' gardings to walk in jest now, so come
along and be peaceable.”

“Tom don' want to go to the poor-farm,” he wailed piteously.

But there was no alternative. They dragged him off the bed and down the
ladder as gently as possible; then Rube Hobson held him on the back seat
of the wagon, while the sheriff unhitched the horse. As they were on
the point of starting, the captive began to wail and struggle more than
ever, the burden of his plaint being a wild and tremulous plea for his
pail of molasses.

“Dry up, old softy, or I'll put the buggy robe over your head!” muttered
Rube Hobson, who had not had much patience when he started on the trip,
and had lost it all by this time.

“By thunder! he shall hev his molasses, if he thinks he wants it!” said
Pitt Packard, and he ran up the ladder and brought it down, comforting
the shivering creature thus, for he lapsed into a submissive silence
that lasted until the unwelcome journey was over.

Tom remained at the poorhouse precisely twelve hours. It did not enter
the minds of the authorities that any one so fortunate as to be admitted
into that happy haven would decline to stay there. The unwilling guest
disappeared early on the morrow of his arrival, and, after some search,
they followed him to the old spot. He had climbed into his beloved
retreat, and, having learned nothing from experience, had mended the
willow door as best he could, and laid him down in peace. They dragged
him out again, and this time more impatiently; for it was exasperating
to see a man (even if he were a fool) fight against a bed and three
meals a day.

The second attempt was little more successful than the first. As a
place of residence, the poor-farm did not seem any more desirable or
attractive on near acquaintance than it did at long range. Tom remained
a week, because he was kept in close confinement; but when they judged
that he was weaned from his old home, they loosed his bonds, and--back
to the plains he sped, like an arrow shot from the bow, or like a bit of
iron leaping to the magnet.

What should be done with him?

Public opinion was divided. Some people declared that the village had
done its duty, and if the “dog-goned lunk-head” wanted to starve
and freeze, it was his funeral, not theirs. Others thought that
the community had no resource but to bear the responsibility of its
irresponsible children, however troublesome they might be. There was
entire unanimity of view so far as the main issues were concerned. It
was agreed that nobody at the poor-farm had leisure to stand guard over
Tom night and day, and that the sheriff could not be expected to spend
his time forcing him out of his hut on the blueberry plains.

There was but one more expedient to be tried, a very simple and
ingenious but radical and comprehensive one, which, in Rube Hobson's
opinion, would strike at the root of the matter.

Tom had fled from captivity for the third time.

He had stolen out at daybreak, and, by an unexpected stroke of fortune,
the molasses pail was hanging on a nail by the shed door. The remains of
a battered old bushel basket lay on the wood-pile: bottom it had none,
nor handles; rotundity of side had long since disappeared, and none
but its maker would have known it for a basket. Tom caught it up in his
flight, and, seizing the first crooked stick that offered, he slung the
dear familiar burden over his shoulder and started off on a jog-trot.

Heaven, how happy he was! It was the rosy dawn of an Indian summer
day,--a warm jewel of a day, dropped into the bleak world of yesterday
without a hint of beneficent intention; one of those enchanting weather
surprises with which Dame Nature reconciles us to her stern New England
rule.

The joy that comes of freedom, and the freedom that comes of joy, unbent
the old man's stiffened joints. He renewed his youth at every mile. He
ran like a lapwing. When his feet first struck the sandy soil of the
plains, he broke into old song of the “bloom-in' gy-ar-ding” and the
“jolly swain,” and in the marvelous mental and spiritual exhilaration
born of the supreme moment he almost grasped that impossible last note.
His heard could hardly hold its burden of rapture when he caught the
well-known gleam of the white birches. He turned into the familiar
path, boy's blood thumping in old man's veins. The past week had been
a dreadful dream. A few steps more and he would be within sight, within
touch of home,--home at last! No--what was wrong? He must have gone
beyond it, in his reckless haste! Strange that he could have forgotten
the beloved spot! Can lover mistake the way to sweetheart's window? Can
child lose the path to mother's knee?

He turned,--ran hither and thither, like one distraught. A nameless
dread flitted through his dull mind, chilling his warm blood, paralyzing
the activity of the moment before. At last, with a sob like that of a
frightened child who flies from some imagined evil lurking in darkness,
he darted back to the white birches and started anew. This time
he trusted to blind instinct; his feet knew the path, and, left to
themselves, they took him through the tangle of dry bushes straight to
his--

It had vanished!

Nothing but ashes remained to mark the spot,--nothing but ashes! And
these, ere many days, the autumn winds would scatter, and the leafless
branches on which they fell would shake them off lightly, never dreaming
that they hid the soul of a home. Nothing but ashes!

Poor Tom o' the blueb'ry plains!




THE NOONING TREE.


The giant elm stood in the centre of the squire's fair green meadows,
and was known to all the country round about as the “Bean ellum.” The
other trees had seemingly retired to a respectful distance, as if they
were not worthy of closer intimacy; and so it stood alone, king of the
meadow, monarch of the village.

It shot from the ground for a space, straight, strong, and superb,
and then bust into nine splendid branches, each a tree in itself, all
growing symmetrically from the parent trunk, and casting a grateful
shadow under which all the inhabitants of the tiny village might have
gathered.

It was not alone its size, its beauty, its symmetry, its density of
foliage, that made it the glory of the neighborhood, but the low grown
of its branches and the extra-ordinary breadth of its shade. Passers-by
from the adjacent towns were wont to hitch their teams by the wayside,
crawl through the stump fence and walk across the fields, for a nearer
view of its magnificence. One man, indeed, was known to drive by the
tree every day during the summer, and lift his hat to it, respectfully,
each time he passed; but he was a poet and his intellect was not greatly
esteemed in the village.

The elm was almost as beautiful in one season as in another. In the
spring it rose from moist fields and mellow ploughed ground, its tiny
brown leaf buds bursting with pride at the thought of the loveliness
coiled up inside. In summer it stood in the midst of a waving garden of
buttercups and whiteweed, a towering mass of verdant leafage, a shelter
from the sun and a refuge from the storm; a cool, splendid, hospitable
dome, under which the weary farmer might fling himself, and gaze upward
as into the heights and depths of an emerald heaven. As for the birds,
they made it a fashionable summer resort, the most commodious and
attractive in the whole country; with no limit to the accommodations
for those of a gregarious turn of mind, liking the advantages of select
society combined with country air. In the autumn it held its own; for
when the other elms changed their green to duller tints, the nooning
tree put on a gown of yellow, and stood out against the far background
of sombre pine woods a brilliant mass of gold and brown. In winter, when
there was no longer dun of upturned sod, nor waving daisy gardens, nor
ruddy autumn grasses, it rose above the dazzling snow crust, lifting
its bare, shapely branches in sober elegance and dignity, and seeming to
say, “Do not pity me; I have been, and, please God, I shall be!”

Whenever the weather was sufficiently mild, it was used as a “nooning”
 tree by all the men at work in the surrounding fields; but it was in
haying time that it became the favorite lunching and “bangeing” place
for Squire Bean's hands and those of Miss Vilda Cummins, who owned the
adjoining farm. The men congregated under the spreading branches
at twelve o' the clock, and spent the noon hour there, eating and
“swapping” stories, as they were doing to-day.

Each had a tin pail, and each consumed a quantity of “flour food” that
kept the housewives busy at the cook stove from morning till night. A
glance at Pitt Packard's luncheon, for instance, might suffice as
an illustration, for, as Jabe Slocum said, “Pitt took after both his
parents; one et a good deal, 'n' the other a good while.” His pail
contained four doughnuts, a quarter section of pie, six buttermilk
biscuits, six ginger cookies, a baked cup custard, and a quart of cold
coffee. This quantity was a trifle unusual, but every man in the group
was lined throughout with pie, cemented with buttermilk bread, and
riveted with doughnuts.

Jabe Slocum and Brad Gibson lay extended slouchingly, their cowhide
boots turned up to the sky; Dave Milliken, Steve Webster, and the others
leaned back against the tree-trunk, smoking clay pipes, or hugging their
knees and chewing blades of grass reflectively.

One man sat apart from the rest, gloomily puffing rings of smoke into
the air. After a while he lay down in the grass with his head buried
in his hat, sleeping to all appearances, while the others talked and
laughed; for he had no stories, though he put in an absent-minded word
or two when he was directly addressed. This was the man from Tennessee,
Matt Henderson, dubbed “Dixie” for short. He was a giant fellow,--a
“great gormin' critter,” Samantha Ann Milliken called him; but if he
had held up his head and straightened his broad shoulders, he would have
been thought a man of splendid presence.

He seemed a being from another sphere instead of from another section
of the country. It was not alone the olive tint of the skin, the mass
of wavy dark hair tossed back from a high forehead, the sombre eyes,
and the sad mouth,--a mouth that had never grown into laughing curves
through telling Yankee jokes,--it was not these that gave him what the
boys called a “kind of a downcasted look.” The man from Tennessee had
something more than a melancholy temperament; he had, or physiognomy was
a lie, a sorrow tugging at his heart.

“I'm goin' to doze a spell,” drawled Jabe Slocum, pulling his straw hat
over his eyes. “I've got to renew my strength like the eagle's, 'f I'm
goin' to walk to the circus this afternoon. Wake me up, boys, when you
think I'd ought to sling that scythe some more, for if I hev it on my
mind I can't git a wink o' sleep.”

This was apparently a witticism; at any rate, it elicited roars of
laughter.

“It's one of Jabe's useless days; he takes 'em from his great-aunt
Lyddy,” said David Milliken.

“You jest dry up, Dave. Ef it took me as long to git to workin' as it
did you to git a wife, I bate this hay wouldn't git mowed down to crack
o' doom. Gorry! ain't this a tree! I tell you, the sun 'n' the airth,
the dew 'n' the showers, 'n' the Lord God o' creation jest took holt 'n'
worked together on this tree, 'n' no mistake!”

“You're right, Jabe.” (This from Steve Webster, who was absently cutting
a _D_ in the bark. He was always cutting _D_'s these days.) “This ellum
can't be beat in the State o' Maine, nor no other state. My brother that
lives in California says that the big redwoods, big as they air, don't
throw no sech shade, nor ain't so han'some, 'specially in the fall o'
the year, as our State o' Maine trees; 'assiduous trees,' he called
'em.”

“_Assidyus_ trees? Why don't you talk United States while you're about
it, 'n' not fire yer long-range words round here? _Assidyus!_ What does
it mean, anyhow?”

“Can't prove it by me. That's what he called 'em, 'n' I never forgot
it.”

“Assidyus--assidyus--it don't sound as if it meant nothing', to me.”

“Assiduous means 'busy,'” said the man from Tennessee, who had suddenly
waked from a brown study, and dropped off into another as soon as he had
given the definition.

“Busy, does it? Wall, I guess we ain't no better off now 'n we ever was.
One tree's 'bout 's busy as another, as fur 's I can see.”

“Wall, there is kind of a meanin' in it to me, but it'sturrible far
fetched,” remarked Jabe Slocum, rather sleepily. “You see, our ellums
and maples 'n' all them trees spends part o' the year in buddin' 'n'
gittin' out their leaves 'n' hangin' em all over the branches; 'n' then,
no sooner air they full grown than they hev to begin colorin' of 'em red
or yeller or brown, 'n' then shakin' 'em off; 'n' this is all extry, you
might say, to their every-day chores o' growin' 'n' cirkerlatin' sap,
'n' spreadin' 'n' thickenin' 'n' shovin' out limbs, 'n' one thing 'n'
'nother; 'n' it stan's to reason that the first 'n' hemlocks 'n' them
California redwoods, that keeps their clo'es on right through the year,
can't be so busy as them that keeps a-dressin' 'n' ondressin' all the
time.”

“I guess you're 'bout right,” allowed Steve, “but I shouldn't never 'a'
thought of it in the world. What yer takin' out o' that bottle, Jabe? I
thought you was a temperance man.”

“I guess he 's like the feller over to Shandagee schoolhouse, that said
he was in favor o' the law, but agin its enforcement!” laughed Pitt
Packard.

“I ain't breakin' no law; this is yarb bitters,” Jabe answered, with a
pull at the bottle.

“It's to cirkerlate his blood,” said Ob Tarbox; “he's too dog-goned lazy
to cirkerlate it himself.”

“I'm takin' it fer what ails me,” said Jabe oracularly; “the heart
knoweth its own bitterness, 'n' it 's a wise child that knows its own
complaints 'thout goin' to a doctor.”

“Ain't yer scared fer fear it'll start yer growth, Laigs?” asked little
Brad Gibson, looking at Jabe's tremendous length of limb and foot. “Say,
how do yer git them feet o' yourn uphill? Do yer start one ahead, 'n'
side-track the other?”

The tree rang with the laughter evoked by this sally, but the man from
Tennessee never smiled.

Jabe Slocum's imperturbable good humor was not shaken in the very least
by these personal remarks. “If I thought 't was a good growin' medicine,
I'd recommend it to your folks, Brad,” he replied cheerfully. “Your
mother says you boys air all so short that when you're diggin' potatoes,
yer can't see her shake the dinner rag 'thout gittin' up 'n' standing
on the potato hills! If I was a sinikitin feller like you, I wouldn't
hector folks that had made out to grow some.”

“Speakin' o' growin',” said Steve Webster, “who do you guess I seen in
Boston, when I was workin' there? That tall Swatkins girl from the
Duck Pond, the one that married Dan Robinson. It was one Sunday, in the
Catholic meetin'-house. I'd allers wanted to go to a Catholic meetin',
an' I declare it's about the solemnest one there is. I mistrusted I was
goin' to everlastin'ly giggle, but I tell yer I was the awedest cutter
yer ever see. But anyway, the Swatkins girl--or Mis' Robinson, she is
now--was there as large as life in the next pew to me, jabberin' Latin,
pawin' beads, gettin' up 'n' kneelin' down, 'n' crossin' herself north,
south, east, 'n' west, with the best of 'em. Poor Dan! 'Grinnin' Dan,'
we used to call him. Well, he don't grin nowadays. He never was good for
much, but he 's hed more 'n his comeuppance!”

“Why, what 's the matter with him? Can't he git work in Boston?”

“Matter? Why, his wife, that I see makin' believe be so dreadful pious
in the Catholic meetin', she 's carried on wuss 'n the Old Driver for
two years, 'n' now she 's up 'n' left him,--gone with a han'somer man.”

Down on Steve Webster's hand came Jabe Slocum's immense paw with a grasp
that made him cringe.

“What the”--began Steve, when the man from Tennessee took up his scythe
and slouched away from the group by the tree.

“Didn't yer know no better 'n that, yer thunderin' fool? Can't yer see a
hole in a grindstun 'thout it's hung on yer nose?”

“What hev I done?” asked Steve, as if dumfounded.

“Done? Where 've yer ben, that yer don't know Dixie's wife 's left him?”

“Where 've I ben? Hain't I ben workin' in Boston fer a year; 'n' since
I come home last week, hain't I ben tendin' sick folks, so 't I
couldn't git outside the dooryard? I never seen the man in my life till
yesterday, in the field, 'n' I thought he was one o' them dark-skinned
Frenchies from Guildford that hed come up here fer hayin'.”

“Mebbe I spoke too sharp,” said Jabe apologetically; “but we 've ben
scared to talk wives, or even women folks, fer a month o' Sundays, fer
fear Dixie 'd up 'n' tumble on his scythe, or do somethin' crazy. You
see it's this way (I'd ruther talk than work; 'n' we ain't workin' by
time to-day, anyway, on account of the circus comin'): 'Bout a year 'n'
a half ago, this tall, han'some feller turned up here in Pleasant River.
He inhailed from down South somewheres, but he didn't like his work
there, 'n' drifted to New York, 'n' then to Boston; 'n' then he
remembered his mother was a State o' Maine woman, 'n' he come here to
see how he liked. We didn't take no stock in him at first,--we never
hed one o' that nigger-tradin' secedin' lot in amongst us,--but he was
pleasant spoken 'n' a square, all-round feller, 'n' didn't git off any
secesh nonsense, 'n' it ended in our likin' him first-rate. Wall, he got
work in the cannin' fact'ry over on the Butterfield road, 'n' then he
fell in with the Maddoxes. You 've hearn tell of 'em; they're relation
to Pitt here.”


“I wouldn't own 'em if I met 'em on Judgement Bench!” exclaimed Pitt
Packard hotly. “My stepfather's second wife married Mis' Maddox's first
husband after he got divorced from her, 'n' that's all there is to it;
they ain't no bloody-kin o' mine, 'n' I don't call 'em relation.”

“Wall, Pitt's relations or not, they're all wuss 'n the Old Driver,
as yer said 'bout Dan Robinson's wife. Dixie went to board there. Mis
Maddox was all out o' husbands jest then,--she 'd jest disposed of her
fourth, somehow or 'nother; she always hed a plenty 'n' to spare, though
there's lots o' likely women folks round here that never hed one chance,
let alone four. Her daughter Fidelity was a chip o' the old block. Her
father hed named her Fidelity after his mother, when she wa'n't nothin'
but a two-days-old baby, 'n' he didn't know how she was goin' to turn
out; if he 'd 'a' waited two months, I believe I could 'a' told him.
_In_fidelity would 'a' ben a mighty sight more 'propriate; but either
of 'em is too long fer a name, so they got to callin' her Fiddy. Wall,
Fiddy didn't waste no time; she was nigh onto eighteen years old when
Dixie went there to board, 'n' she begun huneyfuglin' him's soon as ever
she set eyes on him. Folks warned him, but 't wa'n't no use; he was kind
o' bewitched with her from the first. She wa'n't so han'some, neither.
Blamed 'f I know how they do it; let 'em alone, 'f yer know when yer
're well off, 's my motter. She was red-headed, but her hair become her
somehow when she curled 'n' frizzed it over a karosene lamp, 'n' then
wound it round 'n' round her head like ropes o' carnelian. She hedn't
any particular kind of a nose nor mouth nor eyes, but gorry! when she
looked at yer, yer felt kind as if yer was turnin' to putty inside.”

“I know what yer mean,” said Steve interestedly.

“She hed a figger jest like them fashion-paper pictures you 've seen,
an' the very day any new styles come to Boston Fiddy Maddox would hev
'em before sundown; the biggest bustles 'n' the highest hats 'n' the
tightest skirts 'n' the longest tails to 'em; she'd git 'em somehow,
anyhow! Dixie wa'n't out o' money when he come here, an' a spell
afterwards there was more 'n a thousand dollars fell to him from his
father's folks down South. Well, Fiddy made that fly, I tell you! Dixie
bought a top buggy 'n' a sorrel hoss, 'n' they was on the road most o'
the time when he wa'n't to work; 'n' when he was, she 'd go with Lem
Simmons, 'n' Dixie none the wiser. Mis Maddox was lookin' up a new
husband jest then, so 't she didn't interfere”--

“She was the same kind o' goods, anyhow,” interpolated Ob Tarbox.

