always shut. The garden was divided from the dooryard by the lane
that went past the house to the carriage-house and stable. Visitors
sometimes spoke of the lane as the “avenue,” and of the dooryard as the
“lawn;” but these fine names were never used by grandfather himself,
nor by any of the household, nor were they appropriate to the character
of the place. The dooryard grass was left to grow rather long before it
was cut, like grandfather’s beard before he would consent to have it
trimmed. Dandelions went to seed and clover-heads reddened. Beautiful
things had time to grow up and blossom in that rich, dooryard grass,
before it was swept down by the scythe and carried away in wheelbarrow
loads to be fed to the horses. It was toward night, generally, that the
men wheeled it away, and the children used to follow load after load
to the stable, to enjoy the horses’ enjoyment of it. They always felt
that the dooryard grass belonged to them, and yielded it, at the cost
of many a joy, as their own personal contribution to those good friends
of theirs in the stable--Nelly and Duke and Dan and Nelly’s colt (which
was generally a five-year-old before it ceased to be called “the
colt”).
The garden gate was a small one, of the same rather smart pattern as
the road gate. The grapevine which grew inside the fence--and over,
and under, and through it--had superadded an arch of its tenderest,
broadest, most luminous leaves, which spanned the gate-posts, uplifted
against the blue sky, and was so much more beautiful toward the middle
of summer than any gate could be, that no one ever looked at the little
garden gate at all, except to make sure that it was shut.
It had a peculiar, lively click of the latch, which somehow suggested
all the pleasures of the garden within. The remembrance of it recalls
the figure of John, the gardener, in his blue denim blouse, with a
bunch of radishes and young lettuces in his clean, earthy hands. He
would take a few steps out of his way to the fountain (it had not then
been filled up), and wash the tender roots, dip the leaves and shake
them, before presenting his offering in the kitchen.
There was another figure that often came and went when the garden gate
clicked: the little mother, the children’s grandmother, in her morning
gingham and white apron and garden hat, and the gloves without fingers
she wore when she went to cut her roses. Sometimes she wore no hat,
and the sun shone through her muslin cap. It came to a point just
above her forehead, and was finished with a bunch of narrow ribbon,
pale straw-color or lavender. Her face in the open sunlight or under
the shade of her hat had the tender fairness of one of her own faintly
tinted tea-roses. Young girls and children’s faces may be likened to
flowers, but that fairness of the white soul shining through does not
belong to youth. The soul of a mother is hardly in full bloom until her
cheek begins to sink a little and grow soft with age.
The garden was laid out on an old-fashioned plan, in three low
terraces, each a single step above the other. A long, straight walk
divided the middle terrace, extending from the gate to the seat
underneath the grapevine and pear-tree; and another long, straight path
crossed the first one at right angles from the blackberry bushes at the
top of the garden to the arbor-vitæ hedge at the bottom. The borders
were of box, or polyanthus, or primroses, and the beds were filled with
a confusion of flowers of all seasons, crowding the spaces between the
rose-bushes; so that there where literally layers of flowers, the ones
above half hiding, half supporting the ones beneath, and all uniting to
praise the hand of the gardener that made them grow. Some persons said
the garden needed systematizing; that there was a waste of material
there. Others thought its charm lay in its careless lavishness of
beauty--as if it took no thought for what it was or had, but gave with
both hands and never counted what was left.
It was certain you could pick armfuls, apronfuls, of flowers there, and
never miss them from the beds or the bushes where they grew.
The hedge ran along on top of the stone wall that guarded the
embankment to the road. In June, when the sun lay hot on the whitening
dust, Jack used to lean with his arms deep in the cool, green, springy
mass of the hedge, his chin barely above its close-shorn twigs, and
stare at the slow-moving tops of the tall chestnut-trees across the
meadow, and dream of journeys and of circuses passing, with band
wagons and piebald horses and tramp of elephants and zebras with stiff
manes. How queer an elephant would look walking past the gate of Uncle
Townsend’s meadow!
When the first crop of organ-grinders began to spread along the country
roads, Jack, atilt like a big robin in the hedge, would prick his ear
at the sound of a faint, whining sweetness, far away at the next house
but one. After a silence he would hear it again in a louder strain, at
the very next house; another plodding silence, and the joy had arrived.
The organ-man had actually perceived grandfather’s house, far back as
it was behind the fir-trees, and had stopped by the little gate at the
foot of the brick walk. Then Jack races out of the garden, slamming
the gate behind him, across the dooryard and up the piazza steps, to
beg a few pennies to encourage the man. He has already turned back his
blanket and adjusted his stick. Will grandmother please hurry? It takes
such a long time to find only four pennies, and the music has begun!
All the neighbors’ children have followed the man, and are congregated
about him in the road below. Looks are exchanged between them and Jack,
dangling his legs over the brink of the wall, but no words are wasted.
Then come those moments of indecision as to the best plan of bestowing
the pennies. If you give them too soon, the man may pack up the rest
of his tunes and go away; if you keep them back too long, he may get
discouraged and go, anyhow. Jack concludes to give two pennies at the
close of the first air, and make the others apparent in his hands. But
the organ-man does not seem to be aware of the other two pennies in
reserve. His melancholy eyes are fixed on the tops of the fir-trees
that swing in a circle above Jack’s head, as he sits on the wall.
“Poor man,” Jack thinks, “he is disappointed to get only two pennies!
He thinks, perhaps, I am keeping the others for the next man. How good
of him to go on playing all the same!” He plays all his tunes out
to the end. Down goes the blanket. Jack almost drops the pennies in
his haste to be in time. The man stumps away down the road, and Jack
loiters up the long path to the house, dreamy with the droning music,
and flattered to the soul by the man’s thanks and the way he took off
his hat when he said good-day. Nobody need try to make Jack believe
that an organ-grinder can ever be a nuisance.
The road gate, the garden gate, and the gate at the foot of the path
were the only gates that ever made any pretense to paint. The others
were of the color that wind and weather freely bestow upon a good piece
of old wood that has never been planed.
Jack became acquainted with the farm gates one by one, as his knowledge
of the fields progressed. At first, for his short legs, it was a long
journey to the barn. Here there was a gate which he often climbed
upon but never opened; for within its protection the deep growl of the
old bull was often heard, or his reddish-black head, lowering eye, and
hunched shoulders were seen emerging from the low, dark passage to the
sheds into the sunny cattle-yard. Even though nothing were in sight
more awful than a clucking hen, that doorway, always agape and always
dark as night, was a bad spot for a small boy to pass, with the gate of
retreat closed behind him and the gate of escape into the comfortable,
safe barnyard not yet open.
The left-hand gate, on the upper side of the barn, was the children’s
favorite of all the gates. The barn was built against a hill, and the
roof on the upper side came down nearly to the ground. The children
used to go through the left-hand gate when, with one impulse, they
decided, “Let’s go and slide on the roof!” This was their summer
coasting. Soles of shoes were soon so polished that the sliders were
obliged to climb up the roof on hands and knees. It was not good for
stockings, and in those days there were no “knee-protectors;” mothers’
darning was the only invention for keeping young knees inside of
middle-aged stockings that were expected to “last out” the summer.
It was a blissful pastime, to swarm up the roof and lie, with one’s
chin over the ridge-pole, gazing down from that thrilling height upon
the familiar objects in the peaceful barnyard. Then to turn round
carefully and get into position for the glorious, downward rush over
the gray, slippery shingles! It could not have been any better for
the shingles than for the shoes and stockings; but no one interfered.
Perhaps grandfather remembered a time when he, too, used to slide on
roofs, and scour the soles of his shoes and polish the knees of his
stockings.
The upper gate had another, more lasting attraction; it opened
into the lane that went up past the barn into the orchards--the
lovely, side-hill orchards. Grandfather’s farm was a side-hill farm
altogether, facing the river, with its back to the sunset. If you
sat down comfortably, adjusting yourself to the slope of the ground,
the afternoon shadows stretched far before you; you saw the low blue
mountains across the river, and the sails of sloops tacking against the
breeze. One orchard led to another, through gaps in the stone fences,
and the shadow of one tree met the shadow of its neighbor, across
those long, sun-pierced aisles. The trees bent this way and that, and
shifted their limbs under the autumn’s burden of fruit. The children
never thought of eating a whole apple, but bit one and threw it away
for another that looked more tempting, and so on till their palates
were torpid with tasting. Then they were swung up on top of the cold
slippery loads and jolted down the lane to that big upper door that
opened into the loft where the apple bins were. Here the wagon stopped
with a heavy creak. Some one picked up a child and swung it in at the
big door; some one else caught it and placed it safely on its feet at
one side; and then the men began a race,--the one in the wagon bent
upon filling a basket with apples and hoisting it in at the door,
faster than the man inside could carry it to the bin and empty it and
return for the next.
These bins held the cider apples. The apples for market were brought
down in barrels from the orchards, and then the wagon load of apples
and children went through still another gate that led to another short
lane under more apple-trees, to the fruit-house, where, in the cool,
dim cellar that smelled of all deliciousness, the fruit was sorted
and boxed or barreled for market. And in the late afternoon, or after
supper, if the children were old enough to stay up so late, they were
allowed to ride on the loads of fruit to the steamboat landing.
It is needless to say that this gate, which led to the fruit cellar,
was one Jack very early learned to open. In fact, it was so in
the habit of being opened that it had never acquired the trick of
obstinacy, and gave way at the least pull.
When Jack was rather bigger, he was allowed to cross the road with his
cousin, a boy of his own age, and open the gate into Uncle Townsend’s
meadow. This piece of land had been many years in his grandfather’s
possession but it was still called by the name of its earlier owner.
Names have such a persistent habit of sticking in those long-settled
communities where there is always some one who remembers when staid old
horses were colts and gray-haired men were boys, and when the land your
father was born on was part of his grandfather’s farm on the ridge.
A brook, which was also the waste-way from the mill, ran across Uncle
Townsend’s meadow. Sometimes it overflowed into the grass and made wet
places, and in these spots the grass was of a darker color, and certain
wild flowers were finer than anywhere else; also weeds, among others
the purple, rank “skunk’s cabbage,” which the children admired, without
wishing to gather.
Water-cresses clung to the brookside; in the damp places the largest,
whitest bloodroot grew; under the brush along the fences and by the
rocks grew the blue-eyed hepatica, coral-red columbine, and anemones,
both pure white and those rare beauties with a pale pink flush.
Dog-tooth violets, wild geraniums, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit,
came in due season, and ferns of every pattern of leaf and scroll.
Later, when the wet places were dry, came the tall fire-lilies and
brown-eyed Rudbeckias, “ox-eyed daisies” the children called them,
together with all the delicate, flowering grass-heads and stately
bulrushes and patches of pink and white clover,--and all over the
meadow there was a sleepy sound of bees, and shadows with soft edges
lost in deep waves of grass.
Of course the brook did not stop at the meadow. It went on gurgling
over the stones, dark under the willows; but there were no more gates.
The brook left the home fields and took its own way across everybody’s
land to the river. That was a long walk, which Jack took only when he
was much older.
Another journey, which he grew up to by degrees, was that one to the
upper barn. How many times over did he repeat his instructions before
he was allowed to set out: “Go up the hill, past the mill, until you
come to the first turn to the left. Turn up that way and follow the
lane straight on”--but this was a figure of speech, for no one could go
straight on who followed that lane--“till you come to the three gates.
Be sure to take the left-hand one of the three. Then you are all right.
That gate opens into the lane that goes past the upper barn.”
Near the upper barn were three sugar-maples--the only ones on the place
that yielded sap; and in one of the neighboring fields there was a very
great walnut-tree, second in size only to the old chestnut-tree in the
burying-ground which was a hundred and fifty years old and bigger round
the body than three children clasping hands could span.
Those up-lying fields were rather far away for daily rambles. Jack knew
them less and so cared less for them than for the home acres, which
were as familiar to him as the rooms of grandfather’s house.
But when grandfather’s children were children, the spring lambs
wintered at the upper barn; and beauteous creatures they were by the
following spring, with broad foreheads and curly forelocks and clear
hazel eyes and small mouths just made for nibbling from the hand.
Often, of a keen April morning, when the thawed places in the lane
were covered with clinking ice, the children used to trudge at their
father’s side to see the lambs get their breakfast of turnips, chopped
in the dark cold hay-scented barn, while the hungry creatures bleated
outside and crowded against the door.
Half the poetry of the farm life went into the care of the sheep and
the anxieties connected with them. They were a flock of Cotswolds,
carefully bred from imported stock. Their heavy fleeces made them the
most helpless of creatures when driven hard or worried by the dogs, and
every neighbor’s dog was a possible enemy.
On moonlight nights in spring, when watch-dogs are restless, and
vagabond dogs are keen for mischief, the spirit of the chase would
get abroad. The bad characters would lead on the dogs of uncertain
principles, and now and then one of unspotted reputation, and the evil
work would begin. When the household was asleep, a knock would be heard
upon the window, and the voice of one hoarse with running would give
the alarm:--
“The dogs are after the sheep!”
The big brother would get down his shot-gun, and the father would hunt
for the ointments, the lantern, and the shears (for cutting the wool
away from bleeding wounds), and together they hurried away--the avenger
and the healer. Next day, more than one of the neighbors’ children
came weeping, to identify a missing favorite. Sometimes the innocent
suffered for being found in company with the guilty. There were hard
feelings on both sides. Even the owners of dogs caught with the marks
of guilt upon them disputed the justice of a life for a life.
There is one more gate, and then we come to the last one--the gate of
the burying-ground.
A path went over the hill which divided grandfather’s house from that
of his elder brother, whose descendants continued to live there after
him. Uncle Edward’s children were somewhat older, and his grandchildren
were younger than grandfather’s children; but though slightly
mismatched as to ages the two households were in great accord. The path
crossed the “line fence” by a little gate in the stone wall, and this
was the gate of family visiting.
That way the mothers went of an afternoon with their sewing, or the
last new magazine, or the last new baby; or in the morning to borrow
a cupful of yeast, or to return the last loan of a bowlful of rice,
or to gather ground-ivy (it grew in Uncle Edward’s yard, but not in
grandfather’s) to make syrup for an old cough. That way came the
groups, of a winter evening, in shawls and hoods, creaking over the
snow with lantern-light and laughter to a reading circle, or to one of
those family reunions which took place whenever some relative from a
distance was visiting in the neighborhood. Along that path went those
dear women in haste, to offer their help in sudden, sharp emergencies;
and with slower steps again when all was over, they went to sit with
those in grief, or to consult about the last services for the dead.
That was the way the young people took on their walks in summer--the
stalwart country boys and their pretty city cousins in fresh muslins,
with light, high voices, pitched to the roar of the street. That way
went the nutting parties in the fall and the skating parties in winter.
All the boys and girls of both houses grew up opening and shutting that
gate on one errand or another, from the little white-headed lad with
the mail, to the soldier cousin coming across to say good-by.
Between the two neighboring homes was the family burying-ground: all
this pleasant intercourse went on with the silent cognizance and
sympathy, as it were, of the forefathers who trod the path no more.
The burying-ground was by far the best spot for a resting-place on
either of the farms,--in a hollow of the hills, with a stone fence
all round, draped as if to deaden sounds with heavy festoons of
woodbine. Above the gray granite and white marble tombstones, rose the
locust-trees, tall and still. The beds of myrtle, underneath, were
matted into a continuous carpet of thick, shining leaves which caught
the sunlight at broad noon with a peculiar pale glister like moonlight.
The chestnut-tree stood a little apart, with one great arm outstretched
as if calling attention, or asking for silence. Yet no child ever
hushed its laughter as it passed the little gate with the gray pickets,
overhung by a climbing rose, which opened into the burying-ground;
and when, in the autumn, the old chestnut-tree dropped its nuts, the
children never hesitated to go in that way and gather them because of
the solemn neighborhood. They had grown up in the presence of these
memorials of the beloved dead. But no one ever opened that gate without
at least a momentary thoughtfulness. No one ever slammed it, in anger
or in haste. And so it became a dumb teacher of reverence--a daily
reminder to be quiet, to be gentle, for the sake of those at rest on
the other side of the wall.
THE GARRET AT GRANDFATHER’S
The rooms at grandfather’s house had been used so long, they were
almost human themselves. Each room had a look of its own, when you
opened the door, as expressive as a speaking countenance.
“Come in, children dear!” the sunny sitting-room always seemed to say.
“Sit still and don’t talk too much, and don’t handle the things on the
tables,” said the large, gleaming, dim-lighted parlors.
“Dear me, what weather this is!” grumbled the poky back entry where the
overshoes and waterproofs and wood-boxes were kept.
