PART I

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MISS PRIMROSE

A Novel

by

ROY ROLFE GILSON

Author of "The Flower of Youth" "In the Morning Glow" etc.

[Illustration]

New York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers :: MCMVI

Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Published March, 1906.

_Contents_

PART I

_A Devonshire Lad_

I. LETITIA 3

II. LITTLE RUGBY 13

III. A POET OF GRASSY FORD 27

IV. THE SEVENTH SLICE 43

V. THE HANDMAIDEN 61

VI. COUSIN DOVE 71

VII. OF HAMADRYADS AND THEIR SPELLS 88

PART II

_The School-Mistress_

I. THE OLDER LETITIA 101

II. ON A CORNER SHELF 113

III. A YOUNGER ROBIN 123

IV. HIRAM PTOLEMY 136

V. A. P. A. 150

VI. TRUANTS IN ARCADY 164

VII. PEGGY NEAL 177

VIII. NEW EDEN 188

IX. A SERIOUS MATTER 202

PART III

_Rosemary_

I. THE HOME-KEEPER 211

II. JOHNNY KEATS 219

III. THE FORTUNE-TELLER 234

IV. AN UNEXPECTED LETTER 244

V. SURPRISES 252

VI. AN OLD FRIEND OF OURS 264

VII. SUZANNE 275

VIII. IN A DEVON LANE 287

PART I

_A Devonshire Lad_

_Miss Primrose_

I

LETITIA

All little, white-haired, smiling ladies remind me of Letitia--Letitia

Primrose, whom you saw just now in a corner of our garden among the

petunias. You thought her odd, no doubt, not knowing her as I or as the

children do who find her dough-nuts sweet after school is done, or their

English cousins, those little brown-feathered beggars waiting on winter

mornings in the snow-drifts at her sill. As for myself, I must own to a

certain kinship, as it were, not of blood but of propinquity, a long

next-doorhood in our youth, a tenderer, nameless tie in after years, and

always a fond partiality which began one day by our old green fence.

There, on its Primrose side, it seems, she had parted the grape-vines,

looking for fruit, and found instead--

"Why! whose little boy is this?"

Now, it happened to be Bertram, Jonathan Weatherby's little boy--it

being a holiday, and two pickets off, and the Concords purple in a

witchery of September sheen--though at first he could make no sign to

her of his parentage, so surprised he was, and his mouth so crammed.

"Will I die?" he asked, when he had gulped down all but his tongue.

"Die!" she replied, laughing at his grave, round eyes and pinching his

nearer cheek. "Do I look like an ogress?"

"No," he said; "but I've gone and swallowed 'em."

"The grapes?"

"No--yes--but I mean the pits," whereat she laughed so that his brow

darkened.

"Well, a man _did_ once."

"Did what?"

"Died--from swallowin' 'em."

"Who told you that?"

"Maggie did."

"And who is Maggie?"

"Why, you know Maggie. She's our hired girl."

"How many did you swallow?"

"Five."

"Five!"

"Or six, I guess. I'm not quite sure."

"What made you do it?"

"I didn't. _You_ did."

"_I_ made you swallow them?"

"Why, yes, 'cause, now, I had 'em in my mouth--"

"Six all at once!"

"Yes, and you went and scared me. I forgot to think."

"Mercy! I'm sorry, darling."

"My name isn't darling. It's Bertram."

"I'm sorry, Bertram."

"Oh, that's all right," he forgave her, cheerfully, "as long as I don't

die like the man did; you'll know pretty soon, I guess."

"How shall I know?"

"Well, the man, he hollered. You could hear him 'cross lots, Maggie

says. So, if you listen, why, pretty soon you'll know."

And it is due partly to the fact that Letitia Primrose, listening, heard

no hollering across lots, that I am able here to record the very day

and hour when I first met her; partly that, and partly because Letitia

has a better memory than Jonathan Weatherby's little boy, for I do not

remember the thing at all and must take her word for it.

She was not gray then, of course. It must have been a pink, sweet, merry

face that peered at me through the grape-vines, and a ringing laugh in

those days, and two plump fingers that pinched my cheek. Her hair was

brown and hung in braids, she tells me. She may have been fourteen.

I do not remember her so young. I do remember hugging some one and being

hugged, next door--once in the bay-window by the red geraniums, whose

scent still bears to me some faint, sweet airs of summers gone. It was

not a relative who hugged me; I know by the feeling--the remembered

feeling--for I was dutiful but not o'er keen in the matter of kissing

our kith and kin. No, it was some one who took me by surprise and

rumpled me, some one who seemed, somehow, to have the right to me,

though not by blood--some one too who was nearer my age than most of our

relatives, who were not so young and round and luring as I recall them.

It was some one kneeling, so that our heads were even. The carpet was

red, I remember. I had run in from play, I suppose, and she was there,

and I--I may have been irresistible in those days. At least I know it

was not I, but Eve who--

_That_ must have been Letitia. I have never asked, but it was not Cousin

Julia, or the Potter girl, or Sammy's sister. Excluding the rest of the

world, I infer Letitia. And why not kiss me? She kissed Sammy, that fat,

little, pudding-head Sammy McSomething, who played the mouth-organ.

Since of all the tunes in the world he knew but one (you know which

one), it may seem foolish that I cared; but, remember, I played none!

And she kissed him _for_ playing--kissed him, pudgy and vulgar as he was

with the fetty-bag tied to his neck by a dirty string to ward off

contagions! Ugh! I swore a green, green oath to learn the accordion.

That night in bed--night of the day she kissed him--with only the

moon-lamp burning outside my window, I felt that my cheeks were wet. I

had been thinking. It had come to me awfully as I tossed, that I had

been born too late--for Letitia. Always I should be too young for her.

Dear Letitia, white and kneeling even then, perhaps, at your whiter

prayers, or reading after them, before you slept, in the _Jane Eyre_

which lay for years beneath your pillow, you did not dream that you also

were a heroine of romance. You did not dream of the plot then hatching

in the night: plot with a villain in it--oh, beware, Letitia, of a

pudgy, vulgar, superstitious villain wearing a charmed necklace of

assafoetida to ward off evils, but powerless, even quite odorless

against that green-eyed one! For, lo! Letitia: thy Hero standing

beneath thy chamber-window in the moonbeams, is singing soprano to the

gentle bellowsings of early love!

