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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Autumn, by Robert Nathan
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Autumn
+
+
+Author: Robert Nathan
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 30, 2006  [eBook #18079]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUTUMN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+AUTUMN
+
+by
+
+ROBERT NATHAN
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Robert M. McBride & Company
+Copyright, 1921
+by Robert M. McBride & Company
+
+
+
+
+TO D. M. N., AND TO OUR
+
+FRIEND HERBERT FEIS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+    I Mrs. Grumble
+   II School Lets Out
+  III The Barlys
+   IV Mr. Jeminy Builds A house Out of Boxes
+    V Rain
+   VI Harvest
+  VII Mrs. Grumble Goes to the Fair
+ VIII The Turn of the Year
+   IX The Schoolmaster Leaves Hillsboro,
+      His Work There Seemingly at an End
+    X But He is Sought After All
+   XI And is Found in Good Hands
+  XII Mrs. Wicket
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MRS. GRUMBLE
+
+On Sunday the church bells of Hillsboro rang out across the ripening
+fields with a grave and holy sound, and again at evening knocked
+faintly, with quiet sorrow, at doors where children watched for the
+first star, to make their wishes.  Night came, and to the croaking of
+frogs, the moon rose over Barly Hill.  In the early morning the grass,
+still wet with dew, chilled the bare toes of urchins on their way to
+school where, until four o'clock, the tranquil voice of Mr. Jeminy
+disputed with the hum of bees, and the far off clink of the
+blacksmith's forge in the village.
+
+At four o'clock Mr. Jeminy, with a sigh, gathered his books together.
+He sighed because he was old, and because the day's work was done.  He
+arose from his seat, and taking up his stick, passed out between the
+benches and went slowly down the road.
+
+It was a warm spring day; the air was drowsy and filled with the scent
+of flowers.  A thrush sang in the woods, where Mr. Jeminy heard before
+him the light voices of children.  He thought: "How happy they are."
+And he smiled at his own fancies which, like himself, were timid and
+kind.
+
+But gradually, as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, he grew sad.
+It seemed to him as if the world, strange and contrary during the day,
+were again as it used to be when he was young.
+
+When he crossed the wooden bridge over Barly Water, the minnows,
+frightened, fled away in shoals.  Mr. Jeminy turned down toward the
+village, where he had an errand to attend to.  As his footsteps died
+away, the minnows swam back again, as though nothing had happened.
+One, larger than the rest, found a piece of bread which had fallen into
+the water.  "This is my bread," he said, and gazed angrily at his
+friends, who were trying to bite him.  "I deserve this bread," he added.
+
+Old Mr. Frye kept the general store in Hillsboro, and ran the post
+office.  It was easy to see that he was an honest man; he kept his shop
+tidy, and was sour to everybody.  Through his square spectacles he saw
+his neighbors in the form of fruits, vegetables, stick pins, and pieces
+of calico.  Of Mr. Jeminy he used to say: "Sweet apples, but small,
+very small; small and sweet."
+
+"Yes," said Farmer Barly, "but just tell me, who wants small apples?"
+
+Mr. Frye nodded his head.  "Ah, that's it," he agreed.
+
+At that moment Mr. Jeminy himself entered the store.  "I'd like to buy
+a pencil," he said.  "The pencil I have in mind," he explained, "is
+soft, and writes easily, but has no eraser."
+
+"There you are," said the storekeeper; "that's five cents."
+
+"I used to pay four," said Mr. Jeminy, looking for the extra penny.
+
+"Well, perhaps you did," said Mr. Frye, "but prices are very high now."
+And he moved away to register the sale.
+
+Farmer Barly, who was a member of the school board, cleared his throat,
+and blew on his nose.  "Hem," he remarked.  "Good-day."
+
+"Good-day," said Mr. Jeminy politely, and went out of the store with
+his pencil.  Left to themselves, Mr. Frye and Mr. Barly began to
+discuss him.  "Jeminy is growing old," said Mr. Frye, with a shake of
+his head.
+
+Mr. Barly, although stupid, liked to be direct.  "I was brought up on
+plus and minus," he said, "and I've yet to meet the man who can get the
+better of me.  Now what do you think of that, Mr. Frye?"
+
+Mr. Frye looked up, down, and around; then he began to polish his
+spectacles.  But he only said, "There's some good in that."
+
+"There is indeed," said Mr. Barly, closing one eye, and nodding his
+head a number of times.  "There is indeed.  But those days are over,
+Mr. Frye.  When I was a child I had the fear of God put into me.  It
+was put into me with a birch rod.  But nowadays, Mr. Frye, the children
+neglect their sums, and grow up wild as nettles.  I don't know what
+they're learning nowadays."
+
+And he blew his nose again, as though to say, "What a pity."
+
+"Ah," said Mr. Frye, wisely, "there's no good in _that_."
+
+Mr. Jeminy knew his own faults, and what was expected of him: he was
+not severe enough.  As he walked home that evening, he said to himself:
+"I must be more severe; my pupils tease each other almost under my
+nose.  To-day as I wrote sums on the black-board, I watched out of the
+corner of my eye. . . .  Still, a tweaked ear is soon mended.  And it's
+true that when they learn to add and subtract, they will do each other
+more harm."
+
+The schoolmaster lived in a cottage on the hill overlooking the
+village.  He lived alone, except for Mrs. Grumble, who kept house for
+him, and managed his affairs.  Although they were simple, and easy to
+manage, they afforded her endless opportunities for complaint.  She was
+never so happy as when nothing suited her.  Then she carried her broom
+into Mr. Jeminy's study, and looked around her with a gloomy air.  "No,
+really, it's impossible to go on this way," she would say, and sweep
+Mr. Jeminy, his books and his papers, out of doors.
+
+There, in the company of Boethius, he often considered the world, and
+watched, from above, the gradual life of the village.  He heard the
+occasional tonk of cows on the hillside, the creak of a cart on the
+road, the faint sound of voices, blown by the wind.  From his threshold
+he saw the afternoon fade into evening, and night look down across the
+hills, among the stars.  He saw the lights come out in the valley, one
+by one through the mist, smelled the fresh, sweet air of evening; and
+promptly each night at seven, far off and sad, rolling among the hills,
+he heard the ghostly hooting of the night freight, leaving Milford
+Junction.
+
+"Here," he said to himself, "within this circle of hills, is to be
+found faith, virtue, passion, and good sense.  In this valley youth is
+not without courage, or age without wisdom.  Yet age, although wise, is
+full of sorrow."
+
+While he was musing in this vein, the odor of frying bacon from the
+kitchen, warmed his nose.  So he was not surprised to see Mrs. Grumble
+appear in the doorway soon afterward.  "Your supper is ready," she
+said; "if you don't come in at once it will grow cold."
+
+For supper, Mr. Jeminy had a bowl of soup, a glass of milk, bacon,
+potatoes, and a loaf of bread.  When Mrs. Grumble was seated, he bent
+his head, and said: "Let us give thanks to God for this manifestation
+of His bounty."
+
+During the meal Mrs. Grumble was silent.  But Mr. Jeminy could see that
+she had something important to say.  At last she remarked, "As I was on
+my way to the village, I met Mrs. Barly.  She said, 'You'll have to buy
+your own milk after this, Mrs. Grumble.'  I just stood and looked at
+her."
+
+Mr. Jeminy nodded his head.  "I am not surprised," he said.  And,
+indeed, it did not surprise him.  Now that the war was over, the
+neighbors no longer came to his cottage with gifts of vegetables,
+fruit, and milk.  Mrs. Grumble looked at him thoughtfully, and while
+she washed the plates at the kitchen sink, sighed from the bottom of
+her soul.  Although she liked Mr. Jeminy who, she declared, was a good
+man, she felt, nevertheless, that in his company her talents were
+wasted.  "It is impossible to talk to Mr. Jeminy," she told Miss Beal,
+the dress-maker, "because he talks so much."
+
+It was true; Mr. Jeminy liked to talk a great deal.  But his
+conversation, which was often about such people as St. Francis, or
+Plotinus, did not seem very lively to Mrs. Grumble.  "He talks about
+nothing but the dead," she said to Miss Beal; "mostly heathen."
+
+"No," said Miss Beal.  "How aggravating."
+
+Now, Mr. Jeminy, unheeding the sighs of his housekeeper, continued:
+"But after all, I would not change places with Farmer Barly.  For
+riches are a source of trouble, Mrs. Grumble; they crowd love out of
+the heart.  A man is only to be envied who desires little."
+
+"It is always the same," said Mrs. Grumble; "the rich have their
+pleasures, and the poor people their sorrows."
+
+"That," said Mr. Jeminy, "is the mistake of ignorance.  For Epictetus
+was a slave, and Saint Peter was a fisherman.  They were poor; but they
+did not consider themselves unfortunate.  More to be pitied than either
+Saint Peter or Epictetus, was Croesus, King of Lydia, who was probably
+not as rich as Mr. Gary.  But he knew how to use his wealth.  Therefore
+he was all the more disappointed when it was taken away from him by
+Cyrus, the Persian.  No, Mrs. Grumble, what you can lose is no great
+good to any one.
+
+"If you wish," he added, "I will dry the dishes, and you can spend the
+evening in the village."
+
+As he stood above the sink, rubbing the dishes with a damp cloth, he
+thought: "When I die, I should like it said of me: By his own efforts,
+he remained a poor man."  And he stood still, the dishtowel in his
+hand, thinking of that wealthy iron-master, whose epitaph is said to
+read: Here lies a man who knew how to enlist in his service better men
+than himself.
+
+When the dishes were dried, Mr. Jeminy retired to his den.  This little
+room, from whose windows it was possible to see the sky above Barly
+Hill, blue as a cornflower, boasted a desk, an old leather chair, and
+several shelves of books, among them volumes of history and travel, a
+King James' Bible, Arrian's Epictetus, Sabatier's life of Saint
+Francis, the Meditations of Antoninus, bound in paper, and a Jervas
+translation of Don Quixote.  Here Mr. Jeminy was at home; in the
+evening he smoked his pipe, and read from the pages of Cervantes, whose
+humor, gentle and austere, comforted his mind so often vexed by the
+negligence of his pupils.
+
+On the evening of which I am speaking, Mr. Jeminy knocked the ashes out
+of his pipe, and taking from his desk a bundle of papers, began to
+correct his pupils' exercises.  He was still engaged at this task when
+Mr. Tomkins came to call.
+
+"A fine evening," said Mr. Tomkins from the doorway.
+
+"Come in, William," cried Mr. Jeminy, "come in.  A fine evening,
+indeed.  Well, this is very nice, I must say."
+
+Mr. Tomkins was older than Mr. Jeminy.  His once great frame was dried
+and bent; his face was lined with a thousand wrinkles, and his lips
+were drawn tight under the nose, until nose and chin almost met.  But
+his eyes were bright and active.  Now he sat in Mr. Jeminy's study, his
+large, knobbly hands, brown and withered as leaves in autumn, grasping
+his hat.
+
+"Another year, Jeminy," he said, in a voice shrill with age, "another
+year.  Time to shingle old man Crabbe's roof again.  I'm spry yet."
+And resting a lean finger alongside his nose, he gave sound to a laugh
+like a peal of broken bells.
+
+In his old age Mr. Tomkins was still agile; he crawled out on a roof,
+ripped up rotted shingles, and put down new ones in their place.  To
+see him climb to the top of a ladder, filled Mr. Jeminy with anxiety.
+
+"You'll die," he said, "with a hammer in your hand."
+
+"Then," said Mr. Tomkins, "I'll die as I've lived."
+
+"That's strange enough," said Mr. Jeminy, "when you come to think of
+it.  For men are born into this world hungry and crying.  But they die
+in silence and slip away without touching anything."
+
+Mr. Tomkins cleared his throat, and watched his fingers run around his
+hat's brim.  He wanted to tell Mr. Jeminy some news; but it occurred to
+him that it was no more than a rumor.  Finally he said: "There's a new
+school-ma'am over to North Adams."  He cocked his head sidewise to look
+at the schoolmaster.  "She knows more than you, Jeminy," he said.
+
+Mr. Jeminy sat bowed and still, his hands folded in his lap.  He
+remembered how he had come to Hillsboro thirty years before, a young
+man full of plans and fancies.  He was soon to learn that what had been
+good enough for Great Grandfather Ploughman, was thought to be good
+enough for his grandson, also.  Mr. Jeminy remained in Hillsboro, at
+first out of hope, later out of habit.  At last it seemed to him as if
+Hillsboro were his home.  "Where else should I go?" he had asked
+himself.  "Here is all I have in the world.  Here are my only friends.
+Well, after all," he said to himself more than once, "I am not wasted
+here, exactly."  And he tried to comfort himself with this reflection.
+
+He had started out to build a new school in the wilderness.  "I shall
+teach my pupils something more than plus and minus," he declared.  He
+remembered a little verse he used to sing in those days:
+
+  Laws, manuals,
+  And texts incline us
+  To cheat with plus
+  And rob with minus.
+
+But it had all slipped away, like sand through his fingers.  Now he
+hoped to find one child to whom he could say what was in his mind.
+
+One by one the brighter boys had drifted off to the county schools,
+leaving the little schoolhouse to the dull and to the young.  Some were
+taken out of classes early, and added, like another pig, to the farms.
+Girls, when they were old enough, were kept at home to help their
+mothers; after a while they, too, married; then their education was
+over.  In the winter they nailed the windows shut; in the summer they
+worked with the men, hoarded their pennies, and prayed to God at first,
+but only wished at last, to do better than their neighbors.
+
+Of all whom Mr. Jeminy had taught reading, writing and arithmetic, not
+one was either better or happier than in childhood.
+
+"Not one," said Mr. Jeminy, "is tidy of mind, or humble of heart.  Not
+one has learned to be happy in poverty, or gentle in good fortune."
+
+"There's no poverty to-day," said Mr. Tomkins simply.  It really seemed
+to him as though every one were well off, because the war was over.
+
+"There is more poverty to-day than ever before," said Mr. Jeminy.
+
+"Hm," said Mr. Tomkins.
+
+"Last fall," said Mr. Jeminy, "Sara Barly and Mrs. Grumble helped each
+other put up vegetables.  And Anna Barly came to my cottage, holding
+out her apron, full of apples."
+
+"My wife, too," said Mr. Tomkins, "put up a great many vegetables."
+
+"But to-day," said Mr. Jeminy, "Mrs. Barly and Mrs. Grumble pass each
+other without speaking.  And because we are no longer at war, the bit
+of land belonging to Ezra Adams, where, last spring, Mrs. Wicket
+planted her rows of corn, is left to grow its mouthful of hay, to sell
+to Mr. Frye."
+
+"Ah," said Mr. Tomkins wisely, "that's it.  Well, Mrs. Wicket, now.
+Still," he added, "he'll have a lot of nettles in that hay."
+
+"The rich," Mr. Jeminy continued, "quarrel with the poor, and the poor,
+by way of answer, with rich and poor alike.  And rich or poor, every
+man reaches for more, like a child at table.  That is why, William,
+there is poverty to-day; poverty of the heart, of the mind, and of the
+spirit.
+
+"And yet," he added stoutly a moment later, "I'll not deny there is
+plenty of light; yes, we are wise enough, there is love in our
+hearts . . .  Perhaps, William, heaven will be found when old men like
+you and me, who have lost our way, are dead."
+
+"Lost our way?" quavered Mr. Tomkins, "lost our way?  What are you
+talking about, Jeminy?"
+
+But the fire, burning so brightly before, was almost out.  "Youth,"
+said Mr. Jeminy sadly . . .  And he sat quite still, staring straight
+ahead of him.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Tomkins, "I'll be stepping on home."  Clapping his hat
+somewhat uncertainly onto his head, he rose to go.  Mr. Jeminy
+accompanied him to the door.
+
+"Good-night," he said.
+
+"Good-night," said Mr. Tomkins.  And off he went along the path, to
+tell his wife, as he got into bed, that she was a lucky woman.  But Mr.
+Jeminy stood in the doorway, gazing out across the hills, like David
+over Hebron.  Below him the last late lanterns of the village burned in
+the valley.  He heard the shrill kreef kreedn kreedn of the tree frogs,
+the cheep of crickets, the lonely barking of a dog, ghostly and far
+away; he breathed the air of night, cold, and sweet with honeysuckle.
+Age was in bed; only the young moved and whispered in the shadows;
+youth, obscure and immortal; love and hope, love and sorrow.  From the
+meadows ascended the choir of cicada: katy did, katy didn't, katy
+did. . . .
+
+Mr. Jeminy turned and went indoors.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+SCHOOL LETS OUT
+
+The next day being a holiday, Mr. Jeminy lay in bed, watching, through
+his window, the branches of an oak tree, which is last of all to leaf.
+When he finally arose, the morning was already bright and hot; the
+rooms were swept; all was in order.
+
+Later in the day he followed Mrs. Grumble to the schoolhouse, carrying
+a pail, soap, a scrubbing brush, and a broom.  After Mr. Jeminy had
+filled the pail with water at the school pump, Mrs. Grumble got down on
+her knees, and began to scrub the floor.  The schoolmaster went ahead
+with the broom.  "Sweep in all the corners," she said.  "For," she
+added, "it's in the corners one finds everything."  As she spoke, the
+brush, under her freckled hands, pushed forward a wave of soapy water,
+edged with foam, like the sea.
+
+Mr. Jeminy swept up and down with a sort of solemn joy; he even took
+pride in the little mountain of brown dirt he had collected with his
+broom, and watched it leap across the threshold with regret.  He would
+have liked to keep it. . . .  Then he could have said, "Well, at least,
+I took all this dirt from under the desks."
+
+The truth is that Mr. Jeminy was not a very good teacher.  Although, as
+a young man, he had read, in Latin and Greek, the work of Stoics,
+Gnostics, and Fathers of the Church, and although he had opinions about
+everything, he was unable to teach his pupils what they wished to
+learn, and they, in turn, were unable to understand what he wanted them
+to know.  But that was not entirely his fault, for they came to school
+with such questions as: "How far is a thousand miles?"
