The Atlantic Monthly | Page 7

huge
limbs beneath the empty windows, as though it were running away with
a stolen house under its arm. The place was musty, rat-eaten, and
tenanted by a couple of ghosts, who thought a fever, once quite fatal
within the walls, no suitable discharge from the property, and made
themselves perfectly free of the quarters in properly weird seasons. But
money and labor cleared out all the cobwebs, (for ghosts are but
spiritual cobwebs, you know,) and the old house soon wore a charming
air of rustic comfort.
I used to look over sometimes, for it was full in view from my
chamber-windows, and see the sportsmen going off by sunrise with
their guns or fishing-rods, or lying, after their late dinner, stretched
upon the grass in front of the house, smoking and reading. Sometimes a
fragment of a song would be dropped down from the lazy wings of the
south wind, sometimes a long laugh filled all the summer air and
frightened the pinewood into echoes, and, altogether, the new
neighbors seemed to live an enviable life. They were very civil people,
too; for, though their nearest path out lay across my fields, and close by
the doorway, and they often stopped to buy fruit or cream or butter, we
were never annoyed by an impertinent question or look. Once only I
overheard a remark not altogether civil, and that was on the evening
before my birthday. One of them, the elder, said, as he went away from
my house with a basket of cherries, that he should like to get speech
with that polyglot old maid, who read, and wrote, and made her own
butter-pats. The other answered, that the butter was excellent at any rate,
and perhaps she had a classical cow; and they went down the lane
laughingly disputing about the matter, not knowing that I was behind
the currant-bushes.
"Polyglot old maid!" I thought, very indignantly, as I went into the
house. "I've a mind not to sell them another cake of my butter. But I
wonder if people call me an old maid. I wonder if I am one."
I thought of it all the evening, and dreamt of it all night, waking the

next morning with a new realization of the subject. That first sense of a
lost youth! How sharp and strong it comes! That suddenly opened north
door of middle life, through which the winter winds rush in, sweeping
out of the southern windows all the splendors of the earlier time; it is
like a sea-turn in late summer. It has seemed to be June all along, and
we thought it was June, until the wind went round to the east, and the
first red leaf admonished us. By-and-by we close, as well as we may,
that open door, and look out again from the windows upon blooms,
beautiful in their way, to which some birds yet sing; but, alas! the wind
is still from the east, and blows as though, far away, it had lain among
icebergs.
So I mused all the morning, watering the sentiment with a bit of a
shower out of my cloud; and when the shadows turned themselves, I
went out to see how old age would look to me in the fields and woods.
It was a delicious afternoon, more like a warm dream of hay-making,
odorous, misty, sleepily musical, than a waking reality, on which the
sun shone. Tremulous blue clouds lay down all around upon the
mountains, and lazy white ones lost themselves in the waters; and
through the dozing air, the faint chirp of robin or cricket, and ding of
bells in the woods, and mellow cut of scythe, melted into one song, as
though the heart-beat of the luscious midsummer-time had set itself to
tune.
I walked on to loiter through the woods. No dust-brush for brain or
heart like the boughs of trees! There dwells a truth, and pure, strong
health within them, an ever-returning youth, promising us a glorious
leafage in some strange spring-time, and a symmetry and sweetness
that possess us until our thoughts grow skyward like them, and wave
and sing in some sunnier strata of soul-air. In the woods I was a girl
again, and forgot the flow of the hours in their pleasant companionship.
I must have grown tired and sat down by a thicket of pines to rest,
though I have forgotten, and perhaps I had fallen asleep; for suddenly I
became conscious of a sharp report, and a sharper pain in my shoulder,
and, tearing off my cape, I found the blood was flowing from a wound
just below the joint. I remember little more, for a sudden faintness
came over me; but I have an indistinct remembrance of people coming

up, of voices, of