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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Village Watch-Tower by Wiggin
+
+#3 in our series by Kate Douglas Wiggin
+[Author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm]
+[Also known as Kate Douglas Riggs]
+
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+The Village Watch-Tower
+
+by Kate Douglas Wiggin
+
+June, 1997  [Etext #936]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Village Watch-Tower by Wiggin
+*****This file should be named vilwt10.txt or vilwt10.zip******
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+Pages 1-150 typed by R. McGowan & pages 151-218 scanned by E. P. McGowan
+
+
+
+
+
+The Village Watch-Tower
+by Kate Douglas Wiggin
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION
+
+
+
+These days the name of Kate Douglas Wiggin is virtually unknown.
+But if one mentions the title "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," recognition
+(at least in America) is instant.  Everyone has heard of Rebecca;
+her story has been in print continuously since it was first
+published in 1903.  It is certainly Mrs. Wiggin's most famous book,
+and the only one of her many books that is still in print.
+Everything else she wrote has slipped into complete obscurity.
+Occasionally in an antique shop, one may still find a copy of her
+immensely popular seasonal book, "The Birds' Christmas Carol", but that
+is about the extent of what is readily available, even second-hand.
+
+The Birds' Christas Carol is available as our Etext #721, Nov. 1996.
+
+In 1904, Jack London wrote (from Manchuria!) to say that
+Rebecca had won his heart.  ("She is real," he wrote, "she lives;
+she has given me many regrets, but I love her.") Some eighty years
+later I happened to pick up and read "Rebecca" for the first time.
+The book was so thoroughly enjoyable that when I had finished it,
+I began at once a search for other works by the same author--
+especially for a sequel to "Rebecca", which seemed practically to demand one.
+There was never a sequel written, but "The New Chronicles of Rebecca"
+was published in 1907, and contained some further chapters in the life
+of its heroine.  I had to be satisfied with that, for the time being.
+Then, well over a year after jotting down Mrs. Wiggin's name on my list
+of authors to "purchase on sight", I finally ran across a copy of "The
+Village Watch-Tower"; and it was not even a book of which I had heard.
+It was first published in 1895 by Houghton, who published much of her
+other work at the time, and apparently was never published again.
+Shortly thereafter I found a copy of her autobiography.
+
+Kate Douglas Wiggin (nee Smith) was born in Philadelphia,
+Pennsylvania, on September 28, 1856.  She was raised for the most-part
+in Maine, which forms a backdrop to much of her fiction.
+She moved to California in the 1870s, and became involved
+in the "free kindergarten" movement.  She opened the Silver
+Street Free Kindergarten in San Francisco, the first free
+kindergarten in California, and there she worked until
+the late 1880s (meantime opening her own training school
+for teachers). Her first husband, Samuel Wiggin, died in 1889.
+By then famous, she returned to New York and Maine.
+She moved in international social circles, lecturing and giving
+readings from her work.  In 1895 she married for the second time
+(to George Riggs).
+
+At her home in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden
+Gate and Marin County, she wrote her first book, "The Birds'
+Christmas Carol", to raise money for her school.
+The book also proved to be her means of entrance into publishing,
+translation, and travel in elite circles throughout Europe.
+The book was republished many times thereafter, and translated into
+several languages.  In addition to factual and educational works
+(undertaken together with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith)
+she also wrote a number of other popular novels in the early
+years of the 20th century, including "Rebecca", and "The Story
+of Waitstill Baxter" (1913). She died in 1923, on August 23,
+at Harrow-on-Hill, England.
+
+Beverly Seaton observed, in "American Women Writers",
+that Mrs. Wiggin was "a popular writer who expressed what
+her contemporaries themselves thought of as 'real life'"
+(p. 413). "The Village Watch-Tower" I think is a perfect example
+of that observation; it captures vividly a few frozen moments
+of rural America, right at the twilight of the 19th century.
+Most of it was written in the village of Quillcote, Maine,
+her childhood home--and certainly the model for the village
+of these stories.
+
+No attempt has been made to edit this book for consistency
+or to update or "correct" the spelling.  Mrs. Wiggin's spelling is
+somewhat transitional between modern American and British spellings.
+The only liberty taken is that of removing extra spaces in contractions.
+E.g., I have used "wouldn't" where the original has consistently "would n't";
+this is true for all such contractions with "n't" which appeared
+inordinately distracting to the modern reader.
+
+R. McGowan, San Jose, March 1997
+
+
+
+
+
+THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER
+
+BY KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
+
+
+
+
+
+Dear old apple-tree, under whose gnarled branches these
+stories were written, to you I dedicate the book.  My head was
+so close to you, who can tell from whence the thoughts came?
+I only know that when all the other trees in the orchard were barren,
+there were always stories to be found under your branches, and so it
+is our joint book, dear apple-tree. Your pink blossoms have fallen
+on the page as I wrote; your ruddy fruit has dropped into my lap;
+the sunshine streamed through your leaves and tipped my pencil with gold.
+The birds singing in your boughs may have lent a sweet note here
+and there; and do you remember the day when the gentle shower came?
+We just curled the closer, and you and I and the sky all cried
+together while we wrote "The Fore-Room Rug."
+
+It should be a lovely book, dear apple-tree, but alas!
+it is not altogether that, because I am not so simple as you,
+and because I have strayed farther away from the heart
+of Mother Nature.
+
+KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
+
+"Quillcote," Hollis, Maine,
+August 12, 1895.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+The Village Watch-Tower                 1
+Tom o' the Blueb'ry Plains             31
+The Nooning Tree                       55
+The Fore-Room Rug                      95
+A Village Stradivarius                123
+The Eventful Trip of the Midnight Cry 195
+
+
+
+
+THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER.
+
+
+It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house,
+with its weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles.
+It was in the very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost
+knock on the window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare
+occasions when he brought "old Mis' Bascom" a parcel from Saco.
+
+Humble and dilapidated as it was, it was almost beautiful
+in the springtime, when the dandelion-dotted turf grew close
+to the great stone steps; or in the summer, when the famous
+Bascom elm cast its graceful shadow over the front door.
+The elm, indeed, was the only object that ever did cast its
+shadow there.  Lucinda Bascom said her "front door 'n' entry
+never hed ben used except for fun'rals, 'n' she was goin'
+to keep it nice for that purpose, 'n' not get it all tracked up."
+
+She was sitting now where she had sat for thirty years.
+Her high-backed rocker, with its cushion of copperplate patch
+and its crocheted tidy, stood always by a southern window that
+looked out on the river.  The river was a sheet of crystal, as it
+poured over the dam; a rushing, roaring torrent of foaming white,
+as it swept under the bridge and fought its way between the rocky
+cliffs beyond, sweeping swirling, eddying, in its narrow channel,
+pulsing restlessly into the ragged fissures of its shores,
+and leaping with a tempestuous roar into the Witches' Eel-pot, a deep
+wooded gorge cleft in the very heart of the granite bank.
+
+But Lucinda Bascom could see more than the river from her
+favorite window.  It was a much-traveled road, the road that ran
+past the house on its way from Liberty Village to Milliken's Mills.
+A tottering old sign-board, on a verdant triangle of turf, directed you
+over Deacon Chute's hill to the "Flag Medder Road," and from thence
+to Liberty Centre; the little post-office and store, where the stage
+stopped twice a day, was quite within eyeshot; so were the public
+watering-trough, Brigadier Hill, and, behind the ruins of an old mill,
+the wooded path that led to the Witches' Eel-pot, a favorite
+walk for village lovers.  This was all on her side of the river.
+As for the bridge which knit together the two tiny villages,
+nobody could pass over that without being seen from the Bascoms'. The
+rumble of wheels generally brought a family party to the window,--
+Jot Bascom's wife (she that was Diadema Dennett), Jot himself,
+if he were in the house, little Jot, and grandpa Bascom, who looked
+at the passers-by with a vacant smile parting his thin lips.
+Old Mrs. Bascom herself did not need the rumble of wheels to tell
+her that a vehicle was coming, for she could see it fully ten minutes
+before it reached the bridge,--at the very moment it appeared at the crest
+of Saco Hill, where strangers pulled up their horses, on a clear day,
+and paused to look at Mount Washington, miles away in the distance.
+Tory Hill and Saco Hill met at the bridge, and just there, too, the river
+road began its shady course along the east side of the stream:
+in view of all which "old Mis' Bascom's settin'-room winder"
+might well be called the "Village Watch-Tower," when you consider
+further that she had moved only from her high-backed rocker to
+her bed, and from her bed to her rocker, for more than thirty years,--
+ever since that july day when her husband had had a sun-stroke
+while painting the meeting-house steeple, and her baby Jonathan
+had been thereby hastened into a world not in the least ready
+to receive him.
+
+She could not have lived without that window, she would have told you,
+nor without the river, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she
+could remember.  It was in the south chamber upstairs that she had been born.
+Her mother had lain there and listened to the swirl of the water, in that year
+when the river was higher than the oldest inhabitant had ever seen it,--
+the year when the covered bridge at the Mills had been carried away,
+and when the one at the Falls was in hourly danger of succumbing to the force
+of the freshet.
+
+All the men in both villages were working on the river,
+strengthening the dam, bracing the bridge, and breaking the jams of logs;
+and with the parting of the boom, the snapping of the bridge timbers,
+the crashing of the logs against the rocks, and the shouts of
+the river-drivers, the little Lucinda had come into the world.
+Some one had gone for the father, and had found him on the river,
+where he had been since day-break, drenched with the storm,
+blown fro his dangerous footing time after time, but still battling
+with the great heaped-up masses of logs, wrenching them from one
+another's grasp, and sending them down the swollen stream.
+
+Finally the jam broke; and a cheer of triumph burst
+from the excited men, as the logs, freed from their bondage,
+swept down the raging flood, on and ever on in joyous liberty,
+faster and faster, till they encountered some new obstacle,
+when they heaped themselves together again, like puppets of Fate,
+and were beaten by the waves into another helpless surrender.
+
+With the breaking of the jam, one dead monarch of the forest
+leaped into the air as if it had been shot from a cannon's mouth,
+and lodged between two jutting peaks of rock high on the river bank.
+Presently another log was dashed against it, but rolled off and hurried
+down the stream; then another, and still another; but no force seemed
+enough to drive the giant from its intrenched position.
+
+"Hurry on down to the next jam, Raish, and let it alone,"
+cried the men.  "Mebbe it'll git washed off in the night, and anyhow
+you can't budge it with no kind of a tool we've got here."
+
+Then from the shore came a boy's voice calling, "There's a baby
+up to your house!"  And the men repeated in stentorian tones,
+"Baby up to your house, Raish!  Leggo the log; you're wanted!"
+
+"Boy or girl?" shouted the young father.
+
+"Girl!" came back the answer above the roar of the river.
+
+Whereupon Raish Dunnell steadied himself with his pick
+and taking a hatchet from his belt, cut a rude letter "L"
+on the side of the stranded log.
+
+"L's for Lucindy," he laughed.  "Now you log if you git's fur as Saco,
+drop in to my wife's folks and tell 'em the baby's name."
+
+There had not been such a freshet for years before, and there had
+never been one since; so, as the quiet seasons went by, "Lucindy's log"
+was left in peace, the columbines blooming all about it, the harebells
+hanging their heads of delicate blue among the rocks that held it in place,
+the birds building their nests in the knot-holes of its withered side.
+
+Seventy years had passed, and on each birthday,
+from the time when she was only "Raish Dunnell's little Lou,"
+to the years when she was Lucinda Bascom, wife and mother,
+she had wandered down by the river side, and gazed,
+a little superstitiously perhaps, on the log that had
+been marked with an "L" on the morning she was born.
+It had stood the wear and tear of the elements bravely,
+but now it was beginning, like Lucinda, to show its age.
+Its back was bent, like hers; its face was seamed and wrinkled,
+like her own; and the village lovers who looked at it from
+the opposite bank wondered if, after all, it would hold out
+as long as "old Mis' Bascom."
+
+She held out bravely, old Mrs. Bascom, though she was
+"all skin, bones, and tongue," as the neighbors said; for nobody
+needed to go into the Bascoms' to brighten up aunt Lucinda a bit,
+or take her the news; one went in to get a bit of brightness,
+and to hear the news.
+
+"I should get lonesome, I s'pose," she was wont to say, "if it wa'n't
+for the way this house is set, and this chair, and this winder, 'n' all.
+Men folks used to build some o' the houses up in a lane, or turn 'em back
+or side to the road, so the women folks couldn't see anythin' to keep their
+minds off their churnin' or dish-washin'; but Aaron Dunnell hed somethin'
+else to think about, 'n' that was himself, first, last, and all the time.
+His store was down to bottom of the hill, 'n' when he come up to his meals,
+he used to set where he could see the door; 'n' if any cust'mer come,
+he could call to 'em to wait a spell till he got through eatin'. Land!
+I can hear him now, yellin' to 'em, with his mouth full of victuals!
+They hed to wait till he got good 'n' ready, too.  There wa'n't so much
+comp'tition in business then as there is now, or he'd 'a' hed to give up
+eatin' or hire a clerk.  . . . I've always felt to be thankful that the house
+was on this rise o' ground.  The teams hev to slow up on 'count o'
+the hill, 'n' it gives me consid'ble chance to see folks 'n' what they've
+got in the back of the wagon, 'n' one thing 'n' other.  . . . The
+neighbors is continually comin' in here to talk about things that's goin'
+on in the village.  I like to hear 'em, but land! they can't tell me
+nothing'! They often say, `For massy sakes, Lucindy Bascom, how d'
+you know that?'  `Why,' says I to them, `I don't ask no questions,
+'n' folks don't tell me no lies; I just set in my winder, 'n' put two
+'n' two together,--that's all I do.'  I ain't never ben in a playhouse,
+but I don't suppose the play-actors git down off the platform on t'
+the main floor to explain to the folks what they've ben doin', do they?
+I expect, if folks can't understand their draymas when the're actin'
+of 'em out, they have to go ignorant, don't they?  Well, what do I want
+with explainin', when everythin' is acted out right in the road?"
+
+There was quite a gathering of neighbors at the Bascoms'
+on this particular July afternoon.  No invitations had been sent out,
+and none were needed.  A common excitement had made it vital
+that people should drop in somewhere, and speculate about certain
+interesting matters well known to be going on in the community,
+but going on in such an underhand and secretive fashion that it
+well-nigh destroyed one's faith in human nature.
+
+The sitting-room door was open into the entry, so that
+whatever breeze there was might come in, and an unusual
+glimpse of the new foreroom rug was afforded the spectators.
+Everything was as neat as wax, for Diadema was a housekeeper
+of the type fast passing away.  The great coal stove was enveloped
+in its usual summer wrapper of purple calico, which, tied neatly
+about its ebony neck and portly waist, gave it the appearance
+of a buxom colored lady presiding over the assembly.
+The kerosene lamps stood in a row on the high, narrow mantelpiece,
+each chimney protected from the flies by a brown paper bag
+inverted over its head.  Two plaster Samuels praying under
+the pink mosquito netting adorned the ends of the shelf.
+There were screens at all the windows, and Diadema fidgeted
+nervously when a visitor came in the mosquito netting door,
+for fear a fly should sneak in with her.
+
+On the wall were certificates of membership in the Missionary Society;
+a picture of Maidens welcoming Washington in the Streets of Alexandria,
+in a frame of cucumber seeds; and an interesting document setting forth
+the claims of the Dunnell family as old settlers long before the separation
+of Maine from Massachusetts,--the fact bein' established by an obituary
+notice reading, "In Saco, December 1791, Dorcas, daughter of Abiathar Dunnell,
+two months old of Fits unbaptized."
+
+"He may be goin' to marry Eunice, and he may not," observed Almira Berry;
+"though what she wants of Reuben Hobson is more 'n I can make out.
+I never see a widower straighten up as he has this last year.
+I guess he's been lookin' round pretty lively, but couldn't find anybody
+that was fool enough to give him any encouragement."
+
+"Mebbe she wants to get married," said Hannah Sophia,
+in a tone that spoke volumes.  "When Parson Perkins come
+to this parish, one of his first calls was on Eunice Emery.
+He always talked like the book o' Revelation; so says he,
+`have you got your weddin' garment on, Miss Emery?' says he.
+`No,' says she, `but I ben tryin' to these twenty years.'
+She was always full of her jokes, Eunice was!"
+
+"The Emerys was always a humorous family,"
+remarked Diadema, as she annihilated a fly with a newspaper.
+"Old Silas Emery was an awful humorous man.  He used to live
+up on the island; and there come a freshet one year,
+and he said he got his sofy 'n' chairs off, anyhow!"  That was
+just his jokin'. He hadn't a sign of a sofy in the house;
+'t was his wife Sophy he meant, she that was Sophy Swett.
+Then another time, when I was a little mite of a thin runnin'
+in 'n' out o' his yard, he caught holt o' me, and says he,
+`You'd better take care, sissy; when I kill you and two more,
+thet'll be three children I've killed!'  Land! you couldn't
+drag me inside that yard for years afterwards.
+. . . There! she's got a fire in the cook-stove; there's a stream o'
+smoke comin' out o' the kitchen chimbley.  I'm willin'
+to bet my new rug she's goin' to be married tonight!"
+
+"Mebbe she's makin' jell'," suggested Hannah Sophia.
+
+"Jell'!" ejaculated Mrs. Jot scornfully.  "Do you
+s'pose Eunice Emery would build up a fire in the middle o'
+the afternoon 'n' go to makin' a jell', this hot day?
+Besides, there ain't a currant gone into her house this week,
+as I happen to know."
+
+"It's a dretful thick year for fol'age," mumbled grandpa Bascom,
+appearing in the door with his vacant smile.  "I declare some o'
+the maples looks like balls in the air."
+
+"That's the twentieth time he's hed that over since mornin',"
+said Diadema.  "Here, father, take your hat off 'n' set in the
+kitchen door 'n' shell me this mess o' peas.  Now think smart,
+'n' put the pods in the basket 'n' the peas in the pan;
+don't you mix 'em."
+
+The old man hung his hat on the back of the chair, took the pan
+in his trembling hands, and began aimlessly to open the pods,
+while he chuckled at the hens that gathered round the doorstep
+when they heard the peas rattling in the pan.
+
+"Reuben needs a wife bad enough, if that's all," remarked the
+Widow Buzzell, as one who had given the matter some consideration.
+
+"I should think he did," rejoined old Mrs. Bascom.
+"Those children 'bout git their livin' off the road in summer,
+from the time the dand'lion greens is ready for diggin'
+till the blackb'ries 'n' choke-cherries is gone.
+Diademy calls 'em in 'n' gives 'em a cooky every time
+they go past, 'n' they eat as if they was famished.
+Rube Hobson never was any kind of a pervider, 'n' he's
+consid'able snug besides."
+
+"He ain't goin' to better himself much," said Almira.
+"Eunice Emery ain't fit to housekeep for a cat.
+The pie she took to the pie supper at the church was so tough
+that even Deacon Dyer couldn't eat it; and the boys got holt
+of her doughnuts, and declared they was goin' fishin' next day
+'n' use 'em for sinkers.  She lives from hand to mouth Eunice
+Emery does.  She's about as much of a doshy as Rube is.
+She'll make tea that's strong enough to bear up an egg, most,
+and eat her doughnuts with it three times a day rather than
+take the trouble to walk out to the meat or the fish cart.
+I know for a fact she don't make riz bread once a year."
+
+"Mebbe her folks likes buttermilk bread best; some do,"
+said the Widow Buzzell.  "My husband always said, give him
+buttermilk bread to work on.  He used to say my riz bread
+was so light he'd hev to tread on it to keep it anywheres;
+but when you'd eat buttermilk bread he said you'd got somethin'
+that stayed by you; you knew where it was every time.
+. . . For massy sake! there's the stage stoppin' at the Hobson's door.
+I wonder if Rube's first wife's mother has come from Moderation?
+If 't is, they must 'a' made up their quarrel, for there was a time
+she wouldn't step foot over that doorsill.  She must be goin'
+to stay some time, for there's a trunk on the back o' the stage.
+. . . No, there ain't nobody gettin' out.  Land, Hannah Sophia,
+don't push me clean through the glass!  It beats me why they make winders
+so small that three people can't look out of 'em without crowdin'.
+Ain't that a wash-boiler he's handin' down?  Well, it's a mercy;
+he's ben borrowin' long enough!"
+
+"What goes on after dark I ain't responsible for,"
+commented old Mrs. Bascom, "but no new wash-boiler has gone
+into Rube Hobson's door in the daytime for many a year,
+and I'll be bound it means somethin'. There goes a broom, too.
+Much sweepin' he'll get out o' Eunice; it's a slick 'n'
+a promise with her!"
+
+"When did you begin to suspicion this, Diademy?" asked Almira Berry.
+"I've got as much faculty as the next one, but anybody that lives on the river
+road has just got to give up knowin' anything.  You can't keep runnin'
+to the store every day, and if you could you don't find out much nowadays.
+Bill Peters don't take no more interest in his neighbors than a cow
+does in election."
+
+"I can't get mother Bascom to see it as I do," said Diadema,
+"but for one thing she's ben carryin' home bundles 'bout every
+other night for a month, though she's ben too smart to buy anythin'
+here at this store.  She had Packard's horse to go to Saco last week.
+When she got home, jest at dusk, she drove int' the barn,
+'n' bimeby Pitt Packard come to git his horse,--'t was her own
+buggy she went with.  She looked over here when she went int'
+the house, 'n' she ketched my eye, though 't was half a mile away,
+so she never took a thing in with her, but soon as't was dark she made
+three trips out to the barn with a lantern, 'n' any fool could tell
+'t her arms was full o' pa'cels by the way she carried the lantern.
+The Hobsons and the Emerys have married one another more 'n once,
+as fur as that goes.  I declare if I was goin' to get married I
+should want to be relation to somebody besides my own folks."
+
+"The reason I can hardly credit it," said Hannah Sophia,
+"is because Eunice never had a beau in her life, that I can
+remember of.  Cyse Higgins set up with her for a spell,
+but it never amounted to nothin'. It seems queer, too, for she
+was always so fond o' seein' men folks round that when Pitt
+Packard was shinglin' her barn she used to go out nights
+'n' rip some o' the shingles off, so 't he'd hev more days'
+work on it."
+
+"I always said 't was she that begun on Rube Hobson,
+not him on her," remarked the Widow Buzzell.
+"Their land joinin' made courtin' come dretful handy.
+His critters used to git in her field 'bout every other day
+(I always suspicioned she broke the fence down herself),
+and then she'd hev to go over and git him to drive 'em out.
+She's wed his onion bed for him two summers, as I happen to know,
+for I've been ou' doors more 'n common this summer, tryin'
+to fetch my constitution up.  Diademy, don't you want to look
+out the back way 'n' see if Rube's come home yet?"
+
+"He ain't," said old Mrs. Bascom, "so you needn't look;
+can't you see the curtains is all down?  He's gone up to the Mills,
+'n' it's my opinion he's gone to speak to the minister."
+
+"He hed somethin' in the back o' the wagon covered up with an old
+linen lap robe; 't ain't at all likely he 'd 'a' hed that if he'd ben goin'
+to the minister's," objected Mrs. Jot.
+
+"Anybody'd think you was born yesterday, to hear you talk, Diademy,"
+retorted her mother-in-law. "When you 've set in one spot's long's
+I hev, p'raps you'll hev the use o' your faculties!  Men folks has more
+'n one way o' gettin' married, 'specially when they 're ashamed of it.
+. . . Well, I vow, there's the little Hobson girls comin' out o'
+the door this minute, 'n' they 're all dressed up, and Mote don't seem
+to be with 'em."
+
+Every woman in the room rose to her feet, and Diadema removed
+her murderous eye from a fly which she had been endeavoring to locate
+for some moments.
+
+"I guess they 're goin' up to the church to meet their father 'n' Eunice,
+poor little things," ventured the Widow Buzzell.
+
+"P'raps they be," said old Mrs. Bascom sarcastically;
+"p'raps they be goin' to church, takin' a three-quart
+tin pail 'n' a brown paper bundle along with 'em.
+. . . They 're comin' over the bridge, just as I s'posed.
+. . . Now, if they come past this house, you head 'em off,
+Almiry, 'n' see if you can git some satisfaction out of 'em.
+. . . They ain't hardly old enough to hold their tongues."
+
+An exciting interview soon took place in the middle of the road,
+and Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had
+penetrated the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx.
+She had been vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness
+which almost dazzle the beholder.
+
+"That's about the confirmingest thing I've heern yet!"
+she ejaculated, as she took off her shaker bonnet.
+"They say they're goin' up to their aunt Hitty's to stay two days.
+They're dressed in their best, clean to the skin, for I looked;
+'n' it's their night gownds they've got in the bundle.
+They say little Mote has gone to Union to stop all night
+with his uncle Abijah, 'n' that leaves Rube all alone,
+for the smith girl that does his chores is home sick
+with the hives.  And what do you s'pose is in the pail?
+_Fruit_ _cake_,--that's what 't is, no more 'n' no less!
+I knowed that Smith girl didn't bake it, 'n' so I asked 'em,
+'n' they said Miss Emery give it to 'em.  There was two little
+round try-cakes, baked in muffin-rings. Eunice hed took some o'
+the batter out of a big loaf 'n' baked it to se how it was goin'
+to turn out.  That means wedding-cake, or I'm mistaken!"
+
+"There ain't no gittin' round that," agreed the assembled company,
+"now is there, Mis' Bascom?"
+
+Old Mrs. Bascom wet her finger, smoothed the parting
+of her false front, and looked inscrutable.
+
+"I don't see why you're so secret," objected Diadema.
+
+"I've got my opinions, and I've had 'em some time,"
+observed the good lady.  "I don't know 's I'm bound to tell 'em
+and have 'em held up to ridicule.  Let the veal hang, I say.
+If any one of us is right, we'll all know to-morrow."
+
+"Well, all any of us has got to judge from is appearances," said Diadema,
+"and how you can twist 'em one way, and us another, stumps me!"
+
+"Perhaps I see more appearances than you do,"
+retorted her mother-in-law. "Some folks mistakes all they see
+for all there is.  I was reading a detective story last week.
+It seems there was an awful murder in Schenectady, and a mother
+and her two children was found dead in one bed, with bullet
+holes in their heads.  The husband was away on business,
+and there wasn't any near neighbors to hear her screech.
+Well, the detectives come from far and from near, and begun
+to work up the case.  One of 'em thought 't was the husband,--
+though he set such store by his wife he went ravin'
+crazy when he heard she was dead,--one of 'em laid it
+on the children,--though they was both under six years old;
+and one decided it was suicide,--though the woman was a church
+member and didn't know how to fire a gun off, besides.