“There’s a piece--of cake--in the cupboard for you,” quietly ticked the
dining-room clock, its large face looking at no one in particular.
But of all the rooms in that house, upstairs or down, not one had the
strangeness, the mysterious nod and beck and whisper, of the murky old
garret.
“Hark, what was that?” it would seem to creak; and then there was
silence. “Hush! I’ll tell you a story,” it sometimes answered.
Some of its stories were true, but I should not like to vouch for all
of them.
What a number of queer things it kept hidden away under the eaves that
spread wide, a broad-winged cloak of shadows! What a strange eye it
had, its one half-moon window peering at you from the high, peaked
forehead of the gable.
The garret door was at the far end of the long upper hall; from it the
stairs (and how they did creak!) led up directly out of the cheerful
daylight into that uncarpeted wilderness where it was always twilight.
It was the younger children’s business to trot on errands, and they
were not consulted as to where or when they should go. Grown people
seem to forget how early it gets dark up garret in winter, and how far
away the house noises sound with all the doors shut between.
When the children were sent up garret for nuts,--for Sunday dessert
with mince pie and apples, or to pass around with cider in the
evening,--they were careful to leave the stair door open behind them;
but there was little comfort in that, for all the people were two
flights down and busy with their own concerns.
Downstairs in the bright western chambers nobody thought of its being
late, but up garret, under the eaves, it was already night. Thick ice
incrusted the half-moon window, curtaining its cold ray that sadly
touched an object here and there, and deepened the neighboring gloom.
The autumn nut harvest was spread first upon sheets on the garret floor
to dry, and then it was garnered in the big, green bathtub which had
stood, since the children could remember, over against the chimney, to
the right of the gable window. This tub was for size and weight the
father of all bathtubs. It was used for almost anything but the purpose
for which it was intended.
In summer, when it was empty, the children played “shipwreck” in it;
it was their life-boat, and they were cast away on the high seas. Some
rowed for dear life, with umbrellas and walking-sticks, and some made
believe to cry and call for help,--for that was their idea of the
behavior of a shipwrecked company; and some tramped on the bulging tin
bottom of the tub, which yielded and sprang back with a loud thump,
like the clank of oars. It was very exciting.
In winter it was the granary. It held bushels and bushels of nuts, and
its smooth, out-sloping sides defeated the clever little mice who were
always raiding and rummaging among the garret stores.
Well, it seemed a long distance to the timid little errand girl, from
the stairs, across the garret floor to that bathtub. “Noiseless as fear
in a wide wilderness,” she stepped. Then, what a shock it was, when the
first loud handfuls of nuts bumped upon the bottom of the pail! The
nuts were pointed and cold as lumps of ice; they hurt the small hands
that shoveled them up in haste, and a great many handfuls it took to
fill the pail.
Hanging from the beams that divided the main garret from the eaves,
dangled a perfectly useless row of old garments that seemed to be there
for no purpose but to look dreadful. How they might have appeared in
a different light cannot be said; there seemed to be nothing wrong
with them when the women took them down at house-cleaning time and
shook and beat them about; they were as empty as sacks, every one. But
in that dim, furtive light, seen by over-shoulder glimpses they had
the semblance of dismal malefactors suffering the penalty of their
crimes. Some were hooded and seemed to hang their heads upon their
sunken breasts; all were high-shouldered wretches with dangling arms
and a shapeless, dreary suggestiveness worse than human. The most
objectionable one of the lot was a long, dark weather-cloak, worn
“about the twenties,” as old people say. It was of the fashion of that
“long red cloak, well brushed and neat,” which we read of in John
Gilpin’s famous ride.
But the great-grandfather’s cloak was of a dark green color, and not
well brushed. It had a high, majestic velvet collar, hooked with a
heavy steel clasp and chain; but for all its respectable and kindly
associations, it looked, hanging from the garret rafters, just as much
a gallows-bird as any of its ruffian company.
The children could not forgive their great-grandfather for having had
such a sinister-looking garment, or for leaving it behind him to hang
in the grim old garret and frighten them. Solemn as the garret looked,
no doubt this was one of its jokes: to dress itself up in shadows
and pretend things to tease the children, as we have known some real
persons to do. It certainly was not fair, when they were up there all
alone.