No, I do not play the accordion, nor did I ever. I never even owned one,

so I never practised secretly in the barn-loft, nor did I ever, after

all my plotting, lure young Sammy to play "Sweet Home" to our dear lady

in the moonshine, only to be eclipsed, to his dire confusion and

everlasting shame, by me. It may have been that I had no pocket-money,

or that Santa Claus was short that year in his stock of

wind-instruments, or that Jonathan Weatherby had no ear for melody about

the house, but it is far more likely that Letitia Primrose never again

offended, to my knowledge, in the matter of pudgy little vulgar boys.

Now, as I muse the longer of that fair young lady who lived next door to

us, as I see myself crawling through the place with the pickets off, and

recall beyond it the smell and taste of the warm Concords in my petty

larcenies of a dozen autumns, then other things come back to me, of

Letitia's youth, of its cares and sacrifice and its motherlessness. The

Rev. David Primrose, superannuate divine, bard and scholar, lived mostly

in a chair, as I recall him, and it was Letitia who wheeled him on sunny

days when other girls were larking, who sat beside it in the bay-window,

half-screened by her geraniums, reading to him when his eyes were weary,

writing for him, when his hand trembled, those fine fancies that helped

him to forget his sad and premature decay. She was his only child, his

only housemaid, gardener, errand-boy, and "angel," as mother said, and

the mater went sometimes to sit evenings with him lest Letitia should

never know joys of straw-rides and taffy-pulls and church-sociable

ice-cream and cake.

He had a fine, white, haggard face, too stern for a little child to

care for, but less forbidding to a growing school-boy who had found by

chance that it softened wonderfully with memories of that Rugby where

Tom Brown went to school; for Dr. Primrose had conned his Xenophon

within those very ivied-walls, and, what was more to Bertram Weatherby,

under those very skies had fled like Tom, a hunted hare, working fleet

wonders in the fields of Warwickshire.

"A mad March hare I was, Bertram," he would tell me, the light of his

eyes blazing in that little wind of a happy memory, only to sink and go

out again. Smoothing then with his fine, white hands the plaid shawl

which had been his wife's and was now a coverlet for his wasted knees,

he would say, sadly:

"Broomsticks, Bertram--but in their day there were no fleeter limbs in

Rugby."

There on my upper shelf is an old, worn, dusty copy of the _Odes of

Horace_, which I cannot read, but it bears on its title-page, in a

school-boy's scrawl, the name and date for which I prize it:

"David Buckleton Primrose, Rugby, _A.D._ 18--."

He laughed as he gave it to me.

"Mark, Bertram," said he, "the 'A.D.'"

"Thank you, sir," I replied, tremulously. "You bet I'll always keep it,

Mr. Primrose."

"_Dr._ Primrose," he reproved me, gently.

"Doctor, I mean. Maybe Tom had one like it."

"Likely," he replied. "You must learn to read it."

"Oh, I will, sir--and Greek."

"That's right, my boy. Remember always what Dr. Primrose said when he

gave you Horace: that no gentleman could have pretensions to sound

culture who was not well-grounded in the classics. Can you remember

that?"

Twice he made me repeat it.

"Oh yes, sir, I can remember it," I told him. "Do you suppose Tom put in

his name like that?"

"Doubtless," said Dr. Primrose, "minus the A.D."

"I didn't know you had a middle name," I said.

"Buckleton was my mother's maiden name," he explained. "She was of the

Wiltshire Buckletons, and a very good family, too."

"David Buckleton Primrose," I read aloud.

"Lineal descendant of Dr. Charles Primrose, Vicar of Wakefield," added

the minister, so solemnly that I fairly caught my breath. I had no

notion then of whom he spoke, but there was that in the chant of his

deep voice and the pleasant, pompous sound he gave the title, which awed

me so I could only stare at him, and then at Horace, and then at him

again, as he lay back solemnly in his chair, regarding me with half-shut

eyes. Slowly a smile overspread his features.

"I was only jesting. Did you never hear of the _Vicar of Wakefield_?"

"No," I said.

"There: that little yellow book on the third shelf, between the green

ones. He was its hero, a famous character of Oliver Goldsmith's. He also

was a clergyman, and his name was Primrose."

"Oh," I said, "and did he go to Rugby, sir?"

Now, though the doctor laughed and shook his head, somehow I got that

notion in my noddle, and to this very day must stop to remember that the

vicar was not a Rugby boy. I have even caught myself imagining that I

had read somewhere, or perhaps been told, that his middle name was

Buckleton. One thing, of course, was true of both Primroses: they lived

A.D.

II

LITTLE RUGBY

Hunting fox-grapes on a Saturday in fall, or rambling truantly on a fair

spring morning, and chuckling to hear the school-bells calling in vain

to us across the meadows, it was fine to say:

"Gee! If there was only a game-keeper to get into a row with!"

And then hear Peter's answer:

"Gee, yes! Remember how Velveteens caught Tom up a tree?"

It was fine, I say, because it proved that Peter, too, knew _Tom Brown's

School Days_, and all about Slogger Williams and Tom's fight with him,

all about East and Arthur and Dr. Arnold, and Tom in the last chapter

standing alone in the Rugby chapel by the doctor's grave.

One night in winter I remember keeping watch--hard-pressed was Cæsar

by the hordes of Gaul--a merest stripling from among the legions,

stealthily deserted post, braving the morrow's reckoning to linger in

delicious idleness by his father's shelves. There, in a tattered copy of

an old _Harper's_, whose cover fluttered to the hearth-rug, his eyes

fell upon a set of drawings of a gate, a quadrangle, a tower door with

ivy over it, a cricket-field with boys playing and scattering a flock of

sheep, a shop (at this his eyes grew wider)--a mere little Englishy

village-shop, to be sure, but not like others, for this, indeed, was

Sallie Harrowell's, where Tom bought baked potatoes and a pennyworth of

tea! And out of one full, dark page looked Dr. Arnold--a face as fine

and wise and tender as Bertram Weatherby had fancied it, so that he

turned from it but to turn back again, thinking how Tom had looked upon

its living presence in more wondrous days. Cæsar's deserter read and

looked, and looked and read again, beside the hearth, forgetting the

legions in the Gallic wilds, forgetting the Roman sentry calls for the

cries of cricketers, and seeing naught but the guarded wickets on an

English green and how the sheep browsed peacefully under the windows in

the vines.

Schoolward next morning Rugby and Cæsar nestled together beneath his

arm. He found his Little Rugby on a hill--a red brick school-house

standing awkwardly and solemn-eyed in its threadbare playground, for all

the world like a poor school-master, impoverished without, well stocked

within. It was an ugly, mathematical-looking Rugby, austere and angular,

and without a shred of vine or arching bough for birds or dreams to nest

in, yet Bertram Weatherby hailed it joyfully, ran lightly up its painted

steps, and flung wide open its great hall-door. A flood of sound gushed

forth--laughter, boisterous voices, chatter of girls, and the movement

of restless feet. Across the threshold familiar faces turned, smiling,

familiar voices rose from the tumult, his shoulders tingled with the

buffets of familiar hands.

"Hello, Bildad!"

"Hello, old saw-horse!"

"Hello, yourself! Take _that_!"

But suddenly, in the midst of these savage greetings, that gentle

pressure of an arm about him, and Peter's voice:

"Hello, old man!"

Bertram would whirl at that, his face beaming; they had met but

yesterday--it was as years ago--"Hello, old man! Look, Peter!"

But a gong clanged. Then all about them was the hurry and tramp of feet

upon the stairs. Lost in the precious pages, they climbed together, arm

in arm, drifting upward with the noisy current and through the doors of

the assembly-hall.

"See, Bertram--the cricket-bats on the wall!"

"Yes; and the High Street--and Sallie Harrowell's!"

"And the doctor's door!"

Through another door just then their own masters were slowly filing,

their own doctor last and weightiest of all, his smooth, strong face

busy with some chapel reverie.

"The Professor's like Arnold," Bertram told Peter as they slipped

together into their double seat.

The last gong clanged. There was a last bang of seats turned down, a

last clatter of books upon the desks, the last belated, breathless ones

fluttered down aisles with reddened cheeks, while the Professor waited

with the Bible open in his hand.

"Let us read this morning the one-hundred-and-seventh Psalm--Psalm one

hundred seven."

Peter was in Rugby, hidden by the girl in front. The boy named Bertram

fixed his gaze upon the desk before him. Fair and smooth it was--too

smooth with newness to please a Rugbeian eye. During the Psalm, with his

pocket-knife he cut his initials in the yellow wood, and smiled at

them. In days to come other boys would sit where he was sitting, and

gaze and puzzle over that rude legacy, and, if dreams came true, might

be proud enough to sprawl their elbows where a famous man had lolled.

They might even hang the old seat-top upon the wall, that all who ran

might read the glory of an _alma mater_ in the disobedience of a mighty

son. Bertram Weatherby gazed fondly upon his handiwork and closed his

knife. Time and Destiny must do the rest.

"Let us pray."

For a moment the Professor stood there silently with lowered eyes.

Bertram and Peter, their shoulders touching, bowed their heads.

"_Our Father in heaven...._"

There was no altar--only a flat-topped desk; no stained-glass

windows--only the sunshine on the panes; and there a man's voice, deep

and trembling, and here a school-boy's beating heart.

"_ ... Help us, O Father, to be kinder...._"

How you loved Peter, the Professor, and your ugly Rugby on its hill!

"_ ... Lead us, O Father, to a nobler youth...._"

Ay, they should know you for the man you were, deep down in your hidden

soul.

"_ ... Give us, O Father, courage for the battle...._"

Wait till the next time Murphy bumped you on the stairs!

"_ ... to put behind us all indolence of flesh and soul...._"

You would study hard that term.

"_ ... all heedlessness and disobedience...._"

You would keep the rules.

"_ ... for Jesus' sake--Amen._"

"Peter, did you see the sheep...."

"If the two young gentlemen _whispering_ on the back seat--"

You flushed angrily. Other fellows whispered on back seats. Why, always,

did the whole school turn so knowingly to you?

* * * * *

Sitting, one study-hour, in the assembly-hall, Bertram's eyes wandered

to the top of the _Commentaries_, strayed over the book to the braids of

the Potter girl beyond, and on to the long, brown benches. The hum of

recitations there, whispering behind him, giggling half suppressed, and

the sharp rat-tat of the teacher's warning pencil came to him vaguely as

in a dream. Through the tall windows he saw the spotless blue of the

sky, the bright-green, swaying tips of the maples, and the flight of

wings. Out there it was spring. Two more months of Cæsar--eight more

dreary weeks of legions marching and barbarians bending beneath the

yoke--then summer and the long vacation, knights jousting in the

orchard, Indians scalping on the hill. Eight weeks--forty days of

school.

Behind a sheltering grammar Peter was reading Hughes. Over his shoulder

Bertram could make out Tom, just come to Rugby, watching the football,

and that cool Crab Jones, fresh from a scrimmage, with the famous straw

still hanging from his teeth. He read to the line of Peter's shoulder,

then his eyes wandered again to the school-room window. It was spring in

Grassy Ford--it was spring in Warwickshire....

"If the young _gentleman_ gazing out of the window--"

"_Tertia vigilia eruptionem fecerunt_"--third watch--eruption--they

made. _Eruptionem_--eruption--pimples--break out--sally. They made a

sally at the third watch. _Tertia vigilia_, ablative case. Ablative of

what? Ablative of time. Why ablative of time? Because a noun

denoting--oh, hang their _eruptionem_! They were dead and buried long

ago. Why does a fellow learn such stuff? Help his English--huh! English

helps his Latin--that's what. _How_ does a fellow know _eruptionem_?

Because he's seen pimples--that's how. No sense learning Latin. Dead

language--dead as a door-nail....

Bertram Weatherby drew a picture on the margin of his book--a head,

shoulders, two arms, a trunk--and trousered legs. Carefully, then, he

dotted in the eyes--the nose--the mouth--the ears beneath the tousled

hair. He rolled the shirt-sleeves to the elbows--drew the

trousers-belt--the shoes. Then delicately, smiling to himself the while,

his head tilted, his eyes squinted like a connoisseur, he drew a straw

pendent from the figure's lips.

"Peter, who's that?"

"Sh! not so loud. She'll hear you."

"Who's that, Peter?"

"Hm--Crab Jones."

"Now, if the idle young gentleman drawing _pictures_--"

"_Tertia vigilia eruptionem fecerunt_"--oh, they did, did they? What of

that?...

* * * * *

"Rugby," said the Professor, who had a way of enlivening his classes

with matters of the outer world--"Rugby, as I have heard my friend Dr.

Primrose say, who was a Rugby boy himself, is very different from our

public schools. Only the other day he was telling me of a school-mate, a

professor now, who had returned to England, and who had spent a day

there rambling about the ivied buildings, and searching, I suppose, for

the ancient form where he had carved his name. Dr. Primrose told me how,

as this old friend lingered on the greensward where the boys played

cricket, as he himself had done on that very spot--fine, manly fellows

in their white flannels--he heard not a single oath or vulgar word in

all that hour he loitered there. One young player called to another who

ran too languidly after the ball. '_Aren't_ you playing, Brown?' he

cried, with a touch of irony in his voice."

The Professor paused.

"I have heard stronger language on our playground here."

He paused again, adding, impressively:

"We might do well to _imitate_ our English cousins."

"Just what _I_ say," whispered young Bertram Weatherby.

"The Prof.'s all right," Peter whispered back.

And so, down-town, after school that day, behold!--sitting on stools at

Billy's Palace Lunch Counter, in the Odd Fellow's Block--two fine, manly

chaps, not in white cricket flannels, to be sure, but--

"It's _some_ like Sallie Harrowell's," one mumbled, joyously, crunching

his buttered toast, and the other nodded, taking his swig of tea.

* * * * *

So it came to pass that they looked reverently upon the Professor with

Rugbeian eyes, and more admiringly as they noted new likenesses between

him and the great head-master. There was a certain resemblance of

glowing countenance, they told themselves, a certain ardor of voice, as

they imagined, and over all a sympathy for boys.

"Well," he would say, stopping them as they walked together arm in arm,

"if you seek Peter, look for Bertram--eh?" giving their shoulders a

bantering shake which pleased them greatly as they sauntered on.

Listening to his prayers in chapel, hearing at least the murmur of them

as they bowed their heads, their minds swayed by the earnestness of the

great man's voice rather than by the words he uttered, they felt that

glow which comes sometimes to boys who read and dream. Then Bertram

loved the touch of Peter's shoulder, and, with the memory of another

doctor and another school-boy, he loved his Rugby, little and meagre and

vineless though it was upon its threadbare hill. When he had left it he

would return some day, he thought; he would stand like Tom in the last

chapter; he would sit again at his old brown desk, alone,

musing--missing his mate, and finding silence where happy whisperings

and secret play had been--but still in the pine before him he would

trace the letters he had cut, and, seeing them, he would be again the

boy who cut them there.

One morning, such was the fervor of the Professor's voice, there was

some such dream, and when it ended, prayer and dream together--

"After these exercises--"

It was the Professor's voice.

"--I wish to see in my office Bertram Weatherby and Peter Wynne."

They heard aghast. The whole school turned to them. The Past rose

dreadfully before their startled vision, yet for once, it seems, they

could find no blemish there.

Down-stairs, quaking, they slipped together through the office door. The

Professor had not arrived. They took their stations farthest from his

chair, and leaned, wondering, for support against the wall. There was a

murmur of assembling classes overhead, a hurry of belated feet, and

then--that well-known, awful tread. Peter gulped; Bertram shifted his

feet, his heart thumping against his ribs, but they squared their

shoulders as the door flew open and the Professor, his face grave, his

eyes flashing, swooped down upon them in the little room.

"Bertram!"

"Yes, sir."

"Peter!"

"Yes, sir."

"I have sent for you to answer a most serious charge--most serious,

indeed. I am surprised. I am astonished. Two of my best pupils, two

whom I have praised, not once but many times, here in this very

room--two, I may say, of my favorite boys found violating, wilfully

violating, the rules of this school. I could not believe the charge till

I saw the evidence with my own eyes. I could not believe that boys like

you--boys of good families, boys with minds far above the average of

their age, would despoil, openly despoil--yes, I may say, ruthlessly

despoil--the property of this school, descending--"

"Why, sir, what prop--"

"Descending," cried the Professor, "to vandalism--to a vandalism which I

have again and again proscribed. Over and over I have said, and within

your hearing, that I _would not countenance the defacing of desks_!"

Bertram Weatherby glanced furtively at Peter Wynne. Peter had sighed.

"Over and over," said the Professor, "I have told you that they were not

your property or mine, but the property of the people whose

representative I am. Yet here I find you marring their tops with

jack-knives, carving great, sprawling letters--"

"But, sir, at Rug--"

"Great, ugly letters, I say, sprawling and slashed so deeply that the

polished surface can never be restored."

"At Rug--"

"What will visitors say? What will your parents say if they come, as

parents should, to see the property for which they pay a tribute to the

state?"

"But, sir, at Rug--"

"Bertram, I am grieved. I am grieved, Peter, that boys reared to care

for the neatness of their persons should prove so slovenly in the matter

of the property a great republic intrusts to their use and care."

"But, sir, at Rug--"

"I am astonished."

"At Rug--"

"I am astounded."

"At Rug--"

"Astounded, I repeat."

"At Rugby, sir--"

"_Rugby!_" thundered the Professor. "_Rugby!_ And what of Rugby?"

"Why, at Rugby, sir--"

"And what, pray, has Rugby, or a thousand Rugbys, to do with your wilful

disobedience?"

"They cut, sir--"

"_Cut_, sir!" repeated the Professor. "_Cut_, sir!"

"Yes, sir--their desks, sir."

"And if they do--what then?"

"Well, sir, you said, you know--".

"Said? What did I say? I asked you to imitate the manliness of Rugby

cricketers. I did not ask you to carve your desks like the totem-poles

of savage tribes!"

His face was pale, his eyes dark, his words ground fine.

"Young gentlemen, I will have you know that rules must be obeyed. I will

have you know that I am here not only as a teacher, but as a guardian of

the public property intrusted to my care. Under the rules which I am

placed here to enforce, I can suspend you both--dismiss you from the

privileges of the school. This once I will act with lenience. This once,

young gentlemen, you may think yourselves lucky to escape with demerit

marks, but if I hear again of conduct so unbecoming, so disgraceful, of

vandalism so ruthless and absurd, I shall punish you as you deserve. Now

go."

Softly they shut the office door behind them. Arm in arm they went

together, tiptoe, down the empty hall.

"Well?"

The gloom of a great disappointment was in their voices.

"He's not an Arnold, after all," they said.

III

A POET OF GRASSY FORD

The lesser Primrose was a poet. It was believed in Grassy Ford, though

the grounds seem vague enough now that I come to think of them, that he

published widely in the literary journals of the day. Letitia was seen

to post large envelopes, and anon to draw large envelopes from the

post-office and hasten home with them. The former were supposed to

contain poems; the latter, checks. Be that as it may, I never saw the

Primrose name in print save in our _Grassy Ford Weekly Gazette_. There,

when gossip lagged, you would find it frequently in a quiet upper

corner, set "solid," under the caption "Gems"--a terse distinction from

the other bright matters with which our journal shone, and further

emphasized by the Gothic capitals set in a scroll of stars. Thus

modestly, I believe, were published for the first time--and I fear the

last--David Buckleton Primrose's "Agamemnon," "Ode to Jupiter,"

"Ulysses's Farewell," "Lines on Rereading Dante," "November: an Elegy

Written in the Autumn of Life," as well as those stirring bugle-calls,

"To Arms!" "John Brown," and "The Guns of Sumter," and those souvenirs

of more playful tender moods, "To a Lady," "When I was a Rugby Lad,"

"Thanksgiving Pies," and "Lines Written in a Young Lady's Album on her

Fifteenth Birthday." Now that young lady was Letitia, I chance to know,

for I have seen the verses in her school-girl album, a little leathern

Christmas thing stamped with forget-me-nots now faded, and there they

stand just opposite some school-mate's doggerel of "roses red and

violets blue" signed Johnny Gray. The lines begin, I remember:

"Virtue is in thy modest glance, sweet child,"

and they are written in a flourished, old-fashioned hand. These and

every other line her father dreamed there in his chair Letitia treasures

in a yellow scrap-book made of an odd volume of Rhode Island statutes

for 18--. There, one by one, as he wrote them, or cut them with

trembling fingers from the fresh, ink-scented _Gazette_--"Gems," scroll

and all, and with date attached--she set them neatly in with home-made

paste, pressing flat each precious flower of his muse with her loving

fingers.

Editor Butters used to tell me of the soft-eyed girl, "with virtue in

her modest glance," slipping suddenly into his print-shop, preferably

after dusk had fallen, and of the well-known envelope rising from some

sacred folds, he never quite knew where, to be laid tremblingly upon his

desk.

"Something from father, sir."

It was a faint voice, often a little husky, and then a smile, a bow, and

she had fled.

Editor Nathaniel Butters had a weakness of the heart for all tender

things--a weakness "under oath," however, as he once replied when I

charged him with it, and as I knew, for I myself heard him one summer

afternoon, as he sat, shirt-sleeved and pipe in mouth, perched on a

stool, and setting type hard by a window where I stood beneath fishing

with a dogwood wand.

"The-oc-ri-tus! Humpf! Now, who in thunder cares a tinker's damn

for Theocritus, in Grassy Ford? Some old Greek god, I suppose, who died

and went to the devil; and here's a parson--a Christian parson who ought

to know better--writing an ode to him, for Hank Myers to read, and Jim

Gowdy, and Old Man Flynn. And I don't get a cent for it, not a blank

cent, Sam--well, he doesn't either, for that matter--but it's all

tommy-rot, and here I've got to sweat, putting in capitals where they

don't belong and hopping down to the darned old dictionary every five

minutes to see if he's right--Sam [turning to his printer] there's some

folks think it's just heaven to be a country editor, but I'll be--"

He was a rough, white-bearded, little, round, fat man, who showed me

type-lice, I remember (the first and only time I ever saw the vermin),

and roared when I wiped my eyes, though I've forgiven him. He was good

to Letitia in an hour of need.

Dr. Primrose, it seems, had written his masterpiece, a solemn, Dr.

Johnsonian thing which he named "Jerusalem," and reaching, so old man

Butters told me once, chuckling, "from Friday evening to Saturday

night." The muse had granted him a longer candle than it was her wont

to lend, and Letitia trembled for that sacred fire.

"Print it, child? Of course he'll print it. It's the finest thing I ever

did!"

"True, father, but its length--"

"Not longer than Milton's 'Lycidas,' my dear."

"I know, but--he's so--he looks so fierce, father." She laughed

nervously.

"Who? Butters?"

"Yes."

"Tut! Butters has brains enough--"

"It isn't his brains," replied Letitia. "It's his whiskers, father."

"Whiskers?"

"Yes; they bristle so."

"Don't be foolish, child. Butters has brains enough to know it is worth

the printing. Worth the printing!" he cried, with irony. "Yes, even

though it isn't dialect."

Dialect was then in vogue; no Grassy Ford, however small, in those days,

but had its Rhyming Robin who fondly imagined that he might be another

Burns.

"Dialect!" the doctor repeated, scornfully, his eyes roving to the

shabby ancients on his shelves. "Bring me Horace--that's a good girl.

No--yes." His hand lingered over hers that offered him the book.

"Child," he said, looking her keenly in the eyes, "do you find it so

hard to brave that lion?"

"Oh no, father. I didn't mean I was afraid, only he's so--woolly. You

can hardly make out his eyes, and fire sputters through his old

spectacles. I think he never combs his hair."

"Does he ever grumble at you?"

"Oh no"--and here she laughed--"that is, I never give him time; I run

away."

The old poet made no reply to her, but went on holding that soft little

hand with the Horace in it, and gazing thoughtfully at his daughter's

face.

"We can send it by mail," he said at last.

That roused Letitia.

"Oh, not at all!" she cried. "Why, I'm proud to take it, father. Mr.

Butters isn't so dreadful--if he _is_ fuzzy. I'm sure he'll print it.

There was that letter from Mr. Banks last week, a column long, on

carrots."

He smiled dryly at her over his opened book.

"If only my 'Jerusalem' were artichokes instead of Saracens!" he said.

The fuzzy one was in his lair, proof-reading at his unkempt desk. The

floor was littered at his feet. He was smoking a black tobacco in a

blacker pipe. He wore no coat, no cuffs, and his sleeves were--um; it

does not matter. He glared ("carnivorously," Letitia tells me) at the

opening door.

"Evening," he said, and waited; but the envelope did not arise. So he

rose himself, offering a seat in the midst of his clutter, a plain,

pine, rope-mended chair, from which he pawed soiled sheets of copy and

tattered exchanges that she might sit.

"Looks some like snow," he said.

"Yes," she assented. "I called, Mr. Butters--"

She paused uncertainly. It was her own voice that had disconcerted her,

it was so tremulous.

"Another poem, I suppose," he said, fondly imagining that he had

softened his voice to a tone of gallantry, but succeeding no better than

might be expected of speech so hedged, so beset and baffled, so

veritably bearded in its earward flight.

"You--you mentioned snow, I think," stammered Letitia. He had

frightened her away, or she may have drawn back, half-divining, even in

embarrassment, that the other, the more round-about, the snowy path,

was the better way to approach her theme.

"Snow and east winds are the predictions, I believe, Miss Primrose."

"I dread the winter--don't you?" she ventured.

"No," he replied. "I like it."

"That's because you are--"

"Because I'm so fat, you mean."

"Oh no, Mr. Butters, I didn't even think of that; I meant so--"

And then--heavens!--it flashed across her that she had meant "woolly"!

To save her soul she could think of no synonyme. Her cheeks turned red.

"I meant--why, of course, I meant--you're so well prepared."

"Well prepared," he grumbled.

"Why, yes, you--men can wear beards, you know."

"Egad! you're right," he roared. "You're right, Miss Primrose. I _am_

well mufflered, that's a fact."

"But, really, it must be a great assistance, Mr. Butters."

"Oh yes; it is--and it saves neckties."

And this, mark you, was the way to Poetry! Poor Letitia, with the

manuscript hidden beneath her cloak, was all astray. The image of the

poet with Horace in his lap rose before her and rebuked her. She was

tempted to disclose her mission, dutifully, there and then.

"How is Mrs. Butters?" she inquired instead.

"About as well as common, which is to say, poorly--very poorly, thank

you."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

Editor Butters seemed downcast.

"She's tried everything," he said. "Even had a pocket made in her gown

to hold a potato and a horse-chestnut--but this rheumatism does beat

all, I tell you. How's the old gentleman?"

"The doctor says he will never walk."

"Yes, so I heard," muttered the editor. "It's a damned shame."

He was fumbling with his proofs and did not see her face--yet, after

all, she could feel the sympathy even in his rudeness.

"Still hatching poems, I suppose?"

Her heart, which had warmed even as her cheeks had colored at his other

words, grew cold at these. What manner of toil it was that brought forth

things so pure and beautiful in her sight, what labor of love and

travail of spirit it was to him, she alone would ever know who watched

beside him, seeing his life thus ebbing, dream by dream. She sat silent,

crumpling those precious pages in her hands.

"Well," Butters went on, gruffly, clearing his throat, "he's a good hand

at it." He was not looking at Letitia, but kept his eyes upon a ring of

keys with which he played nervously; and now when he spoke it was more

spasmodically, as if reluctant to broach some matter for which, however,

he felt the time had come. "Yes, he's a good hand at it. Used to be even

better than he is now--but that's natural. I wish, though--you'd just

suggest when it comes handy--just in a quiet sort of way, you know--some

day when you get the chance--that he's getting just a leetle bit--you

can say it better than I can--but I mean long-winded for the _Gazette_.

It's natural, of course, but you see--you see, Miss Primrose, if we

print one long-winded piece, you know--you can see for yourself--why,

every other poet in Grassy Ford starts firing epics at us, which is

natural, of course, but--hard on me. And if I refuse 'em, why, then,

they just naturally up and say, 'Well, you printed Primrose's; why not

mine?' and there they have you--there they have you right by the--yes,

sir, there they have you; and there's the devil to pay. Like as not they

get mad then and stop their papers, which they don't pay for--and that's

natural, too, only it causes feeling and doesn't do me any good, or your

father either."

"But, Mr. Butters, you printed Mr. Banks's letter on carrots, and that

was--"

The editor fairly leaped in his chair.

"There, you have it!" he cried. "Just what I said! There's that

confounded letter of Jim Banks's, column-long on carrots, a-staring me

in the face from now till kingdom come when any other idiot wants to

print something a column long. Just what I say, Miss Primrose; but you

must remember that the readers of the _Gazette_ do raise carrots, and

they _don't_ raise--well, now, for instance, and not to be mean or

personal at all, Miss Primrose--not at all--they _don't_ raise

Agamemnons or Theocrituses. I suppose I should say Theocriti--singular,

Theocritus; plural, Theocriti. No, sir, they don't raise

Theocriti--which is natural, of course, and reminds me--while we are

_on_ the subject--reminds me, Miss Primrose, that I've been thinking--or

wondering--in fact, I've been going to ask you for some time back, only

I never just got the chance--ask you if you wouldn't--just kind of speak

to your father, to kind of induce him, you know, to--to write

on--about--well, about _livelier_ things. You see, Miss Primrose, it's

natural, of course, for scholars to write about things that are dead and

gone. They wouldn't _be_ scholars if they wrote what other people knew

about. That's only natural. Still--still, Miss Primrose, if the old

gentleman _could_ just give us a poem or two on the--well, the issues of

the day, you know--oh, he's a good writer, Miss Primrose! Mind, I'm not

saying a word--not a word--against that. I'd be the last--Good God,

what's the matter, girl! What have I done? Oh, I say now, that's too

bad--that's too bad, girlie. Come, don't do that--don't--Why, if I'd

a-known--"

Letitia, "Jerusalem" crushed in her right hand, had buried her face

among the proof-sheets on his desk. Woolier than ever in his

bewilderment, the editor rose--sat--rose again--patted gingerly (he

had never had a daughter), patted Letitia's shaking shoulders and strove

to soothe her with the only words at his command: "Oh, now, I

say--I--why, say, if I'd a-known"--till Letitia raised her dripping

face.