+And then there come along a detective younger and smarter than
+all the rest, and says he, `If all you bats have seen everything
+you can see, I guess I'll take a look around,' says he.
+Sure enough, there was a rug with `Welcome' on it layin' in front
+of the washstand, and when he turned it up he found an elegant
+diamond stud with a man's full name and address on the gold part.
+He took a train and went right to the man's house.
+He was so taken by surprise (he hadn't missed the stud,
+for he had a full set of 'em) that he owned right up and
+confessed the murder."
+
+"I don't see as that's got anything to do with this case," said Diadema.
+
+"It's got this much to do with it," replied old Mrs. Bascom,
+"that perhaps you've looked all round the room and seen everything
+you had eyes to see, and perhaps I've had wit enough to turn up
+the rug in front o' the washstand."
+
+"Whoever he marries now, Mis' Bascom'll have to say 't
+was the one she meant," laughed the Widow Buzzell.
+
+"I never was caught cheatin' yet, and if I live till Saturday I shall
+be seventy-one years old," said the old lady with some heat.  "Hand me
+Jot's lead pencil, Diademy, and that old envelope on the winder sill.
+I'll write the name I think of, and shut it up in the old Bible.
+My hand's so stiff to-day I can't hardly move it, but I guess I can make
+it plain enough to satisfy you."
+
+"That's fair 'n' square," said Hannah Sophia, "and for
+my pat I hope it ain't Eunice, for I like her too well.
+What they're goin' to live on is more 'n I can see.  Add nothin'
+to nothin' 'n' you git nothin',--that's arethmetic!  He ain't hed
+a cent o' ready money sence he failed up four years ago, 'thout it
+was that hundred dollars that fell to him from his wife's aunt.
+Eunice'll hev her hands full this winter, I guess, with them
+three hearty children 'n' him all wheezed up with phthisic
+from October to April! . . . Who's that coming' down Tory Hill?
+It's Rube's horse 'n' Rube's wagon, but it don't look like Rube."
+
+"Yes, it's Rube; but he's got a new Panama hat, 'n' he 's hed his
+linen duster washed," said old Mrs. Bascom.  . . . "Now, do you
+mean to tell me that that woman with a stuck-up hat on is Eunice Emery?
+It ain't, 'n' that green parasol don't belong to this village.  He's drivin'
+her into his yard! . . . Just as I s'posed, it's that little, smirkin'
+worthless school-teacher up to the Mills.--Don't break my neck, Diademy;
+can't you see out the other winder?--Yes, he's helpin' her out, 'n' showin'
+her in.  He can't 'a' ben married more'n ten minutes, for he's goin'
+clear up the steps to open the door for her!"
+
+"Wait 'n' see if he takes his horse out," said Hannah Sophia.
+"Mebbe he'll drive her back in a few minutes.  . . . No, he's onhitched!
+. . . There, he's hangin' up the head-stall!"
+
+"I've ben up in the attic chamber," called the Widow Buzzell,
+as she descended the stairs; "she's pulled up the curtains, and took
+off her hat right in front o' the winder, 's bold as a brass kettle!
+She's come to stay!  Ain't that Rube Hobson all over,--to bring another
+woman int' this village 'stid o' weedin' one of 'em out as he'd oughter.
+He ain't got any more public sperit than a--hedgehog, 'n' never had!"
+
+Almira drew on her mitts excitedly, tied on her shaker,
+and started for the door.
+
+"I'm goin' over to Eunice's," she said, "and I'm goin'
+to take my bottle of camphire.  I shouldn't wonder a mite
+if I found her in a dead faint on the kitchen floor.
+Nobody need tell me she wa'n't buildin' hopes."
+
+"I'll go with you," said the Widow Buzzell.
+"I'd like to see with my own eyes how she takes it,
+'n' it'll be too late to tell if I wait till after supper.
+If she'd ben more open with me 'n' ever asked for my advice,
+I could 'a' told her it wa'n't the first time Rube Hobson has
+played that trick."
+
+"I'd come too if 't wa'n't milkin' but Jot ain't home
+from the Centre, and I've got to do his chores; come in as you
+go along back, will you?" asked Diadema.
+
+Hannah Sophia remained behind, promising to meet them at the post-office
+and hear the news.  As the two women walked down the hill she drew the old
+envelope from the Bible and read the wavering words scrawled upon it in old
+Mrs. Bascom's rheumatic and uncertain hand,--
+
+
+_the_ _milikins_ _Mills_ _Teecher._
+
+
+"Well Lucindy, you do make good use o' your winder,"
+she exclaimed, "but how you pitched on anything so onlikely
+as her is more'n I can see."
+
+"Just because 't was onlikely.  A man's a great sight likelier
+to do an onlikely thing than he is a likely one, when it comes
+to marryin'.  In the first place, Rube sent his children to school
+up to the Mills 'stid of to the brick schoolhouse, though he had
+to pay a little something to get 'em taken in to another deestrick.
+They used to come down at night with their hands full o'
+'ward o' merit cards.  Do you s'pose I thought they got 'em
+for good behavior, or for knowin' their lessons?  Then aunt Hitty
+told me some question or other Rube had asked examination day.
+Since when has Rube Hobson 'tended examinations, thinks I.  And
+when I see the girl, a red-and-white paper doll that wouldn't know
+whether to move the churn-dasher up 'n' down or round 'n' round,
+I made up my mind that bein' a man he'd take her for certain,
+and not his next-door neighbor of a sensible age and a house 'n'
+farm 'n' cow 'n' buggy!"
+
+"Sure enough," agreed Hannah Sophia, "though that don't
+account for Eunice's queer actions, 'n' the pa'cels 'n'
+the fruit cake."
+
+"When I make out a case," observed Mrs. Bascom modestly,
+"I ain't one to leave weak spots in it.  If I guess at all,
+I go all over the ground 'n' stop when I git through.
+Now, sisters or no sisters, Maryabby Emery ain't spoke to Eunice sence
+she moved to Salem.  But if Eunice has ben bringin' pa'cels home,
+Maryabby must 'a' paid for what was in 'em; and if she's ben bakin'
+fruit cake this hot day, why Maryabby used to be so font o'
+fruit cake her folks were afraid she'd have fits 'n' die.
+I shall be watchin' here as usual to-morrow morning', 'n'
+if Maryabby don't drive int' Eunice's yard before noon I won't
+brag any more for a year to come."
+
+Hannah Sophia gazed at old Mrs. Bascom with unstinted admiration.
+"You do beat all," she said; "and I wish I could stay all night 'n' see
+how it turns out, but Almiry is just comin' over the bridge, 'n' I must
+start 'n' meet her.  Good-by.  I'm glad to see you so smart; you always
+look slim, but I guess you'll tough it out's long 's the rest of us.
+I see your log was all right, last time I was down side o' the river."
+
+
+"They say it 's jest goin' to break in two in the middle,
+and fall into the river," cheerfully responded Lucinda.
+"They say it's just hanging' on by a thread.  Well, that's what
+they 've ben sayin' about me these ten years, 'n' here I be
+still hanging!  It don't make no odds, I guess, whether it's
+a thread or a rope you 're hangin' by, so long as you hang."
+
+* * *
+
+
+The next morning, little Mote Hobson, who had stayed all night
+with his uncle in Union, was walking home by the side of the river.
+He strolled along, the happy, tousle-headed, barefooted youngster,
+eyes one moment on the trees in the hope of squirrels and birds'-nests,
+the next on the ground in search of the first blueberries.
+As he stooped to pick up a bit of shining quartz to add to the collection
+in his ragged trousers' pockets he glanced across the river,
+and at that very instant Lucinda's log broke gently in twain,
+rolled down the bank, crumbling as it went, and, dropping in like a
+tired child, was carried peacefully along on the river's breast.
+
+Mote walked more quickly after that.  It was quite a feather
+in his cap to see, with his own eyes, the old landmark
+slip from its accustomed place and float down the stream.
+The other boys would miss it and say, "It's gone!"
+He would say, "I saw it go!"
+
+Grandpa Bascom was standing at the top of the hill.  His white locks
+were uncovered, and he was in his shirt-sleeves. Baby Jot, as usual,
+held fast by his shaking hand, for they loved each other, these two.
+The cruel stroke of the sun that had blurred the old man's brain had spared
+a blessed something in him that won the healing love of children.
+
+"How d' ye, Mote?" he piped in his feeble voice.  "They say
+Lucindy's dead.  . . . Jot says she is, 'n' Diademy says she is,
+'n' I guess she is.  . . . It 's a dretful thick year for fol'age;
+. . . some o' the maples looks like balls in the air."
+
+Mote looked in at the window.  The neighbors were hurrying to and fro.
+Diadema sat with her calico apron up to her face, sobbing; and for the first
+morning in thirty years, old Mrs. Bascom's high-backed rocker was empty,
+and there was no one sitting in the village watch-tower.
+
+
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+TOM O' THE BLUEB'RY PLAINS.
+
+
+The sky is a shadowless blue; the noon-day sun glows fiercely;
+a cloud of dust rises from the burning road whenever the hot
+breeze stirs the air, or whenever a farm wagon creaks along,
+its wheels sinking into the deep sand.
+
+In the distance, where the green of the earth joins the blue of the sky,
+gleams the silver line of a river.
+
+As far as the eye an reach, the ground is covered
+with blueberry bushes; red leaves peeping among green ones;
+bloom of blue fruit hanging in full warm clusters,--spheres of
+velvet mellowed by summer sun, moistened with crystal dew,
+spiced with fragrance of woods.
+
+In among the blueberry bushes grow huckleberries,
+"choky pears," and black-snaps.
+
+Gnarled oaks and stunted pines lift themselves out
+of the wilderness of shrubs.  They look dwarfed and gloomy,
+as if Nature had been an untender mother, and denied
+them proper nourishment.
+
+The road is a little-traveled one, and furrows of feathery grasses
+grow between the long, hot, sandy stretches of the wheel-ruts.
+
+The first goldenrod gleams among the loose stones at the foot
+of the alder bushes.  Whole families of pale butterflies,
+just out of their long sleep, perch on the brilliant stalks
+and tilter up and down in the sunshine.
+
+Straggling processions of wooly brown caterpillars wend their way
+in the short grass by the wayside, where the wild carrot and the purple
+bull-thistle are coming into bloom.
+
+The song of birds is seldom heard, and the blueberry plains
+are given over to silence save for the buzzing of gorged flies,
+the humming of bees, and the chirping of crickets that stir
+the drowsy air when the summer begins to wane.
+
+It is so still that the shuffle-shuffle of a footstep can be heard
+in the distance, the tinkle of a tin pail swinging musically to and fro,
+the swish of an alder switch cropping the heads of the roadside weeds.
+All at once a voice breaks the stillness.  Is it a child's, a woman's,
+or a man's? Neither yet all three.
+
+
+"I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,
+An' hear the whis-sle of the jol-ly
+--swain."
+
+Everybody knows the song, and everybody knows the cracked voice.
+The master of this bit of silent wilderness is coming home:
+it is Tom o' the blueb'ry plains.
+
+He is more than common tall, with a sandy beard,
+and a mop of tangled hair straggling beneath his torn straw hat.
+A square of wet calico drips from under the back of the hat.
+His gingham shirt is open at the throat, showing his tanned neck
+and chest.  Warm as it is, he wears portions of at least three coats
+on his back.  His high boots, split in foot and leg, are mended
+and spliced and laced and tied on with bits of shingle rope.
+He carries a small tin pail of molasses.  It has a bail of rope,
+and a battered cover with a knob of sticky newspaper.
+Over one shoulder, suspended on a crooked branch, hangs a
+bundle of basket stuff,--split willow withes and the like;
+over the other swings a decrepit, bottomless, three-legged chair.
+
+
+I call him the master of the plains, but in faith he had no legal
+claim to the title.  If he owned a habitation or had established a home
+on any spot in the universe, it was because no man envied him what he took;
+for Tom was one of God's fools, a foot-loose pilgrim in this world
+of ours, a poor addle-pated, simple-minded, harmless creature,--
+in village parlance, a "softy."
+
+Mother or father, sister or brother, he had none, nor ever had,
+so far as any one knew; but how should people who had to work from sun-up
+to candlelight to get the better of the climate have leisure to discover
+whether or no Blueb'ry Tom had any kin?
+
+At some period in an almost forgotten past there
+had been a house on Tom's particular patch of the plains.
+It had long since tumbled into ruins and served for fire-wood
+and even the chimney bricks had disappeared one by one,
+as the monotonous seasons came and went.
+
+Tom had settled himself in an old tool-shop, corn-house, or rude
+out-building of some sort that had belonged to the ruined cottage.
+Here he had set up his house-hold gods; and since no one else
+had ever wanted a home in this dreary tangle of berry bushes,
+where the only shade came from stunted pines that flung shriveled
+arms to the sky and dropped dead cones to the sterile earth,
+here he remained unmolested.
+
+In the lower part of the hut he kept his basket stuff
+and his collection of two-legged and three-legged chairs.
+In the course of evolution they never sprouted another leg,
+those chairs; as they were given to him, so they remained.
+The upper floor served for his living-room, and was reached
+by a ladder from the ground, for there was no stairway inside.
+
+No one had ever been in the little upper chamber.
+When a passer-by chanced to be-think him that Tom's
+hermitage was close at hand, he sometimes turned in his
+team by a certain clump of white birches and drove nearer
+to the house, intending to remind Tom that there was a chair
+to willow-bottom the next time he came to the village.
+But at the noise of the wheels Tom drew in his ladder;
+and when the visitor alighted and came within sight,
+it was to find the inhospitable host standing in the opening
+of the second-story window, a quaint figure framed
+in green branches, the ladder behind him, and on his face
+a kind of impenetrable dignity, as he shook his head and said,
+"Tom ain't ter hum; Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle."
+
+There was something impressive about his way of repelling callers;
+it was as effectual as a door slammed in the face, and yet there
+was a sort of mendacious courtesy about it.  No one ever cared
+to go further; and indeed there was no mystery to tempt the curious,
+and no spoil to attract the mischievous or the malicious.
+Any one could see, without entering, the straw bed in the far corner,
+the beams piled deep with red and white oak acorns, the strings
+of dried apples and bunches of everlastings hanging from the rafters,
+and the half-finished baskets filled with blown bird's-eggs,
+pine cones, and pebbles.
+
+No home in the village was better loved than Tom's
+retreat in the blueberry plains.  Whenever he approached it,
+after a long day's tramp, when he caught the first sight
+of the white birches that marked the gateway to his estate
+and showed him where to turn off the public road into his own
+private grounds, he smiled a broader smile than usual,
+and broke into his well-known song:
+
+
+"I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,
+An' hear the whis-sle of the jol-ly
+--swain."
+
+Poor Tom could never catch the last note.  He had sung
+the song for more than forty years, but the memory of this
+tone was so blurred, and his cherished ideal of it so high
+(or so low, rather), that he never managed to reach it.
+
+Oh, if only summer were eternal!  Who could wish a better
+supper than ripe berries and molasses?  Nor was there need
+of sleeping under roof nor of lighting candles to grope his way
+to pallet of straw, when he might have the blue vault of heaven
+arching over him, and all God's stars for lamps, and for a bed
+a horse blanket stretched over an elastic couch of pine needles.
+There were two gaunt pines that had been dropping their polished
+spills for centuries, perhaps silently adding, year by year,
+another layer of aromatic springiness to poor Tom's bed.
+Flinging his tired body on this grateful couch, burying his head
+in the crushed sweet fern of his pillow with one deep-drawn
+sigh of pleasure,--there, haunted by no past and harassed
+by no future, slept God's fool as sweetly as a child.
+
+Yes, if only summer were eternal, and youth as well!
+
+But when the blueberries had ripened summer after summer,
+and the gaunt pine-trees had gone on for many years weaving poor
+Tom's mattress, there came a change in the aspect of things.
+He still made his way to the village, seeking chairs to mend;
+but he was even more unkempt than of old, his tall figure was bent,
+and his fingers trembled as he wove the willow strands in and out,
+and over and under.
+
+There was little work to do, moreover, for the village had altogether
+retired from business, and was no longer in competition with its neighbors:
+the dam was torn away, the sawmills were pulled down; husbands and fathers
+were laid in the churchyard, sons and brothers and lovers had gone West, and
+mothers and widows and spinsters stayed on, each in her quiet house alone.
+"'T ain't no hardship when you get used to it," said the Widow Buzzell.
+"Land sakes! a lantern 's 's good 's a man any time, if you only think so,
+'n' 't ain't half so much trouble to keep it filled up!"
+
+But Tom still sold a basket occasionally, and the children
+always gathered about him for the sake of hearing him repeat
+his well-worn formula,--Tom allers puts two handles on baskets:
+one to take 'em up by, one to set 'em down by."
+This was said with a beaming smile and a wise shake of the head,
+as if he were announcing a great discovery to an expectant world.
+And then he would lay down his burden of basket stuff,
+and, sitting under an apple-tree in somebody's side yard,
+begin his task of willow-bottoming an old chair.  It was a pretty
+sight enough, if one could keep back the tears,--the kindly,
+simple fellow with the circle of children about his knees.
+Never a village fool without a troop of babies at his heels.
+They love him, too, till we teach them to mock.
+
+When he was younger, he would sing,
+
+"Rock-a-by, baby, on the treetop,"
+
+and dance the while, swinging his unfinished basket to and fro for a cradle.
+He was too stiff in the joints for dancing nowadays, but he still sang
+the "bloomin' gy-ar-ding" when ever they asked him, particularly if
+some apple-cheeked little maid would say, "Please, Tom!"
+He always laughed then, and, patting the child's hand, said, "Pooty gal,--
+got eyes!"  The youngsters dance with glee at this meaningless phrase,
+just as their mothers had danced years before when it was said to them.
+
+Summer waned.  In the moist places the gentian uncurled
+its blue fringes; purple asters and gay Joe Pye waved their
+colors by the roadside; tall primroses put their yellow
+bonnets on, and peeped over the brooks to see themselves;
+and the dusty pods of the milkweed were bursting with
+their silky fluffs, the spinning of the long summer.
+Autumn began to paint the maples red and the elms yellow,
+for the early days of September brought a frost.
+Some one remarked at the village store that old Blueb'ry Tom
+must not be suffered to stay on the plains another winter,
+now that he was getting so feeble,--not if the "_se_leckmen" had
+to root him out and take him to the poor-farm. He would surely
+starve or freeze, and his death would be laid at their door.
+
+Tom was interviewed.  Persuasion, logic, sharp words, all failed
+to move him one jot or tittle.  He stood in his castle door,
+with the ladder behind him, smiling, always smiling
+(none but the fool smiles always, nor always weeps), and saying
+to all visitors, "Tom ain't ter hum; Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle;
+Tom don' want to go to the poor-farm."
+
+November came in surly.
+
+The cheerful stir and bustle of the harvest were over, the corn
+was shocked, the apples and pumpkins were gathered into barns.
+The problem of Tom's future was finally laid before the selectmen;
+and since the poor fellow's mild obstinancy had defeated all attempts
+to conquer it, the sheriff took the matter in hand.
+
+The blueberry plains looked bleak and bare enough now.  It had rained
+incessantly for days, growing ever colder and colder as it rained.
+The sun came out at last, but it shone in a wintry sort of way,--
+like a duty smile,--as if light, not heat, were its object.
+A keen wind blew the dead leaves hither and thither in a wild dance
+that had no merriment in it.  A blackbird flew under an old barrel
+by the wayside, and, ruffling himself into a ball, remarked despondently
+that feathers were no sort of protection in this kind of climate.
+A snowbird, flying by, glanced in at the barrel, and observed that
+anybody who minded a little breeze like that had better join the woodcocks,
+who were leaving for the South by the night express.
+
+The blueberry bushes were stripped bare of green.  The stunted
+pines and sombre hemlocks looked in tone with the landscape now;
+where all was dreary they did not seem amiss.
+
+"Je-whilikins!" exclaimed the sheriff as he drew up his coat collar.
+"A madhouse is the place for the man who wants to live ou'doors in
+the winter time; the poor-farm is too good for him."
+
+But Tom was used to privation, and even to suffering.
+"Ou'doors" was the only home he knew, and with all its rigors he loved it.
+He looked over the barren plains, knowing, in a dull sort of way,
+that they would shortly be covered with snow; but he had three coats,
+two of them with sleeves, and the crunch-crunch of the snow
+under his tread was music to his ears.  Then, too, there were
+a few hospitable firesides where he could always warm himself;
+and the winter would soon be over, the birds would come again,--
+new birds, singing the old songs,--the sap would mount in the trees,
+the buds swell on the blueberry bushes, and the young ivory
+leaves push their ruddy tips through the softening ground.
+The plains were fatherland and mother-country, home and kindred, to Tom.
+He loved the earth that nourished him, and he saw through all
+the seeming death in nature the eternal miracle of the resurrection.
+To him winter was never cruel.  He looked underneath her white mantle,
+saw the infant spring hidden in her warm bosom, and was content to wait.
+Content to wait?  Content to starve, content to freeze, if only
+he need not be carried into captivity.
+
+The poor-farm was not a bad place, either, if only Tom
+had been a reasonable being.  To be sure, when Hannah Sophia
+Palmer asked old Mrs. Pinkham how she liked it, she answered,
+with a patient sigh, that "her 'n' Mr. Pinkham hed lived
+there goin' on nine year, workin' their fingers to the bone
+'most, 'n' yet they hadn't been able to lay up a cent!"
+If this peculiarity of administration was its worst feature,
+it was certainly one that would have had no terrors for Tom o'
+the blueb'ry plains.  Terrors of some sort, nevertheless,
+the poor-farm had for him; and when the sheriff's party
+turned in by the clump of white birches and approached
+the cabin, they found that fear had made the simple wise.
+Tom had provished the little upper chamber, and, in place
+of the piece of sacking that usually served him for a door
+in winter, he had woven a defense of willow.  In fine,
+he had taken all his basket stuff, and, treating the opening
+through which he entered and left his home precisely as
+if it were a bottomless chair, he had filled it in solidly,
+weaving to and fro, by night as well as by day, till he felt,
+poor fool, as safely intrenched as if he were in the heart
+of a fortress.
+
+The sheriff tied his horse to a tree, and Rube Hobson and Pitt Packard
+got out of the double wagon.  Two men laughed when they saw the pathetic
+defense, but the other shut his lips together and caught his breath.
+(He had been born on a poor-farm, but no one knew it at Pleasant River.)
+They called Tom's name repeatedly, but no other sound broke the silence
+of the plains save the rustling of the wind among the dead leaves.
+
+"Numb-head!" muttered the sheriff, pounding on the side
+of the cabin with his whip-stock. "Come out and show yourself!
+We know you're in there, and it's no use hiding!"
+
+At last in response to a deafening blow from Rube Hobson's hard fist,
+there came the answering note of a weak despairing voice.
+
+"Tom ain't ter hum," it said; "Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle."
+
+"That's all right!" guffawed the men; "but you've got to go some more,
+and go a diff'rent way.  It ain't no use fer you to hold back; we've got
+a ladder, and by Jiminy! you go with us this time!"
+
+The ladder was put against the side of the hut, and Pitt Packard
+climbed up, took his jack-knife, slit the woven door from top to bottom,
+and turned back the flap.
+
+The men could see the inside of the chamber now.  They were humorous
+persons who could strain a joke to the snapping point, but they felt,
+at last, that there was nothing especially amusing in the situation.
+Tom was huddled in a heap on the straw bed in the far corner.
+The vacant smile had fled from his face, and he looked, for the first
+time in his life, quite distraught.
+
+"Come along, Tom," said the sheriff  kindly;
+"we 're going to take you where you can sleep in a bed,
+and have three meals a day."
+
+"I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,"
+
+sang Tom quaveringly, as he hid his head in a paroxysm of fear.
+
+"Well, there ain't no bloomin' gardings to walk in jest now,
+so come along and be peaceable."
+
+"Tom don' want to go to the poor-farm," he wailed piteously.
+
+But there was no alternative.  They dragged him off the bed
+and down the ladder as gently as possible; then Rube Hobson held him
+on the back seat of the wagon, while the sheriff unhitched the horse.
+As they were on the point of starting, the captive began to wail
+and struggle more than ever, the burden of his plaint being a wild
+and tremulous plea for his pail of molasses.
+
+"Dry up, old softy, or I'll put the buggy robe over your head!"
+muttered Rube Hobson, who had not had much patience when he started
+on the trip, and had lost it all by this time.
+
+"By thunder! he shall hev his molasses, if he thinks he wants it!"
+said Pitt Packard, and he ran up the ladder and brought it down,
+comforting the shivering creature thus, for he lapsed into a submissive
+silence that lasted until the unwelcome journey was over.
+
+Tom remained at the poorhouse precisely twelve hours.
+It did not enter the minds of the authorities that any one so fortunate
+as to be admitted into that happy haven would decline to stay there.
+The unwilling guest disappeared early on the morrow of his arrival, and,
+after some search, they followed him to the old spot.  He had climbed
+into his beloved retreat, and, having learned nothing from experience,
+had mended the willow door as best he could, and laid him down in peace.
+They dragged him out again, and this time more impatiently;
+for it was exasperating to see a man (even if he were a fool)
+fight against a bed and three meals a day.
+
+The second attempt was little more successful than the first.
+As a place of residence, the poor-farm did not seem any more desirable
+or attractive on near acquaintance than it did at long range.
+Tom remained a week, because he was kept in close confinement;
+but when they judged that he was weaned from his old home,
+they loosed his bonds, and--back to the plains he sped, like an arrow
+shot from the bow, or like a bit of iron leaping to the magnet.
+
+What should be done with him?
+
+Public opinion was divided.  Some people declared that
+the village had done its duty, and if the "dog-goned lunk-head"
+wanted to starve and freeze, it was his funeral, not theirs.
+Others thought that the community had no resource but to
+bear the responsibility of its irresponsible children,
+however troublesome they might be.  There was entire
+unanimity of view so far as the main issues were concerned.
+It was agreed that nobody at the poor-farm had leisure to stand
+guard over Tom night and day, and that the sheriff could
+not be expected to spend his time forcing him out of his hut
+on the blueberry plains.
+
+There was but one more expedient to be tried, a very simple
+and ingenious but radical and comprehensive one, which, in Rube
+Hobson's opinion, would strike at the root of the matter.
+
+Tom had fled from captivity for the third time.
+
+He had stolen out at daybreak, and, by an unexpected stroke
+of fortune, the molasses pail was hanging on a nail by the shed door.
+The remains of a battered old bushel basket lay on the wood-pile: bottom
+it had none, nor handles; rotundity of side had long since disappeared,
+and none but its maker would have known it for a basket.  Tom caught it
+up in his flight, and, seizing the first crooked stick that offered,
+he slung the dear familiar burden over his shoulder and started off
+on a jog-trot.
+
+Heaven, how happy he was!  It was the rosy dawn of an Indian summer day,--
+a warm jewel of a day, dropped into the bleak world of yesterday without
+a hint of beneficent intention; one of those enchanting weather surprises
+with which Dame Nature reconciles us to her stern New England rule.
+
+The joy that comes of freedom, and the freedom
+that comes of joy, unbent the old man's stiffened joints.
+He renewed his youth at every mile.  He ran like a lapwing.
+When his feet first struck the sandy soil of the plains, he broke
+into old song of the "bloom-in' gy-ar-ding" and the "jolly swain,"
+and in the marvelous mental and spiritual exhilaration
+born of the supreme moment he almost grasped that impossible
+last note.  His heard could hardly hold its burden of rapture
+when he caught the well-known gleam of the white birches.
+He turned into the familiar path, boy's blood thumping in old
+man's veins.  The past week had been a dreadful dream.
+A few steps more and he would be within sight,
+within touch of home,--home at last!  No--what was wrong?
+He must have gone beyond it, in his reckless haste!
+Strange that he could have forgotten the beloved spot!
+Can lover mistake the way to sweetheart's window?
+Can child lose the path to mother's knee?
+
+He turned,--ran hither and thither, like one distraught.
+A nameless dread flitted through his dull mind, chilling his
+warm blood, paralyzing the activity of the moment before.
+At last, with a sob like that of a frightened child
+who flies from some imagined evil lurking in darkness,
+he darted back to the white birches and started anew.
+This time he trusted to blind instinct; his feet knew the path,
+and, left to themselves, they took him through the tangle
+of dry bushes straight to his--
+
+It had vanished!
+
+Nothing but ashes remained to mark the spot,--nothing but ashes!
+And these, ere many days, the autumn winds would scatter,
+and the leafless branches on which they fell would shake them
+off lightly, never dreaming that they hid the soul of a home.
+Nothing but ashes!
+
+Poor Tom o' the blueb'ry plains!
+
+
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+THE NOONING TREE.
+
+
+The giant elm stood in the centre of the squire's fair green meadows,
+and was known to all the country round about as the "Bean ellum."
+The other trees had seemingly retired to a respectful distance,
+as if they were not worthy of closer intimacy; and so it stood alone,
+king of the meadow, monarch of the village.
+
+It shot from the ground for a space, straight, strong, and superb,
+and then bust into nine splendid branches, each a tree in itself,
+all growing symmetrically from the parent trunk, and casting
+a grateful shadow under which all the inhabitants of the tiny
+village might have gathered.
+
+It was not alone its size, its beauty, its symmetry, its density
+of foliage, that made it the glory of the neighborhood, but the low
+grown of its branches and the extra-ordinary breadth of its shade.
+Passers-by from the adjacent towns were wont to hitch their teams
+by the wayside, crawl through the stump fence and walk
+across the fields, for a nearer view of its magnificence.
+One man, indeed, was known to drive by the tree every day during
+the summer, and lift his hat to it, respectfully, each time he passed;
+but he was a poet and his intellect was not greatly esteemed
+in the village.
+
+The elm was almost as beautiful in one season as in another.
+In the spring it rose from moist fields and mellow ploughed ground,
+its tiny brown leaf buds bursting with pride at the thought
+of the loveliness coiled up inside.  In summer it stood
+in the midst of a waving garden of buttercups and whiteweed,
+a towering mass of verdant leafage, a shelter from the sun
+and a refuge from the storm; a cool, splendid, hospitable dome,
+under which the weary farmer might fling himself, and gaze
+upward as into the heights and depths of an emerald heaven.
+As for the birds, they made it a fashionable summer resort,
+the most commodious and attractive in the whole country; with no
+limit to the accommodations for those of a gregarious turn of mind,
+liking the advantages of select society combined with country air.
+In the autumn it held its own; for when the other elms changed
+their green to duller tints, the nooning tree put on
+a gown of yellow, and stood out against the far background
+of sombre pine woods a brilliant mass of gold and brown.
+In winter, when there was no longer dun of upturned sod,
+nor waving daisy gardens, nor ruddy autumn grasses,
+it rose above the dazzling snow crust, lifting its bare,
+shapely branches in sober elegance and dignity, and seeming
+to say, "Do not pity me; I have been, and, please God,
+I shall be!"
+
+Whenever the weather was sufficiently mild, it was used as a "nooning"
+tree by all the men at work in the surrounding fields; but it was in haying
+time that it became the favorite lunching and "bangeing" place for Squire
+Bean's hands and those of Miss Vilda Cummins, who owned the adjoining farm.
+The men congregated under the spreading branches at twelve o' the clock,
+and spent the noon hour there, eating and "swapping" stories, as they
+were doing to-day.
+
+Each had a tin pail, and each consumed a quantity of "flour food"
+that kept the housewives busy at the cook stove from morning till night.
+A glance at Pitt Packard's luncheon, for instance, might suffice
+as an illustration, for, as Jabe Slocum said, "Pitt took after
+both his parents; one et a good deal, 'n' the other a good while."
+His pail contained four doughnuts, a quarter section of pie,
+six buttermilk biscuits, six ginger cookies, a baked cup custard,
+and a quart of cold coffee.  This quantity was a trifle unusual,
+but every man in the group was lined throughout with pie,
+cemented with buttermilk bread, and riveted with doughnuts.
+
+Jabe Slocum and Brad Gibson lay extended slouchingly,
+their cowhide boots turned up to the sky; Dave Milliken,
+Steve Webster, and the others leaned back against the tree-trunk,
+smoking clay pipes, or hugging their knees and chewing blades
+of grass reflectively.
+
+One man sat apart from the rest, gloomily puffing rings of smoke
+into the air.  After a while he lay down in the grass with his head
+buried in his hat, sleeping to all appearances, while the others talked
+and laughed; for he had no stories, though he put in an absent-minded word
+or two when he was directly addressed.  This was the man from Tennessee,
+Matt Henderson, dubbed "Dixie" for short.  He was a giant fellow,--
+a "great gormin' critter," Samantha Ann Milliken called him;
+but if he had held up his head and straightened his broad shoulders,
+he would have been thought a man of splendid presence.
+
+He seemed a being from another sphere instead of from another
+section of the country.  It was not alone the olive tint of the skin,
+the mass of wavy dark hair tossed back from a high forehead,
+the sombre eyes, and the sad mouth,--a mouth that had never grown
+into laughing curves through telling Yankee jokes,--it was not these
+that gave him what the boys called a "kind of a downcasted look."
+The man from Tennessee had something more than a melancholy temperament;
+he had, or physiognomy was a lie, a sorrow tugging at his heart.
+
+"I'm goin' to doze a spell," drawled Jabe Slocum, pulling his
+straw hat over his eyes.  "I've got to renew my strength like
+the eagle's, 'f I'm goin' to walk to the circus this afternoon.
+Wake me up, boys, when you think I'd ought to sling that scythe
+some more, for if I hev it on my mind I can't git a wink o' sleep."
+
+This was apparently a witticism; at any rate, it elicited
+roars of laughter.
+
+"It's one of Jabe's useless days; he takes 'em from his
+great-aunt Lyddy," said David Milliken.
+
+"You jest dry up, Dave.  Ef it took me as long to git
+to workin' as it did you to git a wife, I bate this hay wouldn't
+git mowed down to crack o' doom.  Gorry! ain't this a tree!
+I tell you, the sun 'n' the airth, the dew 'n' the showers,
+'n' the Lord God o' creation jest took holt 'n' worked together
+on this tree, 'n' no mistake!"
+
+"You're right, Jabe."  (This from Steve Webster, who was absently
+cutting a _D_ in the bark.  He was always cutting _D_'s these days.)
+"This ellum can't be beat in the State o' Maine, nor no other state.
+My brother that lives in California says that the big redwoods,
+big as they air, don't throw no sech shade, nor ain't so han'some,
+'specially in the fall o' the year, as our State o' Maine trees;
+'assiduous trees,' he called 'em."
+
+"_Assidyus_ trees?  Why don't you talk United States while
+you're about it, 'n' not fire yer long-range words round here?
+_Assidyus!_ What does it mean, anyhow?"
+
+"Can't prove it by me.  That's what he called 'em, 'n'
+I never forgot it."
+
+"Assidyus--assidyus--it don't sound as if it meant nothing', to me."
+
+"Assiduous means 'busy,'" said the man from Tennessee,
+who had suddenly waked from a brown study, and dropped
+off into another as soon as he had given the definition.
+
+"Busy, does it?  Wall, I guess we ain't no better off
+now 'n we ever was.  One tree's 'bout 's busy as another,
+as fur 's I can see."
+
+"Wall, there is kind of a meanin' in it to me, but it'sturrible far
+fetched," remarked Jabe Slocum, rather sleepily.
+"You see, our ellums and maples 'n' all them trees spends part o'
+the year in buddin' 'n' gittin' out their leaves 'n' hangin'
+em all over the branches; 'n' then, no sooner air they full grown
+than they hev to begin colorin' of 'em red or yeller or brown,
+'n' then shakin' 'em off; 'n' this is all extry, you might say,
+to their every-day chores o' growin' 'n' cirkerlatin' sap, 'n' spreadin'
+'n' thickenin' 'n' shovin' out limbs, 'n' one thing 'n' 'nother;
+'n' it stan's to reason that the first 'n' hemlocks 'n' them
+California redwoods, that keeps their clo'es on right through the year,
+can't be so busy as them that keeps a-dressin' 'n' ondressin'
+all the time."
+
+"I guess you're 'bout right," allowed Steve,
+"but I shouldn't never 'a' thought of it in the world.
+What yer takin' out o' that bottle, Jabe?  I thought you
+was a temperance man."
+
+"I guess he 's like the feller over to Shandagee schoolhouse,
+that said he was in favor o' the law, but agin its enforcement!"
+laughed Pitt Packard.
+
+"I ain't breakin' no law; this is yarb bitters," Jabe answered,
+with a pull at the bottle.
+
+"It's to cirkerlate his blood," said Ob Tarbox;
+"he's too dog-goned lazy to cirkerlate it himself."
+
+"I'm takin' it fer what ails me," said Jabe oracularly;
+"the heart knoweth its own bitterness, 'n' it 's a wise child
+that knows its own complaints 'thout goin' to a doctor."
+
+"Ain't yer scared fer fear it'll start yer growth, Laigs?" asked little
+Brad Gibson, looking at Jabe's tremendous length of limb and foot.
+"Say, how do yer git them feet o' yourn uphill?  Do yer start one ahead,
+'n' side-track the other?"
+
+The tree rang with the laughter evoked by this sally,
+but the man from Tennessee never smiled.
+
+Jabe Slocum's imperturbable good humor was not shaken in the very least
+by these personal remarks.  "If I thought 't was a good growin'
+medicine, I'd recommend it to your folks, Brad," he replied cheerfully.
+"Your mother says you boys air all so short that when you're diggin'
+potatoes, yer can't see her shake the dinner rag 'thout gittin'
+up 'n' standing on the potato hills!  If I was a sinikitin feller like you,
+I wouldn't hector folks that had made out to grow some."
+
+"Speakin' o' growin'," said Steve Webster, "who do you guess
+I seen in Boston, when I was workin' there?  That tall Swatkins
+girl from the Duck Pond, the one that married Dan Robinson.
+It was one Sunday, in the Catholic meetin'-house. I'd allers wanted
+to go to a Catholic meetin', an' I declare it's about the solemnest
+one there is.  I mistrusted I was goin' to everlastin'ly giggle,
+but I tell yer I was the awedest cutter yer ever see.
+But anyway, the Swatkins girl--or Mis' Robinson, she is now--
+was there as large as life in the next pew to me, jabberin'
+Latin, pawin' beads, gettin' up 'n' kneelin' down, 'n' crossin'
+herself north, south, east, 'n' west, with the best of 'em.  Poor Dan!
+'Grinnin' Dan,' we used to call him.  Well, he don't grin nowadays.
+He never was good for much, but he 's hed more 'n his comeuppance!"
+
+"Why, what 's the matter with him?  Can't he git work in Boston?"
+
+"Matter? Why, his wife, that I see makin' believe be so
+dreadful pious in the Catholic meetin', she 's carried on wuss 'n
+the Old Driver for two years, 'n' now she 's up 'n' left him,--
+gone with a han'somer man."
+
+Down on Steve Webster's hand came Jabe Slocum's immense
+paw with a grasp that made him cringe.
+
+"What the"--began Steve, when the man from Tennessee took up
+his scythe and slouched away from the group by the tree.
+
+"Didn't yer know no better 'n that, yer thunderin' fool?  Can't yer
+see a hole in a grindstun 'thout it's hung on yer nose?"
+
+"What hev I done?" asked Steve, as if dumfounded.
+
+"Done? Where 've yer ben, that yer don't know Dixie's wife
+'s left him?"
+
+"Where 've I ben?  Hain't I ben workin' in Boston fer
+a year; 'n' since I come home last week, hain't I ben tendin'
+sick folks, so 't I couldn't git outside the dooryard?
+I never seen the man in my life till yesterday, in the field,
+'n' I thought he was one o' them dark-skinned Frenchies from
+Guildford that hed come up here fer hayin'."
+
+"Mebbe I spoke too sharp," said Jabe apologetically;
+"but we 've ben scared to talk wives, or even women folks,
+fer a month o' Sundays, fer fear Dixie 'd up 'n' tumble on his scythe,
+or do somethin' crazy.  You see it's this way (I'd ruther
+talk than work; 'n' we ain't workin' by time to-day, anyway,
+on account of the circus comin'): 'Bout a year 'n' a half ago,
+this tall, han'some feller turned up here in Pleasant River.
+He inhailed from down South somewheres, but he didn't
+like his work there, 'n' drifted to New York, 'n' then
+to Boston; 'n' then he remembered his mother was a State o'
+Maine woman, 'n' he come here to see how he liked.
+We didn't take no stock in him at first,--we never hed one o'
+that nigger-tradin' secedin' lot in amongst us,--but he was
+pleasant spoken 'n' a square, all-round feller, 'n' didn't
+git off any secesh nonsense, 'n' it ended in our likin'
+him first-rate. Wall, he got work in the cannin' fact'ry over on
+the Butterfield road, 'n' then he fell in with the Maddoxes.
+You 've hearn tell of 'em; they're relation to Pitt here."
+
+
+"I wouldn't own 'em if I met 'em on Judgement Bench!"
+exclaimed Pitt Packard hotly.  "My stepfather's second wife married Mis'
+Maddox's first husband after he got divorced from her, 'n' that's
+all there is to it; they ain't no bloody-kin o' mine, 'n' I don't
+call 'em relation."
+
+"Wall, Pitt's relations or not, they're all wuss 'n the Old Driver,
+as yer said 'bout Dan Robinson's wife.  Dixie went to board there.
+Mis Maddox was all out o' husbands jest then,--she 'd jest
+disposed of her fourth, somehow or 'nother; she always hed
+a plenty 'n' to spare, though there's lots o' likely women
+folks round here that never hed one chance, let alone four.
+Her daughter Fidelity was a chip o' the old block.  Her father
+hed named her Fidelity after his mother, when she wa'n't nothin'
+but a two-days-old baby, 'n' he didn't know how she was goin' to turn out;
+if he 'd 'a' waited two months, I believe I could 'a' told him.
+_In_fidelity would 'a' ben a mighty sight more 'propriate; but either
+of 'em is too long fer a name, so they got to callin' her Fiddy.
+Wall, Fiddy didn't waste no time; she was nigh onto eighteen years
+old when Dixie went there to board, 'n' she begun huneyfuglin'
+him's soon as ever she set eyes on him.  Folks warned him,
+but 't wa'n't no use; he was kind o' bewitched with her from the first.
+She wa'n't so han'some, neither.  Blamed 'f I know how they do it;
+let 'em alone, 'f yer know when yer 're well off, 's my motter.
+She was red-headed, but her hair become her somehow when she curled
+'n' frizzed it over a karosene lamp, 'n' then wound it round 'n'
+round her head like ropes o' carnelian.  She hedn't any particular
+kind of a nose nor mouth nor eyes, but gorry! when she looked at yer,
+yer felt kind as if yer was turnin' to putty inside."
+
+"I know what yer mean," said Steve interestedly.
+
+"She hed a figger jest like them fashion-paper pictures you
+'ve seen, an' the very day any new styles come to Boston Fiddy
+Maddox would hev 'em before sundown; the biggest bustles 'n'
+the highest hats 'n' the tightest skirts 'n' the longest tails
+to 'em; she'd git 'em somehow, anyhow!  Dixie wa'n't out o'
+money when he come here, an' a spell afterwards there was
+more 'n a thousand dollars fell to him from his father's
+folks down South.  Well, Fiddy made that fly, I tell you!
+Dixie bought a top buggy 'n' a sorrel hoss, 'n' they was on the road
+most o' the time when he wa'n't to work; 'n' when he was,
+she 'd go with Lem Simmons, 'n' Dixie none the wiser.
+Mis Maddox was lookin' up a new husband jest then, so 't she
+didn't interfere"--
+
+"She was the same kind o' goods, anyhow," interpolated Ob Tarbox.
+
+"Yes, she was one of them women folks that air so light-minded
+you can't anchor 'em down with a sewin'-machine, nor a dishpan,
+nor a husband 'n' young ones, nor no namable kind of a thing;
+the least wind blows 'em here 'n' blows 'em there, like dandelion puffs.
+As time went on, the widder got herself a beau now 'n' then;
+but as fast as she hooked 'em, Fiddy up 'n' took 'em away from her.
+You see she 'd gethered in most of her husbands afore Fiddy was old
+enough to hev her finger in the pie; but she cut her eye-teeth early,
+Fiddy did, 'n' there wa'n't no kind of a feller come to set up
+with the widder but she 'd everlastin'ly grab him, if she hed
+any use fer him, 'n' then there 'd be Hail Columby, I tell yer.
+But Dixie, he was 's blind 's a bat 'n' deef 's a post.  He could
+n't see nothin' but Fiddy, 'n' he couldn't see her very plain."
+
+"He hed warnin's enough," put in Pitt Packard, though Jabe Slocum
+never needed any assistance in spinning a yarn.
+
+"Warnin's! I should think he hed.  The Seventh Day Baptist
+minister went so fur as to preach at him.  'The Apostle Paul gin heed,'
+was the text.  'Why did he gin heed?' says he.  'Because he heerd.
+If he hadn't 'a' heerd, he couldn't 'a' gin heed, 'n' 't wouldn't 'a' done
+him no good to 'a' heerd 'thout he gin heed!'  Wall, it helped consid'ble
+many in the congregation, 'specially them that was in the habit of hearin'
+'n' heedin', but it rolled right off Dixie like water off a duck's back.
+He 'n' Fiddy was seen over to the ballin' alley to Wareham next day,
+'n' they didn't come back for a week."
+
+"'He gin her his hand,
+And he made her his own,'"
+
+sang little Brad Gibson.
+
+"He hed gin her his hand, but no minister nor
+trial-jestice nor eighteen-carat ring nor stificate could 'a'
+made Fiddy Maddox anybody's own 'ceptin' the devil's, an'
+he wouldn't 'a' married her; she'd 'a' ben too near kin.
+We'd never 'spicioned she 'd git 's fur 's marryin' anybody, 'n' she
+only married Dixie 'cause he told her he 'd take her to the
+Wareham House to dinner, 'n' to the County Fair afterwards;
+if any other feller hed offered to take her to supper,
+'n' the theatre on top o' that, she 'd 'a' married him instid."
+
+"How 'd the old woman take it?" asked Steve.
+
+"She disowned her daughter _punctilio:_ in the first place,
+fer runnin' away 'stid o' hevin' a church weddin'; 'n' second place,
+fer marryin' a pauper (that was what she called him; 'n' it was true,
+for they 'd spent every cent he hed); 'n' third place, fer alienatin'
+the 'fections of a travelin' baker-man she hed her eye on fer herself.
+He was a kind of a flour-food peddler, that used to drive a cart round
+by Hard Scrabble, Moderation, 'n' Scratch Corner way.  Mis' Maddox used
+to buy all her baked victuals of him, 'specially after she found
+out he was a widower beginnin' to take notice.  His cart used
+to stand at her door so long everybody on the rout would complain o'
+stale bread.  But bime bye Fiddy begun to set at her winder when
+he druv up, 'n' bime bye she pinned a blue ribbon in her collar.
+When she done that, Mis' Maddox alles hed to take a back seat.
+The boys used to call it a danger signal.  It kind o' drawed yer
+'tention to p'ints 'bout her chin 'n' mouth 'n' neck, 'n' one thing
+'n' 'nother, in a way that was cal'lated to snarl up the thoughts o'
+perfessors o' religion 'n' turn 'em earthways.  There was a spell
+I hed to say, '_Remember_ _Rhapseny!_ _Remember_ _Rhapseny!_'
+over to myself whenever Fiddy put on her blue ribbons.  Wall, as I say,
+Fiddy set at the winder, the baker-man seen the blue ribbons,
+'n' Mis' Maddox's cake was dough.  She put on a red ribbon;
+but land! her neck looked 's if somebody 'd gone over it with a harrer!
+Then she stomped round 'n' slat the dish-rag, but 't wa'n't no use.
+'Gracious, mother,' says Fiddy, 'I don't do nothin' but set at
+the winder.  The sun shines for all.'  'You're right it does,'
+says Mis' Maddox, ''n' that's jest what I complain of.
+I'd like to get a change to shine on something myself.'
+
+"But the baker-man kep' on comin', though when he got
+to the Maddoxes' doorsteps he couldn't make change for a
+quarter nor tell pie from bread; an' sure 's you're born,
+the very day Fiddy went away to be married to Dixie, that mornin'
+she drawed that everlastin' numhead of a flour-food peddler
+out into the orchard, 'n' cut off a lock o' her hair,
+'n' tied it up with a piece o' her blue ribbon, 'n' give it
+to him; an' old Mis' Bascom says, when he went past her house
+he was gazin' at it 'n' kissin' of it, 'n' his horse meanderin'
+on one side the road 'n' the other, 'n' the door o' the cart
+open 'n' slammin' to 'n' fro, 'n' ginger cookies spillin'
+out all over the lot.  He come back to the Maddoxes next morning'
+('t wa'n't his day, but his hoss couldn't pull one way
+when Fiddy's ribbon was pullin' t'other); an' when he found
+out she 'd gone with Dixie, he cussed 'n' stomped 'n' took
+on like a loontic; an' when Mis' Maddox hinted she was ready
+to heal the wownds Fiddy 'd inflicted, he stomped 'n' cussed
+wuss 'n' ever, 'n' the neighbors say he called her a hombly
+old trollop, an' fired the bread loaves all over the dooryard,
+he was so crazy at bein' cheated.
+
+"Wall, to go back to Dixie--I'll be comin' right along, boys."
+(This to Brad Gibson, who was taking his farewell drink of ginger tea
+preparatory to beginning work.)
+
+"I pity you, Steve!" exclaimed Brad, between deep swallows.
+"If you 'd known when you was well off, you 'd 'a' stayed in Boston.
+If Jabe hed a story started, he 'd talk three days after he was dead."
+
+"Go 'long; leave me be!  Wall, as I was sayin', Dixie brought Fiddy home
+('Dell,' he called her), an' they 'peared bride 'n' groom at meetin'
+next Sunday.  The last hundred dollars he hed in the world hed gone into
+the weddin' tower 'n' on to Fiddy's back.  He hed a new suit, 'n' he looked
+like a major.  You ain't got no idea what he was, 'cause his eyes is dull now,
+'n' he 's bowed all over, 'n' ain't shaved nor combed, hardly; but they was
+the han'somest couple that ever walked up the broad aisle.  She hed on a green
+silk dress, an' a lace cape that was like a skeeter nettin' over her neck an'
+showed her bare skin through, an' a hat like an apple orchard in full bloom,
+hummin'-bird an' all.  Dixie kerried himself as proud as Lucifer.
+He didn't look at the minister 'n' he didn't look at the congregation;
+his great eyes was glued on Fiddy, as if he couldn't hardly keep from eatin'
+of her up.  An' she behaved consid'able well for a few months, as long
+'s the novelty lasted an' the silk dresses was new.  Before Christmas,
+though, she began to peter out 'n' git slack-twisted. She allers hated
+housework as bad as a pig would a penwiper, an' Dixie hed to git
+his own breakfast afore he went to work, or go off on an empty stomach.
+Many 's the time he 's got her meals for her 'n' took 'em to her on a waiter.
+Them secesh fellers'll wait on women folks long as they can stan' up.
+
+"Then bime bye the baby come along; but that made
+things wuss 'stid o' better.  She didn't pay no more
+'tention to it than if it hed belonged to the town.
+She 'd go off to dances, an' leave Dixie to home tendin'
+cradle; but that wa'n't no hardship to him for he was 'bout
+as much wropped up in the child as he was in Fiddy.
+Wall, sir, 'bout a month ago she up 'n' disappeared off the face o'
+the airth 'thout sayin' a word or leavin' a letter.
+She took her clo'es, but she never thought o' takin' the baby;
+one baby more or less didn't make no odds to her s' long 's she
+hed that skeeter-nettin' cape.  Dixie sarched fer her high an'
+low fer a fortnight, but after that he give it up as a bad job.
+He found out enough, I guess, to keep him pretty busy thinkin'
+what he 'd do next.  But day before yesterday the same circus
+that plays here this afternoon was playin' to Wareham.
+A lot of us went over on the evenin' train, an' we coaxed
+Dixie into goin', so 's to take his mind off his trouble.
+But land! he didn't see nothin'. He 'd walk right up
+the lions 'n' tigers in the menagerie as if they was cats
+'n' chickens, an' all the time the clown was singin'
+he looked like a dumb animile that 's hed a bullet put in him.
+There was lots o' side shows, mermaids 'n' six-legged calves 'n'
+spotted girls, 'n' one thing 'n' 'nother, an' there was one o'
+them whirligig machines with a mess o' rocking'-hosses goin'
+round 'n' round, 'n' an organ in the middle playin' like sixty.
+I wish we 'd 'a' kept clear o' the thing, but as bad luck would
+hev it, we stopped to look, an' there on top o' two high-steppin'
+white wooden hosses, set Mis' Fiddy an' that dod-gasted
+light-complected baker-man! If ever she was suited to a dot,
+it was jest then 'n' there.  She could 'a' gone prancin'
+round that there ring forever 'n' forever, with the whoopin'
+'n' hollerin' 'n' whizzin' 'n' whirlin' soundin' in her ears,
+'n' the music playin' like mad, 'n' she with nothin'
+to do but stick on 'n' let some feller foot the bills.
+Somebody must 'a' ben thinkin' o' Fiddy Maddox when the invented
+them whirl-a-go-rounds. She was laughin' 'n' carryin'
+on like the old Scratch; her apple-blossom hat dome off,
+'n' the baker-man put it on, 'n' took consid'able time over it,
+'n' pulled her ear 'n' pinched her cheek when he got through;
+an' that was jest the blamed minute we ketched sight of 'em.
+I pulled Dixie off, but I was too late.  He give a groan I shall
+remember to my dyin' day, 'n' then he plunged out o' the crowd
+'n' through the gate like a streak o' lightnin'. We follered,
+but land! we couldn't find him, an' true as I set here,
+I never expected to see him alive agin.  But I did;
+I forgot all about one thing, you see, 'n' that was the baby.
+If it wa'n't no attraction to its mother, I guess he cal'lated
+it needed a father all the more.  Anyhow, he turned up
+in the field yesterday mornin', ready for work, but lookin'
+as if he 'd hed his heart cut out 'n' a piece o' lead put
+in the place of it."
+
+"I don't seem as if she 'd 'a' ben brazen enough to come back
+so near him," said Steve.
+
+"Wall, I don't s'pose she hed any idea o' Dixie's bein'
+at a circus over Wareham jest then; an' ten to one she
+didn't care if the whole town seen her.  She wanted
+to get rid of him, 'n' she didn't mind how she did it.
+Dixie ain't one of the shootin' kinds, an' anyhow, Fiddy Maddox
+wa'n't one to look ahead; whatever she wanted to do,
+that she done, from the time she was knee high to a grasshopper.
+I've seen her set down by a peck basket of apples, 'n' take
+a couple o' bites out o' one, 'n' then heave it fur 's she
+could heave it 'n' start in on another, 'n' then another;
+'n' 't wa'n't a good apple year, neither.  She'd everlastin'ly
+spile 'bout a dozen of 'em 'n' smaller 'bout two mouthfuls.
+Doxy Morton, now, would eat an apple clean down to the core,
+'n' then count the seeds 'n' put 'em on the window-sill to dry,
+'n' get up 'n' put the core in the stove, 'n' wipe her hands
+on the roller towel, 'n' take up her sewin' agin; 'n' if you
+'ve got to be cuttin' 'nitials in tree bark an' writin'
+of 'em in the grass with a stick like you 've ben doin'
+for the last half-hour, you 're blamed lucky to be doin'
+_D_'s not _F_'s, like Dixie there!"
+
+* * *
+
+
+It was three o'clock in the afternoon.  The men had dropped work
+and gone to the circus.  The hay was pronounced to be in a condition
+where it could be left without much danger; but, for that matter,
+no man would have stayed in the field to attend to another man's hay
+when there was a circus in the neighborhood.
+
+Dixie was mowing on alone, listening as in a dream to that subtle
+something in the swish of the scythe that makes one seek to know the song
+it is singing to the grasses.
+
+
+"Hush, ah, hush, the scythes are saying,
+Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep;
+Hush, they say to the grasses swaying,
+Hush, they sing to the clover deep;
+Hush,--'t is the lullaby Time is singing,--
+Hush, and heed not, for all things pass.
+Hush, ah, hush! and the scythes are swinging
+Over the clover, over the grass."
+
+
+And now, spent with fatigue and watching and care and grief,--
+heart sick, mind sick, body sick, sick with past suspense
+and present certainty and future dread,--he sat under the cool
+shade of the nooning tree, and buried his face in his hands.
+He was glad to be left alone with his miseries,--
+glad that the other men, friendly as he felt them to be,
+had gone to the circus, where he would not see or hear them
+for hours to come.
+
+How clearly he could conjure up the scene
+that they were enjoying with such keen relish!
+Only two days before, he had walked among the same tents,
+staring at horses and gay trappings and painted Amazons
+as one who noted nothing; yet the agony of the thing he now
+saw at last lit up all the rest as with a lightning flash,
+and burned the scene forever on his brain and heart.
+It was at Wareham, too,--Wareham, where she had promised
+to be his wife, where she had married him only a year before.
+How well he remembered the night!  They left the parsonage;
+they had ten miles to drive in the moonlight before reaching
+their stopping-place,--ten miles of such joy as only a man could know,
+he thought, who had had the warm fruit of life hanging within
+full vision, but just out of reach,--just above his longing lips;
+and then, in an unlooked-for, gracious moment, his!
+He could swear she had loved him that night, if never again.
+
+But this picture passed away, and he saw that maddening circle
+with the caracoling steeds.  He head the discordant music, the monotonous
+creak of the machinery, the strident laughter of the excited riders.
+As first the thing was a blur, a kaleidoscope of whirling colors,
+into which there presently crept form and order.
+. . . A boy who had cried to get on, and was now crying to get off.
+. . . Old Rube Hobson and his young wife; Rube looking white
+and scared, partly by the whizzing motion, and partly by the
+prospect of paying out ten cents for the doubtful pleasure.
+. . . Pretty Hetty Dunnell with that young fellow from Portland;
+she too timid to mount one of the mettle-some chargers, and snuggling
+close to him in one of the circling seats.  The, good Got!--
+Dell! sitting on a prancing white horse, with the man he knew,
+the man he feared, riding beside her; a man who kept holding on her
+hat with fingers that trembled,--the very hat she "'peared bride in"
+a man who brushed a grasshopper from her shoulder with an air
+of ownership, and, when she slapped his hand coquettishly,
+even dared to pinch her pink cheek,--his wife's cheek,--
+before that crowd of on-lookers! Merry-go-round, indeed!
+The horrible thing was well named; and life was just like it,--
+a whirl of happiness and misery, in which the music cannot play
+loud enough to drown the creak of the machinery, in which one
+soul cries out in pain, another in terror, and the rest laugh;
+but the prancing steeds gallop on, gallop on, and once mounted,
+there is no getting off, unless . . .
+
+There were some things it was not possible for a mean to bear!
+The river!  The river!  He could hear it rippling over the sunny sands,
+swirling among the logs, dashing and roaring under the bridge,
+rushing to the sea's embrace.  Could it tell whither it
+was hurrying?  NO; but it was escaping from its present bonds;
+it would never have to pass over these same jagged rocks again.
+"On, on to the unknown!" called the river.  "I come!  I come!"
+he roused himself to respond, when a faint, faint, helpless voice broke
+in upon the mad clatter in his brain, cleaving his torn heart in twain;
+not a real voice,--the half-forgotten memory of one; a tender wail
+that had added fresh misery to his night's vigil,--the baby!
+
+But the feeble pipe was borne down by the swirl of the water
+as it dashed between the rocky banks, still calling to him.
+If he could only close his ears to it!  But it still called--
+called still--the river!  And still the child's voice
+pierced the rush of sound with its pitiful flute note,
+until the two resolved themselves into contesting strains,
+answering each other antiphonally.  The river --the baby--
+the river--the baby; and in and through, and betwixt and between,
+there spun the whirling merry-go-round, with its curveting
+wooden horses, its discordant organ, and its creaking machinery.
+
+But gradually the child's voice gained in strength,
+and as he heard it more plainly the other sounds grew fainter,
+till at last, thank God! they were hushed.  The din, the whirlwind,
+and the tempest in his brain were lulled into silence,
+as under a "Peace, be still!" and, worn out with the contest,
+the man from Tennessee fell asleep under the grateful shade
+of the nooning tree.  So deep was the slumber that settled over
+exhausted body and troubled spirit that the gathering clouds,
+the sudden darkness, the distant muttering of thunder,
+the frightened twitter of the birds, passed unnoticed.
+A heavy drop of rain pierced the thick foliage and fell on
+his face, but the storm within had been too fierce for him
+to heed the storm without.  He slept on.
+
+* * *
+
+
+Almost every man, woman, and child in the vicinity of Pleasant
+River was on the way to the circus,--Boomer's Grand Six-in-One
+Universal Consolidated Show; Brilliant Constellations of Fixed
+Stars shining in the same Vast Firmament; Glittering Galaxies
+of World-Famous Equestrian Artists; the biggest elephants,
+the funniest clowns, the pluckiest riders, the stubbornest mules,
+the most amazing acrobats, the tallest man and the shortest man,
+the thinnest woman and the thickest woman, on the habitable globe;
+and no connection with any other show on earth, especially Sypher's
+Two-in-One Show now devastating the same State.
+
+If the advertisements setting forth these attractions were
+couched in language somewhat rosier than the facts would warrant,
+there were few persons calm enough to perceive it, when once
+the glamour of the village parade and the smell of the menagerie
+had intoxicated the senses.
+
+The circus had been the sole topic of conversation for a fortnight.
+Jot Bascom could always be relied on for the latest and most authentic
+news of its triumphant progress from one town to another.  Jot was a sort
+of town crier; and whenever the approach of a caravan was announced,
+he would go over on the Liberty road to find out just where it was and what
+were its immediate plans, for the thrilling pleasure of calling at every
+one of the neighbors' on his way home, and delivering his budget of news.
+He was an attendant at every funeral, and as far as possible at every wedding,
+in the village; at every flag-raising and husking, and town and county fair.
+When more pressing duties did not hinder, he endeavored to meet the two
+daily trains that passed through Milliken's Mills, a mile or two from
+Pleasant River.  He accompanied the sheriff on all journeys entailing
+serving of papers and other embarrassing duties common to the law.
+On one occasion, when the two lawyers of the village held an investigation
+before Trial Justice Simeon Porter, they waited an hour because Jot
+Bascom did not come.  They knew that something was amiss, but it was
+only on reflection that they remembered that Jot was not indispensable.
+He went with all paupers to the Poor Farm, and never missed a town meeting.
+He knew all the conditions attending any swapping of horses that
+occurred within a radius of twenty miles,--the terms of the trade
+and the amount paid to boot.  He knew who owed the fish-man and who owed
+the meat-man, and who could not get trusted by either of them.
+In fact, so far as the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence
+could be vested in a faulty human creature, they were present in Jot Bascom.
+That he was quite unable to attend conscientiously to home duties,
+when overborne by press of public service, was true.  When Diadema Bascom
+wanted kindling split, wood brought in, the cows milked, or the pigs fed,
+she commonly found her spouse serving humanity in bulk.
+
+All the details of the approach of the Grand Six-in-One
+Show had, therefore, been heralded to those work-sodden
+and unambitious persons who tied themselves to their own
+wood-piles or haying-fields.
+
+These were the bulletins issues:--
+
+The men were making a circle in the Widow Buzzell's field,
+in the same place where the old one had been,--the old one,
+viewed with awe for five years by all the village small boys.
+
+The forerunners, outriders, proprietors, whatever they might be,
+had arrived and gone to the tavern.
+
+An elephant was quartered in the tavern shed!
+
+The elephant had stepped through the floor!!
+
+The advance guard of performers and part of the show itself had come!
+
+And the "Cheriot"!!
+
+This far-famed vehicle had paused on top of Deacon Chute's hill,
+to prepare for the street parade.  Little Jim Chute had been gloating
+over the fact that it must pass by his house, and when it stopped
+short under the elms in the dooryard his heart almost broke for joy.
+He pinched the twenty-five-cent piece in his pocket to assure
+himself that he was alive and in his right mind.  The precious coin
+had been the result of careful saving, and his hot, excited hands
+had almost worn it thin.  But alas for the vanity of human hopes!
+When the magnificent red-and-gold "Cheriot" was uncovered,
+that its glories might shine upon the waiting world, the door opened,
+and a huddle of painted Indians tumbled out, ready to lead
+the procession, or, if so disposed, to scalp the neighborhood.
+Little Jim gave one panic-stricken look as they leaped over
+the chariot steps, and then fled to the barn chamber, whence he had
+to be dragged by his mother, and cuffed into willingness to attend
+the spectacle that had once so dazzled his imagination.
+
+On the eventful afternoon of the performance the road
+was gay with teams.  David and Samantha Milliken drove by in
+Miss Cummin's neat carryall, two children on the back seat,
+a will-o'-the-wisp baby girl held down by a serious boy.
+Steve Webster was driving Doxy Morton in his mother's buggy.
+Jabe Slocum, Pitt Packard, Brad Gibson, Cyse Higgins,
+and scores of others were riding "shank's mare," as they
+would have said.
+
+It had been a close, warm day, and as the afternoon wore away it grew
+hotter and closer.  There was a dead calm in the air, a threatening blackness
+in the west that made the farmers think anxiously of their hay.  Presently the
+thunderheads ran together into big black clouds, which melted in turn into
+molten masses of smoky orange, so that the heavens were like burnished brass.
+Drivers whipped up their horses, and pedestrians hastened their steps.
+Steve Webster decided not to run even the smallest risk of injuring so
+precious a commodity as Doxy Morton by a shower of rain, so he drove into
+a friend's yard, put up his horse, and waited till the storm should pass by.
+Brad Gibson stooped to drink at a wayside brook, and as he bent over
+the water he heard a low, murmuring, muttering sound that seemed to make
+the earth tremble.
+
+Then from hill to hill "leapt the live thunder."
+Even the distant mountains seemed to have "found a tongue."
+A zigzag chain of lightning flashed in the lurid sky,
+and after an appreciable interval another peal, louder than
+the first, and nearer.
+
+The rain began to fall, the forked flashes of flame darted hither
+and thither in the clouds, and the boom of heaven's artillery grew heavier
+and heavier.  The blinding sheets of light and the tumultuous roar of sound
+now followed each other so quickly that they seemed almost simultaneous.
+Flash--crash--flash--crash--flash--crash; blinding and deafening eye and ear
+at once.  Everybody who could find a shelter of any sort hastened to it.
+The women at home set their children in the midst of feather beds,
+and some of them even huddled there themselves, their babies clinging
+to them in sympathetic fear, as the livid shafts of light illuminated
+the dark rooms with more than noonday glare.
+
+The air was full of gloom; a nameless terror lurked
+within it; the elements seemed at war with each other.
+Horses whinnied in the stables, and colts dashed about the pastures.
+The cattle sought sheltered places; the cows ambling clumsily towards
+some refuge, their full bags dripping milk as they swung heavily
+to and fro.  The birds flew towards the orchards and the deep woods;
+the swallows swooped restlessly round the barns, and hid themselves
+under the eaves or in the shadow of deserted nests.
+
+The rain now fell in sheets.
+
+"Hurry up 'n' git under cover, Jabe," said Brad Gibson;
+"you're jest the kind of a pole to draw lightnin'!"
+
+"You hain't, then!" retorted Jabe.  "There ain't enough o'
+you fer lightnin' to ketch holt of!"
+
+Suddenly a ghastly streak of light leaped out of a cloud,
+and then another, till the sky seemed lit up by cataracts
+of flame.  A breath of wind sprang into the still air.
+Then a deafening crash, clap, crack, roar, peal! and as Jabe
+Slocum looked out of a protecting shed door, he saw a fiery
+ball burst from the clouds, shooting brazen arrows as it fell.
+Within the instant the meeting-house steeple broke into a tongue
+of flame, and then, looking towards home, he fancied
+that the fireball dropped to earth in Squire Bean's meadow.
+
+The wind blew more fiercely now.  There was a sudden
+crackling of wood, falling of old timers, and breaking of glass.
+The deadly fluid ran in a winding course down a great maple
+by the shed, leaving a narrow charred channel through the bark
+to tell how it passed to earth.  A sombre pine stood up,
+black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound
+in the split trunk.
+
+The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint
+rumbling of thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea;
+the clouds broke away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see
+what had been going on in the world since he hid himself an hour before.
+A delicate rainbow bridge stretched from the blackened church
+steeple to the glittering weathercock on the squire's barn;
+and there, in the centre of the fair green meadows from which it
+had risen in glorious strength and beauty for a century or more,
+lay the nooning tree.
+
+The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck
+in the very centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way
+from feather tip to sturdy root, riving the tree in twain,
+cleaving its great boughs left and right, laying one
+majestic half level with the earth, and bending the other till
+the proud head almost touched the grass.
+
+The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering
+upon the bowed branches, turning each into a tear of liquid opal.
+The birds hopped on the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously
+a strange object underneath.
+
+There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke!
+The monarch of the meadow would never again feel the magic
+thrill of the sap in its veins, nor the bursting of brown bud
+into green leaf.
+
+The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs.
+The "time of pleasure and love" was over with the nooning tree; over too,
+with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the light
+of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.
+
+
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+THE FORE-ROOM RUG.
+
+
+Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window
+of the village watch-tower, so called because it commanded
+a view of nearly everything that happened in Pleasant River;
+those details escaping the physical eye being supplied by faith
+and imagination working in the light of past experience.
+She sat in the chair of honor, the chair of choice, the high-backed
+rocker by the southern window, in which her husband's mother,
+old Mrs. Bascom, had sat for thirty years, applying a still more
+powerful intellectual telescope to the doings of her neighbors.
+Diadema's seat had formerly been on the less desirable side of
+the little light-stand, where Priscilla Hollis was now installed.
+
+Mrs. Bascom was at work on a new fore-room rug, the former one having
+been transferred to Miss Hollis's chamber; for, as the teacher at the brick
+schoolhouse, a graduate of a Massachusetts normal school, and the daughter
+of a deceased judge, she was a boarder of considerable consequence.
+It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, and the two women were alone.
+It was a pleasant, peaceful sitting-room, as neat as wax in every part.
+The floor was covered by a cheerful patriotic rag carpet woven entirely
+of red, white, and blue rags, and protected in various exposed localities
+by button rugs,--red, white, and blue disks superimposed one on the other.
+
+Diadema Bascom was a person of some sentiment.  When her old father,
+Captain Dennett, was dying, he drew a wallet from under his pillow,
+and handed her a twenty-dollar bill to get something to remember him by.
+This unwonted occurrence burned itself into the daughter's imagination,
+and when she came as a bride to the Bascom house she refurnished
+the sitting-room as a kind of monument to the departed soldier,
+whose sword and musket were now tied to the wall with neatly hemmed bows
+of bright red cotton.
+
+The chair cushions were of red-and-white glazed patch,
+the turkey wings that served as hearth brushes were hung against
+the white-painted chimney-piece with blue skirt braid, and the white
+shades were finished with home-made scarlet "tossels."
+A little whatnot in one corner was laden with the trophies of battle.
+The warrior's brass buttons were strung on a red picture cord and hung
+over his daguerreotype on the upper shelf; there was a tarnished
+shoulder strap, and a flattened bullet that the captain's jealous
+contemporaries swore _he_ never stopped, unless he got it in the rear
+when he was flying from the foe.  There was also a little tin
+canister in which a charge of powder had been sacredly preserved.
+The scoffers, again, said that "the cap'n put it in his musket
+when he went into the war, and kep' it there till he come out."
+These objects were tastefully decorated with the national colors.
+In fact, no modern aesthete could have arranged a symbolic symphony
+of grief and glory with any more fidelity to an ideal than Diadema Bascom,
+in working out her scheme of red, white, and blue.
+
+Rows of ripening tomatoes lay along the ledges of the windows,
+and a tortoise-shell cat snoozed on one of the broad sills.
+The tall clock in the corner ticked peacefully.  Priscilla Hollis
+never tired of looking at the jolly red-cheeked moon, the group
+of stars on a blue ground, the trig little ship, the old house,
+and the jolly moon again, creeping one after another across the open
+space at the top.
+
+Jot Bascom was out, as usual, gathering statistics of
+the last horse trade; little Jot was building "stickin'" houses
+in the barn; Priscilla was sewing long strips for braiding;
+while Diadema sat at the drawing-in frame, hook in hand,
+and a large basket of cut rags by her side.
+
+Not many weeks before she had paid one of her periodical
+visits to the attic.  No housekeeper in Pleasant River save
+Mrs. Jonathan Bascom would have thought of dusting a garret,
+washing the window and sweeping down the cobwebs once a month,
+and renewing the camphor bags in the chests twice a year;
+but notwithstanding this zealous care the moths had made their
+way into one of her treasure-houses, the most precious of all,--
+the old hair trunk that had belonged to her sister Lovice.
+Once ensconced there, they had eaten through its hoarded relics,
+and reduced the faded finery to a state best described by Diadema
+as "reg'lar riddlin' sieves."  She had brought the tattered
+pile down in to the kitchen, and had spent a tearful afternoon
+in cutting the good pieces from the perforated garments.
+Three heaped-up baskets and a full dish-pan were the result;
+and as she had snipped and cut and sorted, one of her sentimental
+projects had entered her mind and taken complete possession there.
+
+"I declare," she said, as she drew her hooking-needle
+in and out, "I wouldn't set in the room with some folks and work
+on these pieces; for every time I draw in a scrap of cloth
+Lovice comes up to me for all the world as if she was settin'
+on the sofy there.  I ain't told you my plan, Miss Hollis,
+and there ain't many I shall tell; but this rug is going to be
+a kind of a hist'ry of my life and Lovey's wrought in together,
+just as we was bound up in one another when she was alive.
+Her things and mine was laid in one trunk, and the moths sha'n't
+cheat me out of 'em altogether.  If I can't look at 'em wet Sundays,
+and shake 'em out, and have a good cry over 'em, I'll make 'em
+up into a kind of dumb show that will mean something to me,
+if it don't to anybody else.
+
+"We was the youngest of thirteen, Lovey and I,
+and we was twins.  There 's never been more 'n half o'
+me left sence she died. We was born together, played and
+went to school together, got engaged and married together,
+and we all but died together, yet we wa'n't a mite alike.
+There was an old lady come to our house once that used to say,
+'There's sister Nabby, now:  she 'n' I ain't no more alike
+'n if we wa'n't two; she 's jest as diff'rent as I am t'
+other way.'  Well, I know what I want to put into my rag story,
+Miss Hollis, but I don't hardly know how to begin."
+
+Priscilla dropped her needle, and bent over the frame with interest.
+
+"A spray of two roses in the centre,--there 's the beginning;
+why, don't you see, dear Mrs. Bascom?"
+
+"Course I do," said Diadema, diving to the bottom of
+the dish-pan. "I've got my start now, and don't you say a word
+for a minute. The two roses grow out of one stalk; they'll be
+Lovey and me, though I'm consid'able more like a potato blossom.
+The stalk 's got to be green, and here is the very green silk mother
+walked bride in, and Lovey and I had roundabouts of it afterwards.
+She had the chicken-pox when we was about four years old,
+and one of the first things I can remember is climbing up and
+looking over mother's footboard at Lovey, all speckled.
+Mother had let her slip on her new green roundabout
+over her nightgown, just to pacify her, and there she set
+playing with the kitten Reuben Granger had brought her.
+He was only ten years old then, but he 'd begun courting Lovice.
+
+"The Grangers' farm joined ours.  They had eleven children,
+and mother and father had thirteen, and we was always playing together.
+Mother used to tell a funny story about that.  We were all little young
+ones and looked pretty much alike, so she didn't take much notice
+of us in the daytime when we was running out 'n' in; but at night when
+the turn-up bedstead in the kitchen was taken down and the trundle-beds
+were full, she used to count us over, to see if we were all there.
+One night, when she 'd counted thirteen and set down to her sewing,
+father come in and asked if Moses was all right, for one of the neighbors
+had seen him playing side of the river about supper-time. Mother knew she
+'d counted us straight, but she went round with a candle to make sure.
+Now, Mr. Granger had a head as red as a shumac bush; and when she
+carried the candle close to the beds to take another tally,
+there was thirteen children, sure enough, but if there wa'n't a
+red-headed Granger right in amongst our boys in the turn-up bedstead!
+While father set out on a hunt for our Moses, mother yanked the sleepy
+little red-headed Granger out o' the middle and took him home, and father
+found Moses asleep on a pile of shavings under the joiner's bench.
+
+"They don't have such families nowadays.  One time when measles
+went all over the village, they never came to us, and Jabe Slocum said
+there wa'n't enough measles to go through the Dennett family, so they
+didn't start in on 'em.  There, I ain't going to finish the stalk;
+I'm going to draw in a little here and there all over the rug,
+while I'm in the sperit of plannin' it, and then it will be plain
+work of matching colors and filling out.
+
+"You see the stalk is mother's dress, and the outside green
+of the moss roses is the same goods, only it 's our roundabouts.
+I meant to make 'em red, when I marked the pattern,
+and then fill out round 'em with a light color; but now I
+ain't satisfied with anything but white, for nothing will do
+in the middle of the rug but our white wedding dresses.
+I shall have to fill in dark, then, or mixed.  Well, that won't
+be out of the way, if it 's going to be a true rag story;
+for Lovey's life went out altogether, and mine hasn't been
+any too gay.
+
+"I'll begin on Lovey's rose first.  She was the prettiest and
+the liveliest girl in the village, and she had more beaux than you
+could shake a stick at.  I generally had to take what she left over.
+Reuben Granger was crazy about her from the time she was knee-high;
+but when he went away to Bangor to study for the ministry,
+the others had it all their own way.  She was only seventeen;
+she hadn't ever experienced religion, and she was mischeevous
+as a kitten.
+
+"You remember you laughed, this morning, when Mr. Bascom told
+about Hogshead Jowett?  Well, he used to want to keep company
+with Lovey; but she couldn't abide him, and whenever he come to court
+her she clim' into a hogshead, and hid till after he 'd gone.
+The boys found it out, and used to call him 'Hogshead Jowett."
+He was the biggest fool in Foxboro' Four Corners; and that 's
+saying consid'able, for Foxboro' is famous for its fools,
+and always has been.  There was thirteen of 'em there one year.
+They say a man come out from Portland, and when he got as fur
+as Foxboro' he kep' inquiring the way to Dunstan; and I declare
+if he didn't meet them thirteen fools, one after another,
+standing in their front dooryards ready to answer questions.
+When he got to Dunstan, says he, 'For the Lord's sake,
+what kind of a village is that I've just went through?
+Be they _all_ fools there?'
+
+"Hogshead was scairt to death whenever he come to see Lovice.
+One night, when he 'd been there once, and she 'd hid, as she
+always done, he come back a second time, and she went to the door,
+not mistrusting it was him.  'Did you forget anything?'
