sleek, round-sided little mare with one white foot and a white-starred forehead. For years Old Silas had lived here by himself, companioned only by the neighborly smoke of remote chimneys through the long winter months. A spring ago Charles de Paw had made this old man my friend, when he had half cast a shoe at the top of the hill. He was hobbling fretfully, till, seeing the outline of a masculine back in the hill field, I made a courageous call for help. And Old Silas had chuckled as, minus a shoe, but a safe trotter again, my big horse had thanked him with a playful nip at his sleeve; I stroked the fat sides of black Jess, she and Charles de Paw sniffed acquainting noses, and we were all friends. He was a bearded and withered little man, Silas Eldridge, brown as the oak leaves of the winter hills, save for his rosy cheeks, which made him seem, in his golden-brownness, like a red-ripened fall russet turned human to be the keeper of old Appletown. "Near" and "terribul sot," he had his oddities, but the kindliest of hearts, pitying as a woman's. Hardly a soul had set foot in his house-the countryside gossips babbled-since his old father and mother had died, years ago, both laid in the Eldridge family lot the very same week, as befitted these aged sweethearts. His father's scythe was fast nailed to the shed wall, just as he'd hung it the day before that fatal sunstroke; and behind the pantry door his mother's kitchen apron gathered dust on its accustomed hook, untouched for love's sake through all the years. This noon Sir Charles had no clanking shoe, but for a pretext there was always the old pump, and as we left the bit of pine road and turned the corner I looked for Jess's ebon nose lifted over the yard bars-if she were there her master would surely be somewhere about. She was not at the gate nor on the height of the wheat-sown slope back of the house; but out in the garden moved the stooping, blue-shirted back. That charmful old flower garden, out of fashion to-day with so many other "THE SLIM, SCROLL-LIKE TRUNK OF A TWIN WHITE BIRCH" dearly beautiful things-I knew what the dew and the morning had unfolded there, week after week-merry rows of hollyhock bells and scornful scarlet poppies, rollicking beds of gay blue bachelor's-buttons, and silvery-stemmed blossoms of garden pink, clove-spiced. And roses, roses, all the June, sweetleaved Scotch yellow ones and the blushtinted pink, grandmother's creamy white ones and the monstrous-armed rambler's crimsoned sprays. Of these there was now only a solitary General Washington, perennial beauty, as a remembrance. His horseship stopped of his own accord by the pump, and, hearing us, Old Silas hastened out, a bit wearily, it seemed, but a pleased light kindled in the blue eye of the quiet old man, and he gave a shy-bobbed nod of "how-d'ye do." "You know what I'm after, don't you?" I laughed, as he sprily flooded the trough with cold spurting water from the well. "And how've you been all this time, and how's Jess?" June she took sick-jest ailin'. I thought mebbe she'd lie content-like in that place she allers sot sech store by "-he stooped again, meaning, I thought, to hide a twitching mouth. "Its cur'us how I keep lookin' jest the same fur her nose pokin' over the bars! But I braided her foretop fresh and fine, and put new shoes on her, four on 'em, silver foot an' all, 'fore I-" Abruptly 66 Won't yer hop down and rest a bit ? You'll find it real cool up by the big butternut, and I'll give you a posy if you'll name yer choice!" And at this gentleness must I not tarry? The broad butternut was loaded down with sticky clusters; it was nearly "picklin' time," and then-for the three good treats of the fall: butternut pickle, apple butter, and the sweet new cider ! Through the grass were strewed last year's weathered shells, but the greedy squirrels in the woods up back had plundered them of their oily kernels. No The answer was slow in coming, and matter how clever you are, you will spend his voice husky. hours pounding at the nettly barks, only once in a while knocking out a perfect pair of saddle-bags; but how these little "Jess? She's up thar "-he jerked a thumb toward her own grass plot. "Last rascals nibble right to the meat and never miss it! I matched the tossing beauties of the showy aster beds, white, pink, purple, red, and picked five or six benign Father Pansies from the long aisles of heart'sease, before I sat down on the butternut bench, old Silas clipping at the grass with his huge shears. "Have you any picture of Melissa Pike that married Philander Tukey? "I asked, suddenly remembering. From a child I had heard of Melissa Pike-she lived to be over eighty, and was never known to speak a cross word in her life so our parents told us. Silas's grandfather had married a second cousin of this great-aunt of a neighbor of ours-oh, the tangled branches of that genealogical tree! Maybe he'd a portrait of her; at all events the reminiscence would please him, and I loved to win his heartening talk. "Wall, how did ye ever hear tell o' her?"-his shears closed on empty air as he blew out a noiseless whistle. "She's been dead this forty year, and so's Philander. Come to think on it," with a pondering scratch at his grizzled beard, "'pears ter me I've got a couple o' them old daguerreotypes, small they be, but good likenesses, both on 'em." And he started for the shed door. "Don't bother to bring them out!" I called quickly. "Let me come in, won't you?" A scared choke gripped my throat at my daring. ""Tain't no place ter invite yer," he hesi tated. "Guess you'll think I ain't much hand at keepin' house," but he didn't refuse, so I crossed the planked alleyway into the homely, low-ceiled rooms, and through to the grim parlor, silent as the slabbed graveyard over the hill, awesome as the family portraits staring from the wall. He pushed open a shutter, lifting the closed darkness, and the shimmering September sun slanted in on the slippery, rigid-backed haircloth set, garnished with hand-knit tidies of screeching purples and yellows and greens; it threw its caressing glow over the wax flowers on the what-not and the woven strands of an immense hair wreath by the organ, and filled with ominous light the glowering eyes of the austere portraits. Old Silas loosed the worn clasps of the family album, and I studied its thick board pages to find there stiff boyish sittings of Silas himself and his elder brother Jothan Joseph, and the flower face of their little sister Lucy-she had died at sixteen. And the ancient lovers that from wedding to golden wedding had never been for a day apart-the patienteyed Quaker mother and the gaunt, shaggybrowed father, stern above his towering square-cornered collar and a flowing tie. As I unhooked the rubbed case of a satin-framed daguerreotype, the placid, lace-capped face of Melissa Pike looked back at me, her deft hands folded in a capacious lap. And opposite her Philander, a plain man, "sad-complected," capable, so I fancied, of being at least "tryin'!" A sorry spouse for that angeltempered wife. Play me a tune, won't yer?" Silas raised the cover of the sober-paneled organ with a tender hand. "There's only them old singin'-books, but I guess yer know a piece without 'em." Could I tell him that an organ was as strange to me as the faces in the album I was holding? I handled over the blackbound hymnals and drew a few dear tunes from the yellowed keys, the old man, standing silent, listening. But mine was the guilt for the bold sun's gleeful rampage in that ghostchilled parlor; there was Appletown yet to see; and I knew what was going on outside, beneath the butternut, with Charles de Paw left again alone! So I bade the old man my farewells. A quarter of a mile farther on the road came to an end altogether, and we halted on a grassy rise at the last of Appletown's fireless homesteads. My tall horse thrust around a solemn nose with a crafty and inquiring eye, but, taking firm grip of his forelock, I pushed him, bridle-free, into a walled patch of nodding clover, and turned back to the hillside. Gaudy milkwort danced saucily at the foot of great boulders, half-screened with wild grape, and dwarf goldenrod spread over the slope like bedded sunshine. The somber wooded hills bore gallantly the scarlet splashes of the Master Paint-brush. I clambered over the uncertain wall, rumbling down the rough stones in my struggle for footing, and, safe over, I strolled up to the dark-windowed, dozy, porched farm-house, settling comfortably back under the stately elms. Neglected clumps of the spicy cinnamon-rose straggled up to its sagging door-sill, and ruined outbuildings lurched shamelessly to the four winds. Wagons and carts idled and rotted, wheel-deep in a mass of giant raspberry vines, and on the stacked woodpiles, rosetted with lichens, the frolicking chipmunks whisked at hide-and-seek. The roof of the toppling hen-house by the path was moss-shingled, and shadowing it crouched two apple trees, stealthily dropping to the ground their nose-ravishing treasure-great oval yellow Porters and shiny-cheeked red Astrakans, mellow to the core! I was bending to gather a few for my pampered steed, when a goldenwinged woodpecker shot by me. A "flicker" within an apple's throw? I scurried down the slope and through a wide gap in the rail fence, following his sharp "harrie wicket, harrie wicket." And now I was captive for a dreaming hour or the whole afternoon to the magic of the orchard, for when the wood-birds throng, you turn, conscienceless, to the "shepherd's clock" for the hour o' day, and the lenient purple lupine is a sympathetic timekeeper. The blackly mutinous sky had cleared to a cloud-flecked blue, and gorgeously before it swept flicker after flicker with snow-marked back and sun-lined wing. On a pine tree's trembling tip swayed two "thistle-birds" in chrome yellow and jet, and around them, gracefully dipping, wavered the rest of the goldfinch flock, with that "per-chic-o-ree, per-chic-o-ree," delicate as the whisper of fairies. Then back and forth and over and about the silver birches darted the bluebirds, warbling on the wing. "Tru-al-ly, tru-al-ly," they were bluer and blither than ever, and from the heart of an alder clump a little "spot" sparrow was singing. Loitering along the brush to find him, my eye was caught by the slim, scroll-like trunk of a twin white birch, sparkling in the lure of a ruddy sumac. |