"You m-mustn't mind, Mr. B-Butters," she said, smiling through her

tears.

"Why, say, Miss Primrose, if I'd a-dreamed--"

"It's all my f-fault, Mr. B-Butters."

"Damn it, no! It's mine. It's mine, I tell you. I might a-known you'd

think I was criticising your father."

"Oh, it's not that exactly, Mr. Butters, but you see--"

She put her hair out of her eyes and smoothed the manuscript.

"Egad! I see; you had one of the old gentleman's--"

Letitia nodded.

"Egad!" he cried again. "Let's see, Miss Primrose."

"Oh, there isn't the slightest use," she said. "It's too long, Mr.

Butters."

"No, no. Let's have a look at it."

"No," she answered. "No, it's _altogether_ too long, Mr. Butters."

"But let's have a look at it."

She hesitated. His hand was waiting; but she shook her head.

"No. It's the longest poem he ever wrote, Mr. Butters. It's his

masterpiece."

"By George! let's see it, then. Let's see it."

"Why, it's as long, Mr. Butters--it's as long as 'Lycidas.'"

"Long as--hm!" he replied. "Still--still, Miss Primrose," he added,

cheerfully, "that isn't so long when you come to think of it."

"But that's not all," Letitia said. "It's about--it's called--oh, you'll

_never_ print it, Mr. Butters!"

She rose with the poem in her hand.

"Print it!" cried Butters. "Why, of course I'll print it. I'll print it

if every cussed poet in Grassy--"

"Oh, _will_ you, Mr. Butters?"

"Will I? Of course I will."

He took it from her unresisting fingers.

"Je-ru-sa-lem!" he cried, fluttering the twenty pages.

"Yes," she said, "that's--that's the name of it, Mr. Butters," and

straightway set herself to rights again.

IV

THE SEVENTH SLICE

It was the editor himself who told me the story years

afterwards--Butters of "The Pide Bull," as he ever afterwards called his

shop, for in her gratitude Letitia had pointed out to him how natural it

was that he of all men should be the patron of poets, since beyond a

doubt, she averred, he was descended from that very Nathaniel Butter for

whom was printed the first quarto edition of _King Lear_. Indeed, with

the proofs of "Jerusalem" she brought him the doctor's Shakespeare, and

showed him in the preface to the tragedy the record of an antique

title-page bearing these very words:

"Printed for _Nathaniel Butter_, and are to be sold at his shop in

_Paul's_ Churchyard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St.

Austin's Gate, 1608."

"Egad!" said Butters, "I never heard that before. Well, well, well,

well."

"I think there is no doubt, Mr. Butters," said Letitia, "that he was

your ancestor."

"You don't say so," mumbled the delighted editor. "Shouldn't wonder.

Shouldn't wonder now at all. I believe there was an 's' tacked on our

name, some time or other, now that I come to think of it, and printer's

ink always did run in the Butters blood, by George!"

He even meditated hanging up a sign with a pied bull upon it--or so he

said--but rejected the plan as too Old English for Grassy Ford. He never

ceased, however, to refer to "my old cousin--Shakespeare's publisher,

you know," and in the occasional dramatic criticisms that embellished

the columns of the _Gazette_, all plays presented at our Grand

Opera-House in the Odd Fellow's Block were compared, somehow,

willy-nilly, to _King Lear_.

Butters of "The Pide Bull," I say, first told me how that young Crusader

with the tear-wet face had delivered "Jerusalem," saving it from the

stern fate which had awaited it and setting it proudly among the

immortal "Gems." Then I sought Letitia, whose briefer, more reluctant

version filled in wide chinks in the Butters narrative, while my

knowledge of them both, of their modesty and their tender-heartedness,

filled in the others, making the tale complete.

I was too young when the poet wrote his masterpiece to know or care

about it, or how it found its way to the wondering world of Grassy

Ford--nay, to the whole round world as well, "two hemispheres," as old

man Butters used to remind me with offended pride in his voice, which

had grown gruffer with his years. Did he not send _Gazettes_ weekly, he

would ask, to Mrs. Ann Bowers's eldest son, a Methodist missionary in

the Congo wilds, and to "that woman in Asia"? He referred to a Grassy

Ford belle of other days who had married a tea-merchant and lived in

Chong-Chong.

Who knows what befell the edition of that memorable _Gazette_ which

contained "Jerusalem," set solid, a mighty column of Alexandrine lines?

One summer's afternoon, tramping in an Adirondack wilderness, I came by

chance upon the blackened ashes of a fire, and sitting meditatively upon

a near-by log, poking the leaf-strewn earth with my stick, I unearthed a

yellow, half-burned corner of an old newspaper, and, idly lifting it to

read, found it a fragment of some Australian _Times_. Still more

recently, when my aunt Matilda, waxing wroth at the settling floors of

her witch-colonial house in Bedfordtown, had them torn up to lay down

new ones, the carpenters unearthed an old rat's nest built partially of

a New York _Tribune_ with despatches from the field of Gettysburg.

"Sneer not at the power of the press," old man Butters used to say,

stuffing the bowl of his black pipe from my tobacco-jar and casting the

match into my wife's card-tray. "Who knows, my boy? Davy Primrose's

'Jerusalem' may turn up yet."

