Tiverton Tales

Tiverton Tales, by Alice Brown

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Title: Tiverton Tales
Author: Alice Brown
Release Date: January 30, 2007 [EBook #20486]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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TIVERTON TALES
BY ALICE BROWN
[Illustration: Publisher icon]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY ALICE BROWN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO M. H. R.
A MASTER MAGICIAN
CONTENTS
DOORYARDS
A MARCH WIND
THE MORTUARY CHEST
HORN-O'-THE-MOON
A STOLEN FESTIVAL
A LAST ASSEMBLING
THE WAY OF PEACE
THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
HONEY AND MYRRH
A SECOND MARRIAGE

THE FLAT-IRON LOT
THE END OF ALL LIVING

TIVERTON TALES

DOORYARDS
Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards,
those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them, and,
when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the common
occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather holds,
we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the
solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the
hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious
of her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes
of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of
"Come, butter, come! Peter stands a-waiting at the gate, Waiting for his
butter-cake. Come, butter, come!"
chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and then,
lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too hot, and we
lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of salt, to
encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of householders, we
feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them away, when they
would fain take profligate dust-baths under the syringa, leaving
unsightly hollows. But however, and with what complexion, our
dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with purification. Here
are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues; for, in Tiverton, there
is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning, omits to set in order this
outer pale of the temple. Long before the merry months are well under

way, or the cows go kicking up their heels to pasture, or plants are
taken from the south window and clapped into chilly ground, orderly
passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear up" our yards. We gather
stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by the scavenger dog, who
sits now with his tail tucked under him, oblivious of such vagrom ways.
We rake the grass, and then, gilding refined gold, we sweep it. There is
a tradition that Miss Lois May once went to the length of trimming her
grass about the doorstone and clothes-pole with embroidery scissors;
but that was a too-hasty encomium bestowed by a widower whom she
rejected next week, and who qualified his statement by saying they
were pruning-shears.
After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of
ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see
whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads
are brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened,
and the horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than
the delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are
Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.
But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their
mixture of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points
where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all.
Here is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the
father who inherited it, and the grandfather who reclaimed it from
waste; here have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living
and traced indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy, of
pathos, or of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground between
barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield,