Meadow Grass by Alice Brown

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MEADOW-GRASS

TALES OF NEW ENGLAND LIFE

BY ALICE BROWN

1895

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

NUMBER FIVE

FARMER ELI'S VACATION

AFTER ALL

TOLD IN THE POORHOUSE

HEMAN'S MA

HEARTSEASE

MIS' WADLEIGH'S GUEST

A RIGHTEOUS BARGAIN

JOINT OWNERS IN SPAIN

AT SUDLEIGH FAIR

BANKRUPT

NANCY BOYD'S LAST SERMON

STROLLERS IN TIVERTON

TO M.G.R.

LOVER OF WOODS AND FIELD AND SEA.

NUMBER FIVE.

We who are Tiverton born, though false ambition may have ridden us to
market, or the world's voice incited us to kindred clamoring, have a
way of shutting our eyes, now and then, to present changes, and seeing
things as they were once, as they are still, in a certain sleepy yet
altogether individual corner of country life. And especially do we
delight in one bit of fine mental tracery, etched carelessly, yet for
all time, so far as our own' short span is concerned, by the unerring
stylus of youth: the outline of a little red schoolhouse, distinguished
from the other similar structures within Tiverton bounds by "District
No. V.," painted on a shingle, in primitive black letters, and nailed
aloft over the door. Up to the very hollow which made its playground
and weedy garden, the road was elm-bordered and lined with fair
meadows, skirted in the background by shadowy pines, so soft they did
not even wave; they only seemed to breathe. The treasures of the road!
On either side, the way was plumed and paved with beauties so rare that
now, disheartened dwellers in city streets, we covetously con over in
memory that roaming walk to school and home again. We know it now for
what it was, a daily progress of delight. We see again the old
watering-trough, decayed into the mellow loveliness of gray lichen and
greenest moss. Here beside the ditch whence the water flowed, grew the
pale forget-me-not and sticky star-blossomed cleavers. A step farther,
beyond the nook where the spring bubbled first, were the riches of the
common roadway; and over the gray, lichen-bearded fence, the growth of
stubbly upland pasture. Everywhere, in road and pasture too, thronged
milkweed, odorous haunt of the bee and those frailest butterflies of
the year, born of one family with drifting blossoms; and straightly
tall, the solitary mullein, dust-covered but crowned with a gold softer
and more to be desired than the pride of kings. Perhaps the carriage
folk from the outer world, who sometimes penetrate Tiverton's leafy
quiet, may wonder at the queer little enclosures of sticks and pebbles
on many a bare, tree-shaded slope along the road. "Left there from some
game!" they say to one another, and drive on, satisfied. But these are
no mere discarded playthings, dear ignorant travellers! They are tokens
of the mimic earnest with which child-life is ever seeking to sober
itself, and rushing unsummoned into the workaday fields of an aimlessly
frantic world. They are houses, and the stone boundaries are walls.
This tree stump is an armchair, this board a velvet sofa. Not more
truly is "this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog."

Across the road, at easy running distance from the schoolhouse at
noontime or recess, crawled the little river, with its inevitable
"hole," which each mother's son was warned to avoid in swimming, lest
he be seized with cramp there where the pool was bottomless. What eerie
wonders lurked within the mirror of those shallow brown waters! Long
black hairs cleaved and clung in their limpid flowing. To this day, I
know not whether they were horse-hairs, far from home, or swaying
willow roots; the boys said they were "truly" hairs of the kind
destined to become snakes in their last estate; and the girls,
listening, shivered with all Mother Eve's premonitory thrill along the
backbone. Wish-bugs, too, were here, skimming and darting. The
peculiarity of a wish-bug is that he will bestow upon you your heart's
desire, if only you hold him in the hand and wish. But the impossible
premise defeats the conclusion. You never do hold him long enough,
simply because you can't catch him in the first place. Yet the
fascinating possibility is like a taste for drink, or the glamour of
cards. Does the committee-man drive past to Sudleigh market, suggesting
the prospect of a leisurely return that afternoon, and consequent
dropping in to hear the geography class? Then do the laziest and most
optimistic boys betake them hastily from their dinner-pails to the
river, and spend their precious nooning in quest of the potent bug,
through whose spell the unwelcome visit may be averted. The time so
squandered in riotous gaming might have, fixed the afternoon's "North
Poles and Equators" triumphantly in mind, to the everlasting defiance
of all alien questioning; but no! for human delight lies ever in the
unattainable. The committee-man comes like Nemesis, _aequo pede_, the
lesson is unlearned, and the stern-fibred little teacher orders out the
rack known as staying after school. But what durance beyond hours in
the indescribably desolate schoolroom ever taught mortal boy to shun
the delusive insect created for his special undoing? So long as the
heart has woes of its own breeding, so long also will it dodge the
discipline of labor, and grasp at the flicker of an easy success.

