Meadow Grass

Meadow Grass, by Alice Brown

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Title: Meadow Grass Tales of New England Life
Author: 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