The Hills of Hingham | Page 8

in the lighted doorway more
welcome waits me--and questions, batteries of them, even puppy
joining the attack!
Who would have believed I had seen and done all this,--had any such
adventurous trip,--lived any such significant day,--catching my regular
8.35 train as I did!

But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then the
out-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking the children
in bed, I go out to see that all is well about the barn.
How the night has deepened since my return! No wind stirs. The
hill-crest blazes with the 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