It is something to ponder now how all those years that I played away,

Letitia, of whom I thought then only as the young lady who lived next

door and occasional confidante of my idle hours, was slaving with pretty

hands and puzzling her fair young mind to bring both ends together in

decent comfort for that poor dependent one. Yet she does not sigh, this

gray Letitia among the petunias, when she talks of those by-gone days,

but is always smiling back with me some happy memory.

"You were the funniest boy, Bertram," she tells me, "always making

believe that it was old England in Grassy Ford, and that you were Robin

Hood or Lord Somebody or Earl Somebody Else. How father used to laugh at

you! He said it was a pity you would never be knighted, and once he drew

for you your escutcheon--you don't remember? Well, it had three books

upon it--_Tom Brown's School-days_, _Tales of a Grandfather_, and the

_Morte d'Arthur_."

Then I remind her that Robin Saxeholm was half to blame for my early

failure as an American. He was a Devonshire lad; he had been a Harrow

boy, and was a Cambridge man when he came, one summer of my boyhood, to

Grassy Ford to visit the Primroses. His father had been the doctor's

dearest friend when they were boys together in Devonshire, and when

young Robin's five-feet-eleven filled up the poet's doorway, Letitia

tells me, the tears ran down the doctor's cheeks and he held out both

his arms to him:

"Robin Saxeholm!--you young Devon oak, you--tell me, does the Dart still

run?"

"_He_ does, sir!" cried the young Englishman, speaking, Letitia says,

quite in the Devon manner, for those who dwell upon the banks of that

famous river find, it seems, something too human in its temper and

changeful moods to speak of it in the neuter way.

They sat an hour together, the poet and his old friend's son, before

Letitia could show the guest to the room she had prepared for him.

_That_ was a summer!

Robin taught me a kind of back-yard, two-old-cat cricket with a bat

fashioned by his own big hands. Sometimes Letitia joined us, and the

doctor watched us from his chair rolled out upon the garden walk,

applauding each mighty play decorously, in the English fashion, with

clapping hands. Robin Goodfellow, the doctor called our captain, "though

a precious large one, I'll be bound," he said. Letitia called him Mr.

Saxeholm, first--then Mr. Robin, and sometimes, laughingly, Mr.

Bobbin--then Robin. I called him Mr. Bob.

I made up my mind to one thing then and there: I should be happier when

I grew old enough to wear white cricket flannels and a white hat like

Mr. Bob's, and I hoped, and prayed too on my knees, that _my_ skin would

be as clear and pinkish--yes, and my hair as red. Alas! I had begun all

wrong: I was a little beast of a brunette.

I taught Mr. Bob baseball, showed him each hill and dale, each

whimpering brook of Grassy Ford, and fished with him among the lilies in

shady pools while he smoked his pipe and told me of Cambridge and

Harrow-on-the-Hill and the vales of Devon. He had lived once, so he told

me, next door to a castle, though it did not resemble Warwick or

Kenilworth in the least.

"It was just a _cah-sle_," said Mr. Bob, in his funny way.

"With a moat, Mr. Bob?"

"Oh yes, a moat, I dare say--but dry, you know."

"And a drawbridge, Mr. Bob?"

"Well, no--not precisely; at any rate, you couldn't draw it up."

"But a portcullis, I'll bet, Mr. Bob?"

"Well--I _cahn't_ say as to that, I'm sure, Bertram."

He had lived next door to a castle, mind you, and did not know if it had

a portcullis! He had never even looked to see! He had never even asked!

Still, Mr. Bob was a languid fellow, Bertram Weatherby was bound to

admit, even in speech, and drawled out the oddest words sometimes,

talking of "trams" and "guards" and "luggage-vans," which did seem queer

in a college man, though Bertram remembered he was not a Senior and

doubtless would improve his English in due time. Indeed, he helped him,

according to his light, and the credit is the boy's that the young

Britisher, after a single summer in Grassy Ford, could write from

Cambridge to Letitia: "I guess I will never forget the folks in Grassy

Ford! Remember me to the little kid, my quondam guide, philosopher, and

friend."

Robin was always pleasant with Letitia, helping her with her housework,

I remember, wiping her dishes for her, tending her fires, and weeding

her kitchen-garden. There never had been so many holidays, she declared,

gratefully, and she used to marvel that he had come so far, all that

watery way from Devon, yet could be content with such poor fare and such

humble work and quiet pleasures in an alien land so full of wonders. Yet

it must have been cheerful loitering, for he stayed on, week after week.

He had come intending, he confessed, to "stop" but one, but somehow had

small hankering thereafter to see, he said, "what is left of America,

liking your Grassy Fordshire, Bertram, so very well." Perhaps secretly

he was touched by the obvious penury and helplessness of his father's

friend, as well as by the daughter's loving and heavy service, so that

he stayed on but to aid them in the only unobtrusive way, overpaying

them, Letitia says, for what he whimsically called "tuition in the quiet

life," as he gently closed her fingers over the money which she blushed

to take. Then he would quote for her those lines from Pope:

"... Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease

Together mixt, sweet recreation,

And innocence, which most doth please

With meditation."

He read Greek and Latin with Dr. Primrose, and many an argument of

ancient loves and wars I listened to, knowing by the keen-edged feeling

of my teeth when the fray was over that my mouth had been wide open all

the while. Letitia, too, could hear from the kitchen where she made her

pies, for it was a conversational little house, just big enough for a

tête-à-tête, as Dr. Primrose used to say, and when debate waxed high,

she would stand sometimes in the kitchen doorway, in her gingham apron,

wiping the same cup twenty times.

"Young Devon oak," the doctor called him, sometimes half vexed to find

how ribbed and knotty the young tree was.

"We'll look it up, then," he would cry, "but I know I'm right."

"You'll find you are mistaken, I think, doctor."

"Well, now, we'll see. We'll see. You're fresh from the schools and I'm

a bit rusty, I'll confess, but I'm sure I'm--here, now--hm, let's

see--why, can that be possible?--I didn't think so, but--by George!

you're right. You're right, sir. You're right, my boy."

He said it so sadly sometimes and shut the book with an air so beaten,

lying back feebly in his chair, that Robin, Letitia says, would lead the

talk into other channