Tiverton Tales | Page 3

looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his
horse aside.
Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of interest in
seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone. That was a
very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and water

had to be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes
Della did not get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes not
till after dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet ground
suffered varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were potatoes,
when apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke, and stood
up in two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether, and Della,
like the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the mistaken
benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister's daughter,
noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in the warmth
of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was a timid
though official benevolence; but Della's bright eyes grew dark. She
clung to her kitchen chair.
"I guess I won't," she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to
understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had
grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was
frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although
loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own species
of sad and shy content.
Della did not have a long life; and that was some relief to us who were
not altogether satisfied with her outlook here. The place she left need
not be always desolate. There was a good maiden sister to keep the
house, and Eben and the children would be but briefly sorry. They
could recover their poise; he with the health of a simple mind, and they
as children will. Yet he was truly stunned by the blow; and I hoped, on
the day of the funeral, that he did not see what I did. When we went out
to get our horse and wagon, I caught my foot in something which at
once gave way. I looked down--at a broken wicket and a withered apple
by the stake.
Quite at the other end of the town is a dooryard which, in my own mind,
at least, I call the traveling garden. Miss Nancy, its presiding mistress,
is the victim of a love of change; and since she may not wander herself,
she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No sooner does a
green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it up and sets it
elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in all stages of

misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from the lap of
prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under different
conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might guess,
under all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition that
Miss Nancy may move it to-morrow. Even the ladies'-delights have
their months of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country
maids; for no sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark, still
corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and strong.
Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish
through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has
roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and
that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt?
Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no
luck with plants." And that, indeed, is true.
There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to tell
a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles of all
sorts congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the hands of
wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and though,
for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet inwardly constrained
to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no purpose. He is everlastingly
swapping and bargaining, giving play to a faculty which might, in its
legitimate place, have worked out the definite and tangible, but which
now goes automatically clicking on under vain conditions. The house,
too, is overrun with useless articles, presently to be exchanged for
others as unavailing, and in the farmer's pocket ticks a watch which
to-morrow will replace with another more problematic still. But in the
yard are the undisputable evidences of his wild unthrift. Old rusty
mowing-machines, buggies with torn and flapping canvas, sleighs
ready to yawn at every crack, all are