Meadow Grass | Page 4

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