+
+"It is the distance between youth and age," said Mr. Jeminy.  Then the
+children would start to laugh.
+
+"A thousand miles," he would begin. . . .
+
+By the time he had explained it, they were interested in something else.
+
+This summer morning, a dusty fall of sunlight filled the little
+schoolroom with dancing golden motes.  It seemed to Mr. Jeminy that he
+heard the voices of innumerable children whispering together; and it
+seemed to him that one voice, sweeter than all the rest, spoke in his
+own heart.  "Jeminy," it said, "Jeminy, what have you taught my
+children?"
+
+Mr. Jeminy answered: "I have taught them to read the works of
+celebrated men, and to cheat each other with plus and minus."
+
+"Ah," said another voice, with a dry chuckle like salt shaken in a
+saltcellar, "well, that's good."
+
+"Who speaks?" cried Mr. Jeminy.
+
+"What," exclaimed the voice, "don't you know me, old friend?  I am plus
+and minus; I am weights and measures. . . ."
+
+"Lord ha' mercy," cried Mrs. Grumble from the floor, "have you gone
+mad?  Whatever are you doing, standing there, with your mouth open?"
+
+"Eh!" said Mr. Jeminy, stupidly.  "I was dreaming."
+
+A red squirrel sped across the path, and stopped a moment in the
+doorway, his tail arched above his back, his bright, black eyes peering
+without envy at Mrs. Grumble, as she bent above the pail of soap-suds.
+Then, with a flirt of his tail, he hurried away, to hide from other
+squirrels the nuts, seeds, and acorns strewn by the winds of the autumn
+impartially over the earth.
+
+In the afternoon, Mr. Jeminy went into his garden, and began to measure
+off rows of vegetables.  "Two rows of beans," he said, "and two of
+radishes; they grow anywhere.  I'll get Crabbe to give me onion sets,
+cabbages, and tomato plants.  Two rows of peas, and one of lettuce; I
+must have fine soil for my lettuce, and I must remember to plant my
+peas deeply.  A row of beets. . . ."
+
+"Where," said Mrs. Grumble, who stood beside him, holding the hoe, "are
+you going to plant squash?"
+
+". . . and carrots," continued Mr. Jeminy hurriedly. . . .
+
+"We must certainly have a few hills of squash," said Mrs. Grumble
+firmly.
+
+"Oh," said Mr. Jeminy, "squash. . . ."
+
+He had left it out on purpose, because he disliked it.  "You see," he
+said finally, looking about him artlessly, "there's no more room."
+
+"Go away," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+From his seat under a tree, to which he had retired, Mr. Jeminy watched
+Mrs. Grumble mark the rows, hoe the straight, shallow furrows, drop in
+the seeds, and cover them with earth again.  As he watched, half in
+indignation, he thought: "Thus, in other times, Ceres sowed the earth
+with seed, and, like Mrs. Grumble, planted my garden with squash.  I
+would have asked her rather to sow melons here."  Just then Mrs.
+Grumble came to the edge of the vegetable garden.
+
+"Seed potatoes are over three dollars a bushel," she said: "it's hardly
+worth while putting them in."
+
+"Then let's not put any in," Mr. Jeminy said promptly, "for they are
+difficult to weed, and when they are grown you must begin to quarrel
+with insects, for whose sake alone, I almost think, they grow at all."
+
+"The bugs fall off," said Mrs. Grumble, "with a good shaking."
+
+"Fie," said Mr. Jeminy, "how slovenly.  It is better to kill them with
+lime.  But it is best of all not to tempt them; then there is no need
+to kill them."
+
+And as Mrs. Grumble made no reply, he added:
+
+"That is something God has not learned yet."
+
+"Please," said Mrs. Grumble, "speak of God with more respect."
+
+After supper Mr. Jeminy sat in his study reading the story of Saint
+Francis, the Poor Brother of Assisi.  One day, soon after the saint had
+left behind him the gay affairs of town, to embrace poverty, for Jesus'
+sake, and while he was still living in a hut of green branches near the
+little chapel of Saint Damian, he beheld his father coming to upbraid
+him for what he considered his son's obstinate folly.  At once Saint
+Francis, who was possessed of a quick wit, began to gather together a
+number of old stones, which he tried to place one on top of the other.
+But as fast as he put them up, the stones, broken and uneven, fell down
+again.  "Aha," cried old Bernadone, when he came up to his son, "I see
+how you are wasting your time.  What are you doing?  I am sick of you."
+
+"I am building the world again," said Francis mildly; "it is all the
+more difficult because, for building material, I can find nothing but
+these old stones."
+
+Mr. Jeminy gave his pupils their final examination in a meadow below
+the schoolhouse.  There, seated among the dandelions, with voices as
+shrill as the crickets, they answered his questions, and watched the
+clouds, like great pillows, sail on the wind from west to east.  Under
+the shiny sky, among the warm, sweet fields, Mr. Jeminy looked no more
+important than a robin, and not much wiser.  Had the children been
+older, they would have tried all the more to please him, but because
+they were young, they laughed, teased each other, blew on blades of
+grass, and made dandelion chains.  Mr. Jeminy examined the Fifth
+Reader.  "Bound the United States," he said.
+
+"On the west by the Pacific Ocean," began a red-cheeked plowboy, to
+whom the ocean was no more than hearsay.
+
+"Where is San Francisco?"
+
+"San Francisco is in California."
+
+"Where is Seattle?"
+
+But no one knew.  Then Mr. Jeminy thought to himself, "I am not much
+wiser than that.  For I think that Seattle is a little black period on
+a map.  But to them, it is a name, like China, or Jerusalem; it is
+here, or there, in the stories they tell each other.  And I believe
+their Seattle is full of interesting people."
+
+"Well, then," he said, "let me hear you bound Vermont."
+
+That was something everybody knew.
+
+He took the First and Second Reader through their sums.  "Two apples
+and two apples make . . ."
+
+"Four apples."
+
+"And three apples from eight apples leave . . ."
+
+"Five apples."
+
+When spelling time came, the children, going down to the foot, rolled
+over each other in the grass, with loud shouts.  At last only two were
+left to dispute the letters in asparagus, elephant, constancy, and
+philosophical.  Then Mr. Jeminy gathered the children about him.
+
+"The year is over," he said, "and you are free to play again.  But do
+not forget over the summer what you learned with so much difficulty
+during the winter.  Let me say to you who will not return to school: I
+have taught you to read, to write, to add and subtract; you know a
+little history, a little geography.  Do not be proud of that.  There
+are many things to learn; but you would not be any happier for having
+learned them.
+
+"You will ask me what this has to do with you.  I would like to teach
+you to be happy.  For happiness is not in owning much, but in owning
+little: love, and liberty, the work of one's hands, fellowship, and
+peace.  These things have no value; they are not to be bought; but they
+alone are worth having.  Do not envy the rich man, for cares destroy
+his sleep.  And do not ask the poor man not to sing, for song is all he
+has.
+
+"Love poverty, and labor, the poverty of love, the wealth of the heart.
+
+"Be wise and honest farmers.
+
+"School is over.  You may go."
+
+The children ran away, laughing; the boys hurried off together to the
+swimming hole, their casual shouts stealing after them down the road.
+Mr. Jeminy, lying on his back in the grass, listened to them sadly.  As
+the voices grew fainter and fainter, it seemed to him as if they were
+saying: "School is over, school is over."  And he thought: "They are
+counting the seasons.  But to the old, the year is never done."
+
+Mr. Frye, who had been sitting quietly by the road during Mr. Jeminy's
+little speech to the children, now got up, and went back to the
+village, shaking his head solemnly with every step.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE BARLYS
+
+The two hired men on Barly's farm rose in the dark and crept
+downstairs.  By sun-up, Farmer Barly was after them, in his brown
+overalls; he came clumping into the barn, dusty with last year's hay,
+and peered about him in the yellow light.  He opened the harness room,
+and took out harness for the farm wagons; he went to ask if the horses
+had been watered.
+
+The cows were in pasture; in the wagon shed the two men, before a tin
+basin, plunged their arms into water, flung it on their faces, and
+puffed and sighed.  The shed was cold, and redolent of earth.  Outside,
+the odor of coffee, drifting from the house, mingled in the early
+morning air with clover and hay, cut in the fields, but not yet stored.
+
+Anna Barly, from her room, heard her mother moving in the kitchen, and
+sat up in bed.  The patch-work quilt was fallen on the floor, where it
+lay as sleepy as its mistress.  She tossed her hair back from her face;
+it spread broad and gold across her shoulders, and the wide sleeves of
+her nightdress, falling down her arms, bared her round, brown elbows as
+she caught it up again.
+
+In the kitchen, the two hired men, their faces wet and clean, poured
+sugar over their lettuce, and talked with their mouths full.
+
+"I hear tell of a borer, like an ear-worm, spoiling the corn. . . .
+But there's none in our corn, so far as I can see."
+
+"Never been so much rain since I was born."
+
+"A bad year."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Barly, "that's no wonder, either, with prices what
+they are, and you two eating your heads off, for all the work you do."
+
+"Now, then," said her husband hastily, "that's all right, too, mother."
+
+Anna stood at the sink, and washed the dishes.  Her hands floated
+through the warm, soapy water like lazy fish, curled around plates,
+swam out of pots; while her thoughts, drowsy, sunny in her head,
+passed, like her hands, from what was hardly seen to what was hardly
+felt.
+
+"Look after the milk, Anna," said her mother, "while I go for some
+kindlings."  She went out, thin, stooped, her long, lean fingers
+fumbling with her apron; and she came back more bent than before.  She
+put the wood down with a sigh.  "A body's never done," she said.
+
+Anna looked after the milk, all in a gentle phlegm.  Her mother cooked,
+cleaned, scrubbed, carried water, fetched wood, set the house to
+rights; in order to keep Anna fresh and plump until she was married.
+Anna, plump and wealthy, was a good match for any one: old Mr. Frye
+used to smile when he saw her.  "Smooth and sweet," he used to say:
+"molasses . . . hm . . ."
+
+Now she stood dreaming by the stove, until her mother, climbing from
+the cellar, woke her with a clatter of coal.  "Why, you big, awkward
+girl," cried Mrs. Barly, "whatever are you dreaming about?"
+
+Anna thought to herself: "I was dreaming of a thousand things.  But
+when I went to look at them . . . there was nothing left."
+
+"Nothing," she said aloud.
+
+"Then," said her mother doubtfully, "you might help me shell peas."
+
+The two women sat down together, a wooden bowl between them.  The pods
+split under their fingers, click, cluck; the peas fell into the bowl
+like shot at first, dull as the bowl grew full.  Click, cluck, click,
+cluck . . .  Anna began to dream again.  "Oh, do wake up," said her
+mother; "one would think . . ."
+
+Anna's hands went startled into the peas.  "I must be in love," she
+said with half a smile.
+
+Mrs. Barly sighed.  "Ak," she said.
+
+Anna began to laugh.  After a while she asked, "Do you think I'm in
+love?"
+
+"Like as not," said her mother.
+
+"Well, then," Anna cried, "I'm not in love at all--not now."
+
+Mrs. Barly let her fingers rest idly along the rim of the bowl.  "When
+I was a girl . . ." she began.  Then it was Anna's turn to sigh.
+
+"It seems like yesterday," remarked Mrs. Barly, who wanted to say, "I
+am still a young woman."
+
+Anna split pods gravely, her eyes bent on her task.  The tone of her
+mother's voice, tart and dry, filled her mind with the sulky thoughts
+of youth.  "There's fewer alive to-day," she said, "than when you were
+a girl."
+
+Mrs. Barly knew very well what her daughter meant.  "Be glad there's
+any left," she replied, as she turned again to her shelling.
+
+Anna's round, brown finger moved in circles through the peas.  "I'm too
+young to marry," she said, at last.
+
+"No younger than what I was."
+
+But it seemed to Anna as though life had changed since those days.  For
+every one was reaching for more.  And Anna, too, wanted more . . . more
+than her mother had had.  "If I wait," she said in a low voice,
+"to . . . see a bit of life . . . what's the harm?"
+
+The pod in Mrs. Barly's hand cracked with a pop, and trembled in the
+air, split open like the covers of a book.  "I declare," she exclaimed,
+"I don't know what to think . . . well . . . wait . . .  I suppose you
+want to be like Mrs. Wicket?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Anna.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Barly, in a shaking voice, "yes . . . wait . . .
+you'll see a bit of something . . . a taste of the broom,
+perhaps. . . ."
+
+While the two women looked after the house, the hired men worked in the
+fields, under the hot sun, their wet, cotton shirts open at the neck,
+their faces shaded with wide straw hats.  Farmer Barly leaned against
+one side of a tumbled-down wooden fence, and old Mr. Crabbe against the
+other.
+
+"This year," said Farmer Barly, "I'm going to put up a silo in my barn.
+And instead of straw to cover it, I'm going to plant oats on top."
+
+"Go along," said Mr. Crabbe.
+
+"Well, it's a fact," said Mr. Barly.  "I'm building now, back of the
+cows."
+
+"Digging, you might say," corrected Mr. Crabbe.
+
+"Building, by God," said Mr. Barly.
+
+Mr. Crabbe tilted back his head and cast a look of wonder at the sky.
+"A hole is a hole," he said finally.
+
+"So it is," agreed Mr. Barly, "so it is.  It takes a Republican to find
+that out."  And, greatly amused at his own wit, Mr. Barly, who was a
+Democrat, slapped his knee and burst out laughing.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mr. Crabbe solemnly, with pious joy, "I'm a
+Republican . . . a good Republican, Mr. Barly, like my father before
+me."  He smote his fist into his open palm.  "I'll vote the Democrats
+blue in the face.  If a man can't vote for his own advantage, what's
+the ballot for?  I say let's mind our own business.  And let me get my
+hands on what I want."
+
+"Get what you can," said Mr. Barly.
+
+"And the devil take the hindmost."
+
+"It's all the same to me," quoth Mr. Barly, "folks being mostly alike
+as two peas."
+
+Mr. Crabbe spat into the stubble.  "The way I look at it," he said,
+"it's like this: first, there's me; and then there's you.  That's the
+way I look at it, Mr. B."
+
+And he went home to repeat to his wife what he had said to Farmer
+Barly.  "I gave it to him," he declared.
+
+In another field, Abner and John Henry, who had been to war, also
+discussed politics.  They agreed that the pay they received for their
+work was inadequate.  It seemed to them to be the fault of the
+government, which was run for the benefit of others besides themselves.
+
+That afternoon, Mr. Jeminy, with Boethius under his arm, came into
+Frye's General Store, to buy a box of matches for Mrs. Grumble.  As he
+paid for them, he said to Thomas Frye, who had been his pupil in
+school: "These little sticks of wood need only a good scratch to
+confuse me, for a moment, with the God of Genesis.  But they also
+encourage Mrs. Grumble to burn, before I come down in the morning, the
+bits of paper on which I like to scribble my notes."
+
+At that moment, old Mrs. Ploughman entered the store to buy a paper of
+pins.  "Well," she cried, "don't keep me waiting all day." But when Mr.
+Jeminy was gone, she said to Thomas Frye, "I guess I don't want any
+pins.  What was it I wanted?"
+
+Presently she went home again, without having bought anything.  "It's
+all the fault of that old man," she said to herself; "he mixes a body
+up so."
+
+On his way home Mr. Jeminy passed, at the edge of the village, the
+little cottage where the widow Wicket lived with her daughter.  Seeing
+Mrs. Wicket in the garden, he stopped to wave his hand.  Under her
+bonnet, the young woman looked up at him, her plain, thin face flushed
+with her efforts in the garden patch.  "I've never seen such weeds,"
+she cried.  "You'd think . . .  I don't know what you'd think.  They
+grow and grow . . ."
+
+Mr. Jeminy went up the hill toward his house, carrying the box of
+matches.  As he walked, the little white butterflies, which danced
+above the road, kept him company; and all about him, in the meadows,
+among the daisies, the beetles, wasps, bees, and crickets, with fifes,
+flutes, drums, and triangles, were singing joyously together the
+Canticle of the Sun:
+
+"Praised be the Lord God with all his creatures, but especially our
+brother, the sun . . . fair he is, and shines, with a very great
+splendor . . .
+
+"Praised be the Lord for our sister, the moon, and for the stars, which
+he has set clear and lovely in heaven.
+
+". . . (and) for our brother, the wind, and for air and cloud, calm and
+all weather . . .
+
+". . . (and) for our mother, the earth, which does sustain us and keep
+us . . .
+
+"Praised be the Lord for all those who pardon one another . . . and who
+endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall
+endure . . ."
+
+Slowly, to the tonkle of herds in pasture, the crowing of cocks, and
+the thin, clear clang of the smithy, the full sun sank in the west.
+For a time all was quiet, as night, the shadow of the earth, crept
+between man and God.
+
+After supper Thomas Frye, in his father's wagon, went to call on Anna
+Barly.
+
+From her porch where she sat hidden by vines which gave forth an odor
+sweeter than honey, the night was visible, pale and full of shadows.
+To the boy beside her, timid and ardent, the silence of her parents
+seemed, like the night, to be full of opinions.
+
+"Well . . . shall we go for a ride?"
+
+Anna called in to her mother, "I'm going for a ride with Tom."
+
+"Don't be late," said her mother.
+
+The two went down the path, and climbed into the buggy; soon the yellow
+lantern, swung between its wheels, rolled like a star down the road to
+Milford.
+
+"Why so quiet, Tom?"
+
+"Am I, Ann?"
+
+"Angry?"
+
+"Just thinking . . . so to say."
+
+"Oh."  And she began to hum under her breath.
+
+"I was just thinking," he said again.
+
+Then, solemnly, he added, "about things."
+
+"About you and me," he wound up finally.
+
+When she offered him a penny for his thoughts, he said, "Well . . .
+nothing."
+
+"Dear me."
+
+At his hard cluck the wagon swept forward.  "You know what I was
+thinking," he said.
+
+"Do I?" asked Anna innocently.