“Yes, she was one of them women folks that air so light-minded you can't
anchor 'em down with a sewin'-machine, nor a dishpan, nor a husband 'n'
young ones, nor no namable kind of a thing; the least wind blows 'em
here 'n' blows 'em there, like dandelion puffs. As time went on, the
widder got herself a beau now 'n' then; but as fast as she hooked 'em,
Fiddy up 'n' took 'em away from her. You see she 'd gethered in most of
her husbands afore Fiddy was old enough to hev her finger in the pie;
but she cut her eye-teeth early, Fiddy did, 'n' there wa'n't no kind of
a feller come to set up with the widder but she 'd everlastin'ly grab
him, if she hed any use fer him, 'n' then there 'd be Hail Columby, I
tell yer. But Dixie, he was 's blind 's a bat 'n' deef 's a post. He
could n't see nothin' but Fiddy, 'n' he couldn't see her very plain.”

“He hed warnin's enough,” put in Pitt Packard, though Jabe Slocum never
needed any assistance in spinning a yarn.

“Warnin's! I should think he hed. The Seventh Day Baptist minister went
so fur as to preach at him. 'The Apostle Paul gin heed,' was the text.
'Why did he gin heed?' says he. 'Because he heerd. If he hadn't 'a'
heerd, he couldn't 'a' gin heed, 'n' 't wouldn't 'a' done him no good
to 'a' heerd 'thout he gin heed!' Wall, it helped consid'ble many in
the congregation, 'specially them that was in the habit of hearin' 'n'
heedin', but it rolled right off Dixie like water off a duck's back. He
'n' Fiddy was seen over to the ballin' alley to Wareham next day, 'n'
they didn't come back for a week.”

     “'He gin her his hand,
     And he made her his own,'”

sang little Brad Gibson.

“He hed gin her his hand, but no minister nor trial-jestice nor
eighteen-carat ring nor stificate could 'a' made Fiddy Maddox anybody's
own 'ceptin' the devil's, an' he wouldn't 'a' married her; she'd 'a'
ben too near kin. We'd never 'spicioned she 'd git 's fur 's marryin'
anybody, 'n' she only married Dixie 'cause he told her he 'd take her to
the Wareham House to dinner, 'n' to the County Fair afterwards; if any
other feller hed offered to take her to supper, 'n' the theatre on top
o' that, she 'd 'a' married him instid.”

“How 'd the old woman take it?” asked Steve.

“She disowned her daughter _punctilio:_ in the first place, fer runnin'
away 'stid o' hevin' a church weddin'; 'n' second place, fer marryin' a
pauper (that was what she called him; 'n' it was true, for they 'd spent
every cent he hed); 'n' third place, fer alienatin' the 'fections of a
travelin' baker-man she hed her eye on fer herself. He was a kind of a
flour-food peddler, that used to drive a cart round by Hard Scrabble,
Moderation, 'n' Scratch Corner way. Mis' Maddox used to buy all her
baked victuals of him, 'specially after she found out he was a widower
beginnin' to take notice. His cart used to stand at her door so long
everybody on the rout would complain o' stale bread. But bime bye Fiddy
begun to set at her winder when he druv up, 'n' bime bye she pinned a
blue ribbon in her collar. When she done that, Mis' Maddox alles hed to
take a back seat. The boys used to call it a danger signal. It kind o'
drawed yer 'tention to p'ints 'bout her chin 'n' mouth 'n' neck, 'n' one
thing 'n' 'nother, in a way that was cal'lated to snarl up the thoughts
o' perfessors o' religion 'n' turn 'em earthways. There was a spell
I hed to say, '_Remember_ _Rhapseny!_ _Remember_ _Rhapseny!_' over to
myself whenever Fiddy put on her blue ribbons. Wall, as I say, Fiddy set
at the winder, the baker-man seen the blue ribbons, 'n' Mis' Maddox's
cake was dough. She put on a red ribbon; but land! her neck looked 's if
somebody 'd gone over it with a harrer! Then she stomped round 'n' slat
the dish-rag, but 't wa'n't no use. 'Gracious, mother,' says Fiddy, 'I
don't do nothin' but set at the winder. The sun shines for all.' 'You're
right it does,' says Mis' Maddox, ''n' that's jest what I complain of.
I'd like to get a change to shine on something myself.'

“But the baker-man kep' on comin', though when he got to the Maddoxes'
doorsteps he couldn't make change for a quarter nor tell pie from bread;
an' sure 's you're born, the very day Fiddy went away to be married to
Dixie, that mornin' she drawed that everlastin' numhead of a flour-food
peddler out into the orchard, 'n' cut off a lock o' her hair, 'n' tied
it up with a piece o' her blue ribbon, 'n' give it to him; an' old Mis'
Bascom says, when he went past her house he was gazin' at it 'n' kissin'
of it, 'n' his horse meanderin' on one side the road 'n' the other, 'n'
the door o' the cart open 'n' slammin' to 'n' fro, 'n' ginger cookies
spillin' out all over the lot. He come back to the Maddoxes next
morning' ['t wa'n't his day, but his hoss couldn't pull one way when
Fiddy's ribbon was pullin' t'other); an' when he found out she 'd gone
with Dixie, he cussed 'n' stomped 'n' took on like a loontic; an' when
Mis' Maddox hinted she was ready to heal the wownds Fiddy 'd inflicted,
he stomped 'n' cussed wuss 'n' ever, 'n' the neighbors say he called her
a hombly old trollop, an' fired the bread loaves all over the dooryard,
he was so crazy at bein' cheated.

“Wall, to go back to Dixie--I'll be comin' right along, boys.” (This to
Brad Gibson, who was taking his farewell drink of ginger tea preparatory
to beginning work.)

“I pity you, Steve!” exclaimed Brad, between deep swallows. “If you 'd
known when you was well off, you 'd 'a' stayed in Boston. If Jabe hed a
story started, he 'd talk three days after he was dead.”

“Go 'long; leave me be! Wall, as I was sayin', Dixie brought Fiddy home
['Dell,' he called her), an' they 'peared bride 'n' groom at meetin'
next Sunday. The last hundred dollars he hed in the world hed gone into
the weddin' tower 'n' on to Fiddy's back. He hed a new suit, 'n' he
looked like a major. You ain't got no idea what he was, 'cause his eyes
is dull now, 'n' he 's bowed all over, 'n' ain't shaved nor combed,
hardly; but they was the han'somest couple that ever walked up the broad
aisle. She hed on a green silk dress, an' a lace cape that was like a
skeeter nettin' over her neck an' showed her bare skin through, an' a
hat like an apple orchard in full bloom, hummin'-bird an' all. Dixie
kerried himself as proud as Lucifer. He didn't look at the minister 'n'
he didn't look at the congregation; his great eyes was glued on Fiddy,
as if he couldn't hardly keep from eatin' of her up. An' she behaved
consid'able well for a few months, as long 's the novelty lasted an' the
silk dresses was new. Before Christmas, though, she began to peter out
'n' git slack-twisted. She allers hated housework as bad as a pig would
a penwiper, an' Dixie hed to git his own breakfast afore he went to
work, or go off on an empty stomach. Many 's the time he 's got her
meals for her 'n' took 'em to her on a waiter. Them secesh fellers'll
wait on women folks long as they can stan' up.

“Then bime bye the baby come along; but that made things wuss 'stid o'
better. She didn't pay no more 'tention to it than if it hed belonged
to the town. She 'd go off to dances, an' leave Dixie to home tendin'
cradle; but that wa'n't no hardship to him for he was 'bout as much
wropped up in the child as he was in Fiddy. Wall, sir, 'bout a month ago
she up 'n' disappeared off the face o' the airth 'thout sayin' a word or
leavin' a letter. She took her clo'es, but she never thought o' takin'
the baby; one baby more or less didn't make no odds to her s' long 's
she hed that skeeter-nettin' cape. Dixie sarched fer her high an' low
fer a fortnight, but after that he give it up as a bad job. He found out
enough, I guess, to keep him pretty busy thinkin' what he 'd do next.
But day before yesterday the same circus that plays here this afternoon
was playin' to Wareham. A lot of us went over on the evenin' train, an'
we coaxed Dixie into goin', so 's to take his mind off his trouble. But
land! he didn't see nothin'. He 'd walk right up the lions 'n' tigers
in the menagerie as if they was cats 'n' chickens, an' all the time the
clown was singin' he looked like a dumb animile that 's hed a bullet put
in him. There was lots o' side shows, mermaids 'n' six-legged calves
'n' spotted girls, 'n' one thing 'n' 'nother, an' there was one o' them
whirligig machines with a mess o' rocking'-hosses goin' round 'n' round,
'n' an organ in the middle playin' like sixty. I wish we 'd 'a' kept
clear o' the thing, but as bad luck would hev it, we stopped to look,
an' there on top o' two high-steppin' white wooden hosses, set Mis'
Fiddy an' that dod-gasted light-complected baker-man! If ever she was
suited to a dot, it was jest then 'n' there. She could 'a' gone prancin'
round that there ring forever 'n' forever, with the whoopin' 'n'
hollerin' 'n' whizzin' 'n' whirlin' soundin' in her ears, 'n' the music
playin' like mad, 'n' she with nothin' to do but stick on 'n' let some
feller foot the bills. Somebody must 'a' ben thinkin' o' Fiddy Maddox
when the invented them whirl-a-go-rounds. She was laughin' 'n' carryin'
on like the old Scratch; her apple-blossom hat dome off, 'n' the
baker-man put it on, 'n' took consid'able time over it, 'n' pulled her
ear 'n' pinched her cheek when he got through; an' that was jest the
blamed minute we ketched sight of 'em. I pulled Dixie off, but I was
too late. He give a groan I shall remember to my dyin' day, 'n' then
he plunged out o' the crowd 'n' through the gate like a streak o'
lightnin'. We follered, but land! we couldn't find him, an' true as I
set here, I never expected to see him alive agin. But I did; I forgot
all about one thing, you see, 'n' that was the baby. If it wa'n't no
attraction to its mother, I guess he cal'lated it needed a father all
the more. Anyhow, he turned up in the field yesterday mornin', ready for
work, but lookin' as if he 'd hed his heart cut out 'n' a piece o' lead
put in the place of it.”

“I don't seem as if she 'd 'a' ben brazen enough to come back so near
him,” said Steve.

“Wall, I don't s'pose she hed any idea o' Dixie's bein' at a circus over
Wareham jest then; an' ten to one she didn't care if the whole town seen
her. She wanted to get rid of him, 'n' she didn't mind how she did it.
Dixie ain't one of the shootin' kinds, an' anyhow, Fiddy Maddox wa'n't
one to look ahead; whatever she wanted to do, that she done, from the
time she was knee high to a grasshopper. I've seen her set down by a
peck basket of apples, 'n' take a couple o' bites out o' one, 'n' then
heave it fur 's she could heave it 'n' start in on another, 'n' then
another; 'n' 't wa'n't a good apple year, neither. She'd everlastin'ly
spile 'bout a dozen of 'em 'n' smaller 'bout two mouthfuls. Doxy Morton,
now, would eat an apple clean down to the core, 'n' then count the seeds
'n' put 'em on the window-sill to dry, 'n' get up 'n' put the core
in the stove, 'n' wipe her hands on the roller towel, 'n' take up her
sewin' agin; 'n' if you 've got to be cuttin' 'nitials in tree bark an'
writin' of 'em in the grass with a stick like you 've ben doin' for the
last half-hour, you 're blamed lucky to be doin' _D_'s not _F_'s, like
Dixie there!”


*****


It was three o'clock in the afternoon. The men had dropped work and
gone to the circus. The hay was pronounced to be in a condition where
it could be left without much danger; but, for that matter, no man would
have stayed in the field to attend to another man's hay when there was a
circus in the neighborhood.

Dixie was mowing on alone, listening as in a dream to that subtle
something in the swish of the scythe that makes one seek to know the
song it is singing to the grasses.


     “Hush, ah, hush, the scythes are saying,
     Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep;
     Hush, they say to the grasses swaying,
     Hush, they sing to the clover deep;
     Hush,--'t is the lullaby Time is singing,--
     Hush, and heed not, for all things pass.
     Hush, ah, hush! and the scythes are swinging
     Over the clover, over the grass.”


And now, spent with fatigue and watching and care and grief,--heart
sick, mind sick, body sick, sick with past suspense and present
certainty and future dread,--he sat under the cool shade of the nooning
tree, and buried his face in his hands. He was glad to be left alone
with his miseries,--glad that the other men, friendly as he felt them
to be, had gone to the circus, where he would not see or hear them for
hours to come.

How clearly he could conjure up the scene that they were enjoying with
such keen relish! Only two days before, he had walked among the same
tents, staring at horses and gay trappings and painted Amazons as one
who noted nothing; yet the agony of the thing he now saw at last lit up
all the rest as with a lightning flash, and burned the scene forever
on his brain and heart. It was at Wareham, too,--Wareham, where she had
promised to be his wife, where she had married him only a year before.
How well he remembered the night! They left the parsonage; they had
ten miles to drive in the moonlight before reaching their
stopping-place,--ten miles of such joy as only a man could know, he
thought, who had had the warm fruit of life hanging within full vision,
but just out of reach,--just above his longing lips; and then, in an
unlooked-for, gracious moment, his! He could swear she had loved him
that night, if never again.

But this picture passed away, and he saw that maddening circle with the
caracoling steeds. He head the discordant music, the monotonous creak of
the machinery, the strident laughter of the excited riders. As first the
thing was a blur, a kaleidoscope of whirling colors, into which there
presently crept form and order. ... A boy who had cried to get on, and
was now crying to get off. ... Old Rube Hobson and his young wife; Rube
looking white and scared, partly by the whizzing motion, and partly
by the prospect of paying out ten cents for the doubtful pleasure. ...
Pretty Hetty Dunnell with that young fellow from Portland; she too timid
to mount one of the mettle-some chargers, and snuggling close to him in
one of the circling seats. The, good Got!--Dell! sitting on a prancing
white horse, with the man he knew, the man he feared, riding beside her;
a man who kept holding on her hat with fingers that trembled,--the very
hat she “'peared bride in” a man who brushed a grasshopper from her
shoulder with an air of ownership, and, when she slapped his hand
coquettishly, even dared to pinch her pink cheek,--his wife's
cheek,--before that crowd of on-lookers! Merry-go-round, indeed! The
horrible thing was well named; and life was just like it,--a whirl of
happiness and misery, in which the music cannot play loud enough to
drown the creak of the machinery, in which one soul cries out in pain,
another in terror, and the rest laugh; but the prancing steeds gallop
on, gallop on, and once mounted, there is no getting off, unless...

There were some things it was not possible for a mean to bear! The
river! The river! He could hear it rippling over the sunny sands,
swirling among the logs, dashing and roaring under the bridge, rushing
to the sea's embrace. Could it tell whither it was hurrying? NO; but it
was escaping from its present bonds; it would never have to pass over
these same jagged rocks again. “On, on to the unknown!” called the
river. “I come! I come!” he roused himself to respond, when a faint,
faint, helpless voice broke in upon the mad clatter in his brain,
cleaving his torn heart in twain; not a real voice,--the half-forgotten
memory of one; a tender wail that had added fresh misery to his night's
vigil,--the baby!

But the feeble pipe was borne down by the swirl of the water as it
dashed between the rocky banks, still calling to him. If he could only
close his ears to it! But it still called--called still--the river! And
still the child's voice pierced the rush of sound with its pitiful
flute note, until the two resolved themselves into contesting strains,
answering each other antiphonally. The river--the baby--the river--the
baby; and in and through, and betwixt and between, there spun the
whirling merry-go-round, with its curveting wooden horses, its
discordant organ, and its creaking machinery.

But gradually the child's voice gained in strength, and as he heard it
more plainly the other sounds grew fainter, till at last, thank God!
they were hushed. The din, the whirlwind, and the tempest in his brain
were lulled into silence, as under a “Peace, be still!” and, worn out
with the contest, the man from Tennessee fell asleep under the grateful
shade of the nooning tree. So deep was the slumber that settled over
exhausted body and troubled spirit that the gathering clouds, the sudden
darkness, the distant muttering of thunder, the frightened twitter of
the birds, passed unnoticed. A heavy drop of rain pierced the thick
foliage and fell on his face, but the storm within had been too fierce
for him to heed the storm without. He slept on.


*****


Almost every man, woman, and child in the vicinity of Pleasant River
was on the way to the circus,--Boomer's Grand Six-in-One Universal
Consolidated Show; Brilliant Constellations of Fixed Stars shining in
the same Vast Firmament; Glittering Galaxies of World-Famous Equestrian
Artists; the biggest elephants, the funniest clowns, the pluckiest
riders, the stubbornest mules, the most amazing acrobats, the tallest
man and the shortest man, the thinnest woman and the thickest woman,
on the habitable globe; and no connection with any other show on earth,
especially Sypher's Two-in-One Show now devastating the same State.

If the advertisements setting forth these attractions were couched in
language somewhat rosier than the facts would warrant, there were few
persons calm enough to perceive it, when once the glamour of the village
parade and the smell of the menagerie had intoxicated the senses.

The circus had been the sole topic of conversation for a fortnight. Jot
Bascom could always be relied on for the latest and most authentic news
of its triumphant progress from one town to another. Jot was a sort of
town crier; and whenever the approach of a caravan was announced, he
would go over on the Liberty road to find out just where it was and what
were its immediate plans, for the thrilling pleasure of calling at every
one of the neighbors' on his way home, and delivering his budget of
news. He was an attendant at every funeral, and as far as possible at
every wedding, in the village; at every flag-raising and husking, and
town and county fair. When more pressing duties did not hinder, he
endeavored to meet the two daily trains that passed through Milliken's
Mills, a mile or two from Pleasant River. He accompanied the sheriff on
all journeys entailing serving of papers and other embarrassing duties
common to the law. On one occasion, when the two lawyers of the village
held an investigation before Trial Justice Simeon Porter, they waited
an hour because Jot Bascom did not come. They knew that something was
amiss, but it was only on reflection that they remembered that Jot was
not indispensable. He went with all paupers to the Poor Farm, and never
missed a town meeting. He knew all the conditions attending any swapping
of horses that occurred within a radius of twenty miles,--the terms of
the trade and the amount paid to boot. He knew who owed the fish-man and
who owed the meat-man, and who could not get trusted by either of them.
In fact, so far as the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence
could be vested in a faulty human creature, they were present in Jot
Bascom. That he was quite unable to attend conscientiously to home
duties, when overborne by press of public service, was true. When
Diadema Bascom wanted kindling split, wood brought in, the cows milked,
or the pigs fed, she commonly found her spouse serving humanity in bulk.

All the details of the approach of the Grand Six-in-One Show had,
therefore, been heralded to those work-sodden and unambitious persons
who tied themselves to their own wood-piles or haying-fields.

