Tiverton Tales | Page 4

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 the bread soured over night, a pessimistic public, turning for relief to the local drama, said that Amelia Titcomb had married a tramp. But as soon as the heavens smiled again, it was conceded that she must have been getting lonely in her middle age, and that she had taken the way of wisdom so to furbish up mansions for the coming years.