+says she, sparkling out at him through a little crack.
+He was all taken aback by seeing her, and he stammered out,
+'Yes, I forgot my han'k'chief; but it don't make no odds,
+for I didn't pay out but fifteen cents for it two year ago,
+and I don't make no use of it 'ceptins to wipe my nose on.'
+How we did laugh over that!  Well, he had a conviction of sin
+pretty soon afterwards, and p'r'aps it helped his head some;
+at any rate he quit farming, and become a Bullockite preacher.
+
+"It seems odd, when Lovice wa'n't a perfessor herself,
+she should have drawed the most pious young men in the village,
+but she did:  she had good Orthodox beaux, Free and Close Baptists,
+Millerites and Adventists, all on her string together;
+she even had one Cochranite, though the sect had mostly died out.
+But when Reuben Granger come home, a full-feathered-out minister,
+he seemed to strike her fancy as he never had before, though they
+were always good friends from children.  He had light hair
+and blue eyes and fair skin (his business being under cover kep'
+him bleached out), and he and Lovey made the prettiest couple
+you ever see; for she was dark complected, and her cheeks no
+otherways than scarlit the whole durin' time.  She had a change
+of heart that winter; in fact she had two of 'em, for she
+changed hers for Reuben's, and found a hope at the same time.
+'T was a good honest conversion, too, though she did say to me
+she was afraid that if Reuben hadn't taught her what love
+was or might be, she 'd never have found out enough about it
+to love God as she 'd ought to.
+
+"There, I've begun both roses, and hers is 'bout finished.
+I sha'n't have more 'n enough white alapaca.  It's lucky
+the moths spared one breadth of the wedding dresses;
+we was married on the same day, you know, and dressed just alike.
+Jot wa'n't quite ready to be married, for he wa'n't any
+more forehanded 'bout that than he was 'bout other things;
+but I told him Lovey and I had kept up with each other from
+the start, and he 'd got to fall into line or drop out o'
+the percession.--Now what next?"
+
+"Wasn't there anybody at the wedding but you and Lovice?"
+asked Priscilla, with an amused smile.
+
+"Land, yes!  The meeting-house was cram jam full.  Oh, to be sure!
+I know what you 're driving at!  Well, I have to laugh to think
+I should have forgot the husbands!  They'll have to be worked
+into the story, certain; but it'll be consid'able of a chore,
+for I can't make flowers out of coat and pants stuff, and there
+ain't any more flowers on this branch anyway."
+
+Diadema sat for a few minutes in rapt thought,
+and then made a sudden inspired dash upstairs, where Miss
+Hollis presently heard her rummaging in an old chest.
+She soon came down, triumphant.
+
+"Wa'n't it a providence I saved Jot's and Reuben's wedding ties!
+And here they are,--one yellow and green mixed, and one brown.
+Do you know what I'm going to do?  I'm going to draw in a butterfly
+hovering over them two roses, and make it out of the neckties,--
+green with brown spots.  That'll bring in the husbands; and land!
+I wouldn't have either of 'em know it for the world.  I'll take
+a pattern of that lunar moth you pinned on the curtain yesterday."
+
+Miss Hollis smiled in spite of herself.  "You have some
+very ingenious ideas and some very pretty thoughts, Mrs. Bascom,
+do you know it?"
+
+"It's the first time I ever heard tell of it,"
+said Diadema cheerfully.  "Lovey was the pretty-spoken,
+pretty-appearing one; I was always plain and practical.  While I think
+of it, I'll draw in a little mite of this red into my carnation pink.
+It was a red scarf Reuben brought Lovey from Portland.
+It was the first thing he ever give her, and aunt Hitty said
+if one of the Abel Grangers give away anything that cost money,
+it meant business.  That was all fol-de-rol, for there never
+was a more liberal husband, though he was a poor minister;
+but then they always _are_ poor, without they're rich;
+there don't seem to be any halfway in ministers.
+
+"We was both lucky that way.  There ain't a stingy bone in Jot
+Bascom's body.  He don't make much money, but what he does make goes
+into the bureau drawer, and the one that needs it most takes it out.
+He never asks me what I done with the last five cents he give me.
+You 've never been married Miss Hollis, and you ain't engaged,
+so you don't know much about it; but I tell you there 's a heap o'
+foolishness talked about husbands.  If you get the one you like yourself,
+I don't know as it matters if all the other women folks in town don't
+happen to like him as well as you do; they ain't called on to do that.
+They see the face he turns to them, not the one he turns to you.
+Jot ain't a very good provider, nor he ain't a man that 's much
+use round a farm, but he 's such a fav'rite I can't blame him.
+There 's one thing:  when he does come home he 's got something to say,
+and he 's always as lively as a cricket, and smiling as a basket of chips.
+I like a man that 's good comp'ny, even if he ain't so forehanded.
+There ain't anything specially lovable about forehandedness, when you
+come to that.  I shouldn't ever feel drawed to a man because
+he was on time with his work.  He 's got such pleasant ways, Jot has!
+The other afternoon he didn't get home early enough to milk;
+and after I done the two cows, I split the kindling and brought
+in the wood, for I knew he 'd want to go to the tavern and tell
+the boys 'bout the robbery up to Boylston.  There ain't anybody
+but Jot in this village that has wit enough to find out what 's
+going on, and tell it in an int'resting way round the tavern fire.
+And he can do it without being full of cider, too; he don't need
+any apple juice to limber _his_ tongue!
+
+"Well, when he come in, he see the pails of milk,
+and the full wood-box, and the supper laid out under the screen
+cloth on the kitchen table, and he come up to me at the sink,
+and says he, 'Diademy, you 're the best wife in this county,
+and the brightest jewel in my crown,--that 's what _you_ are!'
+(He got that idea out of a duet he sings with Almiry Berry.)
+Now I'd like to know whether that ain't pleasanter than 't
+is to have a man do all the shed 'n' barn work up smart,
+and then set round the stove looking as doleful as a last
+year's bird's nest?  Take my advice, Miss Hollis:
+get a good provider if you can, but anyhow try to find you
+a husband that'll keep on courting a little now and then,
+when he ain't too busy; it smooths things consid'able
+round the house.
+
+"There, I got so int'rested in what I was saying, I've went
+on and finished the carnation, and some of the stem, too.
+Now what comes next?  Why, the thing that happened next,
+of course, and that was little Jot.
+
+"I'll work in a bud on my rose and one on Lovey's,
+and my bud'll be made of Jot's first trousers.  The goods
+ain't very appropriate for a rosebud, but it'll have to do,
+for the idee is the most important thing in this rug.
+When I put him into pants, I hadn't any cloth in the house,
+and it was such bad going Jot couldn't get to Wareham to buy
+me anything; so I made 'em out of an old gray cashmere skirt,
+and lined 'em with flannel."
+
+"Buds are generally the same color as the roses,
+aren't they?" ventured Priscilla.
+
+"I don't care if they be," said Diadema obstinately.
+"What's to hender this bud's bein' grafted on?  Mrs. Granger
+was as black as an Injun, but the little Granger children
+were all red-headed, for they took after their father.
+But I don't know; you've kind o' got me out o' conceit with it.
+I s'pose I could have taken a piece of his baby blanket;
+but the moths never et a mite o' that, and it's too good to cut up.
+There's one thing I can do:  I can make the bud up with a long stem,
+and have it growing right up alongside of mine,--would you?"
+
+"No, it must be stalk of your stalk, bone of your bone,
+flesh of your flesh, so to speak.  I agree with you, the idea
+is the first thing.  Besides, the gray is a very light shade,
+and I dare say it will look like a bluish white."
+
+"I'll try it and see, but I wish to the land the moths
+_had_ eat the pinning-blanket, and then I could have used it.
+Lovey worked the scallops on the aidge for me.
+My grief! what int'rest she took in my baby clothes!
+Little Jot was born at Thanksgiving time, and she come over
+from Skowhegan, where Reuben was settled pastor of his first church.
+I shall never forget them two weeks to the last day of my life.
+There was deep snow on the ground.  I had that chamber there,
+with the door opening into the setting-room. Mother and father
+Bascom kep' out in the dining-room and kitchen, where the work
+was going on, and Lovey and the baby and me had the front
+part of the house to ourselves, with Jot coming in on tiptoe,
+heaping up wood in the fireplace so 't he 'most roasted us out.
+He don't forget his chores in time o' sickness.
+
+"I never took so much comfort in all my days.
+Jot got one of the Billings girls to come over and help
+in the housework, so 't I could lay easy 's long as I
+wanted to; and I never had such a rest before nor since.
+There ain't any heaven in the book o' Revelations that 's any
+better than them two weeks was.  I used to lay quiet in my good
+feather bed, fingering the pattern of my best crochet quilt,
+and looking at the fire-light shining on Lovey and the baby.
+She 'd hardly leave him in the cradle a minute.  When I did
+n't want him in bed with me, she 'd have him in her lap.
+Babies are common enough to most folks, but Lovey was diff'rent.
+She 'd never had any experience with children, either, for we
+was the youngest in our family; and it wa'n't long before we
+come near being the oldest, too, for mother buried
+seven of us before she went herself.  Anyway, I never saw
+nobody else look as she done when she held my baby.
+I don't mean nothing blasphemious when I say 't was for all
+the world like your photograph of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
+
+"The nights come in early, so it was 'most dark
+at four o'clock. The little chamber was so peaceful!
+I could hear Jot rattling the milk-pails, but I'd draw a deep
+breath o' comfort, for I knew the milk would be strained
+and set away without my stepping foot to the floor.
+Lovey used to set by the fire, with a tall candle on the light-stand
+behind her, and a little white knit cape over her shoulders.
+She had the pinkest cheeks, and the longest eyelashes, and a mouth
+like a little red buttonhole; and when she bent over the baby,
+and sung to him,--though his ears wa'n't open, I guess for his
+eyes wa'n't,--the tears o' joy used to rain down my cheeks.
+It was pennyrial hymns she used to sing mostly, and the one I
+remember best was
+
+
+"'Daniel's wisdom may I know,
+Stephen's faith and spirit show;
+John's divine communion feel,
+Moses' meekness, Joshua's zeal,
+Run like the unwearied Paul,
+Win the day and conquer all.
+
+
+"'Mary's love may I possess,
+Lydia's tender-heartedness,
+Peter's fervent spirit feel,
+James's faith by works reveal,
+Like young Timothy may I
+Every sinful passion fly.'
+
+
+"'Oh Diademy,' she 'd say, 'you was always the best,
+and it 's nothing more 'n right the baby should have come to you.
+P'r'aps God will think I'm good enough some time; and if he does,
+Diademy, I'll offer up a sacrifice every morning and every evening.
+But I'm afraid,' says she, 'he thinks I can't stand any more happiness,
+and be a faithful follower of the cross.  The Bible says we 've
+got to wade through fiery floods before we can enter the kingdom.
+I don't hardly know how Reuben and I are going to find any way
+to wade through; we're both so happy, they 'd have to be consid'able
+hot before we took notice,' says she, with the dimples all breaking
+out in her cheeks.
+
+"And that was true as gospel.  She thought everything Reuben done
+was just right, and he thought everything she done was just right.
+There wa'n't nobody else; the world was all Reuben 'n' all Lovey to them.
+If you could have seen her when she was looking for him to come
+from Skowhegan!  She used to watch at the attic window; and when she
+seen him at the foot of the hill she 'd up like a squirrel, and run down
+the road without stopping for anything but to throw a shawl over her head.
+And Reuben would ketch her up as if she was a child, and scold her for
+not putting a hat on, and take her under his coat coming up the hill.
+They was a sight for the neighbors, I must confess, but it wa'n't one you
+could hardly disapprove of, neither.  Aunt Hitty said it was tempting
+Providence and couldn't last, and God would visit his wrath on 'em
+for making idols of sinful human flesh.
+
+"She was right one way,--it didn't last; but nobody
+can tell me God was punishing of 'em for being too happy.
+I guess he 'ain't got no objection to folks being happy here below,
+if they don't forget it ain't the whole story.
+
+"Well, I must mark in a bud on Lovey's stalk now,
+and I'm going to make it of her baby's long white cloak.
+I earned the money for it myself, making coats, and put four
+yards of the finest cashmere into it; for three years after
+little Jot was born I went over to Skowhegan to help
+Lovey through her time o' trial.  Time o' trial!  I thought I
+was happy, but I didn't know how to be as happy as Lovey did;
+I wa'n't made on that pattern.
+
+"When I first showed her the baby (it was a boy,
+same as mine), her eyes shone like two evening stars.
+She held up her weak arms, and gathered the little bundle o'
+warm flannen into 'em; and when she got it close she shut
+her eyes and moved her lips, and I knew she was taking
+her lamb to the altar and offering it up as a sacrifice.
+Then Reuben come in.  I seen him give one look at the two
+dark heads laying close together on the white piller,
+and then go down on his knees by the side of the bed.
+'T wa'n't no place for me; I went off, and left 'em together.
+We didn't mistrust it then, but they only had three days
+more of happiness, and I'm glad I give 'em every minute."
+
+The room grew dusky as twilight stole gently over
+the hills of Pleasant River.  Priscilla's lip trembled;
+Diadema's tears fell thick and fast on the white rosebud,
+and she had to keep wiping her eyes as she followed the pattern.
+
+
+"I ain't said as much as this about it for five years," she went on,
+with a tell-tale quiver in her voice, "but now I've got going I can't stop.
+I'll have to get the weight out o' my heart somehow.
+
+"Three days after I put Lovey's baby into her arms the Lord
+called her home.  'When I prayed so hard for this little
+new life, Reuben,' says she holding the baby as if she could never let
+it go, 'I didn't think I'd got to give up my own in place of it;
+but it's the first fiery flood we've had, dear, and though it burns
+to my feet I'll tread it as brave as I know how.'
+
+"She didn't speak a word after that; she just faded
+away like a snowdrop, hour by hour.  And Reuben and I stared
+at one another in the face as if we was dead instead of her,
+and we went about that house o' mourning like sleep-walkers
+for days and says, not knowing whether we et or slept,
+or what we done.
+
+"As for the baby, the poor little mite didn't live
+many hours after its mother, and we buried 'em together.
+Reuben and I knew what Lovey would have liked.  She gave her life
+for the baby's, and it was a useless sacrifice, after all.
+No, it wa'n't neither; it _could_n't have been!
+You needn't tell me God'll let such sacrifices as that come
+out useless!  But anyhow, we had one coffin for 'em both,
+and I opened Lovey's arms and laid the baby in 'em.
+When Reuben and I took our last look, we thought she
+seemed more 'n ever like Mary, the mother of Jesus.
+There never was another like her, and there never will be.
+'Nonesuch,' Reuben used to call her."
+
+There was silence in the room, broken only by the ticking
+of the old clock and the tinkle of a distant cowbell.
+Priscilla made an impetuous movement, flung herself down by the
+basket of rags, and buried her head in Diadema's gingham apron.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Bascom, don't cry.  I'm sorry, as the children say."
+
+"No, I won't more 'n a minute.  Jot can't stand it to see
+me give way.  You go and touch a match to the kitchen fire,
+so 't the kettle will be boiling, and I'll have a minute to myself.
+I don't know what the neighbors would think to ketch me crying over my
+drawing-in frame; but the spell's over now, or 'bout over, and when I
+can muster up courage I'll take the rest of the baby's cloak and put
+a border of white everlastings round the outside of the rug.
+I'll always mean the baby's birth and Lovey's death to me;
+but the flowers will remind me it 's life everlasting for both
+of 'em, and so it's the most comforting end I can think of."
+
+It was indeed a beautiful rug when it was finished and laid
+in front of the sofa in the fore-room. Diadema was very choice of it.
+When company was expected she removed it from its accustomed place,
+and spread it in a corner of the room where no profane foot could possibly
+tread on it.  Unexpected callers were managed by a different method.
+If they seated themselves on the sofa, she would fear they did not "set easy"
+or "rest comfortable" there, and suggest their moving to the stuffed
+chair by the window.  The neighbors thought this solicitude merely
+another sign of Diadema's "p'ison neatness," excusable in this case
+as there was so much white in the new rug.
+
+The fore-room blinds were ordinarily closed, and the chillness
+of death pervaded the sacred apartment; but on great occasions,
+when the sun was allowed to penetrate the thirty-two tiny panes
+of glass in each window, and a blaze was lighted in the fire-place,
+Miss Hollis would look in as she went upstairs, and muse
+a moment over the pathetic little romance of rags, the story
+of two lives worked into a bouquet of old-fashioned posies,
+whose gay tints were brought out by a setting of sombre threads.
+Existence had gone so quietly in this remote corner of the world that
+all its important events, babyhood, childhood, betrothal, marriage,
+motherhood, with all their mysteries of love and life and death,
+were chronicled in this narrow space not two yards square.
+
+Diadema came in behind the little school-teacher one afternoon.
+
+"I cal'late," she said, "that being kep' in a dark room, and never
+being tread on, it will last longer 'n I do.  If it does, Priscilla,
+you know that white crepe shawl of mine I wear to meeting hot Sundays:
+that would make a second row of everlastings round the border.
+You could piece out the linings good and smooth on the under side,
+draw in the white flowers, and fill 'em round with black to set 'em off.
+The rug would be han'somer than ever then, and the story--
+would be finished."
+
+
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+A VILLAGE STRADIVARIUS.
+
+I.
+
+
+"Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,
+Know more than any book.
+Down with your doleful problems,
+And court the sunny brook.
+The south-winds are quick-witted,
+The schools are sad and slow,
+The masters quite omitted
+The lore we care to know."
+
+Emerson's _April._
+
+
+
+"Find the 317th page, Davy, and begin at the top of
+the right-hand column."
+
+The boy turned the leaves of the old instruction book obediently, and
+then began to read in a sing-song, monotonous tone:--
+
+"'One of Pag-pag'"--
+
+"Pag-a-ni-ni's."
+
+"'One of Paggernyner's' (I wish all the fellers in your stories
+didn't have such tough old names!) 'most dis-as-ter-ous triumphs
+he had when playing at Lord Holland's.' (Who was Lord Holland,
+uncle Tony?) 'Some one asked him to im-pro-vise on the violin
+the story of a son who kills his father, runs a-way, becomes
+a highway-man, falls in love with a girl who will not listen to him;
+so he leads her to a wild country site, suddenly jumping with her
+from a rock into an a-b-y-double-s'"--
+
+"Abyss."
+
+"'--a-- rock--into--an--abyss, were they disappear forever.
+Paggernyner listened quietly, and when the story was at an end
+he asked that all the lights should be distinguished.'"
+
+"Look closer, Davy."
+
+"'Should be extinguished.  He then began playing, and so terrible was the
+musical in-ter-pre-ta-tion of the idea which had been given him that several
+of the ladies fainted, and the sal-salon-s_a_lon, when relighted, looked like
+a battle-field.' Cracky!  Wouldn't you like to have been there, uncle Tony?
+But I don't believe anybody ever played that way, do you?"
+
+"Yes," said the listener, dreamily raising his sightless eyes
+to the elm-tree that grew by the kitchen door.  "I believe it,
+and I can hear it myself when you read the story to me.
+I feel that the secret of everything in the world that is beautiful,
+or true, or terrible, is hidden in the strings of my violin,
+Davy, but only a master can draw it from captivity."
+
+"You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony,
+even if the ladies don't faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen
+doesn't look like a battle-field when you 've finished.
+I'm glad it doesn't, for my part, for I should have more
+housework to do than ever."
+
+"Poor Davy! you couldn't hate housework any worse if you were a woman;
+but it is all done for to-day. Now paint me one of your pictures, laddie;
+make me see with your eyes."
+
+The boy put down the book and leaped out of the open door,
+barely touching the old millstone that served for a step.
+Taking a stand in the well-worn path, he rested his hands
+on his hips, swept the landscape with the glance of an eagle,
+and began like a young improvisator:--
+
+"The sun is just dropping behind Brigadier Hill."
+
+"What color is it?"
+
+"Red as fire, and there isn't anything near it,--it 's almost alone
+in the sky; there 's only teenty little white feather clouds here and there.
+The bridge looks as if it was a silver string tying the two sides
+of the river together.  The water is pink where the sun shines into it.
+All the leaves of the trees are kind of swimming in the red light,--
+I tell you, nunky, just as if I was looking through red glass.
+The weather vane on Squire Bean's barn dazzles so the rooster seems
+to be shooting gold arrows into the river.  I can see the tip top of
+Mount Washington where the peak of its snow-cap touches the pink sky.
+The hen-house door is open.  The chickens are all on their roost,
+with their heads cuddled under their wings."
+
+"Did you feed them?"
+
+The boy clapped his hand over his mouth with a comical gesture
+of penitence, and dashed into the shed for a panful of corn, which he
+scattered over the ground, enticing the sleepy fowls by insinuating calls
+of "Chick, chick, chick, chick!"  _Come,_ biddy, biddy, biddy, biddy!
+_Come,_ chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!"
+
+The man in the doorway smiled as over the misdemeanor of somebody very
+dear and lovable, and rising from his chair felt his way to a corner shelf,
+took down a box, and drew from it a violin swathed in a silk bag.
+He removed the covering with reverential hands.  The tenderness of
+the face was like that of a young mother dressing or undressing her child.
+As he fingered the instrument his hands seemed to have become all eyes.
+They wandered caressingly over the polished surface as if enamored
+of the perfect thing that they had created, lingering here and there
+with rapturous tenderness on some special beauty,--the graceful arch
+of the neck, the melting curves of the cheeks, the delicious swell
+of the breasts.
+
+When he had satisfied himself for the moment, he took the bow,
+and lifting the violin under his chin, inclined his head fondly
+toward it and began to play.
+
+The tune at first seemed muffled, but had a curious bite,
+that began in distant echoes, but after a few minutes' the playing
+grew firmer and clearer, ringing out at last with velvety richness
+and strength until the atmosphere was satiated with harmony.
+No more ethereal note ever flew out of a bird's throat than Anthony
+Croft set free from this violin, his _liebling_, his "swan song,"
+made in the year he had lost his eyesight.
+
+Anthony Croft had been the only son of his mother, and she a widow.
+His boyhood had been exactly like that of all the other boys
+in Edgewood, save that he hated school a trifle more, if possible,
+than any of the others; though there was a unanimity of aversion in this
+matter that surprised and wounded teachers and parents.
+
+The school was the ordinary "deestrick" school of that time; there were
+not enough scholars for what Cyse Higgins called a "degraded" school.
+The difference between Anthony and the other boys lay in the reason as well
+as the degree of his abhorrence.
+
+He had come into the world a naked, starving human soul; he longed
+to clothe himself, and he was hungry and ever hungrier for knowledge;
+but never within the four walls of the village schoolhouse could he get
+hold of one fact that would yield him its secret sense, one glimpse
+of clear light that would shine in upon the "darkness which may be felt"
+in his mind, one thought or word that would feed his soul.
+
+The only place where his longings were ever stilled,
+where he seemed at peace with himself, where he understood
+what he was made for, was out of doors in the woods.
+When he should have been poring over the sweet,
+palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table,
+his vagrant gaze was always on the open window near which he sat.
+He could never study when a fly buzzed on the window-pane;
+he was always standing on the toes of his bare feet,
+trying to locate and understand the buzz that puzzled him.
+The book was a mute, soulless thing that had no relation
+to his inner world of thought and feeling.  He turned ever
+from the dead seven-times-six to the mystery of life about him.
+
+He was never a special favorite with his teachers; that was scarcely
+to be expected.  In his very early years, his pockets were gone through
+with every morning when he entered the school door, and the contents,
+when confiscated, would comprise a jew's-harp, a bit of catgut,
+screws whittled out of wood, tacks, spools, pins, and the like.
+But when robbed of all these he could generally secrete a piece of elastic,
+which, when put between his teeth and stretched to its utmost capacity,
+would yield a delightful twang when played upon with the forefinger.
+He could also fashion an interesting musical instrument in his desk by means
+of spools and catgut and bits of broken glass.  The chief joy of his life
+was an old tuning-fork that the teacher of the singing school had
+given him, but, owing to the degrading and arbitrary censorship of pockets
+that prevailed, he never dared bring it into the schoolroom.  There were ways,
+however, of evading inexorable law and circumventing base injustice.
+He hid the precious thing under a thistle just outside the window.
+The teacher had sometimes a brief season of apathy on hot afternoons,
+when she was hearing the primer class read, "_I see a pig.  The pig is big.
+The big pig can dig;_" which stirring in phrases were always punctuated
+by the snores of the Hanks baby, who kept sinking down on his fat
+little legs in the line and giving way to slumber during the lesson.
+At such a moment Anthony slipped out of the window and snapped
+the tuning-fork several times,--just enough to save his soul from death,--
+and then slipped in again.  He was caught occasionally, but not often;
+and even when he was, there were mitigating circumstances,
+for he was generally put under the teacher's desk for punishment.
+It was a dark, close, sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown
+tied of looking at the triangle of elastic in the teacher's congress boot,
+and tired of wishing it was his instead of hers, he would tie one end
+of a bit of thread to the button of his gingham shirt, and, carrying it
+round his left ear several times, make believe he was Paganini languishing
+in prison and playing on a violin with a single string.
+
+As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony
+Croft was by general assent counted the laziest boy in the village.
+That he was lazy in certain matters merely because he was in
+a frenzy of industry to pursue certain others had nothing to do
+with the case, of course.
+
+If any one had ever given him a task in which he could
+have seen cause working to effect, in which he could have found
+by personal experiment a single fact that belonged to him,
+his own by divine right of discovery, he would have counted
+labor or study all joy.
+
+He was one incarnate Why and How, one brooding wonder and
+interrogation point.  "Why does the sun drive away the stars?
+Why do the leaves turn red and gold?  What makes the seed swell in the earth?
+>From whence comes the life hidden in the egg under the bird's breast?
+What holds the moon in the sky?  Who regulates her shining?
+Who moves the wind?  Who made me, and what am I?  Who, why, how whither?
+If I came from God but only lately, teach me his lessons first,
+put me into vital relation with life and law, and then give me your dead
+signs and equivalents for real things, that I may learn more and more,
+and ever more and ever more."
+
+There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive
+that Tony learned anything in the woods, but as there was never
+sufficient school money to keep the village seat of learning
+open more than half the year the boy educated himself at
+the fountain head of wisdom, and knowledge of the other half.
+His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched from a hen's egg,
+and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black sheep
+and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony
+had more useless information than any boy in the village.
+He knew just where to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring
+home the waxen beauties when other people had scarcely begun to
+think about the spring.  He could tell where to look for the rare
+fringed gentian, the yellow violet, the Indian pipe.