These were the bulletins issues:--

The men were making a circle in the Widow Buzzell's field, in the same
place where the old one had been,--the old one, viewed with awe for five
years by all the village small boys.

The forerunners, outriders, proprietors, whatever they might be, had
arrived and gone to the tavern.

An elephant was quartered in the tavern shed!

The elephant had stepped through the floor!!

The advance guard of performers and part of the show itself had come!

And the “Cheriot”!!

This far-famed vehicle had paused on top of Deacon Chute's hill, to
prepare for the street parade. Little Jim Chute had been gloating over
the fact that it must pass by his house, and when it stopped short under
the elms in the dooryard his heart almost broke for joy. He pinched the
twenty-five-cent piece in his pocket to assure himself that he was alive
and in his right mind. The precious coin had been the result of careful
saving, and his hot, excited hands had almost worn it thin. But alas for
the vanity of human hopes! When the magnificent red-and-gold “Cheriot”
 was uncovered, that its glories might shine upon the waiting world, the
door opened, and a huddle of painted Indians tumbled out, ready to lead
the procession, or, if so disposed, to scalp the neighborhood. Little
Jim gave one panic-stricken look as they leaped over the chariot steps,
and then fled to the barn chamber, whence he had to be dragged by his
mother, and cuffed into willingness to attend the spectacle that had
once so dazzled his imagination.

On the eventful afternoon of the performance the road was gay with
teams. David and Samantha Milliken drove by in Miss Cummin's neat
carryall, two children on the back seat, a will-o'-the-wisp baby girl
held down by a serious boy. Steve Webster was driving Doxy Morton in his
mother's buggy. Jabe Slocum, Pitt Packard, Brad Gibson, Cyse Higgins,
and scores of others were riding “shank's mare,” as they would have
said.

It had been a close, warm day, and as the afternoon wore away it grew
hotter and closer. There was a dead calm in the air, a threatening
blackness in the west that made the farmers think anxiously of their
hay. Presently the thunderheads ran together into big black clouds,
which melted in turn into molten masses of smoky orange, so that the
heavens were like burnished brass. Drivers whipped up their horses, and
pedestrians hastened their steps. Steve Webster decided not to run even
the smallest risk of injuring so precious a commodity as Doxy Morton by
a shower of rain, so he drove into a friend's yard, put up his horse,
and waited till the storm should pass by. Brad Gibson stooped to drink
at a wayside brook, and as he bent over the water he heard a low,
murmuring, muttering sound that seemed to make the earth tremble.

Then from hill to hill “leapt the live thunder.” Even the distant
mountains seemed to have “found a tongue.” A zigzag chain of lightning
flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another
peal, louder than the first, and nearer.

The rain began to fall, the forked flashes of flame darted hither and
thither in the clouds, and the boom of heaven's artillery grew heavier
and heavier. The blinding sheets of light and the tumultuous roar
of sound now followed each other so quickly that they seemed almost
simultaneous. Flash--crash--flash--crash--flash--crash; blinding and
deafening eye and ear at once. Everybody who could find a shelter of any
sort hastened to it. The women at home set their children in the midst
of feather beds, and some of them even huddled there themselves, their
babies clinging to them in sympathetic fear, as the livid shafts of
light illuminated the dark rooms with more than noonday glare.

The air was full of gloom; a nameless terror lurked within it; the
elements seemed at war with each other. Horses whinnied in the stables,
and colts dashed about the pastures. The cattle sought sheltered places;
the cows ambling clumsily towards some refuge, their full bags dripping
milk as they swung heavily to and fro. The birds flew towards the
orchards and the deep woods; the swallows swooped restlessly round the
barns, and hid themselves under the eaves or in the shadow of deserted
nests.

The rain now fell in sheets.

“Hurry up 'n' git under cover, Jabe,” said Brad Gibson; “you're jest the
kind of a pole to draw lightnin'!”

“You hain't, then!” retorted Jabe. “There ain't enough o' you fer
lightnin' to ketch holt of!”

Suddenly a ghastly streak of light leaped out of a cloud, and then
another, till the sky seemed lit up by cataracts of flame. A breath of
wind sprang into the still air. Then a deafening crash, clap, crack,
roar, peal! and as Jabe Slocum looked out of a protecting shed door,
he saw a fiery ball burst from the clouds, shooting brazen arrows as it
fell. Within the instant the meeting-house steeple broke into a tongue
of flame, and then, looking towards home, he fancied that the fireball
dropped to earth in Squire Bean's meadow.

The wind blew more fiercely now. There was a sudden crackling of wood,
falling of old timers, and breaking of glass. The deadly fluid ran in a
winding course down a great maple by the shed, leaving a narrow charred
channel through the bark to tell how it passed to earth. A sombre pine
stood up, black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound in
the split trunk.

The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint rumbling of
thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea; the clouds broke
away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see what had been going
on in the world since he hid himself an hour before. A delicate rainbow
bridge stretched from the blackened church steeple to the glittering
weathercock on the squire's barn; and there, in the centre of the fair
green meadows from which it had risen in glorious strength and beauty
for a century or more, lay the nooning tree.

The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck in the very
centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way from feather tip to
sturdy root, riving the tree in twain, cleaving its great boughs left
and right, laying one majestic half level with the earth, and bending
the other till the proud head almost touched the grass.

The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering upon the bowed
branches, turning each into a tear of liquid opal. The birds hopped on
the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously a strange object underneath.

There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke! The monarch of the
meadow would never again feel the magic thrill of the sap in its veins,
nor the bursting of brown bud into green leaf.

The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs.
The “time of pleasure and love” was over with the nooning tree; over
too, with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the
light of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.




THE FORE-ROOM RUG.


Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window of the village
watch-tower, so called because it commanded a view of nearly everything
that happened in Pleasant River; those details escaping the physical
eye being supplied by faith and imagination working in the light of
past experience. She sat in the chair of honor, the chair of choice,
the high-backed rocker by the southern window, in which her husband's
mother, old Mrs. Bascom, had sat for thirty years, applying a still
more powerful intellectual telescope to the doings of her neighbors.
Diadema's seat had formerly been on the less desirable side of the
little light-stand, where Priscilla Hollis was now installed.

Mrs. Bascom was at work on a new fore-room rug, the former one having
been transferred to Miss Hollis's chamber; for, as the teacher at the
brick schoolhouse, a graduate of a Massachusetts normal school, and
the daughter of a deceased judge, she was a boarder of considerable
consequence. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, and the two women were
alone. It was a pleasant, peaceful sitting-room, as neat as wax in every
part. The floor was covered by a cheerful patriotic rag carpet woven
entirely of red, white, and blue rags, and protected in various exposed
localities by button rugs,--red, white, and blue disks superimposed one
on the other.

Diadema Bascom was a person of some sentiment. When her old father,
Captain Dennett, was dying, he drew a wallet from under his pillow, and
handed her a twenty-dollar bill to get something to remember him by.
This unwonted occurrence burned itself into the daughter's imagination,
and when she came as a bride to the Bascom house she refurnished the
sitting-room as a kind of monument to the departed soldier, whose sword
and musket were now tied to the wall with neatly hemmed bows of bright
red cotton.

The chair cushions were of red-and-white glazed patch, the turkey
wings that served as hearth brushes were hung against the white-painted
chimney-piece with blue skirt braid, and the white shades were finished
with home-made scarlet “tossels.” A little whatnot in one corner was
laden with the trophies of battle. The warrior's brass buttons were
strung on a red picture cord and hung over his daguerreotype on the
upper shelf; there was a tarnished shoulder strap, and a flattened
bullet that the captain's jealous contemporaries swore _he_ never
stopped, unless he got it in the rear when he was flying from the foe.
There was also a little tin canister in which a charge of powder had
been sacredly preserved. The scoffers, again, said that “the cap'n put
it in his musket when he went into the war, and kep' it there till he
come out.” These objects were tastefully decorated with the national
colors. In fact, no modern aesthete could have arranged a symbolic
symphony of grief and glory with any more fidelity to an ideal than
Diadema Bascom, in working out her scheme of red, white, and blue.

Rows of ripening tomatoes lay along the ledges of the windows, and a
tortoise-shell cat snoozed on one of the broad sills. The tall clock in
the corner ticked peacefully. Priscilla Hollis never tired of looking
at the jolly red-cheeked moon, the group of stars on a blue ground, the
trig little ship, the old house, and the jolly moon again, creeping one
after another across the open space at the top.

Jot Bascom was out, as usual, gathering statistics of the last horse
trade; little Jot was building “stickin'” houses in the barn; Priscilla
was sewing long strips for braiding; while Diadema sat at the drawing-in
frame, hook in hand, and a large basket of cut rags by her side.

Not many weeks before she had paid one of her periodical visits to the
attic. No housekeeper in Pleasant River save Mrs. Jonathan Bascom would
have thought of dusting a garret, washing the window and sweeping down
the cobwebs once a month, and renewing the camphor bags in the chests
twice a year; but notwithstanding this zealous care the moths had
made their way into one of her treasure-houses, the most precious of
all,--the old hair trunk that had belonged to her sister Lovice. Once
ensconced there, they had eaten through its hoarded relics, and reduced
the faded finery to a state best described by Diadema as “reg'lar
riddlin' sieves.” She had brought the tattered pile down in to the
kitchen, and had spent a tearful afternoon in cutting the good pieces
from the perforated garments. Three heaped-up baskets and a full
dish-pan were the result; and as she had snipped and cut and sorted,
one of her sentimental projects had entered her mind and taken complete
possession there.

“I declare,” she said, as she drew her hooking-needle in and out, “I
wouldn't set in the room with some folks and work on these pieces; for
every time I draw in a scrap of cloth Lovice comes up to me for all the
world as if she was settin' on the sofy there. I ain't told you my plan,
Miss Hollis, and there ain't many I shall tell; but this rug is going to
be a kind of a hist'ry of my life and Lovey's wrought in together, just
as we was bound up in one another when she was alive. Her things and
mine was laid in one trunk, and the moths sha'n't cheat me out of 'em
altogether. If I can't look at 'em wet Sundays, and shake 'em out, and
have a good cry over 'em, I'll make 'em up into a kind of dumb show that
will mean something to me, if it don't to anybody else.

“We was the youngest of thirteen, Lovey and I, and we was twins. There
's never been more 'n half o' me left sence she died. We was born
together, played and went to school together, got engaged and married
together, and we all but died together, yet we wa'n't a mite alike.
There was an old lady come to our house once that used to say, 'There's
sister Nabby, now: she 'n' I ain't no more alike 'n if we wa'n't two;
she 's jest as diff'rent as I am t' other way.' Well, I know what I want
to put into my rag story, Miss Hollis, but I don't hardly know how to
begin.”

Priscilla dropped her needle, and bent over the frame with interest.

“A spray of two roses in the centre,--there 's the beginning; why, don't
you see, dear Mrs. Bascom?”

“Course I do,” said Diadema, diving to the bottom of the dish-pan. “I've
got my start now, and don't you say a word for a minute. The two roses
grow out of one stalk; they'll be Lovey and me, though I'm consid'able
more like a potato blossom. The stalk 's got to be green, and here
is the very green silk mother walked bride in, and Lovey and I had
roundabouts of it afterwards. She had the chicken-pox when we was about
four years old, and one of the first things I can remember is climbing
up and looking over mother's footboard at Lovey, all speckled. Mother
had let her slip on her new green roundabout over her nightgown, just to
pacify her, and there she set playing with the kitten Reuben Granger had
brought her. He was only ten years old then, but he 'd begun courting
Lovice.

“The Grangers' farm joined ours. They had eleven children, and mother
and father had thirteen, and we was always playing together. Mother
used to tell a funny story about that. We were all little young ones and
looked pretty much alike, so she didn't take much notice of us in the
daytime when we was running out 'n' in; but at night when the turn-up
bedstead in the kitchen was taken down and the trundle-beds were full,
she used to count us over, to see if we were all there. One night, when
she 'd counted thirteen and set down to her sewing, father come in and
asked if Moses was all right, for one of the neighbors had seen him
playing side of the river about supper-time. Mother knew she 'd counted
us straight, but she went round with a candle to make sure. Now, Mr.
Granger had a head as red as a shumac bush; and when she carried the
candle close to the beds to take another tally, there was thirteen
children, sure enough, but if there wa'n't a red-headed Granger right in
amongst our boys in the turn-up bedstead! While father set out on a hunt
for our Moses, mother yanked the sleepy little red-headed Granger out o'
the middle and took him home, and father found Moses asleep on a pile of
shavings under the joiner's bench.

“They don't have such families nowadays. One time when measles went
all over the village, they never came to us, and Jabe Slocum said there
wa'n't enough measles to go through the Dennett family, so they didn't
start in on 'em. There, I ain't going to finish the stalk; I'm going
to draw in a little here and there all over the rug, while I'm in the
sperit of plannin' it, and then it will be plain work of matching colors
and filling out.

“You see the stalk is mother's dress, and the outside green of the moss
roses is the same goods, only it 's our roundabouts. I meant to make 'em
red, when I marked the pattern, and then fill out round 'em with a light
color; but now I ain't satisfied with anything but white, for nothing
will do in the middle of the rug but our white wedding dresses. I shall
have to fill in dark, then, or mixed. Well, that won't be out of the
way, if it 's going to be a true rag story; for Lovey's life went out
altogether, and mine hasn't been any too gay.

“I'll begin on Lovey's rose first. She was the prettiest and the
liveliest girl in the village, and she had more beaux than you could
shake a stick at. I generally had to take what she left over. Reuben
Granger was crazy about her from the time she was knee-high; but when
he went away to Bangor to study for the ministry, the others had it
all their own way. She was only seventeen; she hadn't ever experienced
religion, and she was mischeevous as a kitten.

“You remember you laughed, this morning, when Mr. Bascom told about
Hogshead Jowett? Well, he used to want to keep company with Lovey; but
she couldn't abide him, and whenever he come to court her she clim' into
a hogshead, and hid till after he 'd gone. The boys found it out, and
used to call him 'Hogshead Jowett.” He was the biggest fool in Foxboro'
Four Corners; and that 's saying consid'able, for Foxboro' is famous
for its fools, and always has been. There was thirteen of 'em there one
year. They say a man come out from Portland, and when he got as fur
as Foxboro' he kep' inquiring the way to Dunstan; and I declare if he
didn't meet them thirteen fools, one after another, standing in their
front dooryards ready to answer questions. When he got to Dunstan, says
he, 'For the Lord's sake, what kind of a village is that I've just went
through? Be they _all_ fools there?'

“Hogshead was scairt to death whenever he come to see Lovice. One night,
when he 'd been there once, and she 'd hid, as she always done, he come
back a second time, and she went to the door, not mistrusting it was
him. 'Did you forget anything?' says she, sparkling out at him through
a little crack. He was all taken aback by seeing her, and he stammered
out, 'Yes, I forgot my han'k'chief; but it don't make no odds, for I
didn't pay out but fifteen cents for it two year ago, and I don't make
no use of it 'ceptins to wipe my nose on.' How we did laugh over that!
Well, he had a conviction of sin pretty soon afterwards, and p'r'aps
it helped his head some; at any rate he quit farming, and become a
Bullockite preacher.

“It seems odd, when Lovice wa'n't a perfessor herself, she should have
drawed the most pious young men in the village, but she did: she had
good Orthodox beaux, Free and Close Baptists, Millerites and Adventists,
all on her string together; she even had one Cochranite, though the
sect had mostly died out. But when Reuben Granger come home, a
full-feathered-out minister, he seemed to strike her fancy as he never
had before, though they were always good friends from children. He had
light hair and blue eyes and fair skin (his business being under cover
kep' him bleached out), and he and Lovey made the prettiest couple you
ever see; for she was dark complected, and her cheeks no otherways than
scarlit the whole durin' time. She had a change of heart that winter; in
fact she had two of 'em, for she changed hers for Reuben's, and found a
hope at the same time. 'T was a good honest conversion, too, though she
did say to me she was afraid that if Reuben hadn't taught her what love
was or might be, she 'd never have found out enough about it to love God
as she 'd ought to.

“There, I've begun both roses, and hers is 'bout finished. I sha'n't
have more 'n enough white alapaca. It's lucky the moths spared one
breadth of the wedding dresses; we was married on the same day, you
know, and dressed just alike. Jot wa'n't quite ready to be married, for
he wa'n't any more forehanded 'bout that than he was 'bout other things;
but I told him Lovey and I had kept up with each other from the start,
and he 'd got to fall into line or drop out o' the percession.--Now what
next?”

“Wasn't there anybody at the wedding but you and Lovice?” asked
Priscilla, with an amused smile.

“Land, yes! The meeting-house was cram jam full. Oh, to be sure! I know
what you 're driving at! Well, I have to laugh to think I should have
forgot the husbands! They'll have to be worked into the story, certain;
but it'll be consid'able of a chore, for I can't make flowers out of
coat and pants stuff, and there ain't any more flowers on this branch
anyway.”

Diadema sat for a few minutes in rapt thought, and then made a sudden
inspired dash upstairs, where Miss Hollis presently heard her rummaging
in an old chest. She soon came down, triumphant.

“Wa'n't it a providence I saved Jot's and Reuben's wedding ties! And
here they are,--one yellow and green mixed, and one brown. Do you know
what I'm going to do? I'm going to draw in a butterfly hovering over
them two roses, and make it out of the neckties,--green with brown
spots. That'll bring in the husbands; and land! I wouldn't have either
of 'em know it for the world. I'll take a pattern of that lunar moth you
pinned on the curtain yesterday.”

Miss Hollis smiled in spite of herself. “You have some very ingenious
ideas and some very pretty thoughts, Mrs. Bascom, do you know it?”

“It's the first time I ever heard tell of it,” said Diadema cheerfully.
“Lovey was the pretty-spoken, pretty-appearing one; I was always plain
and practical. While I think of it, I'll draw in a little mite of this
red into my carnation pink. It was a red scarf Reuben brought Lovey from
Portland. It was the first thing he ever give her, and aunt Hitty said
if one of the Abel Grangers give away anything that cost money, it meant
business. That was all fol-de-rol, for there never was a more liberal
husband, though he was a poor minister; but then they always _are_ poor,
without they're rich; there don't seem to be any halfway in ministers.

“We was both lucky that way. There ain't a stingy bone in Jot Bascom's
body. He don't make much money, but what he does make goes into the
bureau drawer, and the one that needs it most takes it out. He never
asks me what I done with the last five cents he give me. You 've never
been married Miss Hollis, and you ain't engaged, so you don't know much
about it; but I tell you there 's a heap o' foolishness talked about
husbands. If you get the one you like yourself, I don't know as it
matters if all the other women folks in town don't happen to like him
as well as you do; they ain't called on to do that. They see the face
he turns to them, not the one he turns to you. Jot ain't a very good
provider, nor he ain't a man that 's much use round a farm, but he 's
such a fav'rite I can't blame him. There 's one thing: when he does
come home he 's got something to say, and he 's always as lively as a
cricket, and smiling as a basket of chips. I like a man that 's good
comp'ny, even if he ain't so forehanded. There ain't anything specially
lovable about forehandedness, when you come to that. I shouldn't ever
feel drawed to a man because he was on time with his work. He 's got
such pleasant ways, Jot has! The other afternoon he didn't get home
early enough to milk; and after I done the two cows, I split the
kindling and brought in the wood, for I knew he 'd want to go to the
tavern and tell the boys 'bout the robbery up to Boylston. There ain't
anybody but Jot in this village that has wit enough to find out what 's
going on, and tell it in an int'resting way round the tavern fire. And
he can do it without being full of cider, too; he don't need any apple
juice to limber _his_ tongue!

“Well, when he come in, he see the pails of milk, and the full wood-box,
and the supper laid out under the screen cloth on the kitchen table, and
he come up to me at the sink, and says he, 'Diademy, you 're the best
wife in this county, and the brightest jewel in my crown,--that 's what
_you_ are!' (He got that idea out of a duet he sings with Almiry Berry.)
Now I'd like to know whether that ain't pleasanter than 't is to have a
man do all the shed 'n' barn work up smart, and then set round the stove
looking as doleful as a last year's bird's nest? Take my advice, Miss
Hollis: get a good provider if you can, but anyhow try to find you a
husband that'll keep on courting a little now and then, when he ain't
too busy; it smooths things consid'able round the house.

“There, I got so int'rested in what I was saying, I've went on and
finished the carnation, and some of the stem, too. Now what comes next?
Why, the thing that happened next, of course, and that was little Jot.

“I'll work in a bud on my rose and one on Lovey's, and my bud'll be made
of Jot's first trousers. The goods ain't very appropriate for a rosebud,
but it'll have to do, for the idee is the most important thing in this
rug. When I put him into pants, I hadn't any cloth in the house, and it
was such bad going Jot couldn't get to Wareham to buy me anything; so I
made 'em out of an old gray cashmere skirt, and lined 'em with flannel.”

“Buds are generally the same color as the roses, aren't they?” ventured
Priscilla.

“I don't care if they be,” said Diadema obstinately. “What's to hender
this bud's bein' grafted on? Mrs. Granger was as black as an Injun, but
the little Granger children were all red-headed, for they took after
their father. But I don't know; you've kind o' got me out o' conceit
with it. I s'pose I could have taken a piece of his baby blanket; but
the moths never et a mite o' that, and it's too good to cut up. There's
one thing I can do: I can make the bud up with a long stem, and have it
growing right up alongside of mine,--would you?”

“No, it must be stalk of your stalk, bone of your bone, flesh of your
flesh, so to speak. I agree with you, the idea is the first thing.
Besides, the gray is a very light shade, and I dare say it will look
like a bluish white.”

“I'll try it and see, but I wish to the land the moths _had_ eat
the pinning-blanket, and then I could have used it. Lovey worked the
scallops on the aidge for me. My grief! what int'rest she took in my
baby clothes! Little Jot was born at Thanksgiving time, and she come
over from Skowhegan, where Reuben was settled pastor of his first
church. I shall never forget them two weeks to the last day of my life.
There was deep snow on the ground. I had that chamber there, with the
door opening into the setting-room. Mother and father Bascom kep' out in
the dining-room and kitchen, where the work was going on, and Lovey and
the baby and me had the front part of the house to ourselves, with Jot
coming in on tiptoe, heaping up wood in the fireplace so 't he 'most
roasted us out. He don't forget his chores in time o' sickness.

“I never took so much comfort in all my days. Jot got one of the
Billings girls to come over and help in the housework, so 't I could
lay easy 's long as I wanted to; and I never had such a rest before nor
since. There ain't any heaven in the book o' Revelations that 's any
better than them two weeks was. I used to lay quiet in my good feather
bed, fingering the pattern of my best crochet quilt, and looking at the
fire-light shining on Lovey and the baby. She 'd hardly leave him in the
cradle a minute. When I did n't want him in bed with me, she 'd have
him in her lap. Babies are common enough to most folks, but Lovey was
diff'rent. She 'd never had any experience with children, either, for we
was the youngest in our family; and it wa'n't long before we come near
being the oldest, too, for mother buried seven of us before she went
herself. Anyway, I never saw nobody else look as she done when she held
my baby. I don't mean nothing blasphemious when I say 't was for all the
world like your photograph of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

“The nights come in early, so it was 'most dark at four o'clock.
The little chamber was so peaceful! I could hear Jot rattling the
milk-pails, but I'd draw a deep breath o' comfort, for I knew the milk
would be strained and set away without my stepping foot to the floor.
Lovey used to set by the fire, with a tall candle on the light-stand
behind her, and a little white knit cape over her shoulders. She had the
pinkest cheeks, and the longest eyelashes, and a mouth like a little red
buttonhole; and when she bent over the baby, and sung to him,--though
his ears wa'n't open, I guess for his eyes wa'n't,--the tears o' joy
used to rain down my cheeks. It was pennyrial hymns she used to sing
mostly, and the one I remember best was


     “'Daniel's wisdom may I know,
     Stephen's faith and spirit show;
     John's divine communion feel,
     Moses' meekness, Joshua's zeal,
     Run like the unwearied Paul,
     Win the day and conquer all.


     “'Mary's love may I possess,
     Lydia's tender-heartedness,
     Peter's fervent spirit feel,
     James's faith by works reveal,
     Like young Timothy may I
     Every sinful passion fly.'


“'Oh Diademy,' she 'd say, 'you was always the best, and it 's nothing
more 'n right the baby should have come to you. P'r'aps God will think
I'm good enough some time; and if he does, Diademy, I'll offer up a
sacrifice every morning and every evening. But I'm afraid,' says she,
'he thinks I can't stand any more happiness, and be a faithful follower
of the cross. The Bible says we 've got to wade through fiery floods
before we can enter the kingdom. I don't hardly know how Reuben and I
are going to find any way to wade through; we're both so happy, they 'd
have to be consid'able hot before we took notice,' says she, with the
dimples all breaking out in her cheeks.

“And that was true as gospel. She thought everything Reuben done was
just right, and he thought everything she done was just right. There
wa'n't nobody else; the world was all Reuben 'n' all Lovey to them.
If you could have seen her when she was looking for him to come from
Skowhegan! She used to watch at the attic window; and when she seen him
at the foot of the hill she 'd up like a squirrel, and run down the road
without stopping for anything but to throw a shawl over her head. And
Reuben would ketch her up as if she was a child, and scold her for not
putting a hat on, and take her under his coat coming up the hill. They
was a sight for the neighbors, I must confess, but it wa'n't one you
could hardly disapprove of, neither. Aunt Hitty said it was tempting
Providence and couldn't last, and God would visit his wrath on 'em for
making idols of sinful human flesh.

“She was right one way,--it didn't last; but nobody can tell me God was
punishing of 'em for being too happy. I guess he 'ain't got no objection
to folks being happy here below, if they don't forget it ain't the whole
story.

“Well, I must mark in a bud on Lovey's stalk now, and I'm going to make
it of her baby's long white cloak. I earned the money for it myself,
making coats, and put four yards of the finest cashmere into it; for
three years after little Jot was born I went over to Skowhegan to help
Lovey through her time o' trial. Time o' trial! I thought I was happy,
but I didn't know how to be as happy as Lovey did; I wa'n't made on that
pattern.

“When I first showed her the baby (it was a boy, same as mine), her eyes
shone like two evening stars. She held up her weak arms, and gathered
the little bundle o' warm flannen into 'em; and when she got it close
she shut her eyes and moved her lips, and I knew she was taking her lamb
to the altar and offering it up as a sacrifice. Then Reuben come in. I
seen him give one look at the two dark heads laying close together on
the white piller, and then go down on his knees by the side of the bed.
'T wa'n't no place for me; I went off, and left 'em together. We didn't
mistrust it then, but they only had three days more of happiness, and
I'm glad I give 'em every minute.”

The room grew dusky as twilight stole gently over the hills of Pleasant
River. Priscilla's lip trembled; Diadema's tears fell thick and fast on
the white rosebud, and she had to keep wiping her eyes as she followed
the pattern.


“I ain't said as much as this about it for five years,” she went on,
with a tell-tale quiver in her voice, “but now I've got going I can't
stop. I'll have to get the weight out o' my heart somehow.

“Three days after I put Lovey's baby into her arms the Lord called her
home. 'When I prayed so hard for this little new life, Reuben,' says she
holding the baby as if she could never let it go, 'I didn't think I'd
got to give up my own in place of it; but it's the first fiery flood
we've had, dear, and though it burns to my feet I'll tread it as brave
as I know how.'

“She didn't speak a word after that; she just faded away like a
snowdrop, hour by hour. And Reuben and I stared at one another in the
face as if we was dead instead of her, and we went about that house o'
mourning like sleep-walkers for days and says, not knowing whether we et
or slept, or what we done.

“As for the baby, the poor little mite didn't live many hours after its
mother, and we buried 'em together. Reuben and I knew what Lovey would
have liked. She gave her life for the baby's, and it was a useless
sacrifice, after all. No, it wa'n't neither; it _could_n't have been!
You needn't tell me God'll let such sacrifices as that come out useless!
But anyhow, we had one coffin for 'em both, and I opened Lovey's arms
and laid the baby in 'em. When Reuben and I took our last look, we
thought she seemed more 'n ever like Mary, the mother of Jesus. There
never was another like her, and there never will be. 'Nonesuch,' Reuben
used to call her.”

There was silence in the room, broken only by the ticking of the old
clock and the tinkle of a distant cowbell. Priscilla made an impetuous
movement, flung herself down by the basket of rags, and buried her head
in Diadema's gingham apron.

“Dear Mrs. Bascom, don't cry. I'm sorry, as the children say.”

“No, I won't more 'n a minute. Jot can't stand it to see me give way.
You go and touch a match to the kitchen fire, so 't the kettle will
be boiling, and I'll have a minute to myself. I don't know what the
neighbors would think to ketch me crying over my drawing-in frame; but
the spell's over now, or 'bout over, and when I can muster up courage
I'll take the rest of the baby's cloak and put a border of white
everlastings round the outside of the rug. I'll always mean the baby's
birth and Lovey's death to me; but the flowers will remind me it 's life
everlasting for both of 'em, and so it's the most comforting end I can
think of.”

It was indeed a beautiful rug when it was finished and laid in front of
the sofa in the fore-room. Diadema was very choice of it. When company
was expected she removed it from its accustomed place, and spread it in
a corner of the room where no profane foot could possibly tread on it.
Unexpected callers were managed by a different method. If they seated
themselves on the sofa, she would fear they did not “set easy” or “rest
comfortable” there, and suggest their moving to the stuffed chair by
the window. The neighbors thought this solicitude merely another sign of
Diadema's “p'ison neatness,” excusable in this case as there was so much
white in the new rug.

The fore-room blinds were ordinarily closed, and the chillness of death
pervaded the sacred apartment; but on great occasions, when the sun was
allowed to penetrate the thirty-two tiny panes of glass in each window,
and a blaze was lighted in the fire-place, Miss Hollis would look in as
she went upstairs, and muse a moment over the pathetic little romance
of rags, the story of two lives worked into a bouquet of old-fashioned
posies, whose gay tints were brought out by a setting of sombre threads.
Existence had gone so quietly in this remote corner of the world that
all its important events, babyhood, childhood, betrothal, marriage,
motherhood, with all their mysteries of love and life and death, were
chronicled in this narrow space not two yards square.

Diadema came in behind the little school-teacher one afternoon.

“I cal'late,” she said, “that being kep' in a dark room, and never being
tread on, it will last longer 'n I do. If it does, Priscilla, you know
that white crepe shawl of mine I wear to meeting hot Sundays: that would
make a second row of everlastings round the border. You could piece
out the linings good and smooth on the under side, draw in the white
flowers, and fill 'em round with black to set 'em off. The rug would be
han'somer than ever then, and the story--would be finished.”




A VILLAGE STRADIVARIUS.


I.


     “Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,
     Know more than any book.
     Down with your doleful problems,
     And court the sunny brook.
     The south-winds are quick-witted,
     The schools are sad and slow,
     The masters quite omitted
     The lore we care to know.”

     Emerson's _April._


“Find the 317th page, Davy, and begin at the top of the right-hand
column.”

The boy turned the leaves of the old instruction book obediently, and
then began to read in a sing-song, monotonous tone:--

“'One of Pag-pag'”--

“Pag-a-ni-ni's.”

“'One of Paggernyner's' (I wish all the fellers in your stories didn't
have such tough old names!) 'most dis-as-ter-ous triumphs he had when
playing at Lord Holland's.' (Who was Lord Holland, uncle Tony?) 'Some
one asked him to im-pro-vise on the violin the story of a son who kills
his father, runs a-way, becomes a highway-man, falls in love with a
girl who will not listen to him; so he leads her to a wild country site,
suddenly jumping with her from a rock into an a-b-y-double-s'”--

“Abyss.”

“'--a--rock--into--an--abyss, were they disappear forever. Paggernyner
listened quietly, and when the story was at an end he asked that all the
lights should be distinguished.'”

“Look closer, Davy.”

“'Should be extinguished. He then began playing, and so terrible was
the musical in-ter-pre-ta-tion of the idea which had been given him
that several of the ladies fainted, and the sal-salon-s_a_lon, when
relighted, looked like a battle-field.' Cracky! Wouldn't you like to
have been there, uncle Tony? But I don't believe anybody ever played
that way, do you?”

“Yes,” said the listener, dreamily raising his sightless eyes to the
elm-tree that grew by the kitchen door. “I believe it, and I can hear
it myself when you read the story to me. I feel that the secret of
everything in the world that is beautiful, or true, or terrible, is
hidden in the strings of my violin, Davy, but only a master can draw it
from captivity.”

“You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony, even if the ladies
don't faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen doesn't look like a
battle-field when you 've finished. I'm glad it doesn't, for my part,
for I should have more housework to do than ever.”

“Poor Davy! you couldn't hate housework any worse if you were a woman;
but it is all done for to-day. Now paint me one of your pictures,
laddie; make me see with your eyes.”

The boy put down the book and leaped out of the open door, barely
touching the old millstone that served for a step. Taking a stand in
the well-worn path, he rested his hands on his hips, swept the landscape
with the glance of an eagle, and began like a young improvisator:--

“The sun is just dropping behind Brigadier Hill.”

“What color is it?”

“Red as fire, and there isn't anything near it,--it 's almost alone
in the sky; there 's only teenty little white feather clouds here and
there. The bridge looks as if it was a silver string tying the two sides
of the river together. The water is pink where the sun shines into it.
All the leaves of the trees are kind of swimming in the red light,--I
tell you, nunky, just as if I was looking through red glass. The weather
vane on Squire Bean's barn dazzles so the rooster seems to be shooting
gold arrows into the river. I can see the tip top of Mount Washington
where the peak of its snow-cap touches the pink sky. The hen-house door
is open. The chickens are all on their roost, with their heads cuddled
under their wings.”

“Did you feed them?”

The boy clapped his hand over his mouth with a comical gesture of
penitence, and dashed into the shed for a panful of corn, which he
scattered over the ground, enticing the sleepy fowls by insinuating
calls of “Chick, chick, chick, chick! _Come,_ biddy, biddy, biddy,
biddy! _Come,_ chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!”

The man in the doorway smiled as over the misdemeanor of somebody very
dear and lovable, and rising from his chair felt his way to a corner
shelf, took down a box, and drew from it a violin swathed in a silk bag.
He removed the covering with reverential hands. The tenderness of the
face was like that of a young mother dressing or undressing her child.
As he fingered the instrument his hands seemed to have become all eyes.
They wandered caressingly over the polished surface as if enamored of
the perfect thing that they had created, lingering here and there with
rapturous tenderness on some special beauty,--the graceful arch of
the neck, the melting curves of the cheeks, the delicious swell of the
breasts.

When he had satisfied himself for the moment, he took the bow, and
lifting the violin under his chin, inclined his head fondly toward it
and began to play.

The tune at first seemed muffled, but had a curious bite, that began
in distant echoes, but after a few minutes' the playing grew firmer and
clearer, ringing out at last with velvety richness and strength until
the atmosphere was satiated with harmony. No more ethereal note ever
flew out of a bird's throat than Anthony Croft set free from this
violin, his _liebling_, his “swan song,” made in the year he had lost
his eyesight.

Anthony Croft had been the only son of his mother, and she a widow. His
boyhood had been exactly like that of all the other boys in Edgewood,
save that he hated school a trifle more, if possible, than any of the
others; though there was a unanimity of aversion in this matter that
surprised and wounded teachers and parents.

The school was the ordinary “deestrick” school of that time; there were
not enough scholars for what Cyse Higgins called a “degraded” school.
The difference between Anthony and the other boys lay in the reason as
well as the degree of his abhorrence.

He had come into the world a naked, starving human soul; he longed to
clothe himself, and he was hungry and ever hungrier for knowledge; but
never within the four walls of the village schoolhouse could he get hold
of one fact that would yield him its secret sense, one glimpse of clear
light that would shine in upon the “darkness which may be felt” in his
mind, one thought or word that would feed his soul.

The only place where his longings were ever stilled, where he seemed at
peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was out
of doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the sweet,
palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant gaze was
always on the open window near which he sat. He could never study when a
fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on the toes of his
bare feet, trying to locate and understand the buzz that puzzled him.
The book was a mute, soulless thing that had no relation to his
inner world of thought and feeling. He turned ever from the dead
seven-times-six to the mystery of life about him.

He was never a special favorite with his teachers; that was scarcely to
be expected. In his very early years, his pockets were gone through with
every morning when he entered the school door, and the contents, when
confiscated, would comprise a jew's-harp, a bit of catgut, screws
whittled out of wood, tacks, spools, pins, and the like. But when robbed
of all these he could generally secrete a piece of elastic, which, when
put between his teeth and stretched to its utmost capacity, would yield
a delightful twang when played upon with the forefinger. He could also
fashion an interesting musical instrument in his desk by means of spools
and catgut and bits of broken glass. The chief joy of his life was an
old tuning-fork that the teacher of the singing school had given him,
but, owing to the degrading and arbitrary censorship of pockets that
prevailed, he never dared bring it into the schoolroom. There were ways,
however, of evading inexorable law and circumventing base injustice.
He hid the precious thing under a thistle just outside the window. The
teacher had sometimes a brief season of apathy on hot afternoons, when
she was hearing the primer class read, “_I see a pig. The pig is big.
The big pig can dig;_” which stirring in phrases were always punctuated
by the snores of the Hanks baby, who kept sinking down on his fat little
legs in the line and giving way to slumber during the lesson. At such
a moment Anthony slipped out of the window and snapped the tuning-fork
several times,--just enough to save his soul from death,--and then
slipped in again. He was caught occasionally, but not often; and even
when he was, there were mitigating circumstances, for he was generally
put under the teacher's desk for punishment. It was a dark, close,
sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown tied of looking
at the triangle of elastic in the teacher's congress boot, and tired
of wishing it was his instead of hers, he would tie one end of a bit of
thread to the button of his gingham shirt, and, carrying it round his
left ear several times, make believe he was Paganini languishing in
prison and playing on a violin with a single string.

As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony Croft was by
general assent counted the laziest boy in the village. That he was lazy
in certain matters merely because he was in a frenzy of industry to
pursue certain others had nothing to do with the case, of course.

If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen cause
working to effect, in which he could have found by personal experiment a
single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine right of discovery,
he would have counted labor or study all joy.

He was one incarnate Why and How, one brooding wonder and interrogation
point. “Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do the leaves turn
red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the earth? From whence comes
the life hidden in the egg under the bird's breast? What holds the moon
in the sky? Who regulates her shining? Who moves the wind? Who made
me, and what am I? Who, why, how whither? If I came from God but only
lately, teach me his lessons first, put me into vital relation with
life and law, and then give me your dead signs and equivalents for real
things, that I may learn more and more, and ever more and ever more.”

There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive that Tony
learned anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient school
money to keep the village seat of learning open more than half the year
the boy educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom, and knowledge
of the other half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched
from a hen's egg, and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black
sheep and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony had
more useless information than any boy in the village. He knew just where
to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring home the waxen beauties
when other people had scarcely begun to think about the spring. He could
tell where to look for the rare fringed gentian, the yellow violet, the
Indian pipe. There were clefts in the rocks of the Indian Cellar where,
when every one else failed, he could find harebells and columbines.

When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing themselves
each in his own way, you would find Tony lying flat on the pine needles
in the woods, listening to the notes of the wild birds, and imitating
them patiently, til you could scarcely tell which was boy and which was
bird; and if you could, the birds couldn't, for many a time he coaxed
the bobolinks and thrushes to perch on the low boughs above his head and
chirp to him as if he were a feathered brother. There was nothing about
the building of nests with which he was not familiar. He could have
taken hold and helped if the birds had not been so shy, and if he had
had beak and claw instead of clumsy fingers. He would sit near a beehive
for hours without moving, or lie prone in the sandy road, under the
full glare of the sun, watching the ants acting out their human comedy;
sometimes surrounding a favorite hill with stones, that the comedy might
not be turned into a tragedy by a careless footfall. The cottage on the
river road grew more and more to resemble a museum and herbarium as the
years went by, and the Widow Croft's weekly house-cleaning was a matter
that called for the exercise of Christian grace.

Still, Tony was a good son, affectionate, considerate, and obedient.
His mother had no idea that he would ever be able, or indeed willing,
to make a living; but there was a forest of young timber growing up, a
small hay farm to depend upon, and a little hoard that would keep him
out of the poorhouse when she died and left him to his own devices.
It never occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable. If he were
difficult to understand, it reflected more upon his eccentricity than
upon her density. What was a woman to do with a boy of twelve who, when
she urged him to drop the old guitar he was taking apart and hurry off
to school, cried, “Oh, mother! when there is so much to learn in this
world, it is wicked, wicked to waste time in school.”

About this period Tony spent hours in the attic arranging bottles and
tumblers into a musical scale. He also invented an instrument made
of small and great, long and short pins, driven into soft board to
different depths, and when the widow passed his door on the way to bed
she invariable saw this barbaric thing locked up to the boy's breast,
for he often played himself to sleep with it.

At fifteen he had taken to pieces and put together again, strengthened,
soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced every accordion, guitar,
melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the
neighboring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way,
but very little, as people in general regarded this “tinkering” as a
pleasing diversion in which they could indulge him without danger. As
an example of this attitude, Dr. Berry's wife's melodeon had lost two
stops, the pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works,
it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were missing. Anthony
worked more than a week on its rehabilitation, and received in return
Mrs. Berry's promise that the doctor would pull a tooth for him some
time! This, of course, was a guerdon for the future, but it seemed
pathetically distant to the lad who had never had a toothache in his
life. He had to plead with Cyse Higgins for a week before that prudent
young farmer would allow him to touch his five-dollar fiddle. He
obtained permission at last only because by offering to give Cyse his
calf in case he spoiled the violin. “That seems square,” said Cyse
doubtfully, “but after all, you can't play on a calf!” “Neither will
your fiddle give milk, if you keep it long enough,” retorted Tony; and
this argument was convincing.

So great was his confidence in Tony's skill that Squire Bean trusted his
father's violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years
before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half century, so
that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost, the neck and the
tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and studied it for two whole
evenings before the open fire. The problem of restoring it was quite
beyond his abilities. He finally took the savings of two summers'
“blueberry money” and walked sixteen miles to Portland, where he bought
a book called The Practical Violinist. The Supplement proved to be
a mine of wealth. Even the headings appealed to his imagination and
intoxicated him with their suggestions,--On Scraping, Splitting, and
Repairing Violins, Violin Players, Great Violinists, Solo Playing,
etc.; and at the very end a Treatise on the Construction, Preservation,
Repair, and Improvement of the Violin, by Jacob Augustus Friedheim,
Instrument Maker to the Court of the Archduke of Weimar.

There was a good deal of moral advice in the preface that sadly puzzled
the boy, who was always in a condition of chronic amazement at the
village disapprobation of his favorite fiddle. That the violin did not
in some way receive the confidence enjoyed by other musical instruments,
he perceived from various paragraphs written by the worthy author of The
Practical Violinist, as for example:--

“Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong prejudice against
the violin because they have always known it associated with dancing and
dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is 'converted,' and
such an obligation will no longer lie against it. ... Many delightful
hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has obtained a respectable
knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise would find the time hang
heavy on his hands; or, for want of some better amusement, would
frequent the dangerous and destructive paths of vice and be ruined
forever. ... I am in hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil, that your
violin will occupy your attention at just those very times when, if you
were immoral or dissipated, you would be at the grogshop, gaming-table,
or among vicious females. Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the
prejudices many hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish
abundance of innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement. These are
the views with which I hope you have adopted it, and will continue to
cherish and cultivate it.”


II.


     “There is no bard in all the choir,
    .......
     Not one of all can put in verse,
     Or to this presence could rehearse
     The sights and voices ravishing
     The boy knew on the hills in spring,
     When pacing through the oaks he heard
     Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
     The heavy grouse's sudden whir,
     The rattle of the kingfisher.”

     Emerson's _Harp._


Now began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never long
enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon. Oh that there had
been some good angel who would have taken in hand Anthony Croft the
boy, and, training the powers that pointed so unmistakably in certain
directions, given to the world the genius of Anthony Croft, potential
instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia; for it was not only that
he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear caught the faintest breath of
harmony or hint of discord, as


     “Fairy folk a-listening
     Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
     And for music to their dance
     Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
     Sap that trembles into buds
     Sending little rhythmic floods
     Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
     Thus all beauty that appears
     Has birth as sound to finer sense
     And lighter-clad intelligence.”


As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and color to
another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody. Notwithstanding
all these gifts and possibilities, the doctor's wife advised the Widow
Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating delicately that these freaks
of nature, while playing no apparent part in the divine economy, could
sometimes be made self-supporting.

The seventeenth year of his life marked a definite epoch in his
development. He studied Jacob Friedheim's treatise until he knew
the characteristics of all the great violin models, from the Amatis,
Hieronymus, Antonius, and Nicolas, to those of Stradivarius, Guarnerius,
and Steiner.

It was in this year, also, that he made a very precious discovery. While
browsing in the rubbish in Squire Bean's garret to see if he could find
the missing sound-post of the old violin, he came upon a billet of wood
wrapped in cloth and paper. When unwrapped, it was plainly labeled “Wood
from the Bean Maple at Pleasant Point; the biggest maple in York County,
and believed to be one of the biggest in the State of Maine.” Anthony
found that the oldest inhabitant of Pleasant River remembered the stump
of the tree, and that the boys used to jump over it and admire
its proportions whenever they went fishing at the Point. The wood,
therefore, was perhaps eighty or ninety years old. The squire agreed
willingly that it should be used to mend the old violin, and told Tony
he should have what was left for himself. When, by careful calculation,
he found that the remainder would make a whole violin, he laid it
reverently away for another twenty years, so that he should be sure it
had completed its century of patient waiting for service, and falling on
his knees by his bedside said, “I thank Thee, Heavenly Father, for
this precious gift, and I promise from this moment to gather the most
beautiful wood I can find, and lay it by where it can be used some time
to make perfect violins, so that if any creature as poor and helpless as
I am needs the wherewithal to do good work, I shall have helped him as
Thou hast helped me.” And according to his promise so he did, and the
pieces of richly curled maple, of sycamore, and of spruce began to
accumulate. They were cut from the sunny side of the trees, in just
the right season of the year, split so as to have a full inch thickness
towards the bark, and a quarter inch towards the heart. They were then
laid for weeks under one of the falls in Wine Brook, where the musical
tinkle, tinkle of the stream fell on the wood already wrought upon by
years of sunshine and choruses of singing birds.


This boy, toiling not alone for himself, but with full and conscious
purpose for posterity also, was he not worthy to wear the mantle of
Antonius Stradivarius?


“That plain white-aproned man who stood at work Patient and accurate
full fourscore years, Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,
And since keen sense is love of perfectness, Made perfect violins, the
needed paths For inspiration and high mastery.”

And as if the year were not full enough of glory, the school-teacher
sent him a book with a wonderful poem in it.

That summer's teaching had been the freak of a college student, who had
gone back to his senior year strengthened by his experience of village
life. Anthony Croft, who was only three or four years his junior, had
been his favorite pupil and companion.

“How does Tony get along?” asked the Widow Croft when the teacher came
to call.

“Tony? Oh, I can't teach him anything.”

Tears sprang to the mother's eyes.

“I know he ain't much on book learning,” she said apologetically, “but
I'm bound he don't make you no trouble in deportment.”

“I mean,” said the school-teacher gravely, “that I can show him how to
read a little Latin and do a little geometry, but he knows as much in
one day as I shall ever know in a year.”

Tony crouched by the old fireplace in the winter evenings, dropping his
knife or his compasses a moment to read aloud to his mother, who sat in
the opposite corner knitting:--


     “Of old Antonio Stradivari,--him
     Who a good quarter century and a half ago
     Put his true work in the brown instrument,
     And by the nice adjustment of its frame
     Gave it responsive life, continuous
     With the master's finger-tips, and perfected
     Like them by delicate rectitude of use.”


The mother listened with painful intentness. “I like the sound of it,”
 she said, “but I can't hardly say I take in the full sense.”

“Why mother,” said the lad, in a rare moment of self-expression, “you
know the poetry says he cherished his sight and touch by temperance;
that an idiot might see a straggling line and be content, but he had
an eye that winced at false work, and loved the true. When it says his
finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude of use, I think it
means doing everything as it is done in heaven, and that anybody
who wants to make a perfect violin must keep his eye open to all the
beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has
put into the world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work
that is crooked or straggling or false, till, after years and years of
rightness, they are fit to make a violin like the squire's, a violin
that can say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn't be ashamed to
play on.”

Do these words seem likely ones to fall from the lips of a lad who had
been at the tail of his class ever since his primer days? Well,
Anthony was seventeen now, and he was “educated,” in spite of sorry
recitations,--educated, the Lord knows how! Yes, in point of fact the
Lord does know how! He knows how the drill and pressure of the daily
task, still more the presence of the high ideal, the inspiration working
from within, how these educate us.

The blind Anthony Croft sitting in the kitchen doorway had seemingly
missed the heights of life he might have trod, and had walked his close
on fifty years through level meadows of mediocrity, a witch in every
finger-tip waiting to be set to work, head among the clouds, feet
stumbling, eyes and ears open to hear God's secret thought; seeing and
hearing it, too, but lacking force to speak it forth again; for while
imperious genius surmounts all obstacles, brushes laws and formulas from
its horizon, and with its own free soul sees its “path and the outlets
of the sky,” potential genius forever needs an angel of deliverance to
set it free.

Poor Anthony Croft, or blessed Anthony Croft, I know not which,--God
knows! Poor he certainly was, yet blessed after all. “One thing I do,”
 said Paul. “One thing I do,” said Anthony. He was not able to realize
his ideals, but he had the “angel aim” by which he idealized his reals.

O waiting heart of God! how soon would thy kingdom come if we all did
our allotted tasks, humble or splendid, in this consecrated fashion!


III.


     “Therein I hear the Parcae reel
     The threads of man at their humming wheel,
     The threads of life and power and pain,
     So sweet and mournful falls the strain.”

     Emerson's _Harp._


Old Mrs. Butterfield had had her third stroke of paralysis, and died
of a Sunday night. She was all alone in her little cottage on the river
bank, with no neighbor nearer than Croft's, and nobody there but a blind
man and a small boy. Everybody had told her it was foolish to live alone
in a house on the river road, and everybody was pleased in a discreet
and chastened fashion of course, that it had turned out exactly as they
had predicted.

Aunt Mehitable Tarbox was walking up to Milliken's Mills, with her
little black reticule hanging over her arm, and noticing that there
was no smoke coming out of the chimney, and that the hens were gathered
about the kitchen door clamoring for their breakfast, she thought it
best to stop and knock. No response followed the repeated blows from
her hard knuckles. She then tapped smartly on Mrs. Butterfield's bedroom
window with her thimble finger. This proving of no avail, she was
obliged to pry open the kitchen shutter, split open a mosquito netting
with her shears, and crawl into the house over the sink. This was a
considerable feat for a somewhat rheumatic elderly lady, but this one
never grudged trouble when she wanted to find out anything.

When she discovered that her premonitions were correct, and that
old Mrs. Butterfield was indeed dead, her grief at losing a pleasant
acquaintance was largely mitigated by her sense of importance at being
first on the spot, and chosen by Providence to take command of the
situation. There were no relations in the village; there was no woman
neighbor within a mile: it was therefore her obvious Christian duty not
only to take charge of the remains, but to conduct such a funeral as the
remains would have wished for herself.

The fortunate Vice-President suddenly called upon by destiny to guide
the ship of state, the general who sees a possible Victoria Cross in
a hazardous engagement, can have a faint conception of aunt Hitty's
feeling on this momentous occasion. Funerals were the very breath of her
life. There was no ceremony, either of public or private import, that,
to her mind, approached a funeral in real satisfying interest. Yet,
with distinct talent in this direction, she had always been “cabined,
cribbed, confined” within hopeless limitations. She had assisted in a
secondary capacity at funerals in the families of other people, but she
would have reveled in personally conducted ones. The members of her own
family stubbornly refused to die, however, even the distant connections
living on and on to a ridiculous old age; and if they ever did die, by
reason of a falling roof, shipwreck, or conflagration, they generally
died in Texas or Iowa, or some remote State where aunt Hitty could not
follow the hearse in the first carriage. This blighted ambition was a
heart sorrow of so deep and sacred a character that she did not even
confess it to “Si,” as her appendage of a husband was called.

Now at last her chance for planning a funeral had come. Mrs. Butterfield
had no kith or kin save her niece, Lyddy Ann, who lived in Andover,
or Lawrence, or Haverhill Massachusetts,--aunt Hitty couldn't remember
which, and hoped nobody else could. The niece would be sent for when
they found out where she lived; meanwhile the funeral could not be put
off.

She glanced round the house preparatory to locking it up and starting
to notify Anthony Croft. She would just run over and talk to him about
ordering the coffin; then she could attend to all other necessary
preliminaries herself. The remains had been well-to-do, and there was no
occasion for sordid economy, so aunt Hitty determined in her own mind to
have the latest fashion in everything, including a silver coffin plate.
The Butterfield coffin plates were a thing to be proud of. They had
been sacredly preserved for years and years, and the entire
collection--numbering nineteen in all had been framed, and adorned the
walls of the deceased lady's best room. They were not of solid silver,
it is true, but even so it was a matter of distinction to have belonged
to a family that could afford to have nineteen coffin plates of any
sort.

Aunt Hitty planned certain dramatic details as she walked town the road
to Croft's. It came to her in a burst of inspiration that she would have
two ministers: one for the long prayer, and one for the short prayer and
the remarks. She hoped that Elder Weeks would be adequate in the latter
direction. She knew she couldn't for the life of her think of anything
interesting about Mrs. Butterfield, save that she possessed nineteen
coffin plates, and brought her hens to Edgewood every summer for their
health; but she had heard Elder Weeks make a moving discourse out of
less than that. To be sure, he needed priming, but she was equal to
that. There was Ivory Brown's funeral: how would that have gone on if it
hadn't been for her? Wasn't the elder ten minutes late, and what would
his remarks have amounted to without her suggestions? You might almost
say she was the author of the discourse, for she gave him all the
appropriate ideas. As she had helped him out of the wagon she had said:
“Are you prepared? I thought not; but there's no time to lose. Remember
there are aged parents; two brothers living, one railroading in Spokane
Falls, the other clerking in Washington, D. C. Don't mention the
Universalists,--there's ben two in the fam'ly; nor insanity,--there 's
ben one o' them. The girl in the corner by the clock is the one that
the remains has been keeping comp'ny with. If you can make some genteel
allusions to her, it'll be much appreciated by his folks.”

As to the long prayer, she knew that the Rev. Mr. Ford could be relied
on to pray until aunt Becky Burnham should twitch him by the coat tails.
She had done it more than once. She had also, on one occasion, got up
and straightened his ministerial neckerchief, which he had gradually
“prayed” around his saintly neck until it was behind the right ear.

These plans proved so fascinating to aunt Hitty that she walked quite
half a mile beyond Croft's, and was obliged to retrace her steps.
She conceived bands of black alpaca for the sleeves and hats of the
pallbearers, and a festoon of the same over the front gate, if there
should be any left over. She planned the singing by the choir. There
had been no real choir-singing at any funeral in Edgewood since the Rev.
Joshua Beckwith had died. She would ask them to open with--

     Rebel mourner, cease your weepin'.
     You too must die.

This was a favorite funeral hymn. The only difficulty would be in
keeping aunt Becky Burnham from pitching it in a key where nobody but a
soprano skylark, accustomed to warble at a great height, could
possibly sing it. It was generally given at the grave, when Elder Weeks
officiated; but it never satisfied aunt Hitty, because the good elder
always looked so unpicturesque when he threw a red bandanna handkerchief
over his head before beginning the twenty-seven verses. After the long
prayer, she would have Almira Berry give for a solo--

     This gro-o-oanin' world 's too dark and
     dre-e-ar for the saints' e - ter - nal rest,

This hymn, if it did not wholly reconcile one to death, enabled one to
look upon life with sufficient solemnity. It was a thousand pities, she
thought, that the old hearse was so shabby and rickety, and that Gooly
Eldridge, who drove it, would insist on wearing a faded peach-blow
overcoat. It was exasperating to think of the public spirit at Egypt,
and contrast it with the state of things at Pleasant River. In Egypt
they had sold the old hearse house for a sausage shop, and now they were
having hearse sociables every month to raise money for a new one.

