The Old Peabody Pew | Page 9

another rug, for I've got all the rugs I can step foot on. I dried so many
apples last year I shan't need to cut up any this season. My jelly and
preserves ain't out, and there I am; and there most of us are, in this
village, without a man to take steps for and trot 'round after! There's
just three husbands among the fifteen women scrubbin' here now, and
the rest of us is all old maids and widders. No wonder the men-folks
die, or move away like Justin Peabody; a place with such a mess o'
women-folks ain't healthy to live in, whatever Lobelia Brewster may
say."
CHAPTER III

Justin Peabody had once faithfully struggled with the practical
difficulties of life in Edgewood, or so he had thought, in those old days
of which Nancy Wentworth was thinking as she wiped the paint of the
Peabody pew. Work in the mills did not attract him; he had no capital
to invest in a stock of goods for store-keeping; school-teaching offered
him only a pittance; there remained then only the farm, if he were to
stay at home and keep his mother company.
"Justin don't seem to take no holt of things," said the neighbours.
"Good Heavens!" It seemed to him that there were no things to take
hold of! That was his first thought; later he grew to think that the
trouble all lay in himself, and both thoughts bred weakness.
The farm had somehow supported the family in the old Deacon's time,
but Justin seemed unable to coax a competence from the soil. He could,
and did, rise early and work late; till the earth, sow crops; but he could

not make the rain fall nor the sun shine at the times he needed them,
and the elements, however much they might seem to favour his
neighbours, seldom smiled on his enterprises. The crows liked Justin's
corn better than any other in Edgewood. It had a richness peculiar to
itself, a quality that appealed to the most jaded palate, so that it was
really worth while to fly over a mile of intervening fields and pay it the
delicate compliment of preference.
Justin could explain the attitude of caterpillars, worms, grasshoppers,
and potato-bugs toward him only by assuming that he attracted them as
the magnet in the toy boxes attracts the miniature fishes.
"Land of liberty! look at 'em congregate!" ejaculated Jabe Slocum,
when he was called in for consultation. "Now if you'd gone in for
breedin' insecks, you could be as proud as Cuffy an' exhibit 'em at the
County Fair! They'd give yer prizes for size an' numbers an' speed, I
guess! Why, say, they're real crowded for room--the plants ain't give
'em enough leaves to roost on! Have you tried 'Bug Death'?"
"It acts like a tonic on them," said Justin gloomily.
"Sho! you don't say so! Now mine can't abide the sight nor smell of it.
What 'bout Paris green?"
"They thrive on it; it's as good as an appetizer."
"Well," said Jabe Slocum, revolving the quid of tobacco in his mouth
reflectively, "the bug that ain't got no objection to p'ison is a bug that's
got ways o' thinkin' an' feelin' an' reasonin' that I ain't able to cope with!
P'r'aps it's all a leadin' o' Providence. Mebbe it shows you'd ought to
quit farmin' crops an' take to raisin' live stock!"
Justin did just that, as a matter of fact, a year or two later; but stock that
has within itself the power of being "live" has also rare qualifications
for being dead when occasion suits, and it generally did suit Justin's
stock. It proved prone not only to all the general diseases that
cattle-flesh is heir to, but was capable even of suicide. At least, it is true
that two valuable Jersey calves, tied to stakes on the hillside, had flung

themselves violently down the bank and strangled themselves with
their own ropes in a manner which seemed to show that they found no
pleasure in existence, at all events on the Peabody farm.
These were some of the little tragedies that had sickened young Justin
Peabody with life in Edgewood, and Nancy Wentworth, even then,
realized some of them and sympathized without speaking, in a girl's
poor, helpless way.
Mrs. Simpson had washed the floor in the right wing of the church and
Nancy had cleaned all the paint. Now she sat in the old Peabody pew
darning the forlorn, faded cushion with grey carpet- thread: thread as
grey as her own life.
The scrubbing-party had moved to its labours in a far corner of the
church, and two of the women were beginning preparations for the
basket luncheons. Nancy's needle was no busier than her memory.
Long years