The Hills of Hingham | Page 8

light of the stars. Such an earth and sky! I lock the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge to the stump. The bare woods are dark with shadow and deep with the silence of the night. A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then the silence and space reach off through the shadows, infinitely far off down the hillside; and the stars gather in the tops of the trees.

[Illustration: The open fire]
II
THE OPEN FIRE
It is a January night.
". . . . . . . Enclosed From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,"
we sit with our book before the fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall and glowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads. The children are in bed. She is reading aloud to me:
"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, 'when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there was a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which, I am sure, we were a great deal happier.'"
Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far away beyond the fire.
"Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand five hundred a year?" I asked.
The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she answered,
"We began on four hundred and fifty a year; and we were perfectly--"
"Yes, but you forget the parsonage; that was rent free!"
"Four hundred and fifty with rent free--and we had everything we could--"
"You forget again that we had n't even one of our four boys."
Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs between her and the fire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listening an hour before.
"If you had allowed me," she went on, "I was going to say how glad we ought to be that we are not quite so rich as--"
"We should like to be?" I questioned.
"'A purchase'"--she was reading again--"'is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. Do you not remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing--'
"Is n't this exactly our case?" she asked, interrupting herself for no other purpose than to prolong the passage she was reading.
"Truly," I replied, trying hard to hide a note of eagerness in my voice, for I had kept my battery masked these many months, "only Lamb wanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. I have driven that old machine for five years and it was second-hand to begin with."
I watched for the effect of the shot, but evidently I had not got the range, for she was saying.
"Is there a sweeter bit in all of 'Elia' than this, do you think"?
"'--And when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome--'"
She had paused again. To know when to pause! how to make the most of your author! to draw out the linked sweetness of a passage to its longest--there reads your loving reader!
"You see," laying her hand on mine, "old books and old friends are best, and I should think you had really rather have a nice safe old car than any new one. Thieves don't take old cars, as you know. And you can't insure them, that's a comfort! And cars don't skid and collide just because they are old, do they? And you never have to scold the children about the paint and--and the old thing does go--what do you think Lamb would say about old cars?"
"Lamb be hanged on old cars!" and I sent the sparks flying with a fresh stick.
"Well, then let's hear the rest of him on 'Old China.'" And so she read, while the fire burned, and outside swept the winter storm.
I have a weakness for out-loud reading and Lamb, and a peculiar joy in wood fires when