All these details flew through aunt Hitty's mind in fascinating
procession. There shouldn't be “a hitch” anywhere. There had been a
hitch at her last funeral, but she had been only an assistant there.
Matt Henderson had been struck by lightning at the foot of Squire Bean's
old nooning tree, and certain circumstances combined to make the funeral
one of unusual interest, so much so that fat old Mrs. Potter from
Deerwander created a sensation at the cemetery. She was so anxious
to get where she could see everything to the best advantage that she
crowded too near the bier, stepped on the sliding earth, and pitched
into the grave. As she weighed over two hundred pounds, and was in a
position of some disadvantage, it took five men to extricate her from
the dilemma, and the operation made a long and somewhat awkward break in
the religious services. Aunt Hitty always said of this catastrophe,
“If I'd 'a' ben Mis' Potter, I'd 'a' ben so mortified I believe I'd 'a'
said, 'I wa'n't plannin' to be buried, but now I'm in here I declare
I'll stop!'”

Old Mrs. Butterfield's funeral was not only voted an entire success by
the villagers, but the seal of professional approval was set upon it
by an undertaker from Saco, who declared that Mrs. Tarbox could make
a handsome living in the funeral line anywhere. Providence, who always
assists those who assist themselves, decreed that the niece Lyddy Ann
should not arrive until the aunt was safely buried; so, there being
none to resist her right or grudge her the privilege aunt Hitty, for the
first time in her life, rode in the next buggy to the hearse. Si, in his
best suit, a broad weed and weepers, drove Cyse Higgins's black colt,
and aunt Hitty was dressed in deep mourning, with the Widow Buzzell's
crape veil over her face, and in her hand a palmleaf fan tied with a
black ribbon. Her comment to Si, as she went to her virtuous couch that
night, was: “It was an awful dry funeral, but that was the only flaw in
it. It would 'a' ben perfect if there' ben anybody to shed tears. I
come pretty nigh it myself, though I ain't no relation, when Elder Weeks
said, 'You'll go round the house, my sisters, and Mis' Butterfield won't
be there; you'll go int' the orchard, and Mis' Butterfield won't be
there; you'll go int' the barn and Mis' Butterfield won't be there;
you'll go int' the shed, and Mis' Butterfield won't be there; you'll go
int' the hencoop, and Mis' Butterfield won't be there!' That would 'a'
drawed tears from a stone most, 'specially sence Mis' Butterfield set
such store by her hens.”

And this is the way that Lyddy Butterfield came into her kingdom, a
little lone brown house on the river's brim. She had seen it only once
before when she had driven out from Portland, years ago, with her aunt.
Mrs. Butterfield lived in Portland, but spent her summers in Edgewood
on account of her chickens. She always explained that the country was
dreadful dull for her, but good for the hens; they always laid so much
better in the winter time.

Lyddy liked the place all the better for its loneliness. She had never
had enough of solitude, and this quiet home, with the song of the
river for company, if one needed more company than chickens and a cat,
satisfied all her desires, particularly as it was accompanied by a snug
little income of two hundred dollars a year, a meagre sum that seemed to
open up mysterious avenues of joy to her starved, impatient heart.

When she was a mere infant, her brother was holding her on his knee
before the great old-fashioned fireplace heaped with burning logs.
A sudden noise startled him, and the crowing, restless baby gave an
unexpected lurch, and slipped, face downward, into the glowing embers.
It was a full minute before the horror-stricken boy could extricate the
little creature from the cruel flame that had already done its fatal
work. The baby escaped with her life, but was disfigured forever. As
she grew older, the gentle hand of time could not entirely efface the
terrible scars. One cheek was wrinkled and crimson, while one eye and
the mouth were drawn down pathetically. The accident might have changed
the disposition of any child, but Lyddy chanced to be a sensitive,
introspective bit of feminine humanity, in whose memory the burning
flame was never quenched. Her mother, partly to conceal her own wounded
vanity, and partly to shield the timid, morbid child, kept her out of
sight as much as possible; so that at sixteen, when she was left an
orphan, she had lived almost entirely in solitude.

She became, in course of time, a kind of general nursery governess in a
large family of motherless children. The father was almost always away
from home; his sister kept the house, and Lyddy stayed in the nursery,
bathing the brood and putting them to bed, dressing them in the morning,
and playing with them in the safe privacy of the back garden or the open
attic. They loved her, disfigured as she was, for the child despises
mere externals, and explores the heart of things to see whether it be
good or evil,--but they could never induce her to see strangers, nor to
join any gathering of people.

The children were grown and married now, and Lyddy was nearly forty when
she came into possession of house and lands and fortune; forty, with
twenty years of unexpended feeling pent within her. Forty, that is
rather old to be interesting, but age is a relative matter. Haven't you
seen girls of four-and-twenty who have nibbled and been nibbled at ever
since they were sixteen, but who have neither caught anything nor been
caught? They are old, if you like, but Lyddy was forty and still young,
with her susceptibilities cherished, not dulled, and with all the
“language of passion fresh and rooted as the lovely leafage about a
spring.”


IV.


     “He shall daily joy dispense
     Hid in song's sweet influence.”

     Emerson's _Merlin._


Lyddy had very few callers during her first month as a property owner
in Edgewood. Her appearance would have been against her winning friends
easily in any case, even if she had not acquired the habits of a
recluse. It took a certain amount of time, too, for the community to get
used to the fact that old Mrs. Butterfield was dead, and her niece
Lyddy Ann living in the cottage on the river road. There were numbers
of people who had not yet heard that old Mrs. Butterfield had bought the
house from the Thatcher boys, and that was fifteen years ago; but this
was not strange, for, notwithstanding aunt Hitty's valuable services in
disseminating general information, there was a man living on the Bonny
Eagle road who was surprised to hear that Daniel Webster was dead, and
complained that folks were not so long-lived as they used to be.

Aunt Hitty thought Lyddy a Goth and a Vandal because she took down
the twenty silver coffin plates and laid them reverently away. “Mis'
Butterfield would turn in her grave,” she said, “if she knew it. She
ain't much of a housekeeper, I guess,” she went on, as she cut over
Dr. Berry's old trousers into briefer ones for Tommy Berry. “She gives
considerable stuff to her hens that she'd a sight better heat over and
eat herself, in these hard times when the missionary societies can't
hardly keep the heathen fed and clothed and warmed--no, I don't mean
warmed, for most o' the heathens live in hot climates, somehow or
'nother. My back door's jest opposite hers; it's across the river, to
be sure, but it's the narrer part, and I can see everything she does as
plain as daylight. She washed a Monday, and she ain't taken her clothes
in yet, and it's Thursday. She may be bleachin' of 'em out, but it
looks slack. I said to Si last night I should stand it till 'bout
Friday,--seein' 'em lay on the grass there, but if she didn't take 'em
in then, I should go over and offer to help her. She has a fire in the
settin'-room 'most every night, though we ain't had a frost yet; and
as near's I can make out, she's got full red curtains hangin' up to her
windows. I ain't sure, for she don't open the blinds in that room till
I get away in the morning, and she shuts 'em before I get back at night.
Si don't know red from green, so he's useless in such matters. I'm going
home late to-night, and walk down on that side o' the river, so't I can
call in after dark and see what makes her house light up as if the sun
was settin' inside of it.”

As a matter of fact, Lyddy was reveling in house-furnishing of a humble
sort. She had a passion for color. There was a red-and-white straw
matting on the sitting-room floor. Reckless in the certain possession
of twenty dollars a month, she purchased yards upon yards of turkey red
cotton; enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long
curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rockers. She knotted
white fringes for the table covers and curtains, painted the inside
of the fireplace red, put some pots, of scarlet geraniums on the
window-sills, filled newspaper rack with ferns and tacked it over an
ugly spot in the wall, edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of
scarlet worsted, and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash
and red cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned
mantelshelf, and held pictures of Mr. Reynolds, Miss Elvira Reynolds,
George, Susy, Anna, John, Hazel, Ella, and Rufus Reynolds, her former
charges. When all this was done, she lighted a little blaze on the
hearth, took the red curtains from their hands, let them fall gracefully
to the floor, and sat down in her rocking-chair, reconciled to her
existence for absolutely the first time in her forty years.

I hope Mrs. Butterfield was happy enough in Paradise to appreciate and
feel Lyddy's joy. I can even believe she was glad to have died, since
her dying could bring such content to any wretched living human soul.
As Lydia sat in the firelight, the left side of her poor face in shadow,
you saw that she was distinctly harmonious. Her figure, clad in plain
black-and-white calico dress, was a graceful, womanly one. She had
beautifully sloping shoulders and a sweet wrist. Her hair was soft
and plentiful, and her hands were fine, strong, and sensitive. This
possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more pitiful, for
if a cheap chrome has smirch across its face, we think it a matter of no
moment, but we deplore the smallest scratch or blur on any work of real
art.

Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she sat in
front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk. It was her
habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple five-o'clock
supper, gatherings ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers for her vases;
and one night she heard, above the rippling of the river, the strange,
sweet, piercing sound of Anthony Croft's violin.

She drew nearer, and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen
doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a high
forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual
fashion. He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was scrupulously
clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie. Out
of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she did every
night without recognizing that the musician was blind. The music had
a curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her
life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself. As she sat on
the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her head resting
against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of Anthony's violin
came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul. Remember that
in her secluded life she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds
evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the
Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.

Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there
was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her
heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had
never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never
before realized. When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft
wail of delicious woe, she bent forward into the dark, dreading that
something would be lost in the very struggle of listening; then, after
a, pause, a pure human tone would break the stillness, and soaring,
bird-like, higher and higher, seem to mount to heaven itself, and,
“piercing its starry floors,” lift poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very
grates of infinite bliss. In the gentle moods that stole upon her in
those summer twilights she became a different woman, softer in her
prosperity than she had ever been in her adversity; for some plants only
blossom in sunshine. What wonder if to her the music and the musician
became one? It is sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his
talents in this way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his
music, and the music was Anthony Croft. When he played on his violin,
it was as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the
bird on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the
lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in
every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the
patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in
passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought
their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was laden
with spiritual harmony. One might indeed have sung of this little red
violin--that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it were veneered
with rubies--all that Shelley sang of another perfect instrument:--


     “The artist who this viol wrought
     To echo all harmonious thought,
     Fell'd a tree, while on the steep
     The woods were in their winter sleep,
     Rock'd in that repose divine
     Of the wind-swept Apennine;
     And dreaming, some of Autumn past,
     And some of Spring approaching fast,
     And some of April buds and showers,
     And some of songs in July bowers,
     And all of love; and so this tree--
     O that such our death may be!--
     Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
     To live in happier form again.”

The viol “whispers in enamoured tone:”--


     “Sweet oracles of woods and dells,
     And summer windy ill sylvan cells;..
     The clearest echoes of the hills,
     The softest notes of falling rills,
     The melodies of birds and bees,
     The murmuring of summer seas,
     And pattering rain, and breathing dew,
     And airs of evening; all it knew....
     --All this it knows, but will not tell
      To those who cannot question well
     The spirit that inhabits it;...
     But, sweetly as its answers will
     Flatter hands of perfect skill,
     It keeps its highest, holiest tone
     For one beloved Friend alone.”

Lyddy heard the violin and the man's voice as he talked to the
child,--heard them night after night; and when she went home to the
little brown house to light the fire on the hearth and let down the warm
red curtains, she fell into sweet, sad reveries; and when she blew out
her candle for the night, she fell asleep and dreamed new dreams, and
her heart was stirred with the rustling of new-born hopes that rose and
took wing like birds startled from their nests.


V.


     “Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
     A poet or a friend to find:
     Behold, he watches at the door!
     Behold his shadow on the floor!”

     Emerson's _Saadi._

Lyddy Butterfield's hen turkey was of a roving disposition. She had
never appreciated her luxurious country quarters in Edgewood, and was
seemingly anxious to return to the modest back yard in her native city.
At any rate, she was in the habit of straying far from home, and the
habit was growing upon her to such an extent that she would even lead
her docile little gobblers down to visit Anthony Croft's hens and share
their corn.

Lyddy had caught her at it once, and was now pursuing her to that end
for the second time. She paused in front of the house, but there were
no turkeys to be seen. Could they have wandered up the hill road,--the
discontented, “traipsing,” exasperating things? She started in that
direction, when she heard a crash in the Croft kitchen, and then the
sound of a boy's voice coming from an inner room,--a weak and querulous
voice, as if the child were ill.

She drew nearer, in spite of her dread of meeting people, or above all
of intruding, and saw Anthony Croft standing over the stove, with an
expression of utter helplessness on his usually placid face. She had
never really seen him before in the daylight, and there was something
about his appearance that startled her. The teakettle was on the floor,
and a sea of water was flooding the man's feet, yet he seemed to be
gazing into vacancy. Presently he stooped, and fumbled gropingly for the
kettle. It was too hot to be touched with impunity, and he finally left
it in a despairing sort of way, and walked in the direction of a shelf,
from under which a row of coats was hanging. The boy called again in a
louder and more insistent tone, ending in a whimper of restless pain.
This seemed to make the man more nervous than ever. His hands went
patiently over and over the shelf, then paused at each separate nail.

“Bless the poor dear!” thought Lyddy. “Is he trying to find his hat,
or what is he trying to do? I wonder if he is music mad?” and she drew
still nearer the steps.

At this moment he turned and came rapidly toward the door. She looked
straight in his face. There was no mistaking it: he was blind. The
magician who had told her through his violin secrets that she had
scarcely dreamed of, the wizard who had set her heart to throbbing and
aching and longing as it had never throbbed and ached and longed before,
the being who had worn a halo of romance and genius to her simple mind,
was stone-blind! A wave of impetuous anguish, as sharp and passionate
as any she had ever felt for her own misfortunes, swept over her soul at
the spectacle of the man's helplessness. His sightless eyes struck her
like a blow. But there was no time to lose. She was directly in his
path: if she stood still he would certainly walk over her, and if she
moved he would hear her, so, on the spur of the moment, she gave a
nervous cough and said, “Good-morning, Mr. Croft.”

He stopped short. “Who is it?” he asked.

“I am--it is--I am--your new neighbor,” said Lyddy, with a trembling
attempt at cheerfulness.

“Oh, Miss Butterfield! I should have called up to see you before this
if it hadn't been for the boy's sickness. But I am a good-for-nothing
neighbor, as you have doubtless heard. Nobody expects anything of me.”

(“Nobody expects anything of me.” Her own plaint, uttered in her own
tone!)

“I don't know about that,” she answered swiftly. “You've given me, for
one, a great deal of pleasure with your wonderful music. I often hear
you as you play after supper, and it has kept me from being lonesome.
That isn't very much, to be sure.”

“You are fond of music, then?”

“I didn't know I was; I never heard any before,” said Lyddy simply; “but
it seems to help people to say things they couldn't say for themselves,
don't you think so? It comforts me even to hear it, and I think it must
be still more beautiful to make it.”

Now, Lyddy Ann Butterfield had no sooner uttered this commonplace speech
than the reflection darted through her mind like a lightning flash that
she had never spoken a bit of her heart out like this in all her life
before. The reason came to her in the same flash: she was not being
looked at; her disfigured face was hidden. This man, at least, could
not shrink, turn away, shiver, affect indifference, fix his eyes on
hers with a fascinated horror, as others had done. Her heart was divided
between a great throb of pity and sympathy for him and an irresistible
sense of gratitude for herself. Sure of protection and comprehension,
her lovely soul came out of her poor eyes and sat in the sunshine. She
spoke her mind at ease, as we utter sacred things sometimes under cover
of darkness.

“You seem to have had an accident; what can I do to help you?” she
asked.

“Nothing, thank you. The boy has been sick for some days, but he seems
worse since last night. Nothing is in its right place in the house, so I
have given up trying to find anything, and am just going to Edgewood to
see if somebody will help me for a few days.”

“Uncle Tony! Uncle To-ny! where are you? Do give me another drink, I'm
so hot!” came the boy's voice from within.

“Coming, laddie! I don't believe he ought to drink so much water, but
what can I do? He is burning up with fever.”

“Now look here, Mr. Croft,” and Lydia's tone was cheerfully decisive.
“You sit down in that rocker, please, and let me command the ship for
a while. This is one of the cases where a woman is necessary. First and
foremost, what were you hunting for?”

“My hat and the butter,” said Anthony meekly, and at this unique
combination they both laughed. Lyddy's laugh was particularly fresh,
childlike, and pleased; one that would have astonished the Reynolds
children. She had seldom laughed heartily since little Rufus had cried
and told her she frightened him when she twisted her face so.

“Your hat is in the wood-box, and I'll find the butter in the twinkling
of an eye, though why you want it now is more than--My patience, Mr.
Croft, your hand is burned to a blister!”

“Don't mind me. Be good enough to look at the boy and tell me what ails
him; nothing else matters much.”

“I will with pleasure, but let me ease you a little first. Here's a rag
that will be just the thing,” and Lyddy, suiting the pretty action to
the mendacious worn, took a good handkerchief from her pocket and tore
it in three strips, after spreading it with tallow from a candle heated
over the stove. This done, she hound up the burned hand skillfully, and,
crossing the dining-room, disappeared within the little chamber door
beyond. She came out presently, and said half hesitatingly, “Would
you--mind going out in the orchard for an hour or so? You seem to be
rather in the way here, and I should like the place to myself, if you'll
excuse me for saying so. I'm ever so much more capable than Mrs. Buck;
won't you give me a trial, sir? Here's your violin and your hat. I'll
call you if you can help or advise me.”

“But I can't let a stranger come in and do my housework,” he objected.
“I can't, you know, though I appreciate your kindness all the same.”

“I am your nearest neighbor, and your only one, for that matter,” said
Lyddy firmly; “its nothing more than right that I should look after
that sick child, and I must do it. I haven't got a thing to do in my
own house. I am nothing but a poor lonely old maid, who's been used to
children all her life, and likes nothing better than to work over them.”

A calm settled upon Anthony's perturbed spirit, as he sat under the
apple-trees and heard Lyddy going to and fro in the cottage. “She isn't
any old maid,” he thought; “she doesn't step like one; she has soft
shoes and a springy walk. She must be a very handsome woman, with a hand
like that; and such a voice! I knew the moment she spoke that she didn't
belong in this village.”

As a matter of fact, his keen ear had caught the melody in Lyddy's
voice, a voice full of dignity, sweetness, and reserve power. His sense
of touch, too, had captured the beauty of her hand, and held it in
remembrance,--the soft palm, the fine skin, supple fingers, smooth
nails, and firm round wrist. These charms would never have been noted
by any seeing man in Edgewood, but they were revealed to Anthony Croft
while Lyddy, like the good Samaritan, bound up his wounds. It is these
saving stars that light the eternal darkness of the blind.

