Tiverton Tales | Page 4

here: poor relations in a
broken-down family. But children love this yard. They come, hand in
hand, with a timid confidence in their right, and ask at the back door for
the privilege of playing in it. They take long, entrancing journeys in the
mouldy old chaise; they endure Siberian nights of sleighing, and throw
out their helpless dolls to the pursuing wolves; or the more
mercantile-minded among the boys mount a three-wheeled express
wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the road. This, in its

dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be despised.
Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate
communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.
This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright
days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads
together over some amiable yarn. But now one house is closed, its
windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has
grown over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed. It
is easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the heart;
and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in us the
pangs of loss and grief.
But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not
remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or
disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon
an historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts
had the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and
the mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him
news of death in a neighboring town. The butcher had gone by, and I
was going; but Deacon Pitts stood there, dramatically intent upon his
mournful morsel. I judged that he was pondering on the possibility of
attending the funeral without the waste of too much precious time now
due the crops. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a
pan of liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling
across the fields, laden with pennyroyal. He set the pan down
hastily--yea, even before the advancing cat!--and made a trumpet of his
hands.
"Sarah!" he called piercingly. "Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away!
Died yesterday!"
I do not know whether he was present at that funeral, but it would be
strange if he were not; for time and tide both served him, and he was
always on the spot. Indeed, one day he reached a house of mourning in
such season that he found the rooms quite empty, and was forced to
wait until the bereaved family should assemble. There they sat, he and
his wife, a portentous couple in their dead black and anticipatory gloom,

until even their patience had well-nigh fled. And then an arriving
mourner overheard the deacon, as he bent forward and challenged his
wife in a suspicious and discouraged whisper:--
"Say, Sarah, ye don't s'pose it's all goin' to fush out, do ye?"
They had their funeral.
To the childish memory, so many of the yards are redolent now of
wonder and a strange, sweet fragrance of the fancy not to be described!
One, where lived a notable cook, had, in a quiet corner, a little grove of
caraway. It seemed mysteriously connected with the oak-leaf cookies,
which only she could make; and the child, brushing through the
delicate bushes grown above his head, used to feel vaguely that, on
some fortunate day, cookies would be found there, "a-blowin' and
a-growin'." That he had seen them stirred and mixed and taken from the
oven was an empty matter; the cookies belonged to the caraway grove,
and there they hang ungathered still. In the very same yard was a
hogshead filled with rainwater, where insects came daily to their death
and floated pathetically in a film of gauzy wings. The child feared this
innocent black pool, feared it too much to let it alone; and day by day
he would hang upon the rim with trembling fingers, and search the
black, smooth depths, with all Ophelia's pangs. And to this moment, no
rushing river is half so ministrant to dread as is a still, dull hogshead,
where insects float and fly.
These are our dooryards. I wish we lived in them more; that there were
vines to sing under, and shade enough for the table, with its wheaten
loaf and good farm butter, and its smoking tea. But all that may come
when we give up our frantic haste, and sit down to look, and breathe,
and listen.

A MARCH WIND
When the clouds hung low, or chimneys refused to draw, or