Life at High Tide | Page 4

aromatic scent of sweet-fern. Once they stopped for some more
blueberries, with a desultory word about the heat; then they picked their
way around juniper-bushes, and over great knees of granite, hot and
slippery, and through low, sweet thickets of bay. At the foot of the hill
the shadows were stretching across the road, and the wind was
flagging.
"My, ain't the shade good?" Lizzie said, when they stopped under her
great elm; "I couldn't bear to live where there wa'n't trees."
"There's always shade on one side or another of the Poor Farm,
anyway," Mrs. Butterfield said, "'cept at noon. And then he could set
indoors. It won't be anything so bad, Lizzie. Now don't you get to
worryin' 'bout him;--I know you, Lizzie Graham!" she ended, her eyes
twinkling.
Lizzie took off her sunbonnet again and fanned herself; she looked at
her old neighbor anxiously.
"Say, now, Mis' Butterfield, honest: do you think folks would talk?"
"If you took Nat in and kep' him? Course they would! You know they
would; you know this here town. And no wonder they'd talk. You're a
nice-appearin' woman, Lizzie, yet. No; I ain't one to flatter; you be.
And ain't he a man? and a likely man, too, for all he's crazy. Course
they'd talk! Now, Lizzie, don't you get to figgerin' on this. It's just like
you! How many cats have you got on your hands now? I bet you're
feedin' that lame dog yet."
Mrs. Graham laughed, but would not say.
"Nat will get along at the Farm real good, after he gets used to it," Mrs.
Butterfield went on, coaxingly; "Dean ain't hard. And Mis' Dean's
many a time told me what a good table they set."
"'Tain't the victuals that would trouble Nat May."
"Well, Lizzie, now you promise me you won't think anything more
about him visitin' you?" Mrs. Butterfield looked at her anxiously.
"I guess Jonesville knows me, after I've lived here all my life!" Lizzie
said, evasively.
"Knows you?" Mrs. Butterfield said; "what's that got to do with it? You
know Jonesville; that's more to the point."
"It's a mean place!" Lizzie said, angrily.
"I'm not sayin' it ain't," Mrs. Butterfield agreed. "Well, Lizzie, you're

good, but you ain't real sensible," she ended, affectionately.
Lizzie laughed, and swung her gate shut. She stood leaning on it a
minute, looking after Mrs. Butterfield laboriously climbing the hill,
until the road between its walls of rusty hazel-bushes and its fringe of
joepye-weed and goldenrod turned to the left and the stout, kindly
figure disappeared. The great elm moved softly overhead, and Lizzie
glanced up through its branches, all hung with feathery twigs, at the
deep August sky.
"Jonesville's never talked about me!" she said to herself, proudly. "I
mayn't be wealthy, but I got a good name. Course it wouldn't do to take
Nat; but my! ain't it a poor planet where you can't do a kind act?"
II
Nathaniel May sat in his darkness, brooding over his machine. Since it
had been definitely arranged that he was to go to the Poor Farm, he did
not care how soon he went; there was no need, he told Dyer, to keep
him for the few days which had been promised.
"I had thought," he said, patiently, "that some one would take me in and
help me finish my machine--for the certain profit that I could promise
them. But nobody seems to believe in me," he ended.
"Oh, folks believe in you, all right, Mr. May," Dyer told him; "but they
don't believe in your machine. See?"
Nathaniel's face darkened. "Blind--blind!" he said.
"How did it come on you?" Dyer asked, sympathetically.
"I was not speaking of myself," Nathaniel told him, hopelessly.
There was really no doubt that the poor, gentle mind had staggered
under the weight of hope; but it was hardly more than a deepening of
old vagueness, an intensity of absorbed thought upon unpractical things.
The line between sanity and insanity is sometimes a very faint one; no
one can quite dare to say just when it has been crossed. But this mild
creature had crossed it somewhere in the beginning of his certainty that
he was going to give the world the means of seeing the unseen. That
this great gift should be flung into oblivion, all for the want, as he
believed, of a little time, broke his poor heart. When Lizzie Graham
came to see him, she found him sitting in his twilight, his elbows on his
knees, his head in his long, thin hands. On one hollow cheek there was
a glistening wet streak. He put up a forlornly trembling hand and wiped
it away when he heard her voice.

"Yes; yes, I do recognize it, ma'am," he said; "I can tell