On either side the little bridge (over which horses pounded with an
ominous thunder and a rain of dust on the head of him who lingered
beneath the sleepers, in a fearsome joy), the meadows were pranked with
purple iris and whispering rushes, mingling each its sweetness with the
good, rank smell of mud below. Here were the treasures of the
water-course, close hidden, or blowing in the light of day. The pale,
golden-hearted arrow-head neighbored the homespun pickerel-weed,
and--oh, mysterious glory from an oozy bed!--luscious, sun-golden
cow-lilies rose sturdily triumphant, dripping with color, glowing in
sheen. The button-bush hung out her balls, and white alder painted the
air with faint perfume; willow-herb built her bowery arches, and the
flags were ever glancing like swords of roistering knights. These
flags, be it known to such as have grown up in grievous ignorance of
the lore inseparable from "deestrick school," hold the most practical
significance in the mind of boy and girl; for they bring forth (I know
we thought for our delight alone!) a delicacy known as flag-buds,
everlastingly dear to the childish palate. These were devoured by the
wholesale in their season, and little mouths grew oozy-green as those
of happy beasties in June, from much champing and chewing. Did we lose
our appetite for the delectable dinner-pail through such literal going
to pasture? I think not. Tastes were elastic, in those days; and
Nature, so bullied, durst seldom revolt.

On one side, the nearest neighbor to the school lived at least a mile
away; but on the other, the first house of all owned treasures manifold
for the little squad who, though the day were wet or dry, fair or
frowning, trotted thither at noon. Here were trees under which lay, in
happy season, over-ripe Bartlett pears; here, too, was one
mulberry-tree, whereof the suggestion was strange and wonderful, and
the fruit less appealing to taste than to a mystical fancy. But outside
the bank wall grew the balm-of-Gileads, in a stately, benevolent
row,--trees of healing, of fragrance and romantic charm. No child ever
sought the old home to beg pears and mulberries, or to fill the
school-house pail at its dark-bosomed well, without bearing away a few
of the leaves in a covetous grasp. Sweet treasure-trove these, to be
pressed to fresh young faces, and held and patted in hot little palms,
till they grew flabby but evermore fragrant, still diffusing over the
dusty schoolroom that warm odor, whispering to those who read no corner
but their own New England, of the myrrh and balsams of the East.

We knew everything in those days, we aimless knights-errant with
dinner-pail and slate; the dry, frosty hollow where gentians bloom when
the pride of the field is over, the woody slopes of the hepatica's
awakening, under coverlet of withered leaves, and the sunny banks where
violets love to live with their good gossip, the trembling anemone. At
noon, we roved abroad into solitudes so deep that even our unsuspecting
hearts sometimes quaked with fear of dark and lonesomeness; and then we
came trooping back at the sound of the bell, untamed, happy little
savages, ready to settle, with a long breath, to the afternoon's drowsy
routine. Arrant nonsense that! the boundary of British America and the
conjugation of the verb _to be_! Who that might loll away the hours
upon a bank in silken ease, needed aught even of computation or the
tongues? He alone had inherited the earth.

All the little figures flitting through those tranquil early dramas are
so sharply drawn, so brightly colored still! I meet Melissa Crane
sometimes nowadays, a prosperous matron with space enough on her broad
back for the very largest plaid ever woven; but her present identity is
hazy and unreal. I see instead, with a sudden throb of memory, the
little Melissa, who, one recess, accepted a sugared doughnut from me,
and said, with a quaint imitation of old folks' manner,--

"I think your mother will be a real good cook, if she lives!"

I hear of Susie Marden, who went out West, married, and grew up with
the country in great magnificence; but to me she is and ever will be
the little girl who made seventy pies, one Thanksgiving time, thereby
earning the somewhat stinted admiration of those among us who could not
cook. Many a great deed, tacitly promised in that springtime, never
came to pass; many a brilliant career ingloriously ended. There was Sam
Marshall. He could do sums to the admiration of class and teacher, and,
Cuvier-like, evolve an entire flock from Colburn's two geese and a
half. His memory was prodigious. He could name the Presidents, bound
the States and Territories, and rattle off the list of prepositions so
fast that you could almost see the spark-shower from his rushing wheels
of thought. It was an understood thing among us, when Sam was in his
teens, that he should at least enter the Senate; perhaps he would even
be President, and scatter offices, like halfpence, among his scampering
townsmen. But to-day he patiently does his haying--by hand! and "goes
sleddin'" in the winter. The Senate is as far from him as the Polar
Star, and I question whether he could even bear the crucial test of two
geese and a half. Yet I still look upon him with a thrill of awe, as
the man selected by the popular vote to represent us in fame's
Valhalla, and mysteriously defeated by some unexpected move of the
"unseen hand at a game."

There were a couple of boys such good comrades as never to be happy
save when together. They cared only for the games made for two; all
their goods were tacitly held in common, and a tradition still lives
that David, when a new teacher asked his exact age, claimed his
comrade's birthday, and then wondered why everybody laughed. They had a
way of wandering off together to the woods, on Saturday. mornings, when
the routine of chores could be hurried through, and always they bore
with them a store of eggs, apples, or sweet corn, to be cooked in happy
seclusion. All this raw material was stolen from the respective
haylofts and gardens at home, though, as the fathers owned, with an
appreciative grin, the boys might have taken it openly for the asking.
That, however, would so have alloyed the charm of gypsying that it was
not to be thought of for a moment; and they crept about on their
foraging expeditions with all the caution of a hostile tribe. Blessed
fathers and mothers to wink at the escapade, and happy boys, wise
chiefly in their longing to be free! We had a theory that Jonathan and
David would go into business together. Perhaps we thought of them in
the same country store, their chairs tilted on either side of the
air-tight stove, telling stories, in the intervals of custom, as they
apparently did in their earlier estate. For, shy as they were in
general company, they chatted together with an intense earnestness all
day long; and it was one of the stock questions in our neighborhood,
when the social light burned low,--

"What under the sun do you s'pose Dave and Jont find to talk about?"

Alas! again the world had builded foolishly; for with early manhood,
they fell in love with the same round-cheeked school-teacher. Jonathan
married her, after what wrench of feeling I know not; and the other
fled to the town, whence he never returned save for the briefest visit
at Thanksgiving or Christmas time. The stay-at-home lad is a warm
farmer, and the little school-teacher a mother whose unlined face shows
the record of a placid life; but David cannot know even this, save by
hearsay, for he never sees them. He is a moneyed man, and not a year
ago, gave the town a new library. But is he happy? Or does the old
wound still show a ragged edge? For that may be, they tell us, even
"when you come to forty year."

Then, clad in brighter vestments of memory, there was the lad who
earned unto himself much renown, even among his disapproving relatives,
by running away from home, in quest of gold and glory. True, he was
brought back at the end of three days, footsore and muddy, and with
noble appetite for the griddle-cakes his mother cooked him in lieu of
the traditional veal,--but all undaunted. He never tried it again, yet
people say he has thrown away all his chances of a thrifty living by
perpetual wandering in the woods with gun and fishing-rod, and that he
is cursed with a deplorable indifference to the state of his fences and
potato-patch. No one could call him an admirable citizen, but I am not
sure that he has chosen the worser part; for who is so jovial and
sympathetic on a winter evening, when the apples are passed, and even
the shining cat purrs content before the blaze, or in the wood
solitudes, familiar to him as his own house door?

"Pa'tridges' nests?" he said, one spring, with a cock of his eye
calculated to show at once a humorous recognition of his genius and his
delinquencies. "Sartain! I wish I was as sure where I keep my scythe
sned!"

He has learned all the lore of the woods, the ways of "wild critters,"
and the most efficacious means both to woo and kill them. Prim
spinsters eye him acridly, as a man given over to "shif'less" ways, and
wives set him up, like a lurid guidepost, before husbands prone to
lapse from domestic thrift; but the dogs smile at him, and children,
for whom he is ever ready to make kite or dory, though all his hay
should mildew, or to string thimbleberries on a grass spear while
supper cools within, tumble merrily at his heels. Such as he should
never assume domestic relations, to be fettered with requirements of
time and place. Let them rather claim maintenance from a grateful
public, and live, like troubadours of old, ministrant to the general
joy.