+There were clefts in the rocks of the Indian Cellar where,
+when every one else failed, he could find harebells and columbines.
+
+When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing
+themselves each in his own way, you would find Tony lying
+flat on the pine needles in the woods, listening to the notes
+of the wild birds, and imitating them patiently, til you could
+scarcely tell which was boy and which was bird; and if you could,
+the birds couldn't, for many a time he coaxed the bobolinks
+and thrushes to perch on the low boughs above his head and chirp
+to him as if he were a feathered brother.  There was nothing
+about the building of nests with which he was not familiar.
+He could have taken hold and helped if the birds had not been so shy,
+and if he had had beak and claw instead of clumsy fingers.
+He would sit near a beehive for hours without moving,
+or lie prone in the sandy road, under the full glare of
+the sun, watching the ants acting out their human comedy;
+sometimes surrounding a favorite hill with stones, that the comedy
+might not be turned into a tragedy by a careless footfall.
+The cottage on the river road grew more and more
+to resemble a museum and herbarium as the years went by,
+and the Widow Croft's weekly house-cleaning was a matter
+that called for the exercise of Christian grace.
+
+Still, Tony was a good son, affectionate, considerate, and obedient.
+His mother had no idea that he would ever be able, or indeed willing,
+to make a living; but there was a forest of young timber growing up,
+a small hay farm to depend upon, and a little hoard that would keep him
+out of the poorhouse when she died and left him to his own devices.
+It never occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable.
+If he were difficult to understand, it reflected more upon his eccentricity
+than upon her density.  What was a woman to do with a boy of twelve who,
+when she urged him to drop the old guitar he was taking apart and hurry off
+to school, cried, "Oh, mother! when there is so much to learn in this world,
+it is wicked, wicked to waste time in school."
+
+About this period Tony spent hours in the attic
+arranging bottles and tumblers into a musical scale.
+He also invented an instrument made of small and great,
+long and short pins, driven into soft board to different depths,
+and when the widow passed his door on the way to bed she
+invariable saw this barbaric thing locked up to the boy's breast,
+for he often played himself to sleep with it.
+
+At fifteen he had taken to pieces and put together again,
+strengthened, soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced
+every accordion, guitar, melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle
+in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the neighboring villages.
+There was a little money to be earned in this way, but very little,
+as people in general regarded this "tinkering" as a pleasing diversion
+in which they could indulge him without danger.  As an example
+of this attitude, Dr. Berry's wife's melodeon had lost two stops,
+the pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works,
+it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were missing.
+Anthony worked more than a week on its rehabilitation,
+and received in return Mrs. Berry's promise that the doctor
+would pull a tooth for him some time!  This, of course,
+was a guerdon for the future, but it seemed pathetically distant
+to the lad who had never had a toothache in his life.
+He had to plead with Cyse Higgins for a week before that prudent
+young farmer would allow him to touch his five-dollar fiddle.
+He obtained permission at last only because by offering to give
+Cyse his calf in case he spoiled the violin.  "That seems square,"
+said Cyse doubtfully, "but after all, you can't play on a calf!"
+"Neither will your fiddle give milk, if you keep it long enough,"
+retorted Tony; and this argument was convincing.
+
+So great was his confidence in Tony's skill
+that Squire Bean trusted his father's violin to him,
+one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years before.
+It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half century,
+so that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost,
+the neck and the tailpiece cracked.  The lad took it home,
+and studied it for two whole evenings before the open fire.
+The problem of restoring it was quite beyond his abilities.
+He finally took the savings of two summers' "blueberry money"
+and walked sixteen miles to Portland, where he bought a book
+called The Practical Violinist.  The Supplement proved
+to be a mine of wealth.  Even the headings appealed to his
+imagination and intoxicated him with their suggestions,--
+On Scraping, Splitting, and Repairing Violins, Violin Players,
+Great Violinists, Solo Playing, etc.; and at the very end
+a Treatise on the Construction, Preservation, Repair,
+and Improvement of the Violin, by Jacob Augustus Friedheim,
+Instrument Maker to the Court of the Archduke of Weimar.
+
+There was a good deal of moral advice in the preface that
+sadly puzzled the boy, who was always in a condition of chronic
+amazement at the village disapprobation of his favorite fiddle.
+That the violin did not in some way receive the confidence
+enjoyed by other musical instruments, he perceived from various
+paragraphs written by the worthy author of The Practical Violinist,
+as for example:--
+
+"Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong
+prejudice against the violin because they have always
+known it associated with dancing and dissipation.
+Let it be understood that your violin is 'converted,'
+and such an obligation will no longer lie against it.
+. . . Many delightful hours may be enjoyed by a young man,
+if he has obtained a respectable knowledge of his instrument,
+who otherwise would find the time hang heavy on his hands;
+or, for want of some better amusement, would frequent the
+dangerous and destructive paths of vice and be ruined forever.
+. . . I am in hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil,
+that your violin will occupy your attention at just those
+very times when, if you were immoral or dissipated, you would
+be at the grogshop, gaming-table, or among vicious females.
+Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the prejudices
+many hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish
+abundance of innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement.
+These are the views with which I hope you have adopted it,
+and will continue to cherish and cultivate it."
+
+II.
+
+
+"There is no bard in all the choir,
+. . . . . . .
+Not one of all can put in verse,
+Or to this presence could rehearse
+The sights and voices ravishing
+The boy knew on the hills in spring,
+When pacing through the oaks he heard
+Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
+The heavy grouse's sudden whir,
+The rattle of the kingfisher."
+
+Emerson's _Harp._
+
+
+Now began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never
+long enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon.
+Oh that there had been some good angel who would have taken in hand
+Anthony Croft the boy, and, training the powers that pointed so
+unmistakably in certain directions, given to the world the genius of
+Anthony Croft, potential instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia;
+for it was not only that he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear
+caught the faintest breath of harmony or hint of discord, as
+
+
+"Fairy folk a-listening
+Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
+And for music to their dance
+Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
+Sap that trembles into buds
+Sending little rhythmic floods
+Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
+Thus all beauty that appears
+Has birth as sound to finer sense
+And lighter-clad intelligence."
+
+
+As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and
+color to another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody.
+Notwithstanding all these gifts and possibilities,
+the doctor's wife advised the Widow Croft to make a plumber
+of him, intimating delicately that these freaks of nature,
+while playing no apparent part in the divine economy,
+could sometimes be made self-supporting.
+
+The seventeenth year of his life marked a definite epoch
+in his development.  He studied Jacob Friedheim's treatise until
+he knew the characteristics of all the great violin models,
+from the Amatis, Hieronymus, Antonius, and Nicolas, to those
+of Stradivarius, Guarnerius, and Steiner.
+
+It was in this year, also, that he made a very precious discovery.
+While browsing in the rubbish in Squire Bean's garret to see
+if he could find the missing sound-post of the old violin,
+he came upon a billet of wood wrapped in cloth and paper.
+When unwrapped, it was plainly labeled "Wood from the Bean
+Maple at Pleasant Point; the biggest maple in York County,
+and believed to be one of the biggest in the State of Maine."
+Anthony found that the oldest inhabitant of Pleasant River remembered
+the stump of the tree, and that the boys used to jump over it
+and admire its proportions whenever they went fishing at the Point.
+The wood, therefore, was perhaps eighty or ninety years old.
+The squire agreed willingly that it should be used to mend the old violin,
+and told Tony he should have what was left for himself.
+When, by careful calculation, he found that the remainder would make
+a whole violin, he laid it reverently away for another twenty years,
+so that he should be sure it had completed its century of patient
+waiting for service, and falling on his knees by his bedside said,
+"I thank Thee, Heavenly Father, for this precious gift, and I promise
+from this moment to gather the most beautiful wood I can find,
+and lay it by where it can be used some time to make perfect violins,
+so that if any creature as poor and helpless as I am needs the wherewithal
+to do good work, I shall have helped him as Thou hast helped me."
+And according to his promise so he did, and the pieces of richly
+curled maple, of sycamore, and of spruce began to accumulate.
+They were cut from the sunny side of the trees, in just the right
+season of the year, split so as to have a full inch thickness
+towards the bark, and a quarter inch towards the heart.
+They were then laid for weeks under one of the falls in Wine Brook,
+where the musical tinkle, tinkle of the stream fell on the wood already
+wrought upon by years of sunshine and choruses of singing birds.
+
+
+This boy, toiling not alone for himself, but with full
+and conscious purpose for posterity also, was he not worthy
+to wear the mantle of Antonius Stradivarius?
+
+
+"That plain white-aproned man who stood at work
+Patient and accurate full fourscore years,
+Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,
+And since keen sense is love of perfectness,
+Made perfect violins, the needed paths
+For inspiration and high mastery."
+
+And as if the year were not full enough of glory, the school-teacher
+sent him a book with a wonderful poem in it.
+
+That summer's teaching had been the freak of a college student, who had
+gone back to his senior year strengthened by his experience of village life.
+Anthony Croft, who was only three or four years his junior, had been his
+favorite pupil and companion.
+
+"How does Tony get along?" asked the Widow Croft when the teacher
+came to call.
+
+"Tony? Oh, I can't teach him anything."
+
+Tears sprang to the mother's eyes.
+
+"I know he ain't much on book learning," she said apologetically,
+"but I'm bound he don't make you no trouble in deportment."
+
+"I mean," said the school-teacher gravely, "that I can show
+him how to read a little Latin and do a little geometry,
+but he knows as much in one day as I shall ever know in a year."
+
+Tony crouched by the old fireplace in the winter evenings,
+dropping his knife or his compasses a moment to read aloud to his mother,
+who sat in the opposite corner knitting:--
+
+
+"Of old Antonio Stradivari,--him
+Who a good quarter century and a half ago
+Put his true work in the brown instrument,
+And by the nice adjustment of its frame
+Gave it responsive life, continuous
+With the master's finger-tips, and perfected
+Like them by delicate rectitude of use."
+
+
+The mother listened with painful intentness.  "I like the sound of it,"
+she said, "but I can't hardly say I take in the full sense."
+
+"Why mother," said the lad, in a rare moment of self-expression,
+"you know the poetry says he cherished his sight and touch by temperance;
+that an idiot might see a straggling line and be content,
+but he had an eye that winced at false work, and loved the true.
+When it says his finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude
+of use, I think it means doing everything as it is done in heaven,
+and that anybody who wants to make a perfect violin must
+keep his eye open to all the beautiful things God has made,
+and his ear open to all the music he has put into the world,
+and then never let his hands touch a piece of work that is crooked
+or straggling or false, till, after years and years of rightness,
+they are fit to make a violin like the squire's, a violin that can
+say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn't be ashamed
+to play on."
+
+Do these words seem likely ones to fall from the lips
+of a lad who had been at the tail of his class ever since his
+primer days?  Well, Anthony was seventeen now, and he was
+"educated," in spite of sorry recitations,--educated, the Lord
+knows how!  Yes, in point of fact the Lord does know how!
+He knows how the drill and pressure of the daily task,
+still more the presence of the high ideal, the inspiration
+working from within, how these educate us.
+
+The blind Anthony Croft sitting in the kitchen doorway had
+seemingly missed the heights of life he might have trod, and had walked
+his close on fifty years through level meadows of mediocrity, a witch
+in every finger-tip waiting to be set to work, head among the clouds,
+feet stumbling, eyes and ears open to hear God's secret thought;
+seeing and hearing it, too, but lacking force to speak it forth again;
+for while imperious genius surmounts all obstacles, brushes laws and
+formulas from its horizon, and with its own free soul sees its "path
+and the outlets of the sky," potential genius forever needs an angel
+of deliverance to set it free.
+
+Poor Anthony Croft, or blessed Anthony Croft, I know not which,--
+God knows!  Poor he certainly was, yet blessed after all.
+"One thing I do," said Paul.  "One thing I do," said Anthony.
+He was not able to realize his ideals, but he had the "angel aim"
+by which he idealized his reals.
+
+O waiting heart of God! how soon would thy kingdom
+come if we all did our allotted tasks, humble or splendid,
+in this consecrated fashion!
+
+III.
+
+
+"Therein I hear the Parcae reel
+The threads of man at their humming wheel,
+The threads of life and power and pain,
+So sweet and mournful falls the strain."
+
+Emerson's _Harp._
+
+
+Old Mrs. Butterfield had had her third stroke of paralysis,
+and died of a Sunday night.  She was all alone in her little
+cottage on the river bank, with no neighbor nearer
+than Croft's, and nobody there but a blind man and a small boy.
+Everybody had told her it was foolish to live alone in a house
+on the river road, and everybody was pleased in a discreet
+and chastened fashion of course, that it had turned out exactly
+as they had predicted.
+
+Aunt Mehitable Tarbox was walking up to Milliken's Mills,
+with her little black reticule hanging over her arm,
+and noticing that there was no smoke coming out of the chimney,
+and that the hens were gathered about the kitchen door clamoring
+for their breakfast, she thought it best to stop and knock.
+No response followed the repeated blows from her hard knuckles.
+She then tapped smartly on Mrs. Butterfield's bedroom window
+with her thimble finger.  This proving of no avail, she was
+obliged to pry open the kitchen shutter, split open a mosquito
+netting with her shears, and crawl into the house over the sink.
+This was a considerable feat for a somewhat rheumatic elderly lady,
+but this one never grudged trouble when she wanted to find
+out anything.
+
+When she discovered that her premonitions were correct,
+and that old Mrs. Butterfield was indeed dead, her grief
+at losing a pleasant acquaintance was largely mitigated
+by her sense of importance at being first on the spot,
+and chosen by Providence to take command of the situation.
+There were no relations in the village; there was no woman
+neighbor within a mile:  it was therefore her obvious Christian
+duty not only to take charge of the remains, but to conduct
+such a funeral as the remains would have wished for herself.
+
+The fortunate Vice-President suddenly called upon by destiny
+to guide the ship of state, the general who sees a possible
+Victoria Cross in a hazardous engagement, can have a faint
+conception of aunt Hitty's feeling on this momentous occasion.
+Funerals were the very breath of her life.  There was no ceremony,
+either of public or private import, that, to her mind,
+approached a funeral in real satisfying interest.
+Yet, with distinct talent in this direction, she had always
+been "cabined, cribbed, confined" within hopeless limitations.
+She had assisted in a secondary capacity at funerals in the families
+of other people, but she would have reveled in personally
+conducted ones.  The members of her own family stubbornly
+refused to die, however, even the distant connections living
+on and on to a ridiculous old age; and if they ever did die,
+by reason of a falling roof, shipwreck, or conflagration,
+they generally died in Texas or Iowa, or some remote State where
+aunt Hitty could not follow the hearse in the first carriage.
+This blighted ambition was a heart sorrow of so deep and sacred
+a character that she did not even confess it to "Si," as her
+appendage of a husband was called.
+
+Now at last her chance for planning a funeral had come.
+Mrs. Butterfield had no kith or kin save her niece, Lyddy Ann,
+who lived in Andover, or Lawrence, or Haverhill Massachusetts,--
+aunt Hitty couldn't remember which, and hoped nobody else could.
+The niece would be sent for when they found out where she lived;
+meanwhile the funeral could not be put off.
+
+She glanced round the house preparatory to locking it
+up and starting to notify Anthony Croft.  She would just run
+over and talk to him about ordering the coffin; then she could
+attend to all other necessary preliminaries herself.
+The remains had been well-to-do, and there was no occasion for
+sordid economy, so aunt Hitty determined in her own mind to have
+the latest fashion in everything, including a silver coffin plate.
+The Butterfield coffin plates were a thing to be proud of.
+They had been sacredly preserved for years and years, and the
+entire collection--numbering nineteen in all had been framed,
+and adorned the walls of the deceased lady's best room.
+They were not of solid silver, it is true, but even so it was a
+matter of distinction to have belonged to a family that could
+afford to have nineteen coffin plates of any sort.
+
+Aunt Hitty planned certain dramatic details as she
+walked town the road to Croft's. It came to her in a burst
+of inspiration that she would have two ministers:  one for
+the long prayer, and one for the short prayer and the remarks.
+She hoped that Elder Weeks would be adequate in the latter
+direction.  She knew she couldn't for the life of her think
+of anything interesting about Mrs. Butterfield, save that she
+possessed nineteen coffin plates, and brought her hens to
+Edgewood every summer for their health; but she had heard Elder
+Weeks make a moving discourse out of less than that.
+To be sure, he needed priming, but she was equal to that.
+There was Ivory Brown's funeral:  how would that have gone on
+if it hadn't been for her?  Wasn't the elder ten minutes late,
+and what would his remarks have amounted to without her suggestions?
+You might almost say she was the author of the discourse,
+for she gave him all the appropriate ideas.  As she had helped him
+out of the wagon she had said:  "Are you prepared?  I thought not;
+but there's no time to lose.  Remember there are aged parents;
+two brothers living, one railroading in Spokane Falls,
+the other clerking in Washington, D. C. Don't mention
+the Universalists,--there's ben two in the fam'ly; nor insanity,--
+there 's ben one o' them.  The girl in the corner by the clock
+is the one that the remains has been keeping comp'ny with.
+If you can make some genteel allusions to her, it'll be much
+appreciated by his folks."
+
+As to the long prayer, she knew that the Rev. Mr. Ford could be relied
+on to pray until aunt Becky Burnham should twitch him by the coat tails.
+She had done it more than once.  She had also, on one occasion,
+got up and straightened his ministerial neckerchief, which he had gradually
+"prayed" around his saintly neck until it was behind the right ear.
+
+These plans proved so fascinating to aunt Hitty that she walked
+quite half a mile beyond Croft's, and was obliged to retrace her steps.
+She conceived bands of black alpaca for the sleeves and hats
+of the pallbearers, and a festoon of the same over the front gate,
+if there should be any left over.  She planned the singing by the choir.
+There had been no real choir-singing at any funeral in Edgewood since
+the Rev. Joshua Beckwith had died.  She would ask them to open with--
+
+
+Rebel mourner, cease your weepin'.
+You too must die.
+
+This was a favorite funeral hymn.  The only difficulty
+would be in keeping aunt Becky Burnham from pitching it
+in a key where nobody but a soprano skylark, accustomed to
+warble at a great height, could possibly sing it.
+It was generally given at the grave, when Elder Weeks officiated;
+but it never satisfied aunt Hitty, because the good elder always
+looked so unpicturesque when he threw a red bandanna handkerchief
+over his head before beginning the twenty-seven verses.
+After the long prayer, she would have Almira Berry give
+for a solo--
+
+
+This gro-o-oanin' world 's too dark and
+dre-e-ar for the saints' e - ter - nal rest,
+
+This hymn, if it did not wholly reconcile one to death,
+enabled one to look upon life with sufficient solemnity.
+It was a thousand pities, she thought, that the old hearse was
+so shabby and rickety, and that Gooly Eldridge, who drove it,
+would insist on wearing a faded peach-blow overcoat.
+It was exasperating to think of the public spirit at Egypt,
+and contrast it with the state of things at Pleasant River.
+In Egypt they had sold the old hearse house for a sausage shop,
+and now they were having hearse sociables every month
+to raise money for a new one.
+
+All these details flew through aunt Hitty's mind in
+fascinating procession.  There shouldn't be "a hitch" anywhere.
+There had been a hitch at her last funeral, but she had been
+only an assistant there.  Matt Henderson had been struck
+by lightning at the foot of Squire Bean's old nooning tree,
+and certain circumstances combined to make the funeral one
+of unusual interest, so much so that fat old Mrs. Potter
+from Deerwander created a sensation at the cemetery.
+She was so anxious to get where she could see everything
+to the best advantage that she crowded too near the bier,
+stepped on the sliding earth, and pitched into the grave.
+As she weighed over two hundred pounds, and was in a position
+of some disadvantage, it took five men to extricate her from
+the dilemma, and the operation made a long and somewhat
+awkward break in the religious services.  Aunt Hitty always
+said of this catastrophe, "If I'd 'a' ben Mis' Potter, I'd 'a'
+ben so mortified I believe I'd 'a' said, 'I wa'n't plannin'
+to be buried, but now I'm in here I declare I'll stop!'"
+
+Old Mrs. Butterfield's funeral was not only voted
+an entire success by the villagers, but the seal of professional
+approval was set upon it by an undertaker from Saco,
+who declared that Mrs. Tarbox could make a handsome living
+in the funeral line anywhere.  Providence, who always assists
+those who assist themselves, decreed that the niece Lyddy Ann
+should not arrive until the aunt was safely buried; so, there being
+none to resist her right or grudge her the privilege aunt Hitty,
+for the first time in her life, rode in the next buggy to
+the hearse.  Si, in his best suit, a broad weed and weepers,
+drove Cyse Higgins's black colt, and aunt Hitty was dressed in
+deep mourning, with the Widow Buzzell's crape veil over her face,
+and in her hand a palmleaf fan tied with a black ribbon.
+Her comment to Si, as she went to her virtuous couch that night, was:
+"It was an awful dry funeral, but that was the only flaw in it.
+It would 'a' ben perfect if there' ben anybody to shed tears.
+I come pretty nigh it myself, though I ain't no relation,
+when Elder Weeks said, 'You'll go round the house, my sisters,
+and Mis' Butterfield won't be there; you'll go int' the orchard,
+and Mis' Butterfield won't be there; you'll go int'
+the barn and Mis' Butterfield won't be there; you'll go int'
+the shed, and Mis' Butterfield won't be there; you'll go int'
+the hencoop, and Mis' Butterfield won't be there!'
+That would 'a' drawed tears from a stone most, 'specially sence Mis'
+Butterfield set such store by her hens."
+
+And this is the way that Lyddy Butterfield came into
+her kingdom, a little lone brown house on the river's brim.
+She had seen it only once before when she had driven out from Portland,
+years ago, with her aunt.  Mrs. Butterfield lived in Portland,
+but spent her summers in Edgewood on account of her chickens.
+She always explained that the country was dreadful dull for her,
+but good for the hens; they always laid so much better in
+the winter time.
+
+Lyddy liked the place all the better for its loneliness.
+She had never had enough of solitude, and this quiet home,
+with the song of the river for company, if one needed more
+company than chickens and a cat, satisfied all her desires,
+particularly as it was accompanied by a snug little income
+of two hundred dollars a year, a meagre sum that seemed to open
+up mysterious avenues of joy to her starved, impatient heart.
+
+When she was a mere infant, her brother was holding
+her on his knee before the great old-fashioned fireplace
+heaped with burning logs.  A sudden noise startled him,
+and the crowing, restless baby gave an unexpected lurch, and slipped,
+face downward, into the glowing embers.  It was a full minute
+before the horror-stricken boy could extricate the little creature
+from the cruel flame that had already done its fatal work.
+The baby escaped with her life, but was disfigured forever.
+As she grew older, the gentle hand of time could not entirely
+efface the terrible scars.  One cheek was wrinkled and crimson,
+while one eye and the mouth were drawn down pathetically.
+The accident might have changed the disposition of any child,
+but Lyddy chanced to be a sensitive, introspective bit of feminine
+humanity, in whose memory the burning flame was never quenched.
+Her mother, partly to conceal her own wounded vanity, and partly
+to shield the timid, morbid child, kept her out of sight as much
+as possible; so that at sixteen, when she was left an orphan,
+she had lived almost entirely in solitude.
+
+She became, in course of time, a kind of general nursery
+governess in a large family of motherless children.
+The father was almost always away from home; his sister kept the house,
+and Lyddy stayed in the nursery, bathing the brood and putting
+them to bed, dressing them in the morning, and playing with them
+in the safe privacy of the back garden or the open attic.
+They loved her, disfigured as she was, for the child despises
+mere externals, and explores the heart of things to see whether it
+be good or evil,--but they could never induce her to see strangers,
+nor to join any gathering of people.
+
+The children were grown and married now, and Lyddy was nearly
+forty when she came into possession of house and lands and fortune;
+forty, with twenty years of unexpended feeling pent within her.
+Forty, that is rather old to be interesting, but age is a relative matter.
+Haven't you seen girls of four-and-twenty who have nibbled and been
+nibbled at ever since they were sixteen, but who have neither caught
+anything nor been caught?  They are old, if you like, but Lyddy was
+forty and still young, with her susceptibilities cherished, not dulled,
+and with all the "language of passion fresh and rooted as the lovely
+leafage about a spring."
+
+IV.
+
+
+"He shall daily joy dispense
+Hid in song's sweet influence."
+
+Emerson's _Merlin._
+
+
+Lyddy had very few callers during her first month
+as a property owner in Edgewood.  Her appearance would
+have been against her winning friends easily in any case,
+even if she had not acquired the habits of a recluse.
+It took a certain amount of time, too, for the community
+to get used to the fact that old Mrs. Butterfield was dead,
+and her niece Lyddy Ann living in the cottage on the river road.
+There were numbers of people who had not yet heard that old
+Mrs. Butterfield had bought the house from the Thatcher boys,
+and that was fifteen years ago; but this was not strange, for,
+notwithstanding aunt Hitty's valuable services in disseminating
+general information, there was a man living on the Bonny Eagle
+road who was surprised to hear that Daniel Webster was dead,
+and complained that folks were not so long-lived as they
+used to be.
+
+Aunt Hitty thought Lyddy a Goth and a Vandal because she took down
+the twenty silver coffin plates and laid them reverently away.
+"Mis' Butterfield would turn in her grave," she said, "if she knew it.
+She ain't much of a housekeeper, I guess," she went on, as she cut
+over Dr. Berry's old trousers into briefer ones for Tommy Berry.
+"She gives considerable stuff to her hens that she'd a sight better heat
+over and eat herself, in these hard times when the missionary societies can't
+hardly keep the heathen fed and clothed and warmed--no, I don't mean warmed,
+for most o' the heathens live in hot climates, somehow or 'nother.
+My back door's jest opposite hers; it's across the river, to be sure,
+but it's the narrer part, and I can see everything she does as plain
+as daylight.  She washed a Monday, and she ain't taken her clothes in yet,
+and it's Thursday.  She may be bleachin' of 'em out, but it looks slack.
+I said to Si last night I should stand it till 'bout Friday,--seein' 'em lay
+on the grass there, but if she didn't take 'em in then, I should go
+over and offer to help her.  She has a fire in the settin'-room 'most
+every night, though we ain't had a frost yet; and as near's I can
+make out, she's got full red curtains hangin' up to her windows.
+I ain't sure, for she don't open the blinds in that room till I
+get away in the morning, and she shuts 'em before I get back at night.
+Si don't know red from green, so he's useless in such matters.
