Green Valley | Page 7

bulbs and seeds and loads of advice and then Elizabeth, I guess, sort of
loved it into a home."
"Well--I guess," mused Skinflint Holden. "Must have cost you a pretty
penny?"
"Why, no, it didn't. I'm telling you it wasn't a matter of dollars so much
as love. If you use plenty of that you can economize on the money
somewhat. Of course, it means work but love always means service,
you know."
Old Skinflint Holden couldn't understand that sort of talk. It was said
that love was one of the things he knew nothing about. His great star
was money. He had had a chance to buy the old tavern but had seen no
possibilities in it of any kind. So he had passed it up and now a man
whose star was love and home had made a paradise of the hopeless
ruin.
"And I'll be danged if he didn't have a whole small field of them there
blue lilies that the children calls flags, over to one corner looking so
darn pretty, like a chunk of sky had dropped there. I'd a never believed
it if I hadn't saw it. I guess Doc Philipps didn't give him them."
Rollins is a great crony of Doc Philipps who almost any day of the year
may be caught burrowing in the ground. For Doc Philipps is a tree
maniac and father to every little green growing thing. He knows trees
as a mother knows her children and he never sets foot outside his front
gate without having tucked somewhere into the many pockets about his
big person a stout trowel, some choice apple seeds, peach and cherry
stones or seedlings of trees and shrubs. In every ramble, and he is a
great walker, he searches for a spot where a tree seedling might grow to
maturity and the minute he finds such a place off comes his coat, back
goes his broad-rimmed hat and out comes the trowel and seed.
Travelers driving along the road and catching sight of the big man on
his knees say to each other, "There's Doc Philipps, planting another
tree."

Up in the big, prim old Howe house sits Madam Howe. She is called
Madam to distinguish her from her daughter-in-law, Mrs. George Howe.
She is a regal old lady of eighty-three and spends most of her time in
her room up-stairs where are gathered the wonderful heirlooms,--older,
far older than she.
There is the mellow brown spinning wheel, and armchairs nearly two
hundred years old and a walnut table that was mixed up in countless
weddings and a beautifully carved old chest and a brocade-covered
settee. There are old, old books and family portraits and there is the
wonderful Madam herself, regal and silver-haired. If she likes you she
will take you to her great room and tell you about the Revolutionary
War as it happened in and to her family; and about her great ride
westward in the prairie schooner; about the Indians and the babyhood
of great cities, and the lovely wild flowers of the virgin prairie; about
the wild animals, the snakes, the pioneer men and women of what is
now only the Middle West.
She will take from out that age-darkened, beautiful chest dresses and
bits of lace and samplers like the one that hangs framed above her
writing desk and tells how it was stitched by one,
ABIGAIL WINSLOW PAGE, Age 13.
There is one thing you must always remember if you wish to stand in
Madam's good graces. You must never sit down on the
brocade-covered settee with the beautiful rose wreath hand-carved on
its gracefully curving walnut back. Some day when she gets to know
you very well she will tell you of the wonderful love stories that were
enacted on that settee. She will begin away, away back with some
great-great-grandmother or some great-grand-aunt and come gradually
down to her own time and history; and as she tells of the young years
of her life, her eyes will go dreaming off into the past and she will
forget you entirely. And you will slip away from that great room and
leave her sitting there, regal and silver haired, her face mellow and
sweet with the golden memories of far, by-gone days.
You can wander in this happy, aimless fashion all about Green Valley,

go in and out its deep-rooted old homes, stroll through its tree-guarded
old streets, and at every turn taste romance and adventure, revel in
beauty of some sort. Even the old, red-brick creamery, ugly in itself, is
a thing of beauty when seen against a sunset sky.
The people who pass you on the streets all smile and nod, stranger
though you are. And if you happen to be at the little undistinguished
depot