+
+"Don't you?"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+So they went on through the dark, under the trees, to Milford.  When
+their little world, smelling of harness, came to a halt in front of the
+drug store, they descended to quench their thirst with syrup, gas,
+milk, and lard.  Then, with dreamy faces, they made their way to the
+movies.
+
+Now their hands are clasped, but they do not notice each other.  For
+they do not know where they are; they imagine they are acting upon the
+screen.  It is a mistake which charms and consoles them both.  "How
+beautiful I am," thinks Anna drowsily, watching Miss Gish.  "And how
+elegant to be in love."
+
+Later Anna will say to herself: "Other people's lives are like that."
+
+On the way home she sat smiling and dreaming.  The horse ran briskly
+through the night mist; and the wheels, rumbling over the ground,
+turned up the thoughts of simple Thomas Frye, only to plow them under
+again.
+
+"Ann," he said when they were more than half-way home, "don't you care
+for me . . . any more?"  As he spoke, he cut at the black trees with
+his long whip.
+
+"Yes, I do, Tom."
+
+"As much as you did?"
+
+"Just as much."
+
+"More, Ann?"
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Then . . . will you?  Say, will you, Ann?"
+
+"I don't know, Tom.  Don't ask me.  Please."
+
+"But I've got to ask you," he cried.
+
+"Oh, what's the good."  And she looked away, to where the faint light
+of the lantern fled along beside them, over the trees.
+
+"Is it," he said slowly, "is it no?"
+
+"Well, then--no."
+
+Thomas was silent.  At last he asked, "Is it a living man, Ann?"
+
+"No," said Anna.
+
+"Is it a dead man, now?"
+
+Anna moved uneasily.  "No, it isn't," she said.  "'Tisn't anybody."
+
+But Thomas persisted.  "Would it be Noel, if he warn't dead in France?"
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"You're not going to keep on thinking of him, are you?"
+
+"I don't plan to."
+
+"Then--" and Thomas came back to the old question once more, "why not?"
+
+"Why not what?"
+
+"Take me, then?"
+
+"Well," she said vaguely, "I'm too young."
+
+"I'd wait."
+
+"'Twouldn't help any.  I want so much, Tom . . . you couldn't give me
+all I want."
+
+He said, "What is it I couldn't give you?"
+
+"I don't know, Tom . . .  I want what other people have . . .
+experiences . . ."
+
+At his bitter laugh, she was filled with pity for herself.  "Is it so
+funny?" she asked.  "I don't care."
+
+"Whatever's got into you, Ann?"
+
+"I don't know there's anything got into me beyond I don't want to grow
+old--and dry. . . ."
+
+"I don't see as you can help it any."
+
+But Anna was tipsy with youth: she swore she'd be dead before she was
+old.
+
+"Hush, Ann."
+
+"Why should I hush?" she asked.  "It's the truth."
+
+"It's a lie, that's what it is," said Thomas.
+
+"Do you hate me, Tom?" she said.  And she sat looking steadily before
+her.
+
+"I don't know what's got into you.  You act so queer."
+
+"I want to be happy," she whispered.
+
+"Then . . . you can do as you like for all of me."
+
+But as they rode along in silence, wrapped in mist, she drew closer to
+him, all her reckless spirit gone.  "There . . . you've made me cry,"
+she said, and put her hand, cold and moist, into his.
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss me, Tom?"
+
+He slapped the reins bitterly across his horse's back.  "What's the
+good of that?" he asked, in turn.
+
+"Perhaps," she said faintly, "there isn't any.  Oh, I don't know . . .
+what's the difference?"
+
+And so they rode on in silence, with pale cheeks and strange thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MR. JEMINY BUILDS A HOUSE OUT OF BOXES
+
+Mr. Jeminy liked to call on Mrs. Wicket, whose little cottage, at the
+edge of the village, on the way to Milford, had belonged to Eben Wicket
+for nearly fifty years.  Now it belonged to the widow of Eben's son,
+John.  Mr. Jeminy remembered John Wicket as a boy in school.  He was a
+rogue; his head was already so full of mischief, that it was impossible
+to teach him anything.  So he was not much wiser when he left school,
+than when he entered it.  However, Mr. Jeminy was satisfied with his
+instruction.  "With more knowledge," the old schoolmaster thought to
+himself, "he might do a great deal of harm in the world.  So perhaps it
+is just as well for him to be ignorant."  And he consoled himself with
+this reflection.
+
+A year later John Wicket ran away from home, taking with him the money
+which his father kept in a stone jug in the kitchen.  Old Mr. Wicket
+refused to send after him.  "I didn't need the money," he said, "and I
+don't need him.  Well, they're both gone."
+
+But after a while, since his son was no longer there to plague him, he
+began to feel proud of him.  "An out and out scamp," he said, with
+relish.  "Never seen the like."
+
+John Wicket was gone for three years, no one knew where.  At last Eben
+received news of him again.  His son, who had been living all this time
+in a nearby village, fell from a ladder and broke his neck.  "Just,"
+said Eben Wicket, "as I expected."
+
+No one, however, expected to see his widow come to live with her
+father-in-law.  The old man himself went to fetch her and her year-old
+child.  She proved to be a small, plain body, with an air of fright
+about her, as though life had surprised her.  Out of respect for Eben,
+as they put it, the gossips went to call.  They found her shy, and
+inclined to be silent; they drank their tea, and examined her with
+curiosity, while she, for her part, seemed to want to hide away.
+
+"As who wouldn't, in her place," said Mrs. Ploughman.
+
+It was agreed that, having married an out-and-out rascal, she ought to
+be willing to spend the remainder of her life quietly.  So she was left
+to herself, which seemed, on the face of it, to be about what she
+wanted.  She tended Eben's house, drove the one cow to pasture, and
+sang to little Juliet from morning till night the songs she remembered
+from her own childhood.
+
+During that time no one had any fault to find with her, excepting old
+Mrs. Crabbe, who thought she should have called her child Mary instead
+of Juliet.  "It's not a proper name," she said to Mrs. Tomkins.  "It
+isn't in the Bible, Mrs. Tomkins.  You'd do as well to call the child
+Salomy.  Salomy's in the Bible."
+
+When Eben Wicket died, early in 1917, he left his house and about an
+acre of land to his daughter-in-law.  She was poor; still, she had
+enough to get along on.  She was young, but every one thought of her as
+a woman whose life was over.  So when Noel Ploughman took to keeping
+company with her, the gossips were all aflitter.  It was June; the
+regulars were on their way to France; and what with the war, and Mrs.
+Wicket, the village had plenty to talk about.  Old Mrs. Ploughman said
+nothing, but regarded her friends with a gloomy and thoughtful air.  On
+the other hand, Miss Beal, the dressmaker, saw no reason to keep her
+opinions to herself.  "It's a scandal," she said to her friend Mrs.
+Grumble; "what with Eben Wicket scarcely cold in his grave, and John a
+thief, with his neck broke and heaven only knows what else besides."
+
+Nevertheless, that summer Noel Ploughman's sober, honest face was often
+to be seen in Mrs. Wicket's garden patch, among the beans and the
+lettuces.  Who can say what they found in one another to admire?  In
+his company she was both happy and regretful, while he, seeing her by
+turns quiet and gay, could not determine which he found more charming.
+They talked over the weather together, and discussed the crops.  Love
+comes slowly in the north; there is time for every one to take a hand
+in it.  August passed without either having mentioned what was in their
+hearts.  Then Mrs. Ploughman made up her mind to put an end to it.  One
+day, when Noel was in Milford, she came to call on Mrs. Wicket.  One
+can imagine what she said to the young woman, who was already a mother
+and a widow.  The next day Mrs. Wicket appeared in her garden, pale and
+composed.  Those who had occasion to pass the little cottage at the
+edge of the village, remarked that she no longer hummed under her
+breath the gay tunes of her childhood.
+
+"Her sin has found her out," said Miss Beal.  "She's fallen by the way."
+
+"You'd think," said Mrs. Crabbe, "she'd behave herself a speck, after
+the life she's had."
+
+Mrs. Grumble also was of the opinion that Mrs. Wicket had done wrong in
+allowing herself to care for Noel Ploughman.  For it seemed to the
+gossips that Mrs. Wicket's life was, by rights, no longer her own to do
+with.  She was the earthly remains of a sinner; she had no right to
+enjoy herself.
+
+Two days later Noel Ploughman enlisted, "for the duration of the war."
+His grandmother accepted the congratulations of Mrs. Crabbe and the
+sympathy of Mrs. Barly with equal satisfaction.  It seemed to her that
+she had done her duty as she saw it.  But when Noel was killed in
+France a year later, she felt that Mrs. Wicket had killed him.  "Now,"
+she croaked to Mrs. Crabbe, "I hope she's satisfied."
+
+She seemed to be; she took the news of Noel's death with curious calm.
+It was almost as if she had been expecting it, looking for it . . . one
+might have thought she had been waiting for it. . . .  After a while,
+she began to sing again.  Her voice, as she crooned to Juliet, was
+musical, but quavery.  It provoked the good women of the village, who
+began to think that perhaps, after all, she had "had her way."
+"There's this much about it," said Miss Beal; "no one else will have
+him now."
+
+Mrs. Grumble agreed with her.  She disliked Mrs. Wicket because Mr.
+Jeminy liked her.  He pitied the young woman who had had the misfortune
+to marry a thief, and he forgave her for wanting to be happy, because
+it did not seem to him that to have been the wife of a good-for-nothing
+was much to settle down on.  In his opinion, life owed her more than
+she had got.
+
+"She is simple and kind," he said to Mrs. Grumble.  "She has had very
+little to give thanks for."
+
+"She'll have more, then, if she can," replied Mrs. Grumble with a toss
+of her head as though to say, "it's you who are simple."
+
+And she looked the other way, when they met on the road.  Mr. Jeminy,
+on the other hand, often went to call at the little house at the edge
+of the village.  The young widow, who had no other callers, felt that
+one friend was enough when he talked as much as Mr. Jeminy.  While he
+laid open before her the great books of the past, illuminating their
+pages with his knowledge and reflections, she listened with an air of
+tranquil pleasure.  She counted the stitches on her sewing, and
+answered "sakes alive," in the pauses.
+
+One day in April she put on her best dress, and took the stage to
+Milford.  When she came home again, in the evening, she brought with
+her a decorated shell for her friend.  But it happened that Thomas Frye
+also came home from Milford, by the same stage.  That was what Mrs.
+Grumble was waiting for.  "Now she's at it again," said Mrs. Grumble.
+"She's bound to have some one," she declared; "one or another, it's all
+the same."  And she gazed meaningly at Mr. Jeminy, who started at once
+for his den, as though he were looking for something.
+
+Then she was delighted with herself, and retired to the kitchen.
+
+It was useless for Mr. Jeminy to retreat to his den.  For sooner or
+later, Mrs. Grumble always found something to do there.  She would come
+in with her broom and her mop, and look around.  Then Mr. Jeminy would
+walk hastily out of the house and descend to the village.  There, it
+would occur to him to call on Mrs. Wicket, because he happened to have
+with him a book he thought she would like to look at, or a flower for
+Juliet.  Mrs. Wicket received each book with gratitude, and looked to
+see if there were any pictures in it, before giving it back again.
+Juliet, on the other hand, wished to know the names of all the flowers.
+When Mr. Jeminy repeated their names in Latin, from the text-book on
+botany, she clapped her hands, and jumped up and down, because it was
+so comical.
+
+Now, in August, Mr. Jeminy was building her a doll's house in Mrs.
+Wicket's tumbledown barn.  It was the sort of work he liked to engage
+in; no one expected him to be accurate, it was only necessary to use
+his imagination.  But Juliet, swinging her legs on top of the feed bin,
+regarded him with round and serious eyes.  For in Juliet's opinion, Mr.
+Jeminy was involved in a difficult task; and she was afraid he might
+not be able to go through with it.
+
+"How many rooms," she said, "is my doll's house going to have?"
+
+"I had counted," said Mr. Jeminy, "on two."  And he went over the
+plans, using his hammer as a pointer.  "Here is the bedroom," he said,
+"and there is the kitchen.  There's where the stove is going to be."
+
+Juliet followed him without interest.  It was apparent that she was
+disappointed.
+
+"Where's the parlor?" she demanded.
+
+"Must there be a parlor?" asked Mr. Jeminy, in surprise.
+
+"What do you think?" said Juliet.  "I have to have a place for Anna to
+keep company in."
+
+Anna was the youngest of her three dolls; that is to say, Anna was
+smaller than either Sara or Margaret.  It seemed to Juliet that to be
+without a parlor was to lack elegance.  Mr. Jeminy rubbed his chin.
+"Isn't Anna very young," he asked, "to keep company in the parlor?"
+
+"No, she isn't," said Juliet.
+
+Then, as Mr. Jeminy made no reply, she added, "She's six, going on
+seven."
+
+Mr. Jeminy sighed.  "Is she indeed?" he remarked absently.  "It is a
+charming age.  I wish I were able to see the world again through the
+eyes of six, going on seven.  What a noble world it would seem, full of
+pleasant people."
+
+"So," declared Juliet, "we have to have a parlor."
+
+However, she could not sit still very long.
+
+Presently she hopped down from the feed bin.  "Look," she said, "this
+is the way to fly."  She began to dance about, waving her arms.
+"This," she declared, "is the way the bees go."  And she ran up and
+down, crying "buzz, buzz."
+
+She decided to play house, by herself.  Arranging her three dolls, made
+of rags and sawdust, on top of the bin, she stood before them, with her
+fingers in her mouth.  Then all at once she began to play.
+
+"My goodness," she exclaimed, "I'm surprised at you.  Look at your
+clothes, every which way.  Margaret, do sit up.  And Sara--you'll be
+the death of me, with all my work to do yet, and everything."
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Henry Stove," she added, addressing a three-legged
+stool, "come right in and sit down.
+
+"Terrible hot weather we're having.  Worst I ever see."
+
+She moved busily about, humming a song to herself.  "I declare, it's
+time you went to school, children," she said finally, stopping to look
+at her family.
+
+Without trouble, she became the school teacher.  Propping her three
+dolls more firmly against the wall, she took her stand directly in
+front of them.  "Do you know your lessons, children?" she asked.  Then
+she squeaked back to herself, "Yes, ma'am."
+
+"Well, then, Margaret, what's the best cow for butter?"
+
+Mr. Jeminy began to laugh.  But almost at once he became serious and
+confused.  For it occurred to him that he did not know what cow was
+best for butter.  "This child," he thought, "who cannot tell me why it
+is necessary to take two apples from four apples, is nevertheless able
+to distinguish between one cow and another.  She is wiser than I am."
+
+He stood gazing thoughtfully at Juliet, and smiling.  The sun of late
+afternoon, already about to sink in the west, was shining through the
+window, covered with dust and cobwebs.  And Mr. Jeminy, watching the
+dust dancing in the sun, thought to himself: "I should like to stay
+here; it is peaceful and friendly.  I should like to help Mrs. Wicket
+plant her little garden in the spring, and plow it under in the autumn.
+Now it is growing late and I must go home again."
+
+Juliet had tired of her play.  "Tell me a story," she said.  "Tell me
+about the war, Mr. Jeminy.  Tell me about Noel Ploughman."
+
+But Mr. Jeminy shook his head.  "No," he said, "it is time to drive
+your mother's cow home from the fields.  Some other day I will tell you
+about the great wars of old, fought for no other reason than glory and
+empire, which disappointed no one, except the vanquished.  But there is
+no time now.  Come; we will go for the cow together."
+
+Hand in hand they went down the road toward Mr. Crabbe's field, where
+Mrs. Wicket rented pasturage for her cow.  The sun was sinking above
+the trees; and they heard, about them, in the fields, the silence of
+evening, the song of the crickets and cicadas.
+
+They found the cows gathered at the pasture bars, with sweet, misty
+breath, their bells clashing faintly as they moved.  "Go 'long," cried
+Juliet, switching her little rod, to single out her own.  And to the
+patter of hoofs and the tonkle of bells, they started home again.
+
+Mrs. Wicket, in the kitchen, watched them from her window, in the
+clear, fading light.  "How good he is," she thought.  And she turned,
+with a smile and a sigh, to set the table for Juliet's supper.
+
+Juliet was singing along the roadside.  "A tisket," she sang, "a
+tasket, a green and yellow basket . . ."  And she chanted, to a tune of
+her own, an old verse she had once heard Mr. Jeminy singing:
+
+  When I was a young man,
+  I said, bright and bold,
+  I would be a great one,
+  When I was old.
+
+  When I was a young man,
+  But that was long ago,
+  I sang the merry old songs
+  All men know.
+
+  When I was a young man,
+  When I was young and smart,
+  I think I broke a mirror,
+  Or a girl's heart.
+
+Mr. Jeminy walked in the middle of the road, under the dying sky,
+already lighted by the young moon, in the west.  As he walked, the
+fresh air of evening, blowing on his face, with its sweet odors, the
+twilight notes of birds among the leaves, the faint acclaim of bells,
+and Juliet's childish singing, filled his heart with unaccustomed
+peace, moved him with gentle and deliberate joy.  He remembered the
+voices he had heard in the little schoolhouse in the spring.
+
+"Jeminy, what are you doing?"
+
+Then Mr. Jeminy raised his head to the sky, in which the first stars of
+night were to be seen.
+
+"I am very busy now," he said, proudly.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+RAIN
+
+From her dormer window, Anna Barly peered out at the wet, gray morning.
+The ground was sopping, the trees black with the night's drenching.  In
+the orchard a sparrow sang an uncertain song; and she heard the
+comfortable drip, drip, drip from the eaves.  It was damp and fresh at
+the window; the breeze, cold and fragrant after rain, made her shiver.
+She drew her wrapper closer about her throat, and sat staring out
+across the sodden lawn, with idle thoughts for company.
+
+She thought that she was young, and that the world was old: that rain
+belonged to youth.  Old age should sit in the sun, but youth was best
+of all in bad weather.  "There's no telling where you are in the rain.
+And there's no one spying, for every one's indoors, keeping dry."  Yes,
+youth is quite a person in the rain.