+I'm going home late to-night, and walk down on that side o' the river,
+so't I can call in after dark and see what makes her house light up
+as if the sun was settin' inside of it."
+
+As a matter of fact, Lyddy was reveling in house-furnishing
+of a humble sort.  She had a passion for color.  There was
+a red-and-white straw matting on the sitting-room floor.
+Reckless in the certain possession of twenty dollars a month,
+she purchased yards upon yards of turkey red cotton;
+enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long
+curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rockers.
+She knotted white fringes for the table covers and curtains,
+painted the inside of the fireplace red, put some pots,
+of scarlet geraniums on the window-sills, filled newspaper
+rack with ferns and tacked it over an ugly spot in the wall,
+edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of scarlet worsted,
+and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash and red
+cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned
+mantelshelf, and held pictures of Mr. Reynolds, Miss
+Elvira Reynolds, George, Susy, Anna, John, Hazel, Ella,
+and Rufus Reynolds, her former charges.  When all this was done,
+she lighted a little blaze on the hearth, took the red curtains
+from their hands, let them fall gracefully to the floor,
+and sat down in her rocking-chair, reconciled to her existence
+for absolutely the first time in her forty years.
+
+I hope Mrs. Butterfield was happy enough in Paradise to appreciate
+and feel Lyddy's joy.  I can even believe she was glad to have died,
+since her dying could bring such content to any wretched living human soul.
+As Lydia sat in the firelight, the left side of her poor face
+in shadow, you saw that she was distinctly harmonious.  Her figure,
+clad in plain black-and-white calico dress, was a graceful, womanly one.
+She had beautifully sloping shoulders and a sweet wrist.  Her hair was
+soft and plentiful, and her hands were fine, strong, and sensitive.
+This possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more pitiful,
+for if a cheap chrome has smirch across its face, we think it a matter
+of no moment, but we deplore the smallest scratch or blur on any
+work of real art.
+
+Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she
+sat in front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk.
+It was her habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple
+five-o'clock supper, gatherings ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers
+for her vases; and one night she heard, above the rippling of the river,
+the strange, sweet, piercing sound of Anthony Croft's violin.
+
+She drew nearer, and saw a, middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen
+doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
+She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a high forehead,
+and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual fashion.
+He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was scrupulously clean,
+and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie.
+Out of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she
+did every night without recognizing that the musician was blind.
+The music had a curious effect upon her.  It was a hitherto unknown influence
+in her life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself.
+As she sat on the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree,
+her head resting against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of
+Anthony's violin came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul.
+Remember that in her secluded life she had heard only such harmony as Elvira
+Reynolds evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute,
+and the Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.
+
+Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
+Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there was
+no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her heart with
+a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had never possessed,
+would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never before realized.
+When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft wail of delicious woe,
+she bent forward into the dark, dreading that something would be lost
+in the very struggle of listening; then, after a, pause, a pure human tone
+would break the stillness, and soaring, bird-like, higher and higher,
+seem to mount to heaven itself, and, "piercing its starry floors,"
+lift poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very grates of infinite bliss.
+In the gentle moods that stole upon her in those summer twilights she
+became a different woman, softer in her prosperity than she had ever
+been in her adversity; for some plants only blossom in sunshine.
+What wonder if to her the music and the musician became one?
+It is sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his talents
+in this way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his music,
+and the music was Anthony Croft.  When he played on his violin, it was
+as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the bird
+on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the lattice
+of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in every tone;
+and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the patient hands
+had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in passionate prayer
+for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought their blessed influence
+on the willing strings until the tone was laden with spiritual harmony.
+One might indeed have sung of this little red violin--that looked to Lyddy,
+in the sunset glow, as if it were veneered with rubies--all that
+Shelley sang of another perfect instrument:--
+
+
+"The artist who this viol wrought
+To echo all harmonious thought,
+Fell'd a tree, while on the steep
+The woods were in their winter sleep,
+Rock'd in that repose divine
+Of the wind-swept Apennine;
+And dreaming, some of Autumn past,
+And some of Spring approaching fast,
+And some of April buds and showers,
+And some of songs in July bowers,
+And all of love; and so this tree--
+O that such our death may be!--
+Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
+To live in happier form again."
+
+The viol "whispers in enamoured tone:"--
+
+
+"Sweet oracles of woods and dells,
+And summer windy ill sylvan cells; . .
+The clearest echoes of the hills,
+The softest notes of falling rills,
+The melodies of birds and bees,
+The murmuring of summer seas,
+And pattering rain, and breathing dew,
+And airs of evening; all it knew....
+--All this it knows, but will not tell
+ To those who cannot question well
+The spirit that inhabits it; ...
+But, sweetly as its answers will
+Flatter hands of perfect skill,
+It keeps its highest, holiest tone
+For one beloved Friend alone."
+
+
+Lyddy heard the violin and the man's voice as he talked to the child,--
+heard them night after night; and when she went home to the little
+brown house to light the fire on the hearth and let down the warm
+red curtains, she fell into sweet, sad reveries; and when she blew
+out her candle for the night, she fell asleep and dreamed new dreams,
+and her heart was stirred with the rustling of new-born hopes that rose
+and took wing like birds startled from their nests.
+
+V.
+
+
+"Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
+A poet or a friend to find:
+Behold, he watches at the door!
+Behold his shadow on the floor!"
+
+Emerson's _Saadi._
+
+
+Lyddy Butterfield's hen turkey was of a roving disposition.
+She had never appreciated her luxurious country quarters in Edgewood, and was
+seemingly anxious to return to the modest back yard in her native city.
+At any rate, she was in the habit of straying far from home, and the habit
+was growing upon her to such an extent that she would even lead her docile
+little gobblers down to visit Anthony Croft's hens and share their corn.
+
+Lyddy had caught her at it once, and was now pursuing her to that
+end for the second time.  She paused in front of the house,
+but there were no turkeys to be seen.  Could they have wandered up
+the hill road,--the discontented, "traipsing," exasperating things?
+She started in that direction, when she heard a crash in the Croft kitchen,
+and then the sound of a boy's voice coming from an inner room,--
+a weak and querulous voice, as if the child were ill.
+
+She drew nearer, in spite of her dread of meeting people,
+or above all of intruding, and saw Anthony Croft standing over the stove,
+with an expression of utter helplessness on his usually placid face.
+She had never really seen him before in the daylight,
+and there was something about his appearance that startled her.
+The teakettle was on the floor, and a sea of water was flooding
+the man's feet, yet he seemed to be gazing into vacancy.
+Presently he stooped, and fumbled gropingly for the kettle.
+It was too hot to be touched with impunity, and he finally left it
+in a despairing sort of way, and walked in the direction of a shelf,
+from under which a row of coats was hanging.  The boy called again in a
+louder and more insistent tone, ending in a whimper of restless pain.
+This seemed to make the man more nervous than ever.
+His hands went patiently over and over the shelf, then paused
+at each separate nail.
+
+"Bless the poor dear!" thought Lyddy.  "Is he trying to find
+his hat, or what is he trying to do?  I wonder if he is music mad?"
+and she drew still nearer the steps.
+
+At this moment he turned and came rapidly toward the door.
+She looked straight in his face.  There was no mistaking it:
+he was blind.  The magician who had told her through his violin
+secrets that she had scarcely dreamed of, the wizard who had set
+her heart to throbbing and aching and longing as it had never
+throbbed and ached and longed before, the being who had worn a halo
+of romance and genius to her simple mind, was stone-blind! A wave
+of impetuous anguish, as sharp and passionate as any she had ever
+felt for her own misfortunes, swept over her soul at the spectacle
+of the man's helplessness.  His sightless eyes struck her like a blow.
+But there was no time to lose.  She was directly in his path:
+if she stood still he would certainly walk over her, and if she
+moved he would hear her, so, on the spur of the moment, she gave
+a nervous cough and said, "Good-morning, Mr. Croft."
+
+He stopped short.  "Who is it?" he asked.
+
+"I am--it is--I am--your new neighbor," said Lyddy,
+with a trembling attempt at cheerfulness.
+
+"Oh, Miss Butterfield!  I should have called up to see
+you before this if it hadn't been for the boy's sickness.
+But I am a good-for-nothing neighbor, as you have doubtless heard.
+Nobody expects anything of me."
+
+("Nobody expects anything of me."  Her own plaint,
+uttered in her own tone!)
+
+"I don't know about that," she answered swiftly.
+"You've given me, for one, a great deal of pleasure with your
+wonderful music.  I often hear you as you play after supper,
+and it has kept me from being lonesome.  That isn't very much,
+to be sure."
+
+"You are fond of music, then?"
+
+"I didn't know I was; I never heard any before," said Lyddy simply;
+"but it seems to help people to say things they couldn't say for themselves,
+don't you think so?  It comforts me even to hear it, and I think it must
+be still more beautiful to make it."
+
+Now, Lyddy Ann Butterfield had no sooner uttered this
+commonplace speech than the reflection darted through
+her mind like a lightning flash that she had never spoken
+a bit of her heart out like this in all her life before.
+The reason came to her in the same flash:  she was not being
+looked at; her disfigured face was hidden.  This man, at least,
+could not shrink, turn away, shiver, affect indifference,
+fix his eyes on hers with a fascinated horror, as others had done.
+Her heart was divided between a great throb of pity and sympathy
+for him and an irresistible sense of gratitude for herself.
+Sure of protection and comprehension, her lovely soul
+came out of her poor eyes and sat in the sunshine.
+She spoke her mind at ease, as we utter sacred things sometimes
+under cover of darkness.
+
+"You seem to have had an accident; what can I do to help you?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing, thank you.  The boy has been sick for some days,
+but he seems worse since last night.  Nothing is in its right
+place in the house, so I have given up trying to find anything,
+and am just going to Edgewood to see if somebody will help me
+for a few days."
+
+"Uncle Tony!  Uncle To-ny! where are you?  Do give me another drink,
+I'm so hot!" came the boy's voice from within.
+
+"Coming, laddie!  I don't believe he ought to drink so much water,
+but what can I do?  He is burning up with fever."
+
+"Now look here, Mr. Croft," and Lydia's tone was cheerfully decisive.
+"You sit down in that rocker, please, and let me command the ship
+for a while.  This is one of the cases where a woman is necessary.
+First and foremost, what were you hunting for?"
+
+"My hat and the butter," said Anthony meekly,
+and at this unique combination they both laughed.
+Lyddy's laugh was particularly fresh, childlike, and pleased;
+one that would have astonished the Reynolds children.
+She had seldom laughed heartily since little Rufus had cried
+and told her she frightened him when she twisted her face so.
+
+"Your hat is in the wood-box, and I'll find the butter in the twinkling
+of an eye, though why you want it now is more than--My patience, Mr. Croft,
+your hand is burned to a blister!"
+
+"Don't mind me.  Be good enough to look at the boy and tell
+me what ails him; nothing else matters much."
+
+"I will with pleasure, but let me ease you a little first.
+Here's a rag that will be just the thing," and Lyddy,
+suiting the pretty action to the mendacious worn, took a
+good handkerchief from her pocket and tore it in three strips,
+after spreading it with tallow from a candle heated over the stove.
+This done, she hound up the burned hand skillfully, and, crossing the
+dining-room, disappeared within the little chamber door beyond.
+She came out presently, and said half hesitatingly,
+"Would you--mind going out in the orchard for an hour or so?
+You seem to be rather in the way here, and I should like
+the place to myself, if you'll excuse me for saying so.
+I'm ever so much more capable than Mrs. Buck; won't you
+give me a trial, sir?  Here's your violin and your hat.
+I'll call you if you can help or advise me."
+
+"But I can't let a stranger come in and do my housework," he objected.
+"I can't, you know, though I appreciate your kindness all the same."
+
+"I am your nearest neighbor, and your only one, for that matter,"
+said Lyddy firmly; "its nothing more than right that I should look after that
+sick child, and I must do it.  I haven't got a thing to do in my own house.
+I am nothing but a poor lonely old maid, who's been used to children
+all her life, and likes nothing better than to work over them."
+
+A calm settled upon Anthony's perturbed spirit, as he sat under
+the apple-trees and heard Lyddy going to and fro in the cottage.
+"She isn't any old maid," he thought; "she doesn't step like one;
+she has soft shoes and a springy walk.  She must be a very
+handsome woman, with a hand like that; and such a voice!
+I knew the moment she spoke that she didn't belong in this village."
+
+As a matter of fact, his keen ear had caught the melody in
+Lyddy's voice, a voice full of dignity, sweetness, and reserve power.
+His sense of touch, too, had captured the beauty of her hand,
+and held it in remembrance,--the soft palm, the fine skin,
+supple fingers, smooth nails, and firm round wrist.
+These charms would never have been noted by any seeing
+man in Edgewood, but they were revealed to Anthony Croft
+while Lyddy, like the good Samaritan, bound up his wounds.
+It is these saving stars that light the eternal darkness
+of the blind.
+
+Lyddy thought she had met her Waterloo when, with arms akimbo,
+she gazed about the Croft establishment, which was a scene
+of desolation for the moment.  Anthony's cousin from
+Bridgton was in the habit of visiting him every two months
+for a solemn house-cleaning, and Mrs. Buck from Pleasant
+River came every Saturday and Monday for baking and washing.
+Between times Davy and his uncle did the housework together;
+and although it was respectably done, there was no pink-and-white
+daintiness about it, you may be sure.
+
+Lyddy came out to the apple-trees in about an hour,
+laughing a little nervously as she said, "I'm sorry to
+have taken a mean advantage of you, Mr. Croft, but I know
+everything you've got in your house, and exactly where it is.
+I couldn't help it, you see, when I was making things tidy.
+It would do you good to see the boy.  His room was too light,
+and the flies were devouring him.  I swept him and dusted him,
+put on clean sheets and pillow slips, sponged him with bay rum,
+brushed his hair, drove out the flies, and tacked a green
+curtain up to the window.  Fifteen minutes after he was sleeping
+like a kitten.  He has a sore throat and considerable fever.
+Could you--can you--at least, will you, go up to my house
+on an errand?"
+
+"Certainly I can.  I know it inside and out as well as my own."
+
+"Very good.  On the clock shelf in the sitting-room there
+is a bottle of sweet spirits of nitre; it's the only bottle there,
+so you can't make any mistake.  It will help until the doctor comes.
+I wonder you didn't send for him yesterday?"
+
+"Davy wouldn't have him," apologized his uncle.
+
+"Wouldn't he ?" said Lyddy with cheerful scorn.
+"He has you under pretty good control, hasn't he?
+But children are unmerciful tyrants."
+
+"Couldn't you coax him into it before you go home?" asked Anthony
+in a wheedling voice.
+
+"I can try; but it isn't likely I can
+influence him, if you can't. Still, if we both fail, I really don't
+see what 's to prevent our sending for the doctor in spite of him.
+He is as weak as a baby, you know, and can't sit up in bed:
+what could he do?  I will risk the consequences, if you will! "
+
+There was a note of such amiable and winning sarcasm in all this,
+such a cheery, invincible courage, such a friendly neighborliness
+and cooperation, above all such a different tone from any
+he was accustomed to hear in Edgewood, that Anthony Croft felt
+warmed through to the core.
+
+As he walked quickly along the road, he conjured up a vision
+of autumn beauty from the few hints nature gave even to her sightless
+ones on this glorious morning,--the rustle of a few fallen leaves under
+his feet, the clear wine of the air, the full rush of the swollen river,
+the whisking of the squirrels in the boughs, the crunch of their teeth
+on the nuts, the spicy odor of the apples lying under the trees.
+He missed his mother that morning more than he had missed her for years.
+How neat she was, how thrifty, how comfortable, and how comforting!
+His life was so dreary and aimless; and was it the best or the right one
+for Davy, with his talent and dawning ambition?  Would it not be better
+to have Mrs. Buck live with them altogether, instead of coming twice a week,
+as heretofore ?  No; he shrank from that with a hopeless aversion born
+of Saturday and Monday dinners in her company.  He could hear her pour
+her coffee into the saucer; hear the scraping of the cup on the rim,
+and know that she was setting it sloppily down on the cloth.  He could
+remember her noisy drinking, the weight of her elbow on the table,
+the creaking of her calico dress under the pressure of superabundant flesh.
+Besides, she had tried to scrub his favorite violin with sapolio.
+No, anything was better than Mrs. Buck as a constancy.
+
+He took off his hat unconsciously as he entered Lyddy's sitting-room.
+A gentle breeze blew one of the full red curtains towards him till
+it fluttered about his shoulders like a frolicsome, teasing hand.
+There was a sweet, pungent odor of pine boughs, a canary sang in the window,
+the clock was trimmed with a blackberry vine; he knew the prickles,
+and they called up to his mind the glowing tints he had loved so well.
+His sensitive hand, that carried a divining rod in every finger-tip,
+met a vase on the shelf, and, traveling upward, touched a full branch
+of alder berries tied about with a ribbon.  The ribbon would be red;
+the woman who arranged this room would make no mistake; for in one morning
+Anthony Croft had penetrated the secret of Lyddy's true personality,
+and in a measure had sounded the shallows that led to the depths
+of her nature.
+
+Lyddy went home at seven o'clock that night rather reluctantly.
+The doctor had said Mr. Croft could sit up with the boy unless he grew
+much worse, and there was no propriety in her staying longer unless
+there was danger.
+
+"You have been very good to me," Anthony said gravely,
+as he shook her hand at parting,--"very good."
+
+They stood together on the doorstep.  A distant bell,
+called to evening prayer-meeting; the restless murmur of the river
+and the whisper of the wind in the pines broke the twilight stillness.
+The long, quiet day together, part of it spent by the sick child's bedside,
+had brought the two strangers curiously near to each other.
+
+"The house hasn't seemed so sweet and fresh since my mother died,"
+he went on, as he dropped her hand, "and I haven't had so many flowers
+and green things in it since I lost my eyesight."
+
+"Was it long ago?"
+
+"Ten years.  Is that long?"
+
+"Long to bear a burden."
+
+"I hope you know little of burden-bearing?"
+
+"I know little else."
+
+"I might have guessed it from the alacrity with which
+you took up Davy's and mine.  You must be very happy to have
+the power to make things straight and sunny and wholesome;
+to breathe your strength into helplessness such as mine.
+I thank you, and I envy you.  Good-night."
+
+Lyddy turned on her heel without a word; her mind was beyond
+and above words.  The sky seemed to have descended upon, enveloped her,
+caught her up into its heaven, as she rose into unaccustomed heights
+of feeling, like Elijah in his chariot of fire.  She very happy!
+She with power, power to make things straight and sunny and wholesome!
+She able to breathe strength into helplessness, even a consecrated,
+Godsmitten helplessness like his!  She not only to be thanked, but envied!
+
+Her house seemed strange to her that night.
+She went to bed in the dark, dreading even the light of a candle;
+and before she turned down her counterpane she flung herself
+on her knees, and poured out her soul in a prayer that had
+been growing, waiting, and waited for, perhaps, for years:--
+
+"O Lord, I thank Thee for health and strength and life.
+I never could do it before, but I thank Thee to-night for life
+on any terms.  I thank Thee for this home; for the chance
+of helping another human creature, stricken like myself;
+for the privilege of ministering to a motherless child.
+Make me to long only for the beauty of holiness, and to be
+satisfied if I attain to it.  Wash my soul pure and clean,
+and let that be the only mirror in which I see my face.
+I have tried to be useful.  Forgive me if it always seemed
+so hard and dreary a life.  Forgive me if I am too happy because
+for one short day I have really helped in a beautiful way,
+and found a friend who saw, because he was blind, the real
+me underneath; the me that never was burned by the fire;
+the me that isn't disfigured, unless my wicked discontent
+has done it; the me that has lived on and on and on,
+starving to death for the friendship and sympathy and love
+that come to other women.  I have spent my forty years in
+the wilderness, feeding on wrath and bitterness and tears.
+Forgive me, Lord, and give me one more vision of the blessed
+land of Canaan, even if I never dwell there."
+
+VI.
+
+
+"Nor less the eternal poles
+Of tendency distribute souls.
+There need no vows to bind
+Whom not each other seek, but find."
+
+Emerson's _Celestial Love._
+
+
+Davy's sickness was a lingering one.  Mrs. Buck came for two or
+three hours a day, but Lyddy was the self-installed angel of the house;
+and before a week had passed the boy's thin arms were around her neck,
+his head on her loving shoulder, and his cheek pressed against hers.
+Anthony could hear them talk, as he sat in the kitchen busy at
+his work.  Musical instruments were still brought him to repair,
+though less frequently than of yore, and he could still make
+many parts of violins far better than his seeing competitors.
+A friend and pupil sat by his side in the winter evenings
+and supplemented his weakness, helping and learning alternately,
+while his blind master's skill filled him with wonder and despair.
+The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted;
+and though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair's
+breadth could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature
+had been busy with her divine work of compensation.
+The one sense stricken with death, she poured floods of new life and
+vigor into the others.  Touch became something more than the stupid,
+empty grasp of things we seeing mortals know, and in place of the two
+eyes he had lost he now had ten in every finger-tip. As for odors,
+let other folks be proud of smelling musk and lavender, but let him
+tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various kinds of so-called
+scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and interpret secrets
+that the universe is ever whispering to us who are pent in partial
+deafness because, forsooth, we see.
+
+He often paused to hear Lydia's low, soothing tones and the boy's
+weak treble.  Anthony had said to him once, "Miss Butterfield is very
+beautiful, isn't she, Davy?  You haven't painted me a picture of her yet.
+How does she look ?"
+
+Davy was stricken at first with silent embarrassment.
+He was a truthful child, but in this he could no more have
+told the whole truth than he could have cut off his hand.
+He was knit to Lyddy by every tie of gratitude and affection.
+He would sit for hours with his expectant face pressed against
+the window-pane, and when he saw her coming down the shady
+road he was filled with a sense of impending comfort and joy.
+
+"NO," he said hesitatingly, "she isn't pretty, nunky, but she's sweet
+and nice and dear, Everything on her shines, it's so clean; and when she
+comes through the trees, with her white apron and her purple calico dress,
+your heart jumps, because you know she's going to make everything pleasant.
+Her hair has a pretty wave in it, and her hand is soft on your forehead;
+and it's most worth while being sick just to have her in the house."
+
+Meanwhile, so truly is "praise our fructifying sun," Lydia bloomed
+into a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech.
+A sly sense of humor woke into life, and a positive talent for conversation,
+latent hitherto because she had never known any one who cared
+to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness.
+When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's sofa,
+his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and flowers
+and music, and about the meaning of life, too,--its burdens and mistakes,
+and joys and sorrows; groping with him in the darkness to find
+a clue to God's purposes.
+
+Davy had long afternoons at Lyddy's house as the autumn
+grew into winter.  He read to her while she sewed rags
+for a new sitting-room carpet, and they played dominoes
+and checkers together in the twilight before supper time,--
+suppers that were a feast to the boy, after Mrs. Buck's cookery.
+Anthony brought his violin sometimes of an evening,
+and Almira Berry, the next neighbor on the road to the Mills,
+would drop in and join the little party.  Almira used to sing
+Auld Robin Gray, What Will You Do, Love, and Robin Adair,
+to the great enjoyment of everybody; and she persuaded Lyddy
+to buy the old church melodeon, and learn to sing alto in Oh,
+Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, Gently, Gently Sighs the Breeze,
+and I know a Bank.  Nobody sighed for the gayeties and advantages
+of a great city when, these concerts being over, Lyddy would
+pass crisp seedcakes and raspberry shrub, doughnuts and cider,
+or hot popped corn and molasses candy.
+
+"But there, she can afford to," said aunt Hitty Tarbox;
+"she's pretty middlin' wealthy for Edgewood.  And it's lucky she
+is, for she 'bout feeds that boy o' Croft's. No wonder
+he wants her to fill him up, after six years of the Widder
+Buck's victuals.  Aurelia Buck can take good flour and sugar,
+sweet butter and fresh eggs, and in ten strokes of her hand she
+can make 'em into something the very hogs 'll turn away from.
+I declare, it brings the tears to my eyes sometimes
+when I see her coming out of Croft's Saturday afternoons,
+and think of the stone crocks full of nasty messes she's
+left behind her for that innocent man and boy to eat up....
+Anthony goes to see Miss Butterfield consid'able often.
+Of course it's awstensibly to walk home with Davy,
+or do an errand or something, but everybody knows better.
+She went down to Croft's pretty nearly every day when his cousin
+from Bridgton come to house-clean. She suspicioned something,
+I guess.  Anyhow, she asked me if Miss Butterfield's two hundred
+a year was in gov'ment bonds.  Anthony's eyesight ain't good,
+but I guess he could make out to cut cowpons off.... It
+would be strange if them two left-overs should take an'
+marry each other; though, come to think of it, I don't
+know's 't would neither.  He's blind, to be sure, and can't
+see her scarred face.  It's a pity she ain't deef,
+so't she can't hear his everlastin' fiddle.  She's lucky
+to get any kind of a husband; she's too humbly to choose.
+I declare, she reminds me of a Jack-o'-lantern, though
+if you look at the back of her, or see her in meetin'
+with a thick veil on, she's about the best appearin' woman in
+Edgewood.... I never see anybody stiffen up as Anthony has.
+He had me make him three white shirts and three gingham ones,
+with collars and cuffs on all of 'em.  It seems as if six
+shirts at one time must mean something out o' the common!"
+
+Aunt Hitty was right; it did mean something out of the common.
+It meant the growth of an all-engrossing, grateful,
+divinely tender passion between two love-starved souls.
+On the one hand, Lyddy, who though she had scarcely known
+the meaning of love in all her dreary life, yet was as full
+to the brim of all sweet, womanly possibilities of loving
+and giving as any pretty woman; on the other, the blind
+violin-maker, who had never loved any woman but his mother,
+and who was in the direst need of womanly sympathy and affection.
+
+Anthony Croft, being ministered unto by Lyddy's kind hands,
+hearing her sweet voice and her soft footstep, saw her as God sees,
+knowing the best; forgiving the worst, like God, and forgetting it,
+still more like God, I think.
+
+And Lyddy?  There is no pen worthy to write of Lyddy.
+Her joy lay deep in her heart like a jewel at the bottom of a clear pool,
+so deep that no ripple or ruffle on the surface could disturb
+the hidden treasure.  If God had smitten these two with one hand,
+he had held out the other in tender benediction.
+
+There had been a pitiful scene of unspeakable solemnity
+when Anthony first told Lyddy that he loved her, and asked her
+to be his wife.  He had heard all her sad history by this time,
+though not from her own lips, and his heart went out to her
+all the more for the heavy cross that had been laid upon her.
+He had the wit and wisdom to put her affliction quite out
+of the question, and allude only to her sacrifice in marrying
+a blind man, hopelessly and helplessly dependent on her sweet
+offices for the rest of his life, if she, in her womanly mercy,
+would love him and help him bear his burdens.
+
+When his tender words fell upon Lyddy's dazed brain
+she sank beside his chair, and, clasping his knees, sobbed:
+"I love you, I cannot help loving you, I cannot help
+telling you I love you!  But you must hear the truth;
+you have heard it from others, but perhaps they softened it.
+If I marry you, people will always blame me and pity you.
+You would never ask me to be your wife if you could see my face;
+you could not love me an instant if you were not blind."
+
+"Then I thank God unceasingly for my infirmity," said Anthony Croft,
+as he raised her to her feet.
+
+
+     .  .  .  .  .  .
+
+
+Anthony and Lyddy Croft sat in the apple orchard,
+one warm day in late spring.
+
+Anthony's work would have puzzled a casual on-looker. Ten stout
+wires were stretched between two trees, fifteen or twenty feet apart,
+and each group of five represented the lines of the musical staff.
+Wooden bars crossed the wires at regular intervals, dividing the staff
+into measures.  A box with many compartments sat on a stool beside him,
+and this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but were in reality whole,
+half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats, sharps, and the like.
+These were cleft in such a way that he could fit them on the wires
+almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to him, and Lyddy had learned
+to transcribe with pen and ink the music she found in wood and wire,
+He could write only simple airs in this way, but when he played
+them on the violin they were transported into a loftier region,
+such genius lay in the harmony, the arabesque, the delicate lacework
+of embroidery with which the tune was inwrought; now high, now low,
+now major, now minor, now sad, now gay, with the one thrilling,
+haunting cadence recurring again and again, to be watched for, longed for,
+and greeted with a throb of delight.
+
+Davy was reading at the window, his curly head buried
+in a well-worn Shakespeare opened at Midsummer Night's Dream.
+Lyddy was sitting under her favorite pink apple-tree, a mass
+of fragrant bloom, more beautiful than Aurora's morning gown.
+She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn innumerable pockets in a
+square basket that she held in her lap.  The pockets were small,
+the needles were fine, the thread was a length of cobweb.
+Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she
+was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart
+could scarcely hold them.  Nature was stirring everywhere.
+The seeds were springing in the warm earth.  The hens
+were clucking to their downy chicks just out of the egg.
+The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple boughs,
+and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could
+look into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings.
+The sight of her bright eyes, alert for every sign of danger,
+sent a rush of feeling through Lyddy's veins that made her long
+to clasp the little feathered mother to her own breast.
+
+A sweet gravity and consecration of thought possessed her,
+and the pink blossoms falling into her basket were not more delicate
+than the rose-colored dreams that flushed her soul.
+
+Anthony put in the last wooden peg, and taking up his violin called,
+"Davy, lad, come out and tell me what this means!"
+
+Davy was used to this; from a wee boy he had been asked
+to paint the changing landscape of each day, and to put into
+words his uncle's music.
+
+Lyddy dropped her needle, the birds stopped to listen,
+and Anthony played.
+
+"It is this apple orchard in May time," said Davy;
+"it is the song of the green things growing, isn't it?"
+
+"What do you say, dear?" asked Anthony, turning to his wife.
+
+Love and hope had made a poet of Lyddy.  "I think Davy is right,"
+she said.  "It is a dream of the future, the story of all new and
+beautiful things growing out of the old.  It is full of the sweetness
+of present joy, but there is promise and hope in it besides.
+It is like the Spring sitting in the lap of Winter, and holding
+a baby Summer in her bosom."
+
+Davy did not quite understand this, though he thought it pretty;
+but Lyddy's husband did, and when the boy went back to his books,
+he took his wife in his arms and kissed her twice,--once for herself,
+and then once again.
+
+
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+THE EVENTFUL TRIP OF THE MIDNIGHT CRY.
+
+
+In the little villages along the Saco River,
+in the year 1850 or thereabouts, the arrival and departure
+of the stage-coach was the one exciting incident of the day.
+It did not run on schedule time in those days, but started
+from Limington or Saco, as the case might be, at about or
+somewhere near a certain hour, and arrived at the other end
+of the route whenever it got there.  There were no trains to meet
+(the railway popularly known as the "York and Yank'em" was not built
+till 1862); the roads were occasionally good and generally bad;
+and thus it was often dusk, and sometimes late in the evening,
+when the lumbering vehicle neared its final destination
+and drew up to the little post-offices along the way.
+However late it might be, the village postmaster had to be on hand
+to receive and open the mailbags; after which he distributed
+the newspapers and letters in a primitive set of pine
+pigeon-holes on the wall, turned out the loafers, "banked up"
+the fire, and went home to bed.
+
+"Life" Lane was a jolly good fellow,--just the man to sit on the box
+seat and drive the three horses through ruts and "thank-you-ma'ams,"
+slush and mud and snow.  There was a perennial twinkle in his eye,
+his ruddy cheeks were wrinkled with laughter, and he had a good story
+forever on the tip of his tongue.  He stood six feet two in his stockings
+(his mother used to say she had the longest Life of any woman in the
+State o' Maine); his shoulders were broad in proportion, and his lungs
+just the sort to fill amply his noble chest.  Therefore, when he had
+what was called in the vernacular "turrible bad goin'," and when any other
+stage-driver in York County would have shrunk into his muffler and snapped
+and snarled on the slightest provocation, Life Lane opened his great
+throat when he passed over the bridges at Moderation or Bonny Eagle,
+and sent forth a golden, sonorous "Yo ho! halloo!" into the still air.
+The later it was and the stormier it was, the more vigor he put into
+the note, and it was a drowsy postmaster indeed who did not start
+from his bench by the fire at the sound of that ringing halloo.
+Thus the old stage-coach, in Life Lane's time, was generally called "The
+Midnight Cry," and not such a bad name either, whether the term was derisively
+applied because the stage was always late; or whether Life's "Yo ho!"
+had caught the popular fancy.
+
+There was a pretty girl in Pleasant River (and, alas! another in
+Bonny Eagle) who went to bed every night with the chickens, but stayed awake
+till she heard first the rumble of heavy wheels on a bridge, then a faint,
+bell-like tone that might have come out of the mouth of a silver horn;
+whereupon she blushed as if it were an offer of marriage, and turned
+over and went to sleep.
+
+If the stage arrived in good season, Life would have a few minutes
+to sit on the loafers' beach beside the big open fire; and what a
+feature he was, with his tales culled from all sorts of passengers,
+who were never so fluent as when sitting beside him "up in front!"
+There was a tallow dip or two, and no other light save that of the fire.
+Who that ever told a story could wish a more inspiring auditor than
+Jacob Bean, a literal, honest old fellow who took the most
+vital interest in every detail of the stories told, looking upon
+their heroes and their villains as personal friends or foes.
+He always sat in one corner of the fireplace, poker in hand,
+and the crowd tacitly allowed him the role of Greek chorus.
+Indeed, nobody could have told a story properly without Jake Bean's
+parentheses and punctuation marks poked in at exciting junctures.
+
+"That 's so every time!" he would say, with a lunge at the forestick.
+"I'll bate he was glad then!" with another stick flung on in just
+the right spot.  "Golly! but that served 'em right!" with a thrust
+at the backlog.
+
+The New England story seemed to flourish under these conditions:
+a couple of good hard benches in a store or tavern, where you could
+not only smoke and chew but could keep on your hat (there was not a man
+in York County in those days who could say anything worth hearing
+with his hat off); the blazing logs to poke; and a cavernous fireplace
+into which tobacco juice could be neatly and judiciously directed.
+Those were good old times, and the stage-coach was a mighty thing
+when school children were taught to take off their hats and make
+a bow as the United States mail passed the old stage tavern.
+
+Life Lane's coaching days were over long before this story begins,
+but the Midnight Cry was still in pretty fair condition, and was driven
+ostensibly by Jeremiah Todd, who lived on the "back-nippin'" road from
+Bonny Eagle to Limington.
+
+When I say ostensibly driven, I but follow the lead of
+the villagers, who declared that, though Jerry held the reins,
+Mrs. Todd drove the stage, as she drove everything else.
+As a proof of this lady's strong individuality, she was still
+generally spoken of as "the Widder Bixby," though she had been
+six years wedded to Jeremiah Todd.  The Widder Bixby, then,
+was strong, self-reliant, valiant, indomitable.  Jerry Todd was,
+to use his wife's own characterization, so soft you could
+stick a cat's tail into him without ruffling the fur.
+He was always alluded to as "the Widder Bixby's husband;"
+but that was no new or special mortification, for he had been
+known successively as Mrs. Todd's youngest baby, the Widder
+Todd's only son, Susan Todd's brother, and, when Susan Todd's
+oldest boy fought at Chapultepec, William Peck's uncle.
+
+The Widder Bixby's record was far different.
+She was the mildest of the four Stover sisters of Scarboro,
+and the quartette was supposed to have furnished more kinds
+of temper than had ever before come from one household.
+When Peace, the eldest, was mad, she frequently kicked the churn
+out of the kitchen door, cream and all,--and that lost
+her a husband.
+
+Love, the second, married, and according to local tradition once
+kicked her husband all the way up Foolscap Hill with a dried cod-fish.
+Charity, the third, married too, -- for the Stovers of Scarboro were
+handsome girls, but she got a fit mate in her spouse.  She failed
+to intimidate him, for he was a foeman worthy of her steel;
+but she left his bed and board, and left in a manner that kept up
+the credit of the Stover family of Scarboro.
+
+They had had a stormy breakfast one morning before he started
+to Portland with a load of hay.  "Good-by," she called,
+as she stood in the door, "you've seen the last of me!"
+"No such luck!" he said, and whipped up his horse.
+Charity baked a great pile of biscuits, and left them
+on the kitchen table with a pitcher of skimmed milk.
+(She wouldn't give him anything to complain of, not she!)
+She then put a few clothes in a bundle, and, tying on her shaker,
+prepared to walk to Pleasant River, twelve miles distant.
+As she locked the door and put the key in its accustomed place
+under the mat, a pleasant young man drove up and explained
+that he was the advance agent of the Sypher's Two-in-One
+Menagerie and Circus, soon to appear in that vicinity.
+He added that he should be glad to give her five tickets
+to the entertainment if she would allow him to paste a few
+handsome posters on that side of her barn next the road;
+that their removal was attended with trifling difficulty,
+owing to the nature of a very superior paste invented by himself;
+that any small boy, in fact, could tear them off in an hour,
+and be well paid by the gift of a ticket.
+
+The devil entered into Charity (not by any means for the first
+time), and she told the man composedly that if he would give her
+ten tickets he might paper over the cottage as well as the barn,
+for they were going to tear it down shortly and build a larger one.
+The advance agent was delighted, and they passed a pleasant
+hour together; Charity holding the paste-pot, while the talkative
+gentleman glued six lions and an elephant on the roof,
+a fat lady on the front door, a tattooed man between the windows,
+living skeletons on the blinds, and ladies insufficiently
+clothed in all the vacant spaces and on the chimneys.
+Nobody went by during the operation, and the agent remarked,
+as he unhitched his horse, that he had never done a neater job.
+"Why, they'll come as far to see your house as they will
+to the circus!" he exclaimed.
+
+"I calculate they will," said Charity, as she latched the gate
+and started for Pleasant River.
+
+I am not telling Charity Stover's story, so I will only add
+that the bill-poster was mistaken in the nature of his paste,
+and greatly undervalued its adhesive properties.
+
+The temper of Prudence, the youngest sister, now Mrs. Todd,
+paled into insignificance beside that of the others, but it was
+a very pretty thing in tempers nevertheless, and would have been
+thought remarkable in any other family in Scarboro.
+
+You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues
+as often as his vices that make him difficult to live with.
+Mrs. Todd's masterfulness and even her jealousy might have
+been endured, by the aid of fasting and prayer, but her neatness,
+her economy, and her forehandedness made a combination that
+only the grace of God could have abided with comfortably,
+so that Jerry Todd's comparative success is a matter of
+local tradition.  Punctuality is a praiseworthy virtue enough,
+but as the years went on, Mrs. Todd blew her breakfast horn
+at so early an hour that the neighbors were in some doubt
+as to whether it might not herald the supper of the day before.
+They also predicted that she would have her funeral before she
+was fairly dead, and related with great gusto that when she
+heard there was to be an eclipse of the sun on Monday,
+the 26th of July, she wished they could have it the 25th,
+as Sunday would be so much more convenient than wash-day.
+
+She had oilcloth on her kitchen to save the floor, and oilcloth
+mats to save the oilcloth; yet Jerry's boots had to be taken off
+in the shed, and he was required to walk through in his stocking feet.
+She blackened her stove three times a day, washed her dishes in the woodhouse,
+in order to keep her sink clean, and kept one pair of blinds open
+in the sitting-room, but spread newspapers over the carpet wherever
+the sun shone in.
+
+It was the desire of Jerry's heart to give up the
+fatigues and exposures of stage-driving, and "keep store,"
+but Mrs. Todd deemed it much better for him to be in the open
+air than dealing out rum and molasses to a roystering crew.
+This being her view of the case, it is unnecessary to state
+that he went on driving the stage.
+
+"Do you wear a flannel shirt, Jerry?" asked Pel Frost once.
+"I don' know," he replied, "ask Mis' Todd; she keeps the books."
+
+"Women-folks" (he used to say to a casual passenger), "like all
+other animiles, has to be trained up before they're real good comp'ny.
+You have to begin with 'em early, and begin as you mean to hold out.
+When they once git in the habit of takin' the bit in their teeth and
+runnin', it's too late for you to hold 'em in."
+
+It was only to strangers that he aired his convictions
+on the training of "womenfolks," though for that matter
+he might safely have done it even at home; for everybody
+in Limington knew that it would always have been too late
+to begin with the Widder Bixby, since, like all the Stovers
+of Scarboro, she had been born with the bit in her teeth.
+Jerry had never done anything he wanted to since he had
+married her, and he hadn't really wanted to do that.
+He had been rather candid with her on this point (as candid
+as a tender-hearted and obliging man can be with a woman who is
+determined to marry him, and has two good reasons why she should
+to every one of his why he shouldn't), and this may have been
+the reason for her jealousy.  Although by her superior force
+she had overborne his visible reluctance, she, being a woman,
+or at all events of the female gender, could never quite forget
+that she had done the wooing.
+
+Certainly his charms were not of the sort to tempt women from the strict
+and narrow path, yet the fact remained that the Widder Bixby was jealous,
+and more than one person in Limington was aware of it.
+
+Pelatiah, otherwise "Pel" Frost, knew more about the matter than most
+other folks, because he had unlimited time to devote to general culture.
+Though not yet thirty years old, he was the laziest man in York County.
+(Jabe Slocum had not then established his record; and Jot Bascom had ruined
+his by cutting his hay before it was dead in the summer of '49, always alluded
+to afterwards in Pleasant River as the year when gold was discovered
+and Jot Bascom cut his hay.)
+
+Pel was a general favorite in half a dozen villages,
+where he was the life of the loafers' bench.  An energetic
+loafer can attend properly to one bench, but it takes
+genius as well as assiduity to do justice to six of them.
+His habits were decidedly convivial, and he spent a good deal
+of time at the general musters, drinking and carousing with
+the other ne'er-do-weels. You may be sure he was no favorite
+of Mrs. Todd's; and she represented to him all that is most
+undesirable in womankind, his taste running decidedly to rosy,
+smiling, easy-going ones who had no regular hours for meals,
+but could have a dinner on the table any time in fifteen
+minutes after you got there.
+
+Now, a certain lady with a noticeable green frock and a white
+"drawn-in" cape bonnet had graced the Midnight Cry on its journey
+from Limington to Saco on three occasions during the month of July.
+Report said that she was a stranger who had appeared at the post-office
+in a wagon driven by a small, freckled boy.
+
+The first trip passed without comment; the second
+provoked some discussion; on the occasion of the third,
+Mrs. Todd said nothing, because there seemed nothing to say,
+but she felt so out-of-sorts that she cut Jerry's hair close
+to his head, though he particularly fancied the thin fringe
+of curls at the nape of his neck.
+
+Pel Frost went over to Todd's one morning to borrow an axe,
+and seized a favorable opportunity to ask casually, "Oh, Mis'
+Todd, did Jerry find out the name o' that woman in a green dress
+and white bunnit that rid to Saco with him last week?"
+
+"Mr. Todd's got something better to do than get acquainted
+with his lady passengers," snapped Mrs. Todd, "'specially as they
+always ride inside."
+
+"I know they gen'ally do," said Pel, shouldering the axe
+(it was for his mother's use), but this one rides up in front part o'
+the way, so I thought mebbe Jerry 'd find out something 'bout her.
+She's han'some as a picture, but she must have a good strong back
+to make the trip down 'n' up in one day."
+
+Nothing could have been more effective or more
+effectual than this blow dealt with consummate skill.
+Having thus driven the iron into Mrs. Todd's soul,
+Pel entertained his mother with an account of the interview
+while she chopped the kindling-wood. He had no special end
+in view when, Iago-like, he dropped his first poisoned seed
+in Mrs. Todd's fertile mind, or, at most, nothing worse
+than the hope that matters might reach an unendurable point,
+and Jerry might strike for his altars and his fires.
+Jerry was a man and a brother, and petticoat government must
+be discouraged whenever and wherever possible, or the world would
+soon cease to be a safe place to live in.  Pel's idea grew upon
+him in the night watches, and the next morning he searched his
+mother's garret till he found a green dress and a white bonnet.
+Putting them in a basket, he walked out on the road a little
+distance till he met the stage, when, finding no passengers inside,
+he asked Jerry to let him jump in and "ride a piece."
+Once within, he hastily donned the green wrapper and tell-tale
+headgear, and, when the Midnight Cry rattled down the stony hill
+past the Todd house, Pel took good care to expose a large green
+sleeve and the side of a white bonnet at the stage window.
+It was easy enough to cram the things back into the basket,
+jump out, and call a cordial thank you to the unsuspecting Jerry.
+He was rewarded for his ingenuity and enterprise at night,
+when he returned Mrs. Todd's axe, for just as he reached
+the back door he distinctly heard her say that if she saw
+that green woman on the stage again, she would knock her off
+with a broomstick as sure as she was a Stover of Scarboro.
+As a matter of fact she was equal to it.  Her great-grandmother
+had been born on a soil where the broomstick is a prominent
+factor in settling connubial differences; and if it occurred
+to her at this juncture, it is a satisfactory proof of the
+theory of atavism.
+
+Pel intended to see this domestic tragedy through to the end,
+and accordingly took another brief trip in costume the very next week,
+hoping to be the witness of a scene of blood and carnage.
+But Mrs. Todd did not stir from her house, although he was confident
+she had seen "my lady green-sleeves" from her post at the window.
+Puzzled by her apathy, and much disappointed in her temper,
+he took off the dress, and, climbing up in front, rode to Moderation,
+where he received an urgent invitation to go over to the county fair
+at Gorham.  The last idea was always the most captivating to Pel,
+and he departed serenely for a stay of several days without
+so much luggage as a hairbrush.  His mother's best clothespin basket,
+to say nothing of its contents, appeared at this juncture to be
+an unexpected incumbrance; so on the spur of the moment he handed
+it up to Jerry just as the stage was starting, saying, "If Mis'
+Todd has a brash to-night, you can clear yourself by showing
+her this basket, but for massy sakes don't lay it on to me!
+You can stan' it better'n I can,--you 're more used to it!"
+
+Jerry took the basket, and when he was well out on the road
+he looked inside and saw a bright green calico wrapper, a white
+cape bonnet, a white "fall veil," and a pair of white cotton gloves.
+He had ample time for reflection, for it was a hot day,
+and though he drove slowly, the horses were sweating at every pore.
+Pel Frost, then, must have overheard his wife's storm of reproaches,
+perhaps even her threats of violence.  It had come to this,
+that he was the village laughing-stock, a butt of ridicule at
+the store and tavern.
+
+Now, two years before this, Jerry Todd had for the first
+and only time in his married life "put his foot down."
+Mrs. Todd had insisted on making him a suit of clothes
+much against his wishes.  When finished she put them
+on him almost by main force, though his plaintive appeals
+would have melted any but a Stover-of-Scarboro heart.
+The stuff was a large plaid, the elbows and knees came
+in the wrong places, the seat was lined with enameled cloth,
+and the sleeves cut him in the armholes.
+
+Mr. Todd said nothing for a moment, but the pent-up
+slavery of years stirred in him, and, mounting to his brain,
+gave him a momentary courage that resembled intoxication.
+He retired, took off the suit, hung it over his arm, and, stalking
+into the sitting-room in his undergarments, laid it on the table
+before his astonished spouse, and, thumping it dramatically,
+said firmly, "I--will--not--wear--them--clo'es!" whereupon
+he fell into silence again and went to bed.
+
+The joke of the matter was, that, all unknown to himself,
+he had absolutely frightened Mrs. Todd.  If only he could have realized
+the impressiveness and the thorough success of his first rebellion!
+But if he had realized it he could not have repeated it often,
+for so much virtue went out of him on that occasion that he felt
+hardly able to drive the stage for days afterward.
+
+"I shall have to put down my foot agin," he said to himself
+on the eventful morning when Pel presented him with the basket.
+"Dern my luck, I've got to do it agin, when I ain't hardly got
+over the other time."  So, after an hour's plotting and planning,
+he made some purchases in Biddeford and started on his return trip.
+He was very low in his mind, thinking, if his wife really meditated
+upon warfare, she was likely to inspect the stage that night,
+but giving her credit in his inmost heart for too much common sense
+to use a broomstick,--a woman with her tongue!
+
+The Midnight Cry rattled on lumberingly.  Its route had been shortened,
+and Mrs. Todd wanted its name changed to something less outlandish,
+such as the Rising Sun, or the Breaking Dawn, or the High Noon,
+but her idea met with no votaries; it had been, was, and ever should be,
+the Midnight Cry, no matter what time it set out or got back.
+It had seen its best days, Jerry thought, and so had he, for that matter.
+Yet he had been called "a likely feller" when he married the Widder Bixby,
+or rather when she married him.  Well, the mischief was done;
+all that remained was to save a remnant of his self-respect,
+and make an occasional dash for liberty.
+
+He did all his errands with his usual care, dropping a blue
+ribbon for Doxy Morton's Sunday hat, four cents' worth of
+gum-camphor for Almira Berry, a spool of cotton for Mrs. Wentworth,
+and a pair of "galluses" for Living Bean.  He finally turned into
+the "back-nippin'" road from Bonny Eagle to Limington, and when he was
+within forty rods of his own house he stopped to water his horses.
+If he feared a scene he had good reason, for as the horses climbed
+the crest of the long hill the lady in green was by his side on the box.
+He looked anxiously ahead, and there, in a hedge of young alder bushes,
+he saw something stirring, and, unless he was greatly mistaken,
+a birch broom lay on the ground near the hedge.
+
+Notwithstanding these danger signals, Jerry's arm encircled
+the plump waist of the lady in green, and, emboldened by the shades
+of twilight, his lips sought the identical spot under the white
+"fall veil" where her incendiary mouth might be supposed to lurk,
+quite "fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."  This done,
+he put on the brake and headed his horses toward the fence.
+He was none too soon, for the Widder Bixby, broom in hand, darted out
+from the alders and approached the stage with objurgations which,
+had she rated them at their proper value, needed no supplement
+in the way of blows.  Jerry gave one terror-stricken look,
+wound his reins round the whipstock, and, leaping from his seat,
+disappeared behind a convenient tree.
+
+At this moment of blind rage Mrs. Todd would have preferred to
+chastise both her victims at once; but, being robbed of one by Jerry's
+cowardly flight, her weapon descended upon the other with double force.
+There was no lack of courage here at least.  Whether the lady in green
+was borne up by the consciousness of virtue, whether she was too
+proud to retreat, or whatever may have been her animating reason,
+the blow fell, yet she stood her ground and gave no answering shriek.
+Enraged as much by her rival's cool resistance as by her own sense
+of injury, the Widder Bixby aimed full at the bonnet beneath
+which were the charms that had befuddled Jerry Todd's brain.
+To blast the fatal beauty that had captivated her wedded husband
+was the Widder Bixby's idea, and the broom descended.
+A shower of seeds and pulp, a copious spattering of pumpkin juice,
+and the lady in green fell resistlessly into her assailant's arms;
+her straw body, her wooden arms and pumpkin head, decorating the earth
+at her feet!  Mrs. Todd stared helplessly at the wreck she had made,
+not altogether comprehending the ruse that had led to her discomfiture,
+but fully conscious that her empire was shaken to its foundations.
+She glanced in every direction, and then hurling the hateful
+green-and-white livery into the stage, she gathered up all traces
+of the shameful fray, and sweeping them into her gingham apron ran
+into the house in a storm of tears and baffled rage.
+
+Jerry stayed behind the tree for some minutes, and when the coast
+was clear he mounted the seat and drove to the store and the stable.
+When he had put up his horses he went into the shed, took
+off his boots as usual, but, despite all his philosophy, broke into
+a cold sweat of terror as he crossed the kitchen threshold.
+"I can't stand many more of these times when I put my foot down,"
+he thought, "they're too weakening!"
+
+But he need not have feared.  There was a good supper under the
+mosquito netting on the table, and, most unusual luxury, a pot of hot tea.
+Mrs. Todd had gone to bed and left him a pot of tea!
+
+Which was the more eloquent apology!
+
+Jerry never referred to the lady in green, then or afterwards;
+he was willing to let well enough alone; but whenever his spouse
+passed a certain line, which, being a Stover of Scarboro,
+she was likely to do about once in six months, he had only to summon
+his recreant courage and glance meaningly behind the kitchen door,
+where the birch broom hung on a nail.  It was a simple remedy to
+outward appearances, but made his declining years more comfortable.
+I can hardly believe that he ever took Pel Frost into his confidence,
+but Pel certainly was never more interesting to the loafers'
+bench than when he told the story of the eventful trip of the Midnight
+Cry and "the breaking in of the Widder Bixby."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTES:
+1. On page 20, reentered is spelled with diaeresis over the second "e".
+2. On pages 153 & 154 the verses beginning respectively "Rebel mourner"
+and "This gro-o-oanin' world" are accompanied with staves of music in
+the treble clef.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Village Watch-Tower by Wiggin
+
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