People of the Whirlpool | Page 2

do not lack dogs. Lark is
senior now, and Timothy Saunders's sheep dog, The Orphan, is also a
veteran; the foxhounds are in their prime, while Martha Corkle, as we
shall always call her, is raising a promising pair of collie pups.
Beside the curl, and covering mother's diaries, lies a square white
volume, the first part of my "Experience Boke" before mentioned, and
upon it two queer fat little pairs of bronze kid shoes, buttonless and

much worn on the toes, telling a tale of feet that dragged and ankles
that wobbled through inexperience in walking. Ah yes! I'm quite awake
and the same Barbara, though looking over a wider and eye-opening
horizon, having had three rows of candles, ten in a row, around my last
birthday cake and one extra in the middle, which extravagance has
constrained the family to use lopsided, tearful, pink candles ever since.
And the two pairs of feet that first touched good earth so hesitatingly
with those crumpled shoes are now standing firmly in wool-lined
rubber boots topped by brown corduroy trousers, upon the winter slat
walk that leads to the tool house, while their owners, touched by the
swish of the Whirlpool that has recently drawn this peaceful town into
its eddies, are busy trying to turn their patrol wagon, that for a year has
led a most conservative existence as a hay wain and a stage-coach
dragged by a curiously assorted team of dogs and goat, into the
semblance of some weird sort of autocart, by the aid of bits of old
garden hose, cast-away bicycle gearing, a watering-pot, and an oil
lantern.
I have wondered for a week past what yeast was working in their brains.
Of course, the seven-year-old Vanderveer boy on the Bluffs had an
electric runabout for a Christmas gift, also a man to run it! Corney
Delaney, as Evan named the majestic gray goat--of firm disposition
blended with a keen sense of humour--that father gave the boys last
spring and who has been their best beloved ever since, has for many
days been left in duress with the calves in the stack-yard, where the
all-day diet of cornstalks is fatally bulging his once straight-fronted
figure.
In fact, it is the doings of these two pairs of precious feet, with the
bodies, heads, and arms that belong to them, that have caused the dust
to gather in my desk, and the "Garden Boke," though not the garden,
which is more of a joy than ever, to be suspended and take a different
form. Flesh-and-blood books that write themselves are so compelling
and absorbing that one often wonders at the existence of any other kind,
and, feeling this strongly, yet I turn to paper pages as silent confidants.
Why? Heredity and its understudy, Habit, the two _h_'s that control
both the making of solitary tartlets as well as family pies.
So the last entry in the "Garden Boke" was made a week before the day
recorded in the white book with the cherubs' heads painted on it that

underlies the shoes.
It seems both strange and significant to me now that this book chanced
to be given me by Lavinia Dorman, mother's school friend and
bridesmaid, a spinster of fifty-five, and was really the beginning of the
transfer of her friendship to me, the only woman friendship that I have
ever had, and its quality has that fragrant pungence that comes from
sweet herbs, that of all garden odours are the most lasting.
I suppose that it is one of the strongest human habits to write down the
very things that one is least likely to forget, and _vice-versa;_ for
certainly I shall never forget the date and double record on that first fair
page beneath the illuminated word _Born_,--yet I often steal up here to
peep at it,--and live the intervening five years backward for pure joy.
January 10, 189-, Richard Russell------ and John Evan------.
Every time I read the names anew I wonder what I should have done if
there had been a single name upon the page. I must then have chosen
between naming him for father or Evan--an impossibility; for even if
the names had been combined, whose should I have put first?
No, the twins are in every way an advantage. To Evan, in providing
him at once with a commuted family sufficient for his means; to father,
among other reasons, by giving him the pleasure of saying, to friends
who felt it necessary to visit him in the privacy of his study and be
apologetically sympathetic, "I have observed that the first editions of
very important books are frequently in two volumes," sending them
away wondering what he really meant; to me by saving the rack of
argument, the form of evil I most