Not all the memories of that early day are quite unspotted by remorse.
Although we wore the mask of jocund faces and straightforward glance,
we little people repeatedly proclaimed ourselves the victims of Adam's
fall. Even then we needed to pray for deliverance from those passions
which have since pursued us. There was the little bound girl who lived
with a "selec'man's" wife, a woman with children of her own, but a hard
taskmistress to the stranger within her gates. Poor little Polly! her
clothes, made over from those of her mistress, were of dark, rough
flannel, often in uncouth plaids and appalling stripes. Her petticoats
were dyed of a sickly hue known as cudbar, and she wore heavy woollen
stockings of the same shade. Polly got up early, to milk and drive the
cows; she set the table, washed milkpans, and ran hither and thither on
her sturdy cudbar legs, always willing, sometimes singing, and often
with a mute, questioning look on her little freckled face, as if she
had already begun to wonder why it has pleased God to set so many
boundary lines over which the feeble may not pass. The selec'man's
son--a heavy-faced, greedy boy--was a bully, and Polly became his butt;
she did his tasks, hectored by him in private, and with a child's
strange reticence, she never told even us how unbearable he made her
life. We could see it, however; for not much remains hidden in that
communistic atmosphere of the country neighborhood. But sometimes Polly
revolted; her temper blazed up, a harmless flash in the pan, and then,
it was said, Mis' Jeremiah took her to the shed-chamber and, trounced
her soundly. I myself have seen her sitting at the little low window,
when I trotted by, in the pride of young life, to "borry some
emptin's," or the recipe for a new cake. Often she waved a timid hand
to me; and I am glad to remember a certain sunny morning, illuminated
now because I tossed her up a bright hollyhock in return. It was little
to give out of a full and happy day; but Polly had nothing. Once she
came near great good fortune,--and missed it! For a lady, who boarded a
few weeks in the neighborhood, took a fancy to Polly, and was stirred
to outspoken wrath by our tales of the severity of her life. She gave
her a pretty pink cambric dress, and Polly wore it on "last day," at
the end of the summer term. She was evidently absorbed in love of it,
and sat, smoothing its shiny surface with her little cracked hand, so
oblivious to the requirements of the occasion that she only looked up
dazed when the teacher told her to describe the Amazon River, and
unregretfully let the question pass. The lady meant to take Polly away
with, her, but she fell sick with erysipelas in the face, and was
hurried off to the city to be nursed, "a sight to behold," as everybody
said. And whether she died, or whether she got well and forgot Polly,
none of us ever heard. We only knew she did not return, bringing the
odor of violets and the rustle of starched petticoats into our placid
lives.

But all these thoughts of Polly would be less wearing, when they come
in the night-time knocking at the heart, if I could only remember her
as glowing under the sympathy and loving-kindness of her little mates.
Alas! it was not so. We were senseless little brutes, who, never having
learned the taste of misery ourselves, had no pity for the misfortunes
of others. She was, indeed, ill-treated; but what were we, to translate
the phrase? She was an under dog, and we had no mercy on her. We
"plagued" her, God forgive us! And what the word means, in its full
horror, only a child can compass. We laughed at her cudbar petticoats,
her little "chopped hands;" and when she stumbled over the arithmetic
lesson, because she had been up at four o'clock every morning since the
first bluebirds came, we laughed at that. Life in general seems to have
treated Polly in somewhat the same way. I hear that she did not marry
well, and that her children had begun to "turn out bad," when she died,
prematurely bent and old, not many weeks ago. But when I think of what
we might have given and what we did withhold, when I realize that one
drop of water from each of us would have filled her little cup to
overflowing, there is one compensating thought, and I murmur,
conscience-smitten, "I'm glad she had the pink dress!"

And now the little school is ever present with us, ours still for
counsel or reproof. Its long-closed sessions are open, by day and
night; and I suppose, as time goes on, and we drop into the estate of
those who sit by the fireside, oblivious to present scenes, yet acutely
awake to such as

"Flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,"

it will grow more and more lifelike and more near. Beside it, live all
the joys of memory and many a long-past pain. For we who have walked in
country ways, walk in them always, and with no divided love, even
though brick pavements have been our chosen road this many a year. We
follow the market, we buy and sell, and even run across the sea, to fit
us with new armor for the soul, to guard it from the hurts of years;
but ever do we keep the calendar of this one spring of life. Some
unheard angelus summons us to days of feast and mourning; it may be the
joy of the fresh-springing willow, or the nameless pain responsive to
the croaking of frogs, in the month when twilights are misty, and waves
of world-sorrow flood in upon the heart, we know not why. All those
trembling half-thoughts of the sleep of the year and its awakening,--we
have not escaped them by leaving the routine that brought them forth.
We know when the first violets are blowing in the woods, and we paint
for ourselves the tasselling of the alder and the red of maple-buds. We
taste still the sting of checkerberry and woodsy flavor of the fragrant
birch. When fields of corn are shimmering in the sun, we know exactly
how it would seem to run through those dusty aisles, swept by that
silken drapery, and counselled in whispers from the plumy tops so far
above our heads. The ground-sparrow's nest is not strange to us; no,
nor the partridge's hidden treasure within the wood. We can make
pudding-bags of live-forever, dolls' bonnets, "trimmed up to the
nines," out of the velvet mullein leaf, and from the ox-eyed daisies,
round, cap-begirt faces, smiling as the sun. All the homely secrets of
rural life are ours: the taste of pie, cinnamon-flavored, from the
dinner-pails at noon; the smell of "pears a-b'ilin'," at that happiest
hour when, in the early dusk, we tumble into the kitchen, to find the
table set and the stove redolent of warmth and savor. "What you got for
supper?" we cry,--question to be paralleled in the summer days by
"What'd you have for dinner?" as, famished little bears, we rush to the
dairy-wheel, to feed ravenously on the cold, delicious fragments of the
meal eaten without us.

If time ever stood still, if we were condemned to the blank solitude of
hospital nights or becalmed, mid-ocean days, and had hours for
fruitless dreaming, I wonder what viands we should choose, in setting
forth a banquet from that ambrosial past! Foods unknown to poetry and
song: "cold b'iled dish," pan-dowdy, or rye drop-cakes dripping with
butter! For these do we taste, in moments of retrospect; and perhaps we
dwell the more on their homely savor because we dare not think what
hands prepared them for our use, or, when the board was set, what faces
smiled. We are too wise, with the cunning prudence of the years, to
penetrate over-far beyond the rosy boundary of youth, lest we find also
that bitter pool which is not Lethe, but the waters of a vain regret.

FARMER ELI'S VACATION

"It don't seem as if we'd really got round to it, does it, father?"
asked Mrs. Pike.

The west was paling, and the August insects stirred the air with their
crooning chirp. Eli and his wife sat together on the washing-bench
outside the back door, waiting for the milk to cool before it should be
strained. She was a large, comfortable woman, with an unlined face, and
smooth, fine auburn hair; he was spare and somewhat bent, with curly
iron-gray locks, growing thin, and crow's-feet about his deep-set gray
eyes. He had been smoking the pipe of twilight contentment, but now he
took it out and laid it on the bench beside him, uncrossing his legs
and straightening himself, with the air of a man to whom it falls,
after long pondering, to take some decisive step.

"No; it don't seem as if 'twas goin' to happen," he owned. "It looked
pretty dark to me, all last week. It's a good deal of an undertakin',
come to think it all over. I dunno's I care about goin'."

"Why, father! After you've thought about it so many years, an' Sereno's
got the tents strapped up, an' all! You must be crazy!"

"Well," said the farmer, gently, as he rose and went to carry the
milk-pails into the pantry, calling coaxingly, as he did so, "Kitty!
kitty! You had your milk? Don't you joggle, now!" For one eager tabby
rose on her hind legs, in purring haste, and hit her nose against the
foaming saucer.

Mrs. Pike came ponderously to her feet, and followed, with the heavy,
swaying motion of one grown fleshy and rheumatic. She was not in the
least concerned about Eli's change of mood. He was a gentle soul, and
she had always been able to guide him in paths of her own choosing.
Moreover, the present undertaking was one involving his own good
fortune, and she meant to tolerate no foolish scruples which might
interfere with its result. For Eli, though he had lived all his life
within easy driving distance of the ocean, had never seen it, and ever
since his boyhood he had cherished one darling plan,--some day he would
go to the shore, and camp out there for a week. This, in his starved
imagination, was like a dream of the Acropolis to an artist stricken
blind, or as mountain outlines to the dweller in a lonely plain. But
the years had flitted past, and the dream never seemed nearer
completion. There were always planting, haying, and harvesting to be
considered; and though he was fairly prosperous, excursions were
foreign to his simple habit of life. But at last, his wife had stepped
into the van, and organized an expedition, with all the valor of a
Francis Drake.

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