+
+With slim, lazy fingers, she began to braid her long, fair hair.  It
+seemed to her that folks were always peering and prying, to make sure
+that every one else was like themselves.  "You're doing different than
+what I did," they said.
+
+Anna wanted to "do different."  Yet she was without courage or wisdom.
+And because she was sulky and heedless, Mrs. Ploughman called her Sara
+Barly's rebellious daughter.  As Mrs. Ploughman belonged to the
+Methodist side of the town, Mrs. Tomkins was usually ready to disagree
+with her.  But on this occasion, all Mrs. Tomkins could think to say,
+was: "Well, that's queer."
+
+"But what's she got to be rebellious over?" she asked, peering brightly
+at Mrs. Ploughman.
+
+"Perhaps," said Mrs. Ploughman, "she's sorry she wasn't born a boy."
+
+"Well," cried Mrs. Tomkins, "I never heard of such a thing."
+
+"There's lots you never heard of, Mrs. Tomkins," said Mrs. Ploughman.
+
+"And plenty I never hope to hear," said Mrs. Tomkins promptly.  "My
+life!"
+
+After breakfast, Anna helped her mother with the housework.  She took a
+hand in making the beds, and put her own room in order by tumbling
+everything into the closet and shutting the door.  Then she went into
+the kitchen to help with the lunch.  When Mrs. Barly saw her dreaming
+over the carrots, she asked:
+
+"What are you gaping at now?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Then Mrs. Barly grew vexed.  "You're not feeble-minded, I hope," she
+said.
+
+"No, I'm not," said Anna.
+
+"I'm glad of that," said Mrs. Barly.
+
+When Anna said that she was not thinking of anything, she believed that
+she was telling the truth.  But as a matter of fact, she was thinking
+of Thomas Frye.  She wanted him to be in love with her, although she
+said to herself: "I am not in love with any one."  Sometimes she
+thought that her heart was buried in France, with Noel Ploughman.
+However, she was mistaken.  The tear she dropped in secret over his
+death, was for her own youth, out of her timid, clumsy, sweet-and-sour
+feelings.
+
+In the afternoon she went for a walk.  The rain, starting again after
+breakfast, had stopped, but the sky was still overcast, the air damp
+and searching.  From the trees overhead as she passed, icy drops rained
+down upon her; she felt the silence all about her, and saw, from the
+rises, the gray hills, the rolling mist, and the low clouds, trailing
+above the woods, now light, now dark.
+
+She was disappointed because life was no different than it was.  She
+had hoped to find it as delightful as in those happy days before the
+war, when she played at kissing games and twined dandelion wreaths in
+her hair.  But now it did not amuse her to play at post-office; she was
+sad because she was no longer able to be gay.  As she passed the little
+cottage belonging to Mrs. Wicket, she thought to herself: "Yes, you've
+seen something of life.  But not what I want to see, exactly.  Look at
+you."  Like Mrs. Grumble, she believed that Mrs. Wicket had nothing
+more to live for.  "There you are," she said, "and there you'll be.
+Life doesn't mean even as much as a hayride, so far as you're concerned.
+
+"You, God," she cried, "put something in my way, just once."
+
+At that moment Juliet, who had been peeking out from behind the house,
+came skipping down the path to the road.  As she drew near, her
+progress became slower; finally she stood still, and balanced herself
+on one leg, like a stork.
+
+"Hello," she said.  Then she looked up and down the road, to see what
+there was to talk about.
+
+"I have a little house Mr. Jeminy made me out of boxes," she said at
+last.
+
+"No," said Anna.
+
+"Well, that's a fact," said Juliet, who had once heard Mr. Frye say,
+"Well, that's a fact," to Mr. Crabbe.
+
+"My goodness," said Anna, "isn't that elegant?"  And she looked down at
+Juliet, who was staring solemnly up at her.
+
+"Yes, it is," said Juliet.
+
+"What were you doing," asked Anna, "when I came along?"
+
+"I was playing going to Milford," said Juliet.  "Do you want to play
+with me?"
+
+It seemed to Juliet that playing was something for any one to do.
+
+Anna began to laugh.  She had a mind to say, "Do you think I'm as
+little as you are?"  But instead, she found herself thinking, "Oh, my,
+wouldn't it be fun."
+
+"Why," she cried, "I declare, I do want to play with you."
+
+"All right," said Juliet.  And she turned soberly back to the barn,
+behind the house.  But Anna sat down in the grass.  "Just you wait,"
+she said, "till I get my shoes and stockings off.  I'm going to play
+proper."
+
+Presently their happy voices, linked in laughter, rose from behind the
+house, where Juliet was showing Anna how to play store.  She tied her
+apron around her little belly, and came forward rubbing her hands.
+"Would you like some nice licorice?" she asked.  "Everything's very
+dear."
+
+When she was tired of playing store, she began to imitate old Mrs.
+Tomkins, the carpenter's wife.  "This is the way to have the
+rheumatism," she said.  And she hopped around on one foot.
+
+After they were through playing, they sat quietly together in the hay,
+in the barn, without anything more to say.  Anna was warm and happy;
+she wanted to hug Juliet, to hold her tight, to rock up and down with
+her.  "There," she thought, "if I only had one like her."
+
+"What are you thinking about?" she asked, to tease her.
+
+"I was just thinking," said Juliet, "it's fun to play with people."
+
+Anna felt her heart give a sudden twist.  "Why, you dear, odd little
+thing," she cried.  And taking the child in her arms, she covered the
+tiny head with kisses.  But Juliet drew away.
+
+"I'm not little," she said.  "I'm old."
+
+"So am I old," said Anna.  She felt the joy run out of her; it left her
+empty.  "I expect everybody in the world is old," she said.  She
+watched her hands move about in the hay like great spiders.
+
+"Is it fun to be old, do you think?" asked Juliet.
+
+"I don't know," said Anna.  "I don't expect it is, much."
+
+"Mother is old," said Juliet.  "What do old people do?"
+
+Anna looked out through the barn door across the wet fields, the
+drenched hillsides, shrouded in mist.  "I don't know," she said.  And
+she got up to go home.
+
+"Well, good-by," said Juliet.
+
+Just then Mrs. Wicket came in from the road, with a basket on her arm.
+When she saw Anna standing in front of the barn she grew pink and
+confused.  For she thought that Anna had come to call on her.  "Good
+afternoon," she said.  "I was out.  I'm real sorry.  Won't you come in?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Anna.  "I was going on . . .  I only stopped for a
+minute. . . ."
+
+And without another word she ran down the path, and out of the gate.
+Mrs. Wicket stood looking after her in silence.  Then, with a sigh, she
+turned, and went indoors.  But Anna ran and ran until she was tired.
+As she ran she kept saying to herself, over and over, "I won't be like
+that, I won't, I won't."
+
+It seemed to her as though she were running away from Hillsboro itself,
+running away from Mrs. Wicket, from her mother, from Thomas Frye, from
+Anna Barly, from everything she wouldn't be. . . .
+
+"I won't," she cried, "I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't."
+
+"Never."
+
+Mr. Jeminy, who was seated on his coat by the side of the road, got up
+with a smile.  "Well, Anna Barly," he said.
+
+"Ak," she whispered, clapping both hands to her mouth, "how you scared
+me."  She could feel her heart beating with fright; her lips trembled,
+her eyes filled with tears.  She stood staring at Mr. Jeminy, who
+stared gravely back at her.  "Are you going to run away from me, too?"
+he asked, at last.
+
+"No," said Anna.  Then, all at once, she burst out crying.  "I can't
+help it," she cried, between her sobs.  "I can't help it.  Don't look
+at me."
+
+"No," said Mr. Jeminy, "I won't."  And he gazed up at the tree tops,
+dark and sharp against the cold, gray sky.
+
+Anna cried herself out.  Then pale and ashamed, she started home again
+with Mr. Jeminy.  "I don't know what got into me," she said.  "I don't
+know what you'll think."
+
+"I think," declared Mr. Jeminy, looking up at the sky, "I think--why, I
+think this wet weather will pass, Anna Barly.  Yes, to-morrow will be
+cold and clear."
+
+Anna did not answer him.  She was tired; she had played, she had cried,
+now she wanted to rest.
+
+In Frye's General Store, Mr. Frye and Mr. Crabbe were disputing a game
+of checkers.  They sat opposite each other, stared at the checkerboard,
+and stroked their chins.  Farmer Barly stood watching them.  He puffed
+on his pipe, and nodded his head at every move.  But all the while he
+was thinking about Anna.  "Pretty near time she was settling down," he
+thought.
+
+Mr. Frye jumped over two, and leaned back in his chair with a satisfied
+smile.  The hops of his own men put him into the best of humor.  It was
+not that he wanted to win; he only wanted to do all the jumping.  "Let
+me do the taking," he would have said, "and you can do the winning."
+When Mr. Crabbe hopped over three in a row, Mr. Frye became gloomy.  He
+felt that Mr. Crabbe was getting all the pleasure.  "You're too spry
+for me," he said.  "You're like a flea.  Well. . . ."
+
+"It's your turn, Mr. F.," said Mr. Crabbe.
+
+Mr. Frye looked at the board with distaste.  There were no more jumps
+for him to make.  He pushed a round black checker forward.
+
+"There you are," he said.
+
+"Here I go," declared Mr. Crabbe.  And he began hopping again.
+
+Mr. Frye shook his head.  "I don't know as I'm feeling very good
+to-day," he told Farmer Barly.
+
+As he was speaking, Anna Barly entered the store, on her way home.
+Thomas Frye, who was behind the counter, came forward to meet her.
+When she saw him, her cheeks, which were pale, grew red.  "He can see I
+was crying," she thought.  "Well, I don't care.  I hate him.  What did
+I stop for?"
+
+She remembered that her mother had wanted a spool of white cotton.
+"Number eleven," she said.
+
+When she saw her father and Mr. Frye in the corner, she grew sulkier
+than ever.  "They're just laying to settle me down," she thought.  And
+turning to hide her face, still stained with tears, she made believe to
+wave to some one, out the window.
+
+Mr. Crabbe took another man.  "Tsck," said Mr. Frye; "maybe I'd better
+go and see what Anna wants.  Thomas don't appear to know what he's
+about."
+
+"Leave them be," said Mr. Crabbe, "leave them be."  And he winked first
+at Mr. Barly, and then at Mr. Frye.  "Don't go spoiling things," he
+said.
+
+Mr. Frye allowed his mouth to droop in a thin smile.  "Young people are
+slow to-day," he remarked.  "They act like they had something on their
+minds.  Green fruit . . . slow to ripe.  In my time we went at it
+smarter."  And he looked thoughtfully at Anna Barly.  He saw her in the
+form of acres of land, live stock, farm buildings, and money in the
+bank.  "Molasses," he thought; "yes, sir, molasses.  Maple sugar."  But
+when he looked at his son Thomas, he frowned.  "Go on," he wanted to
+say, "go on, you slowpoke."
+
+Farmer Barly also frowned at Thomas Frye.  He felt that he was being
+hurried.  "She's well enough where she is," he thought.  "She's young
+yet.  A year or two more . . ."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Crabbe, "I look forward to the day."  And he waved his
+hand kindly in the air.  "It's your move, Mr. F."
+
+Mr. Frye arose, and walked toward the door, where Thomas was bidding
+Anna good-by.  "See you to-night," Thomas whispered; "heh, Anna?"
+
+"Please yourself," said Anna.  And off she went, without looking at Mr.
+Frye, who had come to speak to her.  When she was gone, Mr. Frye gave
+his son a keen glance.  In it was both curiosity and malice.  But
+Thomas turned away.  It seemed to him that women must have been easier
+to understand when his father was young.  For no one could understand
+them now.
+
+While the storekeeper's back was turned, Mr. Crabbe rearranged the
+checkerboard.  He took up two of Mr. Frye's men and put them in his
+pocket.  Then he winked at Mr. Barly, as though to say: "I'm just a
+leetle too smart for him."
+
+Farmer Barly winked back.  It amused him to have Mr. Frye beaten
+unfairly.  Mr. Frye wanted to get his daughter away from him.  "Well,"
+he said in his mind, to Mr. Frye, "just go easy.  Just go easy, Mr.
+Frye."  And he winked again at Mr. Crabbe.  "That's right," he said,
+"give it to him."
+
+When Mr. Jeminy left Anna, at the edge of the village, he went to call
+on Grandmother Ploughman.  He found her in the company of old Mrs.
+Crabbe, who had brought her knitting over, for society's sake.  Mrs.
+Ploughman received him with quiet dignity, due to a sense of the wrong
+she had suffered, for which she blamed Mrs. Wicket, and the Democratic
+Party.  Mr. Ploughman, she often said, had been a good Republican all
+his life.  Unfortunately, he was dead; otherwise, things would have
+been different.
+
+It seemed to her that the country was being run by a set of villains.
+"The world is in a bad way," she declared.  "I don't know what we're
+coming to."  And an expression of bleak satisfaction illuminated her
+face, wrinkled with age.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Jeminy, "these are unhappy times.  I am afraid we are
+leaving behind us a difficult task for those who follow.  They had a
+right to expect better things of us, Mrs. Ploughman."
+
+"I've not left anything behind," said Mrs. Ploughman decidedly; "not
+yet."
+
+"I should hope not," ejaculated Mrs. Crabbe.  "No."
+
+"It's the young," said Mrs. Ploughman, "who get the old into trouble.
+Nothing ever suits them until they're in mischief; and then it's up to
+their elders to pull them out again.  I know, for I've seen it, father
+and son."
+
+"It is the old," said Mr. Jeminy, "who get the young into trouble."
+
+"Is it, indeed?" said Mrs. Ploughman.
+
+"Well, I don't believe it."  And she gave Mr. Jeminy a bright, peaked
+look.
+
+"Then," she continued, "when you've done for them, year in and year
+out, off they go, and that's the end of it."
+
+"Ah, yes," croaked Mrs. Crabbe; "off they go."
+
+"If it isn't one thing," said Mrs. Ploughman, "it's another.  Trouble
+and death--that's a woman's lot in this world, like the Good Book says."
+
+"Death is the end of everything," remarked Mrs. Crabbe.
+
+"I'm not afraid to die," Mrs. Ploughman declared.  "There's things to
+do the other side of the grave, same as here.  And it's a joy to do
+them, in the light of the Lord.  I can tell you, Mrs. Crabbe, I won't
+be sorry to go.  My folks are waiting there for me."  Her voice
+trembled, and she rocked up and down to compose herself.  "He needn't
+try to mix me up," she thought to herself; "not in my own home.  No."
+
+"Then," said Mr. Jeminy, "you believe in an after life, Mrs. Ploughman?"
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Ploughman firmly, directing her remarks to Mrs.
+Crabbe, "I do.  I believe there's a life hereafter, when our sorrows
+will be repaid us.  There weren't all those hearts broke for nothing,
+Mrs. Crabbe, nor for what's going on here now, with strikes, and
+famine, and bloody murders."
+
+"That's real edifying, Mrs. Ploughman," said Mrs. Crabbe, "real
+edifying.  Yes," she exclaimed with energy, "these are terrible times.
+Now they give me tea without sugar in it.  For there's no sugar to be
+had.  Well, I won't drink it.  I spit it out, when nobody's looking."
+
+And she plied her needles with vigor, to show what she thought of such
+an arrangement.
+
+"As I was saying," said Mrs. Ploughman, "it's the young who get the old
+into trouble.  And artful folk, who'd ought to know better, with the
+life they've had.  I've had no peace in this life.  But I'll have it
+hereafter."
+
+At this reflection upon Mrs. Wicket, Mr. Jeminy rose to go.  "You are
+right," he said; "no one will disturb you."  And he went home to Mrs.
+Grumble.
+
+"Where have you been all day?" she demanded.
+
+Mr. Jeminy smiled.  He knew that Mrs. Grumble thought he had been
+spending the afternoon at Mrs. Wicket's.  "I have been to call on Mrs.
+Ploughman," he said.  "There I met old Mrs. Crabbe."
+
+Then Mrs. Grumble hurried out into the garden to pick a mess of young
+beans for supper, because Mr. Jeminy liked them better than squash.
+The bowl of squash she returned to the ice box.  "I'll eat it myself,
+to-morrow," she thought.
+
+"Supper will be a little late," she said to Mr. Jeminy, "because the
+stove won't draw in wet weather."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+HARVEST
+
+Mr. Jeminy, clad in a pair of brown, earthy overalls, a blue, cotton
+shirt, and a straw hat, full of holes, was helping Mr. Tomkins dig
+potatoes, up on Barly Hill.  From the field on the slopes above the
+village, he could see the hills across the valley, misted in the sun.
+Above him stretched the shining sky, thronged with its winds, the low
+clouds of early autumn trailing their shadows across the woods.  All
+was peace; he saw September's yellow fields, and felt, on his face, the
+cool fall wind, with its smoke of burning leaves, mingled with the odor
+of spaded earth, and fresh manure.
+
+With every toss of his fork he covered with earth the little piles of
+straw and ordure which Mr. Tomkins had spread on the ground.  As he
+advanced in this manner, small flocks of sparrows rose before him, and
+flew away with dissatisfied cries.  "Come," he said to them, "the world
+does not belong to you.  I believe you have never read the works of
+Epictetus, who says, 'true education lies in learning to distinguish
+what is ours, from what does not belong to us.'  However, you have a
+more modern spirit; for you believe that whatever you see belongs to
+you, providing you are able to get hold of it."
+
+He was happy; in the warm, noon-day drowse, he felt, like Abraham, the
+grace of God within him, and found even in the humblest sparrow enough
+to afford him an opportunity to discuss morals with himself.
+
+"There'll be potatoes," said Mr. Tomkins, "enough to last all winter
+for the two of us.  That's riches, Jeminy; where's your talk now of the
+world being poor?"
+
+"Some of these potatoes," said Mr. Jeminy, bending over, "are rotted
+from the wet weather."
+
+"To-morrow," said Mr. Tomkins, "I'll borrow a harrow from Farmer Barly.
+And next spring I'll plant corn here on the hill.  Table corn, that is.
+Then we'll have a corn-husking, Jeminy; you and I, and the rest of the
+young ones."  And he burst out laughing, in his high, cracked voice.
+
+"Do you remember the last corn-husking?" asked Mr. Jeminy.  "It was in
+the autumn before the war.  Anna Barly and Alec Stove lost themselves
+in the woods.  And Elsie Cobbler burned her fingers.  How she cried and
+carried on; Anna came running back, to see what it was all about.  But
+before the evening was over, she was off again, with Noel Ploughman."
+
+Mr. Tomkins nodded his head.  Timid in the presence of Mr. Jeminy's
+books, he was happy and hearty in his own potato patch.  "I remember,"
+he said.  "I remember more than you do, Jeminy.  I can look back to the
+first husking bee I ever was at.  That was in '62.  A year later I
+shouldered a gun, and went off with the drafts of '63.  Your speaking
+of Noel put me in mind of it.
+
+"When I got home again," he continued, "there was nothing for me to do.
+In those days folks did their own work.  Then there was time for
+everything.  But the days are not as long as they used to be when I was
+young.  Now there's no time for anything.
+
+"But Noel was a good man.  He was handy, and amiable.  He could lay a
+roof, or mend a thresher, it was all the same to him.  What do you
+think, Jeminy?  Anna Barly won't forget him in a hurry--heh?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Jeminy; "no, Anna won't forget him in a hurry.  That is
+as it should be, William.  She believes that she has suffered.  And if
+she fools herself a little, I, for one, would be inclined to forgive
+her."
+
+"She won't fool herself any," said Mr. Tomkins; "not Anna.  Wait and
+see."
+
+The shadows of late afternoon stretched half across the field when Mr.
+Jeminy laid down his fork, and started to return home.  As he followed
+Mr. Tomkins down the hill, he saw the tops of the clouds lighted by the
+descending sun, and heard, across the valley, the harsh notes of a
+cow's horn, calling the hands on Ploughman's Farm in from the fields.
+
+He stopped a moment at a shadowy spring, hidden away among the ferns,
+for a cup of cold, clear water.  Holding the cup, made of tin, to his
+lips, he observed:
+
+"Thus, of old, the farmer stooped to refresh himself.  When he was
+done, he gave thanks to the rustic god, who watched his house, and
+protected his flocks.  They were the best of friends; each was modest
+and reasonable.  To-day God is like a dead ancestor; there is no way to
+argue with him."
+
+"I'm glad," said Mr. Tomkins, "that the minister isn't here to listen
+to you.  Come along now; I've plenty still to do before supper.  The
+widow Wicket's gate is down.  But I've promised to set a fence for
+Farmer Barly first."
+
+"You need help, William," remarked Mr. Jeminy thoughtfully; "you need
+help.  I must see what I can do."  And he went home, down the hill,
+after Mr. Tomkins.
+
+The next day he started out early in the morning.  When Mrs. Grumble
+asked him where he was going, he replied, "I must step over to Mr.
+Tomkins, to help him with something."
+
+From Mr. Tomkins he borrowed a saw, a plane, a hammer, and a box of
+nails.  Then he hurried off to mend Mrs. Wicket's gate.  On the way he
+stopped to gather an armful of goldenrod for his friend, and also to
+pick a yellow aster for himself, from Mrs. Cobbler's garden.
+
+When he arrived at Mrs. Wicket's cottage, the widow's pale face and
+listless manner, filled him with alarm.  "I've been up with Juliet,"
+she said.  "The child has a touch of croup.  It's nothing.  She's
+better this morning."  And she gave him her hand, still cold with the
+chill of night.
+
+"Good heavens," exclaimed Mr. Jeminy; "I am sure Mrs. Grumble would
+have been glad to keep you company."
+
+Mrs. Wicket smiled.  But she did not answer this declaration, which Mr.
+Jeminy knew in his heart to be untrue.
+
+Putting down his tools, he began to examine the gate.  "Hm," he said.
+"Hm.  Yes, I'll soon have this fixed for you."  Mrs. Wicket stood
+watching him with a gentle smile.  "You're very kind," she said.  "It's
+very kind of you, Mr. Jeminy.  Most folks are too proud to turn a hand
+for me, no matter what was to happen."
+
+"Tut," said Mr. Jeminy.
+
+"Well, it's a fact," said Mrs. Wicket gravely.  "I've never felt
+loneliness like I do here.  Not ever.  Because I've had trouble, Mr.
+Jeminy, and known sorrow, folks leave me alone.  I'd go away . . . only
+where would I go?"
+
+"Sorrow," said Mr. Jeminy, "is a good friend, Mrs. Wicket.  Sorrow and
+poverty are close to our hearts.  They teach the spirit to be resolute
+and indulgent.
+
+"One must also learn," he added, "to bear sorrow without being vexed by
+it."
+
+"I've never had sorrow without being vexed by it," said Mrs. Wicket.
+"To my way of thinking, sorrow comes so full of troubles, it's hard to
+tell what's one, and what's the other."
+
+"Sorrow," said Mr. Jeminy, "comes only to the humble and the wise.  It
+is the emotion of a gentle and courageous spirit.  But wherever trouble
+is found, there is also to be found envy, pride, and vanity.  It is
+good to be humble, Mrs. Wicket; in humility lie the forces of peace.
+The humble heart is an impregnable fortress."
+
+And he tapped his breast, as though to say, "Here is a whole army."
+
+"Yes," she mused, "yes . . . but the heart's liable to break, too,
+after a while."
+
+"Not the humble heart," said Mr. Jeminy firmly.  "No . . . you cannot
+break the humble heart."
+
+Mrs. Wicket stood gazing at the ground, twisting her apron with her
+hands.  On her face was a look of pity for Mr. Jeminy, because she had
+heard that he was not to teach school any longer.  "It will be a hard
+blow to him," she thought.
+
+"Few," continued Mr. Jeminy, "go very long without their share of
+sorrow.  And sorrow is not a light thing to bear, Mrs. Wicket.
+Poverty, also, falls to the lot of most of us; and it is not easy to be
+poor.  Yet to be poor, to be sad, and to be brave, is indeed the best
+of life.  He who wants little for himself, is a happy man.  If he is
+wise, he will pity those who have more than they need.  He will not
+envy them; he will see the trouble they are making for themselves.
+There is no end of pity in this world, Mrs. Wicket; like love, it makes
+rich men of us all."
+
+Mrs. Wicket nodded her head.  "Yes," she said, "it's a blessing to feel
+pity.  It makes you strong, like.  The humble heart is a power of
+strength."
+
+And she went back to Juliet, who had begun to cough again.  Left to
+himself, Mr. Jeminy regarded the gate-post with a thoughtful air.  But
+inwardly he was very much pleased with himself.
+
+That year they kept harvest home before September was fairly done.  In
+the meadows the hay, gathered in stacks, shone in the moonlight like
+little hills of snow; and in the shadows the crickets hopped and sang,
+repeating with shrill voices, the murmurs of lovers, hidden in the
+woods.
+
+Anna Barly and her friends watched the moon come up along the road to
+Adams' Forge.  In Ezra Adams' haywagon they were singing the harvest
+in.  Their voices rolled across the fields in lovely glees, rose in the
+old, familiar songs, broke into laughter, and died away in whispers.
+Thus they renewed their interrupted youth, and celebrated the return of
+peace.
+
+It was a cold, still night, with dew white as frost over the ground.
+Anna, huddled in the hay, could see her breath go out in fog; while the
+moon, shining in her face, seemed to veil in shadow the forms of her
+companions--Elsie Cobbler with her round, soft elbow over Brandon
+Adam's face, Susie Ploughman murmuring to Alec Stove . . .  She was
+chilly and wakeful; and watching the moon through miles of empty sky,
+heard, as if from far away, the singing up front, back of the driver's
+seat, and Thomas, whispering at her side.
+
+"What a grand night.  Clear as a bell."
+
+"Yes," said Anna, "It's lovely."
+
+She lay back against the posts of the haywagon, her young face lifted
+to the sky.  Her heart was full; the beauty of the night, the hoarse,
+familiar sounds, the shining, silent fields, and the pale, lofty sky,
+filled her with longing and regret.  She closed her eyes; was it Noel,
+there, or Thomas?  It was love, it was youth to be loved, to be held,
+to be hugged to her breast.
+
+"Listen . . . they're singing Love's Old Sweet Song."
+
+The song died out, leaving the night quiet as before, cold, silvery,
+urgent.  She drew nearer to him; he breathed the simple fragrance of
+her hair, and felt the faint warmth of her body, close to his.  Then
+silence seized upon Thomas Frye; he grew sad without knowing why.  The
+figures at his side, curled in the hay, seemed to him ghostly as a
+dream.  Poor Thomas; he was addled with moonlight; moonlight over Anna,
+over him, moonlight over the hills, over the road, and voices unseen in
+the shadows, and shadows unheard all around him.
+
+"I could go on like this till the end of time."
+
+"Could you?"
+
+"I could ride like this forever and ever."
+
+Anna lay quiet, lulled by the cold and the gentle movement of the
+wagon, now fast, now slow.  "Together?" she asked.  "Like this?"
+
+"That's what I mean."
+
+His hand touched hers; their fingers twined about each other.  "I
+know," said Anna.  She, too, could have gone on forever, dreaming in
+the moonlight.  Noel . . .  Thomas . . . what was the difference?
+"Don't talk.  Look at the trees, up against the moon.  Look at my
+breath; there's a regular fog of it."
+
+"Are you cold?"  He bent to wrap the heavy blanket more snugly about
+her.  He wanted to say: "You belong to me, and I belong to you."  And
+at that moment, with all her heart, Anna wanted to belong to some one,
+wanted some one to belong to her . . .
+
+"Thanks, Tom--dear."
+
+The haywagon crossed the first rise, south of the village.  Below the
+road, a rocky field swept downward to the woods, pale green and silver
+in the moonlight; and beyond, far off and faint, rose Barly Hill, with
+Barly's lamp burning as bright for all the distance, as if it hung just
+over those trees, still, and faint with shadows.
+
+"See," said Anna, "there's our light."
+
+But Thomas did not even lift his head to look.  In the chilly, solemn,
+night air, he was warm and drowsy with his own silence, which being all
+too full of things to say was like to turn him into sugar with pure
+sorrow.  And Anna, her round lips parted with desire, waited for him to
+speak, and held his hand tighter and tighter.
+
+"Starlight," she murmured, "starbright, very first star I see to-night,
+wish I may, wish I might . . ."
+
+"Sky's full of stars," said Thomas.
+
+"Do you know what I wished?"
+
+"Do I?"
+
+"Don't you?"
+
+He looked at her in silence; awkwardly, then, she drew him down, until
+her lips brushed his cheek.
+
+"Look at Elsie," she murmured.  "Did you ever?"
+
+But Thomas would not look at Elsie; not until Anna had told him her
+wish.  "Wish I may, wish I might . . ."
+
+"Have the wish . . ."
+
+But she would only whisper it in his ear.
+
+Miles away, in Mrs. Wicket's cottage, Mr. Jeminy sat dreaming, and
+rocking up and down.  He had come to keep an eye on Juliet, so that
+Mrs. Wicket could sit with Mrs. Tomkins, who was feeling poorly.  While
+Juliet, at his feet, played with her dolls, Mr. Jeminy gave himself up
+to reflection.  He thought: "The little insects which run about my
+garden paths at home, and eat what I had intended for myself, are not
+more lonely than I am.  For here, within the walls of my mind, there is
+only myself.  And you, Anna Barly, you cannot give poor Thomas Frye
+what he wishes.  Do not deceive yourself; when you are gone, he will be
+as lonely as before.  Come, confess, in your heart that pleases you;
+you would not have it otherwise.  We are all lenders and borrowers
+until we die; it is only the dead who give."
+
+When Juliet was tired of playing, she put her dolls to bed, and settled
+herself in Mr. Jeminy's lap.  There, while the lamplight danced across
+the walls, drowsy with sleep, she ended her day.  "Tell me a story.
+Tell me about the big, white bull, who swam over the sea."
+
+"Hm . . . well . . . once upon a time there was a great white
+bull . . ."
+
+Then Mr. Jeminy rehearsed again the story of long, long ago, while the
+bright eyes closed, and the tired head drooped lower and lower; while
+the autumn moon rose up above the hills, and the haywagon rumbled along
+the road, to the sound of laughter and cries.
+
+But Thomas Frye and Anna Barly were no longer seated in the hay,
+watching the harvest in.  Unobserved by the others, they had stolen
+away before the wagon reached Milford.  Now they were lying in a field,
+looking up at the stars, quieter than the crickets, which were singing
+all about them.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+MRS. GRUMBLE GOES TO THE FAIR
+
+September's round moon waned; Indian summer was over.  One morning in
+October Miss Beal, the dressmaker, had taken her sewing to Mr.
+Jeminy's, in order to spend the day with Mrs. Grumble.  There, as she
+sat rocking up and down in the kitchen, the fall wind brought to her
+nose the odor of grapes ripening in the sun.  The corn stood gathered
+in the fields, and in the yellow barley stubble the grasshopper, old
+and brown, leaped full of love upon his neighbor.  Mrs. Grumble, beside
+a pile of Mr. Jeminy's winter clothes, sorted, mended, and darned,
+while the sun fell through the window, bright and hot across her
+shoulders.  She kept one eye on the oven where her biscuits were
+baking, counted stitches, and listened to Miss Beal, who tilted
+solemnly forward in her chair when she had anything to say, and moved
+solemnly back again when it was over.
+
+"Mrs. Stove," declared Miss Beal, leaning forward and looking up at
+Mrs. Grumble, "won't have a new dress this year.  Well, she's right,
+material is dreadful to get.  As I said to her: Mrs. Stove, your old
+dress will do; just let me fix it up a little.  No, she says, she'll
+wear it as it is."
+
+"Look at me," said Mrs. Grumble.  "Here's an old rag.  But I get along."
+
+"Indeed you do," said Miss Beal.  "Still," she added, speaking for
+herself, "one has to live."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Grumble airily.
+
+"Goodness," exclaimed the dressmaker.  "Gracious, Mrs. Grumble."
+
+"I declare," avowed Mrs. Grumble, "what with things costing what they
+do, and every one so mean, I'd die as glad as not, out of spite."
+
+"I wouldn't want to die," said Miss Beal slowly.  "It's too awful.  I
+want to stay alive, looking around."
+
+"You're just as curious," said Mrs. Grumble.  "Well, there, I'm not.
+Men are a bad lot.  You can't trust a one of them.  Not for long."
+
+"Yes," sighed Miss Beal, "there's a good deal I want to see.  I'd like
+to see Niagara Falls, Mrs. Grumble."
+
+"Lor'," said Mrs. Grumble, "a lot of water."
+
+"All coming down," said the dressmaker, "crashing and falling."
+
+"I'd rather see a circus," declared Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"Would you now?" asked Miss Beal, and her fingers ran in and out, in
+and out, faster than ever, "would you, now?  Well, then . . . there's a
+fair at Milford this blessed afternoon."
+
+"Would you go along?" asked Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"Glory," said Miss Beal.
+
+"I was going anyhow," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+Then Miss Beal began to giggle.  "Well, I declare," she remarked, "I
+feel that young."
+
+"Go away," said Mrs. Grumble; "to hear you talk . . ."  She was in the
+best of humor.
+
+"All the young folks will be there," said Miss Beal.  "I heard as how
+Alec Stove was going with Susie Ploughman.  And there's Thomas
+Frye . . . and Anna Barly . . ."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+Miss Beal held up her thread against the light.  "There's a queer
+thing," she admitted.  "I can't make head nor tail of it.  Do you think
+there's an understanding between them, Mrs. Grumble?"
+
+"If there is," said Mrs. Grumble, "then Thomas has more sense than I
+gave him credit for.  Because how any one could have an understanding
+with that wild thing, is more than I can see."
+
+"How she carries on," agreed Miss Beal, "first with Noel, when he was
+alive, and now with him."
+
+"Ah," remarked Mrs. Grumble, "those are the new ideas.  She has her
+head full of them.  Only the other day, down to the store, I heard her
+say to Mr. Frye: 'It's the old who are always getting the young into
+trouble.'"
+
+"Just think of that," said Miss Beal.
+
+"To my way of thinking," continued Mrs. Grumble, "the shoe is on the
+other foot.  What with the young folks growing up so wild, we must all
+be as busy as thieves to keep what belongs to us."
+
+"And what belongs to us,  Mrs. Grumble?" asked the dressmaker, lifting
+from her lap a dress designed for Mrs. Sneath, the butcher's wife.
+
+"No more than what we can get," replied Mrs. Grumble, with a shake of
+her head.  "And that's little enough."
+
+"Then," said Miss Beal, "what do you think Anna Barly meant by saying
+'twas the old had got her into trouble?"
+
+"Why, bless your soul," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+Miss Beal, from the front of her chair, regarded her friend with round
+and serious eyes.  "I don't rightly know, Mrs. Grumble," she said, "but
+I came on her yesterday, and I declare if she hadn't been crying.  Last
+night I dreamed old Mrs. Tomkins died.  And you know, Mrs. Grumble,
+dream of the dead . . ."
+
+"Go away," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"Mind," quoth Miss Beal, "I don't mean to say there's anything as
+shouldn't be.  Still, nothing would surprise me."
+
+"There's no use talking," cried Mrs. Grumble, "because I don't believe
+a word of it."  But she felt it her duty to add: "For all I never saw
+Anna look so poorly."
+
+"A touch of influenza," answered Miss Beal, "so Sara Barly says.  Lord
+save us: a big healthy girl like Anna."
+
+"It's the healthy ones who get it," said Mrs. Grumble with a sigh.
+"God moves in a mysterious way."
+
+"His wonders to perform."
+
+Mrs. Grumble arose and placed a kettle of water on the stove.  "We'll
+have some tea," she said, "and I'll cook you some fritters.  Jeminy is
+out.  Then we'll go to the fair."
+
+"Glory," said Miss Beal.
+
+After lunch the two women put on their bonnets and went to take their
+seats in the Milford stage.  As the wagon set out, creaking and
+crowded, everyone began to talk; and so, with cheeks reddened by the
+wind, rolled, still talking, into Milford.
+
+The fair grounds were in a meadow, bounded on one side by a stream,
+and, beyond it, a wood already brown and blue with cold.  Over the dead
+grass the bright colors of the fair shone in the sun; one could hear
+the music and the voices almost a mile away.  On the other side of the
+field rose a gentle slope covered with goldenrod and white and purple
+blooms in which the bees and wasps were still busy.  There, above the
+crowd of men and women, the happy insects were bringing to a close
+their own bazaar, begun amid the showers of early spring.  Here was the
+bee, with his milch-cow, the ant with her souvenir, and the mild
+cricket, amused like Miss Beal by everything.  Here, also, the wealthy
+spider, slung upon her twig, waited in patience for the homeless fly.
+And as, in comfort, she fed upon his juices, she exclaimed: "The right
+to fasten my web to this twig is a serious matter.  For without me the
+fly would be wasted, and would not obtain a proper burial."
+
+"I am very comfortable here," she added, "and I believe I have a right
+to this place, which, but for me, would be only a twig, and of no use
+to anybody."
+
+Below, in the meadow, our two friends went arm in arm about the fair
+grounds; Miss Beal bought, as her first purchase, a spool of ribbon;
+and Mrs. Grumble had her fortune told.  They rode on the carousel, all
+the while thinking: "This is really too silly."  As Mrs. Grumble
+climbed down from her wooden horse, she said to herself: "I'm having as
+good a time as that little girl with the pigtails, who is going around
+for the fifth time."
+
+If they turned west, their eyes were filled with the afternoon sun;
+when they looked east, they saw the maples, yellow and green, against
+the farther woods, the autumn sky, swept by its bright winds.  All
+about them men and women rejoiced in the sunshine, told each other it
+was a fine day, and looked for some cause of dispute.
+
+"The races are going to begin," said Mrs. Grumble, and taking her
+friend by the arm, made her way toward the track, where she could see
+the horses going gravely up and down.  "There is a good one," she said;
+"see how he jumps about."
+
+The drivers wheeled into line, and sped away with a rush; the band
+played and the spectators shouted.
+
+"Oh, my," said Miss Beal, "look there."  And she pointed to where Mr.
+Jeminy, close to the fence, was dancing up and down, waving his hat in
+the air.  "Why, the old fool," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"At his age," echoed Miss Beal.
+
+But it did not amuse Mrs. Grumble to hear anyone else find fault with
+Mr. Jeminy.  "He's enjoying himself," she said.  "I don't know as how
+we've any call to make remarks."
+
+"I only said 'at his age,'" replied Miss Beal hastily.  But when she
+thought it over, it occurred to her that she was right, and Mrs.
+Grumble was wrong.  Without courage on her own account, she was able to
+defend with energy the general opinion.  "I said 'at his age,'" she
+repeated more firmly.
+
+Mrs. Grumble folded her hands, and assumed a forbidding expression.  "I
+expect," she said, "that Mr. Jeminy is old enough to do as he pleases."
+
+"Maybe he is," answered the dressmaker, nettled by her friend's tone,
+"maybe he is.  And maybe there's others old enough to know what's right
+in a man of his years, Mrs. Grumble."
+
+"At any rate," remarked Mrs. Grumble, "it's not for you to say."
+
+"It's not alone me is saying it," replied Miss Beal.  "What's more,"
+she added, "for all I don't like to repeat this to you, Mrs. Grumble,
+there's many think Mr. Jeminy is too old to teach school any longer.
+There's some would like to see a young woman at the schoolhouse."
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+Miss Beal laid her hand on her friend's arm in a gesture at once
+triumphant and consoling.  "Never you mind," she said; "trouble comes
+to all."
+
+Mr. Jeminy went home from the fair with a light heart.  He started
+early, because he liked to walk; and he carried in his hand a bit of
+lace for Mrs. Grumble.  As he went down the road, beneath the turning
+leaves, and through the shadows cast by the descending sun, he began to
+sing, out of the fullness of his heart, the following song:
+
+  The Lord of all things,
+  With liberalitee,
+  Maketh the small birds,
+  To sing on every tree.
+
+  The Lord of all things,
+  He maketh also me;
+  Giveth me no wings,
+  Giveth me no words.
+
+When Mr. Jeminy had sung as much as he liked, he went on to say: "In
+autumn the birds go south by easy stages; to-day their songs are
+departed from these woods, where there is none left but the catbird, to
+creak upon the bough.  Soon snow will cover the earth, in which nothing
+is growing.  But you, happy song birds, will build your nests far away,
+in green and windy trees, and your quarrels will fill distant valleys
+with music."
+
+When Mr. Jeminy was nearly home he looked behind him and saw Thomas
+Frye and Anna Barly returning from the fair.  He drew aside to let them
+pass, and with the sun shining in his eyes, he thought to himself,
+"Only the young are happy to-day."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE TURN OF THE YEAR
+
+A fortnight later, the dress-maker was called in haste to Barly Farm,
+to sew coarse and fine linen, and a dress for Anna to be married in.
+But it all had to be done within the week, towels, sheets,
+pillow-cases, table-cloths, and aprons.  "More than a body could sew in
+a month," she declared.  For Anna was going to have a baby.  "Do what
+you can," said Mrs. Barly, "and we'll have to get along with that."
+And so we find Miss Beal at the farm by eight each morning, wishing the
+day were longer, to enable her tongue to catch up to her fingers; for
+she thought that she knew a thing or two, and could see what was
+directly in front of her nose.  "I'm nobody's fool," she said, as she
+guided the cloth, snapped the thread, and rocked the treadle of the
+sewing machine; and she sang to herself from morning to evening.  As
+the only songs she knew were from the hymnal, she sang, with a heart
+overflowing with praise:
+
+  Ah how shall fallen man
+  Be just before his God?
+  If He contend in righteousness,
+  We sink beneath His rod.  Amen.
+
+or again:
+
+  Who place on Sion's God their trust
+  Like Sion's rock shall stand,
+  Like her immovable be fixed
+  By His almighty hand.  Amen.
+
+She was happy; it seemed to her that God, to whom she lifted up her
+prayers, was wise and active, watching every sparrow.  She was
+satisfied that young folks were no better off than in her own day, but
+might expect to find themselves, if they fell from grace, as wretched
+as in the past.  When Sara Barly had made the dress-maker comfortable
+in the spare room, she went down to the kitchen in search of Anna.  But
+Anna was in the barn with Tabitha, the cat, whose new-born kittens
+filled her with glee.  Mrs. Barly stood in the middle of the kitchen,
+as idle as her pots, and looked out through the window at the brown and
+yellow fields.  When she had tied her apron on, she felt dull and
+tired; it seemed to her as if she were no longer virtuous, yet had not
+received anything in return for what she had given.  And because she
+felt as if she had been cheated, she, also, lifted up her voice to God.
+"Oh, God," she said, "all my life I never did anything like that."
+
+By way of answer, she heard the low hum of the sewing machine, and the
+alleluias of the dressmaker, singing as though she were in church.
+
+Farmer Barly was down in the south pasture, with the schoolmaster's
+friend, Mr. Tomkins; he wanted to put up a swinging gate between the
+south field and the road.  But all at once he felt like saying: "I
+don't want a gate at all; I want a fence to shut people out."  For when
+he thought of Anna, in the gay autumn weather, he felt old and moldy.
+
+"A bad year," said Mr. Tomkins; "still, I guess you're not worrying.  I
+understand you put a silo in your barn.  But I suppose you have your
+own reasons for doing it.  A good year for cows, what with the grass.
+I hear you're thinking of buying Crabbe's Jersey bull.  A fine animal;
+I'd like him myself."
+
+"You're welcome to him," said Mr. Barly.
+
+"Ah," said Mr. Tomkins, "he's beyond me, Mr. Barly, beyond my means.
+I'm not a rich man.  But I have my health."
+
+"What are riches?" asked Mr. Barly.  "They're a source of trouble, Mr.
+Tomkins.  They teach a young girl to waste her time."
+
+"Well, trouble," said Mr. Tomkins.
+
+"But what's trouble?  Between you and me, a bit of trouble is good for
+us all.  Then we're liable to know better."
+
+Mr. Barly shook his head wearily.  "I don't know," he said; "folks are
+queer crotchets."
+
+"Why, then," said Mr. Tomkins, "so they are; and so would I be, as
+crotchety as you like, if I owned anything beyond the | little I have."
+
+"Small good it would do you," said Mr. Barly.  "Life is a heavy cross,
+having or not having, what with other people doing as they please."
+And taking leave of Mr. Tomkins, he went home, thinking that in a world
+where people robbed their neighbors, it were better not to possess
+anything.
+
+As he passed the potato patch, he heard Abner singing, without much
+tune to his voice, a song he had learned in the army.  "Ay," muttered
+Mr. Barly, "go on--sing.  You've learned that much, anyway.  I may as
+well sing, myself, for all the good I've ever had attending to my
+business.  I'll sing a good one; then I'll be right along with
+everybody, and let come what may."
+
+Anna, too, heard Abner singing, as she knelt in front of the basket
+where the mother cat lay with her four blind kittens.  "You see,
+Tabby," she said, "people still sing.  A lot of them learned to sing in
+the war, and now they're home, they may as well sing as cry.  Oh,
+Tabby, I wanted to sing, too . . . now look at me.
+
+"I went out so grand," she said.  "I was going to find all sorts of
+things.  But what did I find?"
+
+At that moment, John Henry entered the barn, smoking his corncob pipe.
+When the smell of smoke reached Anna, she grew weak and ill, and
+stumbling back to the house, went upstairs to rest.  But even to climb
+the stairs made her catch her breath.  Now, before breakfast of a
+morning, she was deathly sick; afterwards she was tired, and ready to
+cry over anything.  Poor Anna; she was dumb with shame.  "I'm worse
+than Mrs. Wicket," she said to herself, over and over again.  "I'm
+worse than Mrs. Wicket.  My life is ruined.  I'd be better dead."
+
+And what of honest Thomas?  He was pale with fright.  It seemed to him
+as if the devil had reached up, and caught him by the leg.  He was in
+for it.  But like a fly in a web, he could not believe that it was not
+some other fly.  "Oh, God," he prayed, "look down . . . say something
+to me."
+
+When Mr. Jeminy was told that Thomas Frye and Anna Barly were to be
+married, he exclaimed: "What a shame.
+
+"Yes," he continued with energy, "what a shame, Mrs. Grumble.  They did
+as they were bid.  Now they know that love is a trap to catch the
+young, and tie them up once and for all, close to the kitchen sink."
+
+"No one bade them do what they'd no right to do," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"They did," replied Mr. Jeminy sensibly, "only what they were meant to
+do.  Youth was not made for the chimney corner, Mrs. Grumble.  And love
+is not all one piece.  We make it so, because we are timid and
+indolent.  We like to think that one rule fits everything; that
+everything is simple and familiar.  Even God, Mrs. Grumble, in your
+opinion, is an old man, like myself."
+
+"He is not," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"Yes," continued Mr. Jeminy, "you believe that God is an old man,
+insulted by everything.  Now he has been insulted by Anna Barly, who
+did as she had a mind to.  Well, well . . ."
+
+"No matter," said Mrs. Grumble comfortably, "there's the baby; you
+can't get around that."
+
+"Mrs. Grumble," said Mr. Jeminy earnestly, "I am going to Farmer Barly.
+I am going to say to him, 'Let me have Anna's baby, and we'll say no
+more about it.'  Yes, that is what I am going to do."
+
+"Well," gasped Mrs. Grumble, throwing herself back in her chair, "well,
+I never . . . so that's it . . .  I can tell you this: the day that
+baby comes into this house, I go out of it.  Why, who ever heard of
+such a thing?  No, indeed."
+
+"There," she thought to herself, "that's what comes of people like Mrs.
+Wicket."
+
+"Mrs. Grumble," said Mr. Jeminy.
+
+"I've no more to say," said Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"Mrs. Grumble," pleaded Mr. Jeminy, "I am an old man.  There is nothing
+left for me to do in the world any more.  I am sure you would be
+pleased with Anna's baby.  Let us do this much for youth; for the new
+world."
+
+"I declare," cried Mrs. Grumble, "you'll drive me clean out of my wits.
+The new world . . . you mean Sodom and Gomorrah, more like.  The new
+world . . . sakes alive."
+
+"Mrs. Grumble," said Mr. Jeminy, "the old world is dead and gone.  Let
+the young be free to build a new world.  It will be happier than ours.
+It will be a world of love, and candor.  Perhaps it will be also a
+world of poverty.  That would not do any harm, Mrs. Grumble."
+
+"A fine world," said Mrs. Grumble.  "At least, I won't live to see much
+of it, I've that to be thankful for."
+
+"Finer than what it is," retorted Mr. Jeminy, losing his temper, "finer
+than what it is.  Not the same, sad pattern."
+
+"The old pattern is good enough for me," replied Mrs. Grumble.
+
+"You're a fossil," said Mr. Jeminy.
+
+Then Mrs. Grumble raised her voice in prayer.  "Lord," she prayed,
+"don't let me forget myself.  Because if I do . . ."
+
+"Yes, that's it," cried Mr. Jeminy, "stop up your ears . . ."  And out
+he went in a rage.  Mrs. Grumble, left alone, looked after him with
+flashing eyes and a heaving bosom.  "Oh," she breathed, "if I could
+only lay my hands on him."
+
+But when she did, at last, lay hands on him, it was not in the way she
+looked for, as she sat rocking up and down, waiting for him to come
+home again.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE SCHOOLMASTER LEAVES HILLSBORO,
+  HIS WORK THERE SEEMINGLY AT AN END
+
+Mr. Jeminy came slowly out of the post-office, and turned up the road
+leading to his house.  In one hand, crumpled in his pocket, he held his
+dismissal from Hillsboro school: "On account of age," it said.  Next
+morning, at nine o'clock, the new teacher was coming to take over the
+little schoolhouse, with its splintered desks, the dusty blackboard,
+and the colored maps.
+
+As he walked, the sun sank in the west, and evening crept up the road
+after him.  The air was damp; he could see his breath pass out in fog
+before his face.  The wind, blowing above his head, showered down the
+last dried, yellow leaves upon his path; before him he saw the chilly
+sky with its faint, lonely star, and over him the half moon, like a
+slice; and he heard the autumn wind, steady and cold.  "You fields," he
+said, "you trees, you meadows and little paths, I do not believe you
+wanted to dismiss me.  You must have enjoyed the daisy chains my pupils
+used to weave for you in the spring.  Now they will learn the use of
+figures and percents, and the names of cities I have forgot.  I will
+never hear again the voices of children at the playhour come tumbling
+in through the school windows.  For at my age one does not begin to
+teach again.  But it is ridiculous to say that I am an old man."
+
+It grew darker and darker, the trees creaked and popped in the cold, or
+groaned like bass viols; and all along the roadside Mr. Jeminy could
+see the feeble glimmer of fireflies, fallen among the leaves.  He said
+to them, "Little creatures, my flame is also spent.  But I do not
+intend, like you, to lie by the roadside in the wind, and keep myself
+warm with memories.  Now I am going where I can be of use to others.
+For I am brisk and tough, and do not hope to gain by my efforts more
+than I deserve."
+
+Thus, following his thoughts, Mr. Jeminy passed, without knowing it,
+the house where Mrs. Grumble, sitting by the stove, awaited his return.
+The moon, riding out the wind above his head, peered down at him
+between the branches, as he stepped from shadow into moonlight, and
+again into shadow.  Under the trees the dry, fallen leaves stirred
+about his feet, and other leaves, which he could not see, fell near him
+in the dark.  As he passed the little orchard belonging to Mrs. Wicket,
+he heard the ripe apples dropping in the night.
+
+In the gray of dawn, he found himself approaching a farmhouse somewhere
+south of Milford, whose lighted lamp, pale yellow in the early
+twilight, drew him from the road, across the fields.  As he turned
+through the tumbled gate, a woman came to the door, her dress billowing
+back from her in the breeze.
+
+"Come in, old man," she said.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+BUT HE IS SOUGHT AFTER ALL
+
+In Mrs. Tomkin's garden the hydrangeas were already pink with frost,
+and the leaves of the maples, fallen upon the ground, covered the earth
+with patches of yellow and red.  By the side of the road, piles of
+leaves, raked together by Mr. Tomkins, were set on fire; they burned
+with a crackle and a roar, and gave off an odor at once pungent and
+regretful, which mingled in the fresh autumn air with the fragrance of
+grapes and cider, as the last apples of the season, too old and ripe to
+keep, went to the press back of the barn.
+
+Juliet liked to play in Mrs. Tomkins' garden, where the hens, each
+anxious to be not the first, but the second, ran after each other as
+though to say, "You go and see, and I'll come and look."
+
+Now she sat on the steps of Mrs. Tomkins' porch with her doll Sara,
+while her mother, Mrs. Wicket, watched at the bedside of Mrs. Grumble,
+who was very ill.  Juliet did not realize how ill she was; she thought
+Mrs. Grumble might have croup.  But Mrs. Ploughman, who sat on the
+porch with Mrs. Tomkins, knew that Mrs. Grumble had pneumonia.  "Got,"
+she explained, "by setting up that night, when Mr. Jeminy never came
+home."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Tomkins, "he never came home.  If it had been me, in
+Mrs. Grumble's place, I'd have gone to bed, instead of parading around
+with a lantern all night, catching my death."
+
+"Mr. Jeminy," said Mrs. Ploughman, "was a queer man, and no mistake.  I
+remember the day he stepped in to pay me a call.  Mrs. Crabbe was with
+me.  'Mrs. Ploughman,' he said, 'and you, Mrs. Crabbe, we're leaving a
+lot of trouble behind us.' Fancy that, Mrs. Tomkins--as though I'd up
+and go any minute.  'Mr. Jeminy,' I said, 'I'm not afraid to die.  When
+my time comes, I'll go joyfully.'"
+
+"No doubt you will," said Mrs. Tomkins comfortably.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Ploughman, "it's a good thing, in my opinion, he was
+made to give up teaching school.  It's a wonder the children know
+anything at all, Mrs. Tomkins.  I declare, it used to mix me up
+something terrible, just to listen to him."
+
+Mrs. Tomkins gazed at her sewing with thoughtful pleasure.  "It was a
+hard blow to him," she said.  "He did his best.  Maybe he was a little
+queer.  But he harmed no one.  He used to tell the children stories.
+
+"How is Mrs. Grumble," she asked, "to-day?"
+
+"Weak," said Mrs. Ploughman; "very weak, out of her mind part of the
+time with the fever."
+
+"Do you calculate she'll die, Mrs. Ploughman?"
+
+"I don't know.  But I don't calculate she'll live, Mrs. Tomkins.
+Still, we must hope for the best.  This is the way it was; first the
+influenza, and then the pneumony.  Double pneumony, the doctor says.
+There's a lot of it around again, like last year.  It takes the young
+and the hardy.  It won't get me.  No.
+
+"There's nothing to do for it," she added, "nothing, that is, beyond
+nursing."
+
+"If it wasn't for Mrs. Wicket," said Mrs. Tomkins, "I expect she'd have
+been dead before this.  Mrs. Wicket's a capable woman in things like
+that.  Capabler than Miss Beal.  There was no one else ever made me so
+comfortable.  I have to say that about her; Mrs. Grumble's getting the
+best of care.  And I'm looking after Juliet.  Not that she's any
+trouble; she's as quiet as a mouse, playing all day long with her
+dolls."
+
+But Mrs. Ploughman could not find it in her heart to forgive Mrs.
+Wicket for having been the cause of her grandson Noel's death.  "Yes,"
+she said, "I expect Mrs. Grumble's getting good care.  But when a
+body's dying, 'tisn't so much care you want, as salvation.  I wouldn't
+want any Jezebel hanging over my deathbed, Mrs. Tomkins, thank you."
+
+Mrs. Tomkins, who attended each Sunday the little Baptist church at
+Adams' Forge, did not believe that she and Mrs. Ploughman would meet in
+heaven.  However, she did not choose this moment to mention it.  "It
+may be as you say, Mrs. Ploughman," she remarked, "or it may be that
+we've been too hard oh Mrs. Wicket.  Mind you, I don't speak for her
+life with that bad egg of Eben Wicket's.  But we ought to forgive
+others as we would have others forgive us."
+
+"You needn't quote Gospels to me," declared Mrs. Ploughman; "I'm as
+easy to forgive as the next one, where there's a reason for it.  I
+don't hold it against Mrs. Wicket that she drove my Noel to his death.
+No.  I forgive her for it.  And I don't blame Mr. Jeminy for going off,
+if he had a mind to, and leaving Mrs. Grumble to catch the pneumony."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Tomkins.
+
+"But there's this much queer," said Mrs. Ploughman: "The way she takes
+on in the fever.  She does nothing but call him back, Mrs. Tomkins.
+'Mr. Jeminy,' she hollers, 'where's the old rascal?' she says.  Then
+she goes on about his being in some trouble, and she has to get him out
+of it.  'He's in the toils,' she says; 'he's with the scarlet woman.'"
+
+"My life!" exclaimed Mrs. Tomkins.
+
+"I declare," said Mrs. Ploughman, "I wouldn't be Mrs. Wicket, or Miss
+Beal, not for a thousand dollars."
+
+Mrs. Tomkins sighed.  "It's real sad," she said.  "I'd like to find Mr.
+Jeminy; it would ease the old woman's last hours.  But he's likely far
+away by this time.  And there's no one could spare the time to go after
+him, even if a body knew where he was.  Though I've an idea he went
+south, through Milford.  Walking, I should say."
+
+"The ole vagabone," exclaimed Mrs. Ploughman.
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Tomkins declared with energy, "it's a wicked sin, Mrs.
+Ploughman, for him to be away now, and Mrs. Grumble taken down mortal.
+He's been a good friend to William for nigh on twenty years.  I'd go
+after him myself, if it weren't for my rheumatism."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Ploughman, "I never heard of such a thing."
+
+"There's lots you never heard of, Mrs. Ploughman," said Mrs. Tomkins.
+And folding her hands, she gazed at her friend with quiet satisfaction.
+
+Little Juliet, playing on the steps with her doll Sara, missed none of
+this conversation, only a part of which, however, she understood.
+While she dressed and undressed her child, made of rags and sawdust,
+put her to sleep and woke her up again, she was listening with
+attention first to Mrs. Tomkins, and then to Mrs. Ploughman.
+
+"Let's play you're Mrs. Grumble," she told Sara.  And she covered the
+doll with her handkerchief.  Sara did not mind the square piece of
+cambric, which Juliet often used to carry small handfuls of earth from
+one place to another.  "I'm mother," said Juliet.  Rising to her feet,
+she went out into the garden, and returned again.  "My dear Mrs.
+Grumble," she exclaimed, "how do you feel to-day?"
+
+"Very poorly, thank you," replied Sara, in that curious squeak with
+which all of Juliet's children answered their mother.
+
+"Well, that's too bad," said Juliet.  "Where does it hurt you, Mrs. G.?"
+
+"In the stummick," squeaked Sara.
+
+Juliet shook her head soberly.  "Dear me," she said.  "Well, cheer up,
+Mrs. Grumble; what would you like to have?"
+
+"Ice cream," said Sara hopefully, "and fritters."
+
+"All right," said Juliet.  She went back into the garden, whence she
+presently returned with a few dead leaves and some mud.  "Here," she
+said; "here's the ice cream.  And here's the fritters.  Don't get sick,
+now, will you?"
+
+"No," said Sara.
+
+Her mother gazed at her with sympathy.  "What else would you like?" she
+inquired.
+
+"I'd like Mr. Jeminy," squeaked Sara.  "He's in the toils."
+
+"I'll go and see if I can find him," said Juliet.  And she began to
+look about for a twig, or a small branch, suitable for Jeminy.  But all
+at once she grew thoughtful.  It had occurred to her that to look for
+Mr. Jeminy in the flesh would be a delightful adventure.  It would
+please every one.  She sat down on the porch steps to think it over.
+
+In the first place, it would be necessary to slip off unobserved.  For
+although Mrs. Tomkins, by her own account, would be glad to have Mr.
+Jeminy back again, Juliet felt that she could not explain to Mrs.
+Tomkins exactly what she intended to do.  As for the trip, an umbrella
+in case of rain, and the company of Sara would be sufficient.  Then it
+was only a question of walking in the direction of Milford, before she
+came on Mr. Jeminy in the middle of the road; so Mrs. Tomkins had said.
+
+With Sara under her arm, she tiptoed around to the rear of the house,
+skipped through the yard, climbed the low fence, and hurried home.
+There she put on her best bonnet, and took her mother's umbrella from
+the closet.  Then she went back to her own room and took down her penny
+bank.  Holding it upside down, she began to shake it as hard as she
+could.  But only five pennies fell out.  "That's enough," she decided.
+It seemed to her that with five pennies she could buy almost anything.
+
+When she went to bid good-by to her family, she decided that Sara was
+not the doll she would take along with her, after all.  For Anna had a
+bonnet, whereas Sara had none.  Anna also wore a new dress, made for
+her by Mrs. Wicket out of an old petticoat.  Sara was better company,
+but Anna would be more respected along the road.
+
+"I guess I'll take you, Anna," said Juliet.  "No use your pulling a
+face, Sara," she added; "it won't get you anything.  You can't go.  So
+you may as well know it.  Maybe if you're good, I'll bring you
+something back."
+
+And off she went down the road to Milford, Anna under one arm and the
+umbrella under the other.
+
+For a while, as she walked, she told herself stories.  She believed
+that she was the princess of one of Mr. Jeminy's fairy tales; then Anna
+became a duchess, or an old queen.  The fact that nothing unusual
+happened to her, did not seem to her of any importance; she saw the
+russet fields, the bare woods, the solemn clouds, and far off shine and
+shadow; and walked with serious pomp for her own delight, as long as
+she was able.
+
+But after a while she grew tired, and sat down by the roadside to rest.
+As she sat there, the sun sank lower, and the gathering chill of
+evening made itself felt in the air.  Then for the first time doubt as
+to the wisdom of her course presented itself to her.
+
+"We're going to catch it when we get home," she told Anna.
+
+With a feeling of dismay, she remembered how far away from home she
+was.  The hush of evening, the silence of the fields, filled her head
+with vague fears.  She held her doll tightly to her breast for comfort.
+The little red squirrel, flirting along the low stone wall, seemed to
+peer at her as though to say; "This is where I live.  But where do you
+live?  You can't live here; I won't have it."  Juliet began to shiver
+with cold.
+
+"Oh, goodness," she whispered to Anna, "I'm going to catch it when I
+get home."
+
+But to start for home again in the gloom, took more courage than she
+had left her.  Grasping her umbrella, her five pennies, and her doll,
+she retreated to the middle of the road.  "Mr. Jeminy," she cried, "Mr.
+Jeminy, where are you?"
+
+The silence, more ghostly than before, was not to be endured.  "Mr.
+Jeminy," she called at the top of her voice, "Mr. Jeminy, Mr. Jeminy,
+Mr. Jeminy.
+
+"Oh, please come back."
+
+She was saved the ignominy of tears.  For at that moment she heard from
+down the road a sound of wheels, and the beat of hoofs.  And presently
+a farm wagon, drawn by an old white horse, approached her in the
+twilight.
+
+"Well, bite me," said the farmer, peering at her over the front of the
+wagon.  "Are you lost, child?"
+
+"No, sir," said Juliet.  Now that she was found, she was in the best of
+spirits, all sprightliness and wheedle.  "I'm not lost.  I'm looking
+for somebody."
+
+"Do tell," said the farmer.  "A friend of yourn?"
+
+"An old man," said Juliet.  "An old, old man.  He's a friend of mine.
+I have to tell him to come home as fast as he can, because it's a
+wicked sin."
+
+"Does he live hereabouts?" asked the farmer.
+
+"He used to," said Juliet, "but he ran away.  Now Mrs. Grumble's sick,
+he ought to come home again, and ease her last hours."
+
+The farmer began to chuckle.  "What's the old gaffer's name?"
+
+"Mr. Jeminy," said Juliet.
+
+"Hop in," said the farmer.  "I'll take you along.  He's been stopping
+with Aaron Bade, over to the Forge.  I declare, if that don't beat all.
+Curl up in the hay, child, it'll keep you warm.  What were you doing,
+hollering for him?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Juliet.
+
+The farm wagon started on again, through the rapidly falling dusk.
+Juliet, under a blanket in the hay, looked up at the tall figure of the
+farmer, set like a giant above her.
+
+"Mister," she said.
+
+"Yes, ma'am?"
+
+"Did he come with a scarlet woman, did you hear?"
+
+"Not so far as I know.  No, he came all alone, early in the morning.
+Wasn't anybody with him."
+
+Beneath her blanket, Juliet hugged Anna to her breast.  "There, you
+see," she whispered.  And in her fresh, young voice, she began to sing,
+while the wagon rattled down the road to Milford, a song she had heard
+her mother singing the year Noel Ploughman died.
+
+  "Love is the first thing,
+  Love goes past.
+  Sorrow is the next thing,
+  Quiet is the last.
+
+  Love is a good thing,
+  Quiet isn't bad,
+  But sorrow is the best thing
+  I've ever had."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+AND IS FOUND IN GOOD HANDS
+
+From the Bade farmhouse, a mile below Hemlock Mountain, the road winds
+down to Adams' Forge, past Aaron Bade's stony fields.  To the north
+lies Milford; but to the south lies that enchanting land, blue in the
+distance, misty in the sun, which the heart delights to call its home.
+
+It is the land we see from any hilltop.  As we gaze at its far off
+rises, its hazy, shadowy valleys, we feel within us a longing and a
+faint melancholy.  There, we think, dwell the friends who would love
+us, if we were known to them, and there, too, must be found the beauty
+and the happiness that we have failed to discover where we are.  It
+seems to us that there, in the distance, we should be happier, we
+should be more amiable and more dignified.
+
+Aaron Bade, tied to his rocky farm on the slopes above Adams' Forge,
+remembered with a feeling of pleasure his one journey as far south as
+Attleboro.  He had been obliged to return home before he had found the
+happiness which he had expected to find.  However, once he was home, he
+realized that he had left it behind him, in Attleboro, or just a little
+further south . . .
+
+Now, at forty, he was neither happy nor unhappy, but turned back in his
+mind to the fancies of his youth, and enjoyed, in imagination, the
+travels denied him in reality.
+
+He had no love for the farm, which had belonged to his father; an old
+flute, on which his father used to play, was more of a treasure to him.
+Often in summer, as day faded, and the dews of night descended; when
+the clear lights in the valley were set twinkling one by one, leaving
+the uplands to the winds and stars, Aaron Bade, perched upon his
+pasture bars, piped to the faintly glowing sky his awkward thoughts and
+clumsy feelings.
+
+In the morning he took leave of his wife, and with his hoe slung over
+his shoulder, made his way down to the cornfield.  There, seated upon a
+stone, he saw himself in Attleboro again, pictured to himself the
+countryside beyond, and before noon, was half way round the world,
+leaving friends behind him in every land.  Then, with a sigh, he would
+go in among the corn with his weeder, only to stand dreaming at every
+rustle of wind, seeing, in his mind, the smoke of distant cities,
+hearing, in fancy, the booming of foreign seas.
+
+His wife was no longer a young woman.  As a girl she had also had hopes
+for herself.  It seemed to her, when she chose Aaron Bade, that in his
+company, life would be surprising and delightful.  She expected to see
+something of the world--he spoke of it so much.  But she was mistaken.
+For Aaron's travels were all of the mind.  And she soon discovered that
+the more he talked, the more there remained for her to do.  Thus her
+hopes died away; between the stove and the chickens, and what with
+cleaning, washing, sweeping and dusting, she rarely found time nowadays
+for more than a shake of her head, never very pretty, and at last no
+longer young, at the thought of what she had looked for, what she had
+meant to find.  In short, from hopeful girl, Margaret Bade was,
+sensibly enough, turned practical woman; and when, on clear afternoons,
+with his work still to do, Aaron would take his flute down into the
+fields, she did his chores, as well as her own, with the wise remark
+that after all, they had to be done.
+
+Nevertheless, when the dishes were washed--when the shadows of evening
+crept in past the lamp, no longer able to exclude them, she began to
+feel lonely and sad.  And as the notes of Aaron's flute mingled with
+the night sounds, the chirp of crickets, the hum of insects, she felt,
+rather than thought, "Life is so much spilt milk.  And all that comes
+of fancies, is Aaron's flute, playing down there in the pasture."
+
+It was to this family that Mr. Jeminy came in the chilly dawn, on his
+way, apparently, to the ends of the earth, and, after breakfast, fell
+asleep in the hayloft, leaving them both gaping with pleasure and
+curiosity.  For he came, Aaron had to admit, like a tramp; but spoke,
+Margaret thought, like the Gospels.  "He's from roundabout," she said;
+"I hope he doesn't think to try and sell us anything.  Men with
+something to sell always talk like the minister first."
+
+But Aaron, with his mind on the far off world across the smoky autumn
+hills, was pained at such a suggestion.  "You're wrong, mother," he
+said solemnly.  "No, sirree.  He's not from roundabout.  And he's no
+common tramp either.  He's come a distance, I believe."
+
+"Then," said Margaret with regret, "I suppose he'll be going on again."
+
+Aaron Bade stared attentively at one brown hand.  "We could use a man
+on the farm," he said.
+
+It gave his wife no pleasure to be obliged to agree with him.
+
+"There's plenty still for a man to do, after you're done," she said.
+But she smiled almost at once; for like the women of that north
+country, crabbed and twisted as their own apple trees, she loved her
+husband for the trouble he gave her.
+
+"It's a queer thing," said Aaron; "he has the look of a bookish man.
+Like old St. John Deakan down to the Forge, only St. John don't know
+anything, for all his looks."
+
+"His talk was elegant," Mrs. Bade agreed.  She stood still for a
+moment, looking down at her pots and pans.  "He's seen a deal of life,
+I dare say," she added casually--so casually as to make one almost
+think that she herself had seen all she wanted to see.
+
+"Well," said Aaron, "that's what schooling does for a man.  It gives
+him a manner of talking, along with something to say."
+
+Margaret, bent over her work again, plunged her red, wet arms up to the
+elbow in hot, soapy water.  "You'll never lack talk, Aaron," she
+remarked; "or suffer for want of something to say.  But it isn't
+washing my pots for me, nor bringing in the corn . . ."
+
+"I'm going along now," said Aaron.  "If the old man wakes before I'm
+back again, don't hurry him off, mother; I'd be glad to talk with him a
+bit before he goes."
+
+"Who said anything about hurrying him off?" cried Mrs. Bade.  "He can
+stay till doomsday, for all I care.  He can sit and talk to me, while
+you're blowing on your flute.  It'll be real companionable."
+
+And she turned back to her pots and pans, a faint smile causing her
+mouth to curl down at one end, and up at the other.
+
+Mr. Jeminy awoke in the afternoon.  It was the nature of this kind and
+simple man to accept without question the hospitality of people he had
+never seen before; for he felt friendly toward every one.  As he sat
+down to supper with the Bades, he bowed his head, and offered up a
+grace, with all his heart:
+
+"Abide, O Lord, in this house; and be present at the breaking of bread,
+in love and in kindness.  Amen."
+
+During the meal, Aaron Bade asked Mr. Jeminy many questions, to
+discover what the old man hoped to do.  "I suppose," he said, "you've
+come a good distance."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Jeminy gravely, "I have come a good distance."
+
+Aaron Bade gave his wife a look which said plainly, "There, you see,
+mother."
+
+"Where is your home, old man?" asked Mrs. Bade kindly.
+
+"I have no home," said Mr. Jeminy.
+
+Aaron Bade cleared his throat.  "Are you bound anywhere in particular?"
+he asked.
+
+"No," said Mr. Jeminy.
+
+"Then," said Aaron Bade, "we'd admire to have you stay with us, if it's
+agreeable to you."
+
+Mr. Jeminy looked about him at the homely kitchen, with its brown
+crockery set away neatly on the shelves.  "If I stay with you," he
+said, "I should like to work in the fields, and help with the sowing
+and the harvesting."
+
+"So you may," said Aaron Bade.
+
+Mr. Jeminy looked at Margaret.  "And you, madam?" he asked.  "Would you
+care for the company of a garrulous old man at evening in your kitchen?"
+
+Margaret blushed with pleasure.  "Yes," she said.
+
+"Very well," said Mr. Jeminy; "I will stay."
+
+In this fashion Mr. Jeminy settled down at Bade's Farm, as farm hand to
+Aaron Bade.  At the end of a week he felt that he had nothing to
+regret.  He was active and spry, and believed himself to be useful.  In
+fact, he could not remember when he had been so happy.  High on his
+hill, he heard October's skyey gales go by above his head, and in the
+noonday drowse, watched, from the shade of a tree, the crows fly out
+across the valley, with creaking wings and harsh, discordant cries.  In
+the early morning, he came tip-toeing down the stairs; from the open
+doorway he marked day rise above the east in bands of yellow light, and
+saw the foggy clouds of dawn slip quietly away, rising from the
+valleys, drifting across the hills; in the afternoon he labored in the
+fields, and at night, his tired body filled his mind with comfortable
+thoughts.
+
+On his way to lunch, he stopped at the woodpile to get an armful of
+kindling for Mrs. Bade.  The sober way she looked at him as he came in,
+hid from all but herself the almost voluptuous pleasure it gave her
+merely to be waited on, a pleasure she was more than half afraid to
+enjoy, for fear at jealous heaven might take it away, and leave her
+with all her work to do, and bad habits besides.
+
+Therefore, as she ladled out potatoes, two to a plate, she seemed, to
+look at her, busier than ever; and far from being grateful, might have
+been used to favors every day of her life, whereas all the while she
+was saying ecstatically to herself, "Lord, make me humble."
+
+For she saw in Mr. Jeminy all she had fancied as a girl, and lost hope
+in as a woman.  Life . . . life was, then, to be had--leastways, a view
+of it, a good view of it--was to be heard of, by special act of Grace,
+on Bade's Farm, at Adams' Forge--of all places.  So she dressed in her
+neatest, and was kinder than ever to Aaron, who was missing it.  For
+she felt it was all just for her; she alone saw Mr. Jeminy for what he
+was, a grand, unusual peephole on the world.  It was her own private
+peep, she thought.  But she was wrong.  Aaron was peeping as hard as
+she, and pitying her, as she was pitying him, for all he thought she
+was missing.
+
+As for Mr. Jeminy, he let them think what they pleased.  At first he
+was silent, out of shame.  But later he enjoyed it as much as they did.
+"In Ceylon," he would say, "the tea fields . . ."
+
+One day, a week after his arrival, Mr. Jeminy took the plow horse,
+Elijah, to the village to be shod.  There the fragrance of wood fires
+mingled with a sweeter smell from barns and kitchens.  As it was the
+hour when school let out, the yard in front of the schoolhouse was
+filled with children on their way home; laughing and calling each
+other, their voices rose in minor glees along the road, like the
+squabble of birds.  And Mr. Jeminy, in front of the smithy, watched
+them go by, while his thoughts as follows:
+
+"There," he said to himself, "its arms of texts, goes the new world.
+Within those careless heads and happy hearts we must look for courage,
+for wisdom and for sacrifice.  Yet I believe they have the same
+thoughts as anybody else.  That is to say, they suppose it is God's
+business to look after them.  Yes, they are like their parents: they
+are carried away by what they are doing, which they do not believe
+could be done otherwise.  One can see with what coldness, or even
+blows, they receive the advances of other little children, who wish to
+play with them.  Well, as for those others, they go off at once, and
+play by themselves.  One of them, whose hat has been taken by the rest,
+is digging in the earth with a bent twig, sharpened at one end.
+Possibly he is digging for a treasure, which will be of no value to
+anybody but himself.  When he is older, he will be sorry he is not a
+child again."
+
+At this point, Elijah being shod and ready, he ceased his reflections
+and went call for Aaron at the post-office.  As the rode home together,
+the old schoolmaster, sunk in reverie, remained silent.  But Aaron
+wanted to talk, now that he had some one to talk to.
+
+"We'll get around to the wood to-morrow, and lay in another cord or
+two."
+
+"As you like."
+
+"They're saying down to the store that feed will be higher than ever
+this winter.  I suppose we'd better lay in a store.  I can't sell a few
+barrels of potatoes, though I did want to save them."
+
+Mr. Jeminy roused himself with an effort.  "I had the horse shod all
+around," he said.
+
+Aaron nodded.  "I guess it's just as well," he replied.  "Did you ask
+about fixing the harrow?"
+
+"It will take a week," said Mr. Jeminy.  "I said to go ahead, figuring
+that we had the whole winter before us."
+
+"We could do with a new harrow," said Aaron, "only there's no way to
+pay for it."
+
+Mr. Jeminy shook the reins over Elijah's back.  "I have a little
+money," he began, "laid away . . ."
+
+"You're very kind," said Aaron, "but I don't figure to take advantage
+of it.  Still, living's hard; so much trouble.  Take me; here I am
+bound down to a farm's got as many rocks in it as anything else.  I've
+been as far south as Attleboro, but I've never had a view of the world,
+like you've had.  I'll die as I've lived, without anything to be
+grateful for, so far as I can see."
+
+"You've had more to be grateful for than I ever had," said Mr. Jeminy
+simply, "and I'm not complaining."
+
+"Go along," said Aaron; "you're speaking out of kindness.  But it
+doesn't fool me any.  I know you've led a wandering life, Mr. Jeminy.
+But I'd admire to see a little something of the world myself."
+
+Above them the smoke from Aaron's chimney, thin and blue, rose bending
+like an Indian pipe in the still air.  And Mr. Jeminy gazed at it in
+silence, before replying:
+
+"You have had the good things of life, Aaron Bade."
+
+"Have I?" said Aaron bitterly.  "I'm sure I didn't know it.  What are
+the good things of life, Mr. Jeminy?"
+
+"Love," said Mr. Jeminy, "peace, quiet of the heart, the work of one's
+hands.  Perhaps it is human to wish for more.  But to be human is not
+always to be wise.  Do you desire to see the world, Aaron Bade?  Soon
+you would ask to be home again."
+
+"Well, I don't know about that," said Aaron.
+
+"Ah," said Mr. Jeminy, "love is best of all."
+
+And once again he relapsed into silence.  In the evening he drove the
+cows in.  High up on Hemlock, Aaron, among his slow, thin tunes,
+thought to himself: "There go the cows.  Mr. Jeminy understands me;
+he's a traveled man."  And he played his flute harder than ever,
+because Mr. Jeminy, who had seen, as Aaron thought, all Aaron had
+wanted to see, breathed the airs of foreign lands, and sailed the seven
+seas, was setting Aaron's cows to right, in Aaron's tumbled barn.
+
+In the kitchen, Margaret, going to light the lamp, smiled at her
+thoughts, which were timid and gay.  She was happy because Mr. Jeminy,
+who had seen so many elegant women, helped her with her apple jellies,
+and brought her kindlings for the stove.
+
+When the cows were milked, Mr. Jeminy came out of the barn, and stood
+looking up at the sky, yellow and green, with its promise of frost.  "A
+cold night," he said to himself, "and a bright morning."  He could hear
+the wind rising in the west.  "Winter is not far off," he said, and he
+carried the two warm, foaming milkpails into the kitchen.
+
+As he was eating his supper, a wagon came clattering down the road and
+stopped at the door.  "There's Ellery Deakan back from Milford," said
+Margaret at the window.  "I wonder what he wants at this time of night.
+Looks to be somebody with him.  Go and see, Mr. Jeminy.  I've the
+pudding to attend to."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MRS. WICKET
+
+Mrs. Grumble was dying.  She lay without moving, one wasted hand
+holding tightly to the fingers of Mrs. Wicket, who sat beside the bed.
+There, where Mrs. Grumble had worked and scolded for twenty years, all
+was still; while the clock on the dresser, like a solemn footstep,
+seemed to deepen the silence with its single, hollow beat.
+
+But if it was quiet in the schoolmaster's house, it was far from being
+quiet in the village, where Mrs. Tomkins was going hurriedly from house
+to house in search of Mrs. Wicket's runaway daughter.  Mrs. Wicket, who
+was dozing, did not hear the anxious voices calling everywhere for
+Juliet.  To Mrs. Grumble, the sound was like the dwindling murmur of a
+world with which she was nearly done.  She felt that her end was
+approaching, and remarked:
+
+"I hope I haven't given you too much trouble, Mrs. Wicket."
+
+Mrs. Wicket tried to assure Mrs. Grumble that she had not been any
+trouble to her.  But Mrs. Grumble said weakly:
+
+"Maybe when I was out of my head . . ."
+
+"Don't you fret yourself a mite about that," cried Mrs. Wicket; "for
+that's all over.  Now you're going to get well."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Grumble, "no, I'm not going to get well.  I'm going to
+die."  She thought over, in silence, what she had just said, and it
+appeared to satisfy her.  At the thought of death she was calm and
+willing.  "I remember," she remarked, "how I used to have a horror of
+dying.  I was afraid to die, without having done anything to make me
+out different from anybody else.  But I guess nobody's any different
+when it comes to dying, Mrs. Wicket.  It feels easy and natural."
+
+"Don't you so much as even think of it," said Mrs. Wicket.
+
+Mrs. Grumble smiled.  "There's no use trying to fool me," she declared.
+"I'm not afraid any more.  I'd like to see Mr. Jeminy before I go.  I'd
+like to know he was in good hands.  I'd like to think you'd look after
+him a bit, Mrs. Wicket, when I'm gone."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Wicket, "set your mind at rest."
+
+"You've been very kind to me," said Mrs. Grumble, with difficulty.
+"You've had a hard time of it here in Hillsboro.  You're a good woman,
+Mrs. Wicket.  I'm glad you'll be here for him when he comes home.  I
+took care of him for twenty years.  As though he were my own."
+
+"I'll care for him the same," said Mrs. Wicket, "as though he were my
+own."
+
+Mrs. Grumble seemed to be content with this promise, for she remained
+for some time sunk in silence.  At last she said, "He'll come in time
+for me to see him again.  He won't leave me to die alone, not after I
+took care of him for twenty years.
+
+"I remember the time he brought me a bit of lace from the fair over to
+Milford.  He used to give me a lot of trouble.  But he didn't forget to
+bring me home a piece of lace from the fair.  I put it on my petticoat.
+
+"He's on his way home now, Mrs. Wicket: yes, I can feel he's coming
+home."
+
+Mrs. Wicket, who had been up with Mrs. Grumble the night before, let
+her head droop forward on her breast.  "I don't doubt it," she said.
+And in the silence of the sickroom, she presently fell asleep.  Mrs.
+Grumble lay with wide open eyes, staring at the door through which Mr.
+Jeminy was to come.  She felt quiet and happy; it seemed to her that
+her pain was already over and done with.  Framed in the doorway, in the
+yellow lamplight, she beheld the fancies of her youth, the memories of
+the past.  She saw again the woman she had been, and watched, with eyes
+filled with compassion, her early sorrows, and the troubles of her
+later years.  "It was all of no account," she said to herself, "but it
+doesn't matter now."  And she set herself to wait in patience for Mr.
+Jeminy, who she never doubted would come to help her die.
+
+Meanwhile the schoolmaster, in Aaron Bade's wagon, was rattling along
+the road, with Juliet tight asleep in his arms.  As he drew near his
+home, he saw in the distance Barly Hill, and the lights of Barly Farm
+shining across the valley.  "I am coming home again," he said to them;
+"I have no longer any pride.  So now I know that I am an old man."
+
+But later a feeling of peace took possession of his heart.  "Yes," he
+said, "I am an old man.  The world is not my affair any more.  I belong
+to yesterday, with its triumphs and its failures; I must share in the
+glory, such as it is, of what has been done.  The future is in the
+hands of this child, sound asleep by my side.  It is in your hands,
+Anna Barly, and yours, Thomas Frye.  But you must do better than I did,
+and those with whom I quarreled.  To youth is given the burden and the
+pain.  Only the old are happy to-day.
+
+"Children, children, what will become of you?"
+
+When Mr. Jeminy, with Juliet in his arms, strode in through Mrs.
+Grumble's door, Mrs. Wicket rose to her feet, her hands pressed to her
+bosom with delight and alarm.  Mr. Jeminy gave Juliet to her mother.
+"Take the child home," he said.  Then with timid, hesitant steps, he
+approached Mrs. Grumble's bed.
+
+"You've been a long time coming," she said.  "I'm tired."
+
+"I'm here now," replied Mr. Jeminy; "I am not going away any more."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Grumble, "you'd better stay home and attend to things.
+I won't be here much longer."
+
+Mr. Jeminy wanted to say "nonsense," but he was unable to speak.
+Instead he took Mrs. Grumble's hand in both of his.  "Are you going to
+leave me, dear friend?" he asked.
+
+Mrs. Grumble smiled; then she gave a sigh.  "Look what you called me,"
+she said.  And they were both silent, thinking of the past together.
+In the distance the crisp footsteps of Mrs. Wicket died away down the
+hill.  And presently nothing was to be heard but the steady ticking of
+the clock on the mantel.  Then Mr. Jeminy, for once, could find nothing
+to say.  It seemed to him that instead of the clock's ticking, he heard
+the footsteps of death in the house, on the stair . . . tik, tok, tik,
+tok . . .  And he sighed, with sadness and horror, "Ah, my friend," he
+thought, "are you as frightened as I am?"
+
+Presently he saw that Mrs. Grumble was trying to lift herself up in
+bed.  "I'm going now," she said.  Her voice was low, but resonant.
+"Mrs. Wicket will look after you.  She's a good woman, Mr. Jeminy.  My
+mind's at peace.  I never knew death was so simple and ordinary.  It's
+almost like nothing."
+
+She sank back; her voice gave out and she began to cough.  "You will
+only tire yourself by talking," said Mr. Jeminy.  "Rest now.  Then in
+the morning . . ."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Grumble faintly, "there'll be no morning for me, unless
+it's the morning of the Lord.  Not where I'm going."
+
+"You are going where I, too, must go," said Mr. Jeminy.  "You are going
+a little before me.  Soon I shall come hurrying after you."
+
+"It's nearly over," said Mrs. Grumble.  "I did what I could."  Her mind
+began to wander; she spoke some words to herself.
+
+"You, God," said Mr. Jeminy aloud, "this is your doing.  Then come and
+be present; receive the forgiveness of this good woman, to whom you
+gave, in this life, poverty and sacrifice."
+
+"Please," whispered Mrs. Grumble, "speak of God with more respect."
+They were her last words; it was the end.  A spasm of coughing shook
+her; for a moment she seemed anxious to speak.  But as Mr. Jeminy bent
+over her, her breath failed; her head fell back, and with a single,
+frightened glance, Mrs. Grumble passed away, without saying what she
+had intended.
+
+Mr. Jeminy closed her eyes, and folded her hands across her breast.
+"She is gone already," he thought; "she is far away.  She has pressed
+ahead, so swiftly, beyond sight or hearing."
+
+He bent his head.  "You made me comfortable in my life, Mrs. Grumble,"
+he said, "yet at the end I could do nothing for you.  But you will not
+think badly of me for that.
+
+"Now you are hurrying through eternity.  To you, these few slow hours
+before the dawn are no different from to-morrow or yesterday; they will
+never pass.
+
+"Do you see, at last, the meaning of the spectacle you have just
+quitted?  Do you understand what I, for all my wisdom, do not
+understand?  You are free to ask God to explain it to you; you can say,
+'I saw armies with banners, and scholars with their books.'  Perhaps he
+will tell you the meaning of it.  But for us, who remain, it has no
+meaning.  Well, we say, this is life.  We laugh, applaud, talk
+together, and think about ourselves.  And one by one we slip away, no
+wiser than before.
+
+"We are like the bees, who work from dawn till dark, gathering honey in
+the fields and in the woods.  But we are not as wise as the bees, for
+each one grasps what he can, and cries, 'this is mine.'  Then seeing
+that it is of no use to him, he adds, 'What will you give me for it?'"
+
+And he began to think of the past.  It seemed to him that he was in
+school again.  It was spring; and the children came romping into the
+schoolroom, their arms full of books and flowers.  Summer passed; he
+saw Anna Barly crying by the roadside, under the gray sky.  He heard
+himself saying to Mrs. Grumble: "Yes, that's right, stop up your
+ears . . ."  And he saw himself walking toward Milford in the
+moonlight, under the falling leaves.  "Who, now," he thought, "will
+drive me out of doors because my room is in disorder, or burn, when I
+am away, the scraps of paper on which I have scribbled my memoranda?"
+
+He bowed his head.  "Rest quietly, Mrs. Grumble," he said.  "Your
+troubles are over.  For you there is neither doubt nor grief; life does
+not matter to you any more.  Nor does it matter very much to me.  For
+there is no one now to care what I do.  I am no trouble to anybody."
+
+The chilly breath of morning filled the valley with mist, fine, gray,
+imperceptible in the faint light of dawn.  And a farmer's cart, as it
+rattled down the road, woke, in his chair, the old schoolmaster from
+the reverie into which he had fallen.
+
+Faint and clear the early lights of the village went out, leaving the
+valley empty and cold.  A freight train whistled at the junction, and
+crept, with tolling bell, over the switches, to the south.
+
+The sun, rising, poured its yellow light into Mrs. Grumble's room,
+illuminating the bed, with its silent burden, and the still figure
+huddled in the chair.  Slowly, and with difficulty, Mr. Jeminy got to
+his feet and crossed to the window.  There his gaze encountered Mrs.
+Wicket, coming up the hill.
+
+Blowing on his hands, Mr. Jeminy went to meet her in the early sunshine.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUTUMN***
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