Meadow Grass | Page 7

swung below.
"Well, father," called Hattie, her rosy face like a flower under the large
shade-hat she had trimmed for the occasion, "guess we're goin' to have
a good day!"
He nodded from the window, where he was patiently holding his head
high and undergoing strangulation, while his wife, breathing huskily
with haste and importance, put on his stock.
"You come in, Hattie, an' help pack the doughnuts into that lard-pail on
the table," she called. "I guess you'll have to take two pails. They ain't
very big."
At length, the two teams were ready, and Eli mounted to his place,
where he looked very slender beside his towering mate. The hired man
stood leaning on the pump, chewing a bit of straw, and the cats rubbed

against his legs, with tails like banners; they were all impressed by a
sense of the unusual.
"Well, good-by, Luke," Mrs. Pike called, over her shoulder; and Eli
gave the man a solemn nod, gathered up the reins, and drove out of the
yard. Just outside the gate, he pulled up.
"Whoa!" he called, and Luke lounged forward. "Don't you forgit them
cats! Git up, Doll!" And this time, they were gone.
For the first ten miles of the way, familiar in being the road to market,
Eli was placidly cheerful. The sense that he was going to do some
strange deed, to step into an unknown country, dropped away from him,
and he chatted, in his intermittent, serious fashion, of the crops and the
lay of the land.
"Pretty bad job up along here, ain't it, father?" called Sereno, as they
passed a sterile pasture where two plodding men and a yoke of oxen
were redeeming the soil from its rocky fetters.
"There's a good deal o' pastur', in some places, that ain't fit for nothin'
but to hold the world together," returned Eli; and then he was silent, his
eyes fixed on Doll's eloquent ears, his mouth working a little. For this
progress through a less desirable stratum of life caused him to cast a
backward glance over his own smooth, middle-aged road.
"We've prospered, 'ain't we, Maria?" he said, at last; and his wife,
unconsciously following his thoughts, in the manner of those who have
lived long together, stroked her black silk visite, and answered, with a
well-satisfied nod:
"I guess we 'ain't got no cause to complain."
The roadside was parched under an August sun; tansy was dust-covered,
and ferns had grown ragged and gray. The jogging horses left behind
their lazy feet a suffocating cloud.
"My land!" cried Mrs. Pike, "if that ain't goldenrod! I do b'lieve it

comes earlier every year, or else the seasons are changin'. See them
elderberries! Ain't they purple! You jest remember that bush, an' when
we go back, we'll fill some pails. I dunno when I've made elderberry
wine."
Like her husband, she was vaguely excited; she began to feel as if life
would be all holidays. At noon, they stopped under the shadow of an
elm-tree which, from its foothold in a field, completely arched the road;
and there they ate a lunch of pie and doughnuts, while the horses, freed
from their headstalls, placidly munched a generous feed of oats, near by.
Hattie and her mother accepted this picnicking with an air of apologetic
amusement; and when one or two passers-by looked at them, they
smiled a little at vacancy, with the air of wishing it understood that they
were by no means accustomed to such irregularities.
"I guess they think we're gypsies," said Hattie, as one carriage rolled
past.
"Well, they needn't trouble themselves," returned her mother, rising
with difficulty to brush the crumbs from her capacious lap. "I guess I've
got as good an extension-table to home as any on 'em."
But Eli ate sparingly, and with a preoccupied and solemn look.
"Land, father!" exclaimed his wife, "you 'ain't eat no more'n a bird!
"I guess I'll go over to that well," said he, "an' git a drink o' water. I
drink more'n I eat, if I ain't workin'." But when he came back, carefully
bearing a tin pail brimming with cool, clear water, his face expressed
strong disapprobation, and he smacked his lips scornfully.
"Terrible flat water!" he announced. "Tastes as if it come out o' the
cistern." But the others could find no fault with it, and Sereno drained
the pail.
"Pretty good, I call it," he said; and Mrs. Pike rejoined,--
"You always was pretty particular about water, father."

But Eli still shook his head, and ejaculated, "Brackish, brackish!" as he
began to put the bit in Doll's patient mouth. He was thinking, with a
passion of loyalty, of the clear, ice-cold water at home, which had
never been shut out, by a pump, from the purifying airs