Lyddy thought she had met her Waterloo when, with arms akimbo, she gazed
about the Croft establishment, which was a scene of desolation for the
moment. Anthony's cousin from Bridgton was in the habit of visiting
him every two months for a solemn house-cleaning, and Mrs. Buck from
Pleasant River came every Saturday and Monday for baking and washing.
Between times Davy and his uncle did the housework together; and
although it was respectably done, there was no pink-and-white daintiness
about it, you may be sure.

Lyddy came out to the apple-trees in about an hour, laughing a little
nervously as she said, “I'm sorry to have taken a mean advantage of you,
Mr. Croft, but I know everything you've got in your house, and exactly
where it is. I couldn't help it, you see, when I was making things tidy.
It would do you good to see the boy. His room was too light, and the
flies were devouring him. I swept him and dusted him, put on clean
sheets and pillow slips, sponged him with bay rum, brushed his hair,
drove out the flies, and tacked a green curtain up to the window.
Fifteen minutes after he was sleeping like a kitten. He has a sore
throat and considerable fever. Could you--can you--at least, will you,
go up to my house on an errand?”

“Certainly I can. I know it inside and out as well as my own.”

“Very good. On the clock shelf in the sitting-room there is a bottle of
sweet spirits of nitre; it's the only bottle there, so you can't make
any mistake. It will help until the doctor comes. I wonder you didn't
send for him yesterday?”

“Davy wouldn't have him,” apologized his uncle.

“Wouldn't he?” said Lyddy with cheerful scorn. “He has you under pretty
good control, hasn't he? But children are unmerciful tyrants.”

“Couldn't you coax him into it before you go home?” asked Anthony in a
wheedling voice.

“I can try; but it isn't likely I can influence him, if you can't.
Still, if we both fail, I really don't see what 's to prevent our
sending for the doctor in spite of him. He is as weak as a baby,
you know, and can't sit up in bed: what could he do? I will risk the
consequences, if you will!”

There was a note of such amiable and winning sarcasm in all this, such
a cheery, invincible courage, such a friendly neighborliness and
cooperation, above all such a different tone from any he was accustomed
to hear in Edgewood, that Anthony Croft felt warmed through to the core.

As he walked quickly along the road, he conjured up a vision of autumn
beauty from the few hints nature gave even to her sightless ones on this
glorious morning,--the rustle of a few fallen leaves under his feet, the
clear wine of the air, the full rush of the swollen river, the whisking
of the squirrels in the boughs, the crunch of their teeth on the nuts,
the spicy odor of the apples lying under the trees. He missed his mother
that morning more than he had missed her for years. How neat she was,
how thrifty, how comfortable, and how comforting! His life was so dreary
and aimless; and was it the best or the right one for Davy, with his
talent and dawning ambition? Would it not be better to have Mrs.
Buck live with them altogether, instead of coming twice a week, as
heretofore? No; he shrank from that with a hopeless aversion born of
Saturday and Monday dinners in her company. He could hear her pour her
coffee into the saucer; hear the scraping of the cup on the rim, and
know that she was setting it sloppily down on the cloth. He could
remember her noisy drinking, the weight of her elbow on the table, the
creaking of her calico dress under the pressure of superabundant flesh.
Besides, she had tried to scrub his favorite violin with sapolio. No,
anything was better than Mrs. Buck as a constancy.

He took off his hat unconsciously as he entered Lyddy's sitting-room.
A gentle breeze blew one of the full red curtains towards him till it
fluttered about his shoulders like a frolicsome, teasing hand. There was
a sweet, pungent odor of pine boughs, a canary sang in the window, the
clock was trimmed with a blackberry vine; he knew the prickles, and
they called up to his mind the glowing tints he had loved so well. His
sensitive hand, that carried a divining rod in every finger-tip, met a
vase on the shelf, and, traveling upward, touched a full branch of alder
berries tied about with a ribbon. The ribbon would be red; the woman
who arranged this room would make no mistake; for in one morning Anthony
Croft had penetrated the secret of Lyddy's true personality, and in a
measure had sounded the shallows that led to the depths of her nature.

Lyddy went home at seven o'clock that night rather reluctantly. The
doctor had said Mr. Croft could sit up with the boy unless he grew much
worse, and there was no propriety in her staying longer unless there was
danger.

“You have been very good to me,” Anthony said gravely, as he shook her
hand at parting,--“very good.”

They stood together on the doorstep. A distant bell, called to evening
prayer-meeting; the restless murmur of the river and the whisper of
the wind in the pines broke the twilight stillness. The long, quiet day
together, part of it spent by the sick child's bedside, had brought the
two strangers curiously near to each other.

“The house hasn't seemed so sweet and fresh since my mother died,” he
went on, as he dropped her hand, “and I haven't had so many flowers and
green things in it since I lost my eyesight.”

“Was it long ago?”

“Ten years. Is that long?”

“Long to bear a burden.”

“I hope you know little of burden-bearing?”

“I know little else.”

“I might have guessed it from the alacrity with which you took up
Davy's and mine. You must be very happy to have the power to make
things straight and sunny and wholesome; to breathe your strength into
helplessness such as mine. I thank you, and I envy you. Good-night.”

Lyddy turned on her heel without a word; her mind was beyond and above
words. The sky seemed to have descended upon, enveloped her, caught her
up into its heaven, as she rose into unaccustomed heights of feeling,
like Elijah in his chariot of fire. She very happy! She with power,
power to make things straight and sunny and wholesome! She able to
breathe strength into helplessness, even a consecrated, Godsmitten
helplessness like his! She not only to be thanked, but envied!

Her house seemed strange to her that night. She went to bed in the dark,
dreading even the light of a candle; and before she turned down her
counterpane she flung herself on her knees, and poured out her soul in
a prayer that had been growing, waiting, and waited for, perhaps, for
years:--

“O Lord, I thank Thee for health and strength and life. I never could do
it before, but I thank Thee to-night for life on any terms. I thank
Thee for this home; for the chance of helping another human creature,
stricken like myself; for the privilege of ministering to a motherless
child. Make me to long only for the beauty of holiness, and to be
satisfied if I attain to it. Wash my soul pure and clean, and let that
be the only mirror in which I see my face. I have tried to be useful.
Forgive me if it always seemed so hard and dreary a life. Forgive me
if I am too happy because for one short day I have really helped in a
beautiful way, and found a friend who saw, because he was blind, the
real me underneath; the me that never was burned by the fire; the me
that isn't disfigured, unless my wicked discontent has done it; the me
that has lived on and on and on, starving to death for the friendship
and sympathy and love that come to other women. I have spent my forty
years in the wilderness, feeding on wrath and bitterness and tears.
Forgive me, Lord, and give me one more vision of the blessed land of
Canaan, even if I never dwell there.”


VI.


     “Nor less the eternal poles
     Of tendency distribute souls.
     There need no vows to bind
     Whom not each other seek, but find.”

     Emerson's _Celestial Love._


Davy's sickness was a lingering one. Mrs. Buck came for two or three
hours a day, but Lyddy was the self-installed angel of the house; and
before a week had passed the boy's thin arms were around her neck, his
head on her loving shoulder, and his cheek pressed against hers. Anthony
could hear them talk, as he sat in the kitchen busy at his work. Musical
instruments were still brought him to repair, though less frequently
than of yore, and he could still make many parts of violins far better
than his seeing competitors. A friend and pupil sat by his side in the
winter evenings and supplemented his weakness, helping and learning
alternately, while his blind master's skill filled him with wonder and
despair. The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted; and
though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair's breadth
could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature had been busy
with her divine work of compensation. The one sense stricken with death,
she poured floods of new life and vigor into the others. Touch became
something more than the stupid, empty grasp of things we seeing mortals
know, and in place of the two eyes he had lost he now had ten in every
finger-tip. As for odors, let other folks be proud of smelling musk and
lavender, but let him tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various
kinds of so-called scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and
interpret secrets that the universe is ever whispering to us who are
pent in partial deafness because, forsooth, we see.

He often paused to hear Lydia's low, soothing tones and the boy's
weak treble. Anthony had said to him once, “Miss Butterfield is very
beautiful, isn't she, Davy? You haven't painted me a picture of her yet.
How does she look?”

Davy was stricken at first with silent embarrassment. He was a truthful
child, but in this he could no more have told the whole truth than
he could have cut off his hand. He was knit to Lyddy by every tie of
gratitude and affection. He would sit for hours with his expectant face
pressed against the window-pane, and when he saw her coming down the
shady road he was filled with a sense of impending comfort and joy.

“NO,” he said hesitatingly, “she isn't pretty, nunky, but she's sweet
and nice and dear, Everything on her shines, it's so clean; and when
she comes through the trees, with her white apron and her purple calico
dress, your heart jumps, because you know she's going to make everything
pleasant. Her hair has a pretty wave in it, and her hand is soft on your
forehead; and it's most worth while being sick just to have her in the
house.”

Meanwhile, so truly is “praise our fructifying sun,” Lydia bloomed into
a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech.
A sly sense of humor woke into life, and a positive talent for
conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who
cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness.
When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's
sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and
flowers and music, and about the meaning of life, too,--its burdens and
mistakes, and joys and sorrows; groping with him in the darkness to find
a clue to God's purposes.

Davy had long afternoons at Lyddy's house as the autumn grew into
winter. He read to her while she sewed rags for a new sitting-room
carpet, and they played dominoes and checkers together in the twilight
before supper time,--suppers that were a feast to the boy, after Mrs.
Buck's cookery. Anthony brought his violin sometimes of an evening, and
Almira Berry, the next neighbor on the road to the Mills, would drop
in and join the little party. Almira used to sing Auld Robin Gray, What
Will You Do, Love, and Robin Adair, to the great enjoyment of everybody;
and she persuaded Lyddy to buy the old church melodeon, and learn to
sing alto in Oh, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, Gently, Gently Sighs the
Breeze, and I know a Bank. Nobody sighed for the gayeties and advantages
of a great city when, these concerts being over, Lyddy would pass crisp
seedcakes and raspberry shrub, doughnuts and cider, or hot popped corn
and molasses candy.

“But there, she can afford to,” said aunt Hitty Tarbox; “she's pretty
middlin' wealthy for Edgewood. And it's lucky she is, for she 'bout
feeds that boy o' Croft's. No wonder he wants her to fill him up, after
six years of the Widder Buck's victuals. Aurelia Buck can take good
flour and sugar, sweet butter and fresh eggs, and in ten strokes of her
hand she can make 'em into something the very hogs 'll turn away from. I
declare, it brings the tears to my eyes sometimes when I see her coming
out of Croft's Saturday afternoons, and think of the stone crocks full
of nasty messes she's left behind her for that innocent man and boy to
eat up.... Anthony goes to see Miss Butterfield consid'able often.
Of course it's awstensibly to walk home with Davy, or do an errand or
something, but everybody knows better. She went down to Croft's pretty
nearly every day when his cousin from Bridgton come to house-clean.
She suspicioned something, I guess. Anyhow, she asked me if Miss
Butterfield's two hundred a year was in gov'ment bonds. Anthony's
eyesight ain't good, but I guess he could make out to cut cowpons
off.... It would be strange if them two left-overs should take an'
marry each other; though, come to think of it, I don't know's 't would
neither. He's blind, to be sure, and can't see her scarred face. It's a
pity she ain't deef, so't she can't hear his everlastin' fiddle. She's
lucky to get any kind of a husband; she's too humbly to choose. I
declare, she reminds me of a Jack-o'-lantern, though if you look at the
back of her, or see her in meetin' with a thick veil on, she's about the
best appearin' woman in Edgewood.... I never see anybody stiffen up as
Anthony has. He had me make him three white shirts and three gingham
ones, with collars and cuffs on all of 'em. It seems as if six shirts at
one time must mean something out o' the common!”

Aunt Hitty was right; it did mean something out of the common. It meant
the growth of an all-engrossing, grateful, divinely tender passion
between two love-starved souls. On the one hand, Lyddy, who though she
had scarcely known the meaning of love in all her dreary life, yet was
as full to the brim of all sweet, womanly possibilities of loving and
giving as any pretty woman; on the other, the blind violin-maker, who
had never loved any woman but his mother, and who was in the direst need
of womanly sympathy and affection.

Anthony Croft, being ministered unto by Lyddy's kind hands, hearing
her sweet voice and her soft footstep, saw her as God sees, knowing the
best; forgiving the worst, like God, and forgetting it, still more like
God, I think.

And Lyddy? There is no pen worthy to write of Lyddy. Her joy lay deep
in her heart like a jewel at the bottom of a clear pool, so deep that
no ripple or ruffle on the surface could disturb the hidden treasure.
If God had smitten these two with one hand, he had held out the other in
tender benediction.

There had been a pitiful scene of unspeakable solemnity when Anthony
first told Lyddy that he loved her, and asked her to be his wife. He had
heard all her sad history by this time, though not from her own lips,
and his heart went out to her all the more for the heavy cross that
had been laid upon her. He had the wit and wisdom to put her affliction
quite out of the question, and allude only to her sacrifice in marrying
a blind man, hopelessly and helplessly dependent on her sweet offices
for the rest of his life, if she, in her womanly mercy, would love him
and help him bear his burdens.

When his tender words fell upon Lyddy's dazed brain she sank beside
his chair, and, clasping his knees, sobbed: “I love you, I cannot help
loving you, I cannot help telling you I love you! But you must hear the
truth; you have heard it from others, but perhaps they softened it. If I
marry you, people will always blame me and pity you. You would never ask
me to be your wife if you could see my face; you could not love me an
instant if you were not blind.”

“Then I thank God unceasingly for my infirmity,” said Anthony Croft, as
he raised her to her feet.


*****


Anthony and Lyddy Croft sat in the apple orchard, one warm day in late
spring.

Anthony's work would have puzzled a casual on-looker. Ten stout wires
were stretched between two trees, fifteen or twenty feet apart, and each
group of five represented the lines of the musical staff. Wooden
bars crossed the wires at regular intervals, dividing the staff into
measures. A box with many compartments sat on a stool beside him, and
this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but were in reality whole,
half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats, sharps, and the like.
These were cleft in such a way that he could fit them on the wires
almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to him, and Lyddy had
learned to transcribe with pen and ink the music she found in wood and
wire, He could write only simple airs in this way, but when he played
them on the violin they were transported into a loftier region, such
genius lay in the harmony, the arabesque, the delicate lacework of
embroidery with which the tune was inwrought; now high, now low, now
major, now minor, now sad, now gay, with the one thrilling, haunting
cadence recurring again and again, to be watched for, longed for, and
greeted with a throb of delight.

Davy was reading at the window, his curly head buried in a well-worn
Shakespeare opened at Midsummer Night's Dream. Lyddy was sitting under
her favorite pink apple-tree, a mass of fragrant bloom, more beautiful
than Aurora's morning gown. She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn
innumerable pockets in a square basket that she held in her lap. The
pockets were small, the needles were fine, the thread was a length of
cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she
was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely
hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in
the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of
the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple boughs,
and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could look
into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings. The sight of
her bright eyes, alert for every sign of danger, sent a rush of feeling
through Lyddy's veins that made her long to clasp the little feathered
mother to her own breast.

A sweet gravity and consecration of thought possessed her, and the
pink blossoms falling into her basket were not more delicate than the
rose-colored dreams that flushed her soul.

Anthony put in the last wooden peg, and taking up his violin called,
“Davy, lad, come out and tell me what this means!”

Davy was used to this; from a wee boy he had been asked to paint the
changing landscape of each day, and to put into words his uncle's music.

Lyddy dropped her needle, the birds stopped to listen, and Anthony
played.

“It is this apple orchard in May time,” said Davy; “it is the song of
the green things growing, isn't it?”

“What do you say, dear?” asked Anthony, turning to his wife.

Love and hope had made a poet of Lyddy. “I think Davy is right,” she
said. “It is a dream of the future, the story of all new and beautiful
things growing out of the old. It is full of the sweetness of present
joy, but there is promise and hope in it besides. It is like the Spring
sitting in the lap of Winter, and holding a baby Summer in her bosom.”

Davy did not quite understand this, though he thought it pretty; but
Lyddy's husband did, and when the boy went back to his books, he took
his wife in his arms and kissed her twice,--once for herself, and then
once again.




THE EVENTFUL TRIP OF THE MIDNIGHT CRY.


In the little villages along the Saco River, in the year 1850 or
thereabouts, the arrival and departure of the stage-coach was the one
exciting incident of the day. It did not run on schedule time in those
days, but started from Limington or Saco, as the case might be, at about
or somewhere near a certain hour, and arrived at the other end of the
route whenever it got there. There were no trains to meet (the railway
popularly known as the “York and Yank'em” was not built till 1862); the
roads were occasionally good and generally bad; and thus it was often
dusk, and sometimes late in the evening, when the lumbering vehicle
neared its final destination and drew up to the little post-offices
along the way. However late it might be, the village postmaster had to
be on hand to receive and open the mailbags; after which he distributed
the newspapers and letters in a primitive set of pine pigeon-holes on
the wall, turned out the loafers, “banked up” the fire, and went home to
bed.

“Life” Lane was a jolly good fellow,--just the man to sit on the box
seat and drive the three horses through ruts and “thank-you-ma'ams,”
 slush and mud and snow. There was a perennial twinkle in his eye,
his ruddy cheeks were wrinkled with laughter, and he had a good story
forever on the tip of his tongue. He stood six feet two in his stockings
(his mother used to say she had the longest Life of any woman in the
State o' Maine); his shoulders were broad in proportion, and his lungs
just the sort to fill amply his noble chest. Therefore, when he had what
was called in the vernacular “turrible bad goin',” and when any other
stage-driver in York County would have shrunk into his muffler and
snapped and snarled on the slightest provocation, Life Lane opened his
great throat when he passed over the bridges at Moderation or Bonny
Eagle, and sent forth a golden, sonorous “Yo ho! halloo!” into the still
air. The later it was and the stormier it was, the more vigor he put
into the note, and it was a drowsy postmaster indeed who did not start
from his bench by the fire at the sound of that ringing halloo. Thus the
old stage-coach, in Life Lane's time, was generally called “The Midnight
Cry,” and not such a bad name either, whether the term was derisively
applied because the stage was always late; or whether Life's “Yo ho!”
 had caught the popular fancy.

There was a pretty girl in Pleasant River (and, alas! another in Bonny
Eagle) who went to bed every night with the chickens, but stayed awake
till she heard first the rumble of heavy wheels on a bridge, then a
faint, bell-like tone that might have come out of the mouth of a silver
horn; whereupon she blushed as if it were an offer of marriage, and
turned over and went to sleep.

If the stage arrived in good season, Life would have a few minutes to
sit on the loafers' beach beside the big open fire; and what a feature
he was, with his tales culled from all sorts of passengers, who were
never so fluent as when sitting beside him “up in front!” There was a
tallow dip or two, and no other light save that of the fire. Who that
ever told a story could wish a more inspiring auditor than Jacob Bean,
a literal, honest old fellow who took the most vital interest in every
detail of the stories told, looking upon their heroes and their
villains as personal friends or foes. He always sat in one corner of the
fireplace, poker in hand, and the crowd tacitly allowed him the role of
Greek chorus. Indeed, nobody could have told a story properly without
Jake Bean's parentheses and punctuation marks poked in at exciting
junctures.

“That 's so every time!” he would say, with a lunge at the forestick.
“I'll bate he was glad then!” with another stick flung on in just the
right spot. “Golly! but that served 'em right!” with a thrust at the
backlog.

The New England story seemed to flourish under these conditions: a
couple of good hard benches in a store or tavern, where you could not
only smoke and chew but could keep on your hat (there was not a man in
York County in those days who could say anything worth hearing with his
hat off); the blazing logs to poke; and a cavernous fireplace into which
tobacco juice could be neatly and judiciously directed. Those were good
old times, and the stage-coach was a mighty thing when school children
were taught to take off their hats and make a bow as the United States
mail passed the old stage tavern.

Life Lane's coaching days were over long before this story begins, but
the Midnight Cry was still in pretty fair condition, and was driven
ostensibly by Jeremiah Todd, who lived on the “back-nippin'” road from
Bonny Eagle to Limington.

When I say ostensibly driven, I but follow the lead of the villagers,
who declared that, though Jerry held the reins, Mrs. Todd drove the
stage, as she drove everything else. As a proof of this lady's strong
individuality, she was still generally spoken of as “the Widder Bixby,”
 though she had been six years wedded to Jeremiah Todd. The Widder Bixby,
then, was strong, self-reliant, valiant, indomitable. Jerry Todd was,
to use his wife's own characterization, so soft you could stick a cat's
tail into him without ruffling the fur. He was always alluded to as “the
Widder Bixby's husband;” but that was no new or special mortification,
for he had been known successively as Mrs. Todd's youngest baby, the
Widder Todd's only son, Susan Todd's brother, and, when Susan Todd's
oldest boy fought at Chapultepec, William Peck's uncle.

The Widder Bixby's record was far different. She was the mildest of the
four Stover sisters of Scarboro, and the quartette was supposed to
have furnished more kinds of temper than had ever before come from one
household. When Peace, the eldest, was mad, she frequently kicked the
churn out of the kitchen door, cream and all,--and that lost her a
husband.

Love, the second, married, and according to local tradition once kicked
her husband all the way up Foolscap Hill with a dried cod-fish. Charity,
the third, married too,--for the Stovers of Scarboro were handsome
girls, but she got a fit mate in her spouse. She failed to intimidate
him, for he was a foeman worthy of her steel; but she left his bed and
board, and left in a manner that kept up the credit of the Stover family
of Scarboro.

They had had a stormy breakfast one morning before he started to
Portland with a load of hay. “Good-by,” she called, as she stood in the
door, “you've seen the last of me!” “No such luck!” he said, and whipped
up his horse. Charity baked a great pile of biscuits, and left them on
the kitchen table with a pitcher of skimmed milk. (She wouldn't give
him anything to complain of, not she!) She then put a few clothes in a
bundle, and, tying on her shaker, prepared to walk to Pleasant River,
twelve miles distant. As she locked the door and put the key in its
accustomed place under the mat, a pleasant young man drove up and
explained that he was the advance agent of the Sypher's Two-in-One
Menagerie and Circus, soon to appear in that vicinity. He added that
he should be glad to give her five tickets to the entertainment if she
would allow him to paste a few handsome posters on that side of her barn
next the road; that their removal was attended with trifling difficulty,
owing to the nature of a very superior paste invented by himself; that
any small boy, in fact, could tear them off in an hour, and be well paid
by the gift of a ticket.

The devil entered into Charity (not by any means for the first time),
and she told the man composedly that if he would give her ten tickets he
might paper over the cottage as well as the barn, for they were going
to tear it down shortly and build a larger one. The advance agent was
delighted, and they passed a pleasant hour together; Charity holding the
paste-pot, while the talkative gentleman glued six lions and an elephant
on the roof, a fat lady on the front door, a tattooed man between the
windows, living skeletons on the blinds, and ladies insufficiently
clothed in all the vacant spaces and on the chimneys. Nobody went by
during the operation, and the agent remarked, as he unhitched his horse,
that he had never done a neater job. “Why, they'll come as far to see
your house as they will to the circus!” he exclaimed.

“I calculate they will,” said Charity, as she latched the gate and
started for Pleasant River.

I am not telling Charity Stover's story, so I will only add that
the bill-poster was mistaken in the nature of his paste, and greatly
undervalued its adhesive properties.

The temper of Prudence, the youngest sister, now Mrs. Todd, paled into
insignificance beside that of the others, but it was a very pretty thing
in tempers nevertheless, and would have been thought remarkable in any
other family in Scarboro.

You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues as often
as his vices that make him difficult to live with. Mrs. Todd's
masterfulness and even her jealousy might have been endured, by the
aid of fasting and prayer, but her neatness, her economy, and her
forehandedness made a combination that only the grace of God could have
abided with comfortably, so that Jerry Todd's comparative success is a
matter of local tradition. Punctuality is a praiseworthy virtue enough,
but as the years went on, Mrs. Todd blew her breakfast horn at so early
an hour that the neighbors were in some doubt as to whether it might not
herald the supper of the day before. They also predicted that she would
have her funeral before she was fairly dead, and related with great
gusto that when she heard there was to be an eclipse of the sun on
Monday, the 26th of July, she wished they could have it the 25th, as
Sunday would be so much more convenient than wash-day.

She had oilcloth on her kitchen to save the floor, and oilcloth mats to
save the oilcloth; yet Jerry's boots had to be taken off in the shed,
and he was required to walk through in his stocking feet. She blackened
her stove three times a day, washed her dishes in the woodhouse, in
order to keep her sink clean, and kept one pair of blinds open in the
sitting-room, but spread newspapers over the carpet wherever the sun
shone in.

It was the desire of Jerry's heart to give up the fatigues and exposures
of stage-driving, and “keep store,” but Mrs. Todd deemed it much better
for him to be in the open air than dealing out rum and molasses to a
roystering crew. This being her view of the case, it is unnecessary to
state that he went on driving the stage.

“Do you wear a flannel shirt, Jerry?” asked Pel Frost once. “I don'
know,” he replied, “ask Mis' Todd; she keeps the books.”

“Women-folks” (he used to say to a casual passenger), “like all other
animiles, has to be trained up before they're real good comp'ny. You
have to begin with 'em early, and begin as you mean to hold out. When
they once git in the habit of takin' the bit in their teeth and runnin',
it's too late for you to hold 'em in.”

It was only to strangers that he aired his convictions on the training
of “womenfolks,” though for that matter he might safely have done it
even at home; for everybody in Limington knew that it would always
have been too late to begin with the Widder Bixby, since, like all the
Stovers of Scarboro, she had been born with the bit in her teeth. Jerry
had never done anything he wanted to since he had married her, and he
hadn't really wanted to do that. He had been rather candid with her on
this point (as candid as a tender-hearted and obliging man can be with
a woman who is determined to marry him, and has two good reasons why she
should to every one of his why he shouldn't), and this may have been
the reason for her jealousy. Although by her superior force she had
overborne his visible reluctance, she, being a woman, or at all events
of the female gender, could never quite forget that she had done the
wooing.

Certainly his charms were not of the sort to tempt women from the
strict and narrow path, yet the fact remained that the Widder Bixby was
jealous, and more than one person in Limington was aware of it.

Pelatiah, otherwise “Pel” Frost, knew more about the matter than most
other folks, because he had unlimited time to devote to general culture.
Though not yet thirty years old, he was the laziest man in York County.
(Jabe Slocum had not then established his record; and Jot Bascom had
ruined his by cutting his hay before it was dead in the summer of '49,
always alluded to afterwards in Pleasant River as the year when gold was
discovered and Jot Bascom cut his hay.)

Pel was a general favorite in half a dozen villages, where he was the
life of the loafers' bench. An energetic loafer can attend properly to
one bench, but it takes genius as well as assiduity to do justice to six
of them. His habits were decidedly convivial, and he spent a good deal
of time at the general musters, drinking and carousing with the other
ne'er-do-weels. You may be sure he was no favorite of Mrs. Todd's; and
she represented to him all that is most undesirable in womankind, his
taste running decidedly to rosy, smiling, easy-going ones who had no
regular hours for meals, but could have a dinner on the table any time
in fifteen minutes after you got there.

Now, a certain lady with a noticeable green frock and a white “drawn-in”
 cape bonnet had graced the Midnight Cry on its journey from Limington to
Saco on three occasions during the month of July. Report said that she
was a stranger who had appeared at the post-office in a wagon driven by
a small, freckled boy.

The first trip passed without comment; the second provoked some
discussion; on the occasion of the third, Mrs. Todd said nothing,
because there seemed nothing to say, but she felt so out-of-sorts that
she cut Jerry's hair close to his head, though he particularly fancied
the thin fringe of curls at the nape of his neck.

Pel Frost went over to Todd's one morning to borrow an axe, and seized
a favorable opportunity to ask casually, “Oh, Mis' Todd, did Jerry find
out the name o' that woman in a green dress and white bunnit that rid to
Saco with him last week?”

“Mr. Todd's got something better to do than get acquainted with his lady
passengers,” snapped Mrs. Todd, “'specially as they always ride inside.”

“I know they gen'ally do,” said Pel, shouldering the axe (it was for
his mother's use), “but this one rides up in front part o' the way, so I
thought mebbe Jerry 'd find out something 'bout her. She's han'some as a
picture, but she must have a good strong back to make the trip down 'n'
up in one day.”

Nothing could have been more effective or more effectual than this
blow dealt with consummate skill. Having thus driven the iron into Mrs.
Todd's soul, Pel entertained his mother with an account of the interview
while she chopped the kindling-wood. He had no special end in view when,
Iago-like, he dropped his first poisoned seed in Mrs. Todd's fertile
mind, or, at most, nothing worse than the hope that matters might reach
an unendurable point, and Jerry might strike for his altars and his
fires. Jerry was a man and a brother, and petticoat government must
be discouraged whenever and wherever possible, or the world would soon
cease to be a safe place to live in. Pel's idea grew upon him in the
night watches, and the next morning he searched his mother's garret till
he found a green dress and a white bonnet. Putting them in a basket, he
walked out on the road a little distance till he met the stage, when,
finding no passengers inside, he asked Jerry to let him jump in and
“ride a piece.” Once within, he hastily donned the green wrapper and
tell-tale headgear, and, when the Midnight Cry rattled down the stony
hill past the Todd house, Pel took good care to expose a large green
sleeve and the side of a white bonnet at the stage window. It was easy
enough to cram the things back into the basket, jump out, and call a
cordial thank you to the unsuspecting Jerry. He was rewarded for his
ingenuity and enterprise at night, when he returned Mrs. Todd's axe, for
just as he reached the back door he distinctly heard her say that if she
saw that green woman on the stage again, she would knock her off with a
broomstick as sure as she was a Stover of Scarboro. As a matter of fact
she was equal to it. Her great-grandmother had been born on a soil where
the broomstick is a prominent factor in settling connubial differences;
and if it occurred to her at this juncture, it is a satisfactory proof
of the theory of atavism.

Pel intended to see this domestic tragedy through to the end, and
accordingly took another brief trip in costume the very next week,
hoping to be the witness of a scene of blood and carnage. But Mrs. Todd
did not stir from her house, although he was confident she had seen “my
lady green-sleeves” from her post at the window. Puzzled by her apathy,
and much disappointed in her temper, he took off the dress, and,
climbing up in front, rode to Moderation, where he received an urgent
invitation to go over to the county fair at Gorham. The last idea was
always the most captivating to Pel, and he departed serenely for a stay
of several days without so much luggage as a hairbrush. His mother's
best clothespin basket, to say nothing of its contents, appeared at this
juncture to be an unexpected incumbrance; so on the spur of the moment
he handed it up to Jerry just as the stage was starting, saying, “If
Mis' Todd has a brash to-night, you can clear yourself by showing her
this basket, but for massy sakes don't lay it on to me! You can stan' it
better'n I can,--you 're more used to it!”

Jerry took the basket, and when he was well out on the road he looked
inside and saw a bright green calico wrapper, a white cape bonnet, a
white “fall veil,” and a pair of white cotton gloves. He had ample time
for reflection, for it was a hot day, and though he drove slowly, the
horses were sweating at every pore. Pel Frost, then, must have overheard
his wife's storm of reproaches, perhaps even her threats of violence.
It had come to this, that he was the village laughing-stock, a butt of
ridicule at the store and tavern.

Now, two years before this, Jerry Todd had for the first and only time
in his married life “put his foot down.” Mrs. Todd had insisted on
making him a suit of clothes much against his wishes. When finished she
put them on him almost by main force, though his plaintive appeals would
have melted any but a Stover-of-Scarboro heart. The stuff was a large
plaid, the elbows and knees came in the wrong places, the seat was lined
with enameled cloth, and the sleeves cut him in the armholes.

Mr. Todd said nothing for a moment, but the pent-up slavery of years
stirred in him, and, mounting to his brain, gave him a momentary courage
that resembled intoxication. He retired, took off the suit, hung it over
his arm, and, stalking into the sitting-room in his undergarments,
laid it on the table before his astonished spouse, and, thumping it
dramatically, said firmly, “I--will--not--wear--them--clo'es!” whereupon
he fell into silence again and went to bed.

The joke of the matter was, that, all unknown to himself, he had
absolutely frightened Mrs. Todd. If only he could have realized the
impressiveness and the thorough success of his first rebellion! But
if he had realized it he could not have repeated it often, for so much
virtue went out of him on that occasion that he felt hardly able to
drive the stage for days afterward.

“I shall have to put down my foot agin,” he said to himself on the
eventful morning when Pel presented him with the basket. “Dern my luck,
I've got to do it agin, when I ain't hardly got over the other time.”
 So, after an hour's plotting and planning, he made some purchases in
Biddeford and started on his return trip. He was very low in his mind,
thinking, if his wife really meditated upon warfare, she was likely to
inspect the stage that night, but giving her credit in his inmost heart
for too much common sense to use a broomstick,--a woman with her tongue!

The Midnight Cry rattled on lumberingly. Its route had been shortened,
and Mrs. Todd wanted its name changed to something less outlandish, such
as the Rising Sun, or the Breaking Dawn, or the High Noon, but her idea
met with no votaries; it had been, was, and ever should be, the Midnight
Cry, no matter what time it set out or got back. It had seen its best
days, Jerry thought, and so had he, for that matter. Yet he had been
called “a likely feller” when he married the Widder Bixby, or rather
when she married him. Well, the mischief was done; all that remained was
to save a remnant of his self-respect, and make an occasional dash for
liberty.

He did all his errands with his usual care, dropping a blue ribbon for
Doxy Morton's Sunday hat, four cents' worth of gum-camphor for Almira
Berry, a spool of cotton for Mrs. Wentworth, and a pair of “galluses”
 for Living Bean. He finally turned into the “back-nippin'” road from
Bonny Eagle to Limington, and when he was within forty rods of his own
house he stopped to water his horses. If he feared a scene he had good
reason, for as the horses climbed the crest of the long hill the lady in
green was by his side on the box. He looked anxiously ahead, and there,
in a hedge of young alder bushes, he saw something stirring, and, unless
he was greatly mistaken, a birch broom lay on the ground near the hedge.

Notwithstanding these danger signals, Jerry's arm encircled the plump
waist of the lady in green, and, emboldened by the shades of twilight,
his lips sought the identical spot under the white “fall veil” where
her incendiary mouth might be supposed to lurk, quite “fit for treasons,
stratagems, and spoils.” This done, he put on the brake and headed his
horses toward the fence. He was none too soon, for the Widder Bixby,
broom in hand, darted out from the alders and approached the stage with
objurgations which, had she rated them at their proper value, needed
no supplement in the way of blows. Jerry gave one terror-stricken
look, wound his reins round the whipstock, and, leaping from his seat,
disappeared behind a convenient tree.

At this moment of blind rage Mrs. Todd would have preferred to chastise
both her victims at once; but, being robbed of one by Jerry's cowardly
flight, her weapon descended upon the other with double force. There was
no lack of courage here at least. Whether the lady in green was borne up
by the consciousness of virtue, whether she was too proud to retreat,
or whatever may have been her animating reason, the blow fell, yet she
stood her ground and gave no answering shriek. Enraged as much by her
rival's cool resistance as by her own sense of injury, the Widder
Bixby aimed full at the bonnet beneath which were the charms that
had befuddled Jerry Todd's brain. To blast the fatal beauty that had
captivated her wedded husband was the Widder Bixby's idea, and the broom
descended. A shower of seeds and pulp, a copious spattering of pumpkin
juice, and the lady in green fell resistlessly into her assailant's
arms; her straw body, her wooden arms and pumpkin head, decorating the
earth at her feet! Mrs. Todd stared helplessly at the wreck she
had made, not altogether comprehending the ruse that had led to her
discomfiture, but fully conscious that her empire was shaken to its
foundations. She glanced in every direction, and then hurling the
hateful green-and-white livery into the stage, she gathered up all
traces of the shameful fray, and sweeping them into her gingham apron
ran into the house in a storm of tears and baffled rage.

Jerry stayed behind the tree for some minutes, and when the coast was
clear he mounted the seat and drove to the store and the stable. When
he had put up his horses he went into the shed, took off his boots
as usual, but, despite all his philosophy, broke into a cold sweat of
terror as he crossed the kitchen threshold. “I can't stand many more
of these times when I put my foot down,” he thought, “they're too
weakening!”

But he need not have feared. There was a good supper under the mosquito
netting on the table, and, most unusual luxury, a pot of hot tea. Mrs.
Todd had gone to bed and left him a pot of tea!

Which was the more eloquent apology!

Jerry never referred to the lady in green, then or afterwards; he was
willing to let well enough alone; but whenever his spouse passed a
certain line, which, being a Stover of Scarboro, she was likely to do
about once in six months, he had only to summon his recreant courage and
glance meaningly behind the kitchen door, where the birch broom hung
on a nail. It was a simple remedy to outward appearances, but made his
declining years more comfortable. I can hardly believe that he ever
took Pel Frost into his confidence, but Pel certainly was never more
interesting to the loafers' bench than when he told the story of the
eventful trip of the Midnight Cry and “the breaking in of the Widder
Bixby.”


NOTES:

1. On page 20, reentered is spelled with diaeresis over the second “e”.

2. On pages 153 & 154 the verses beginning respectively “Rebel mourner”
 and “This gro-o-oanin' world” are accompanied with staves of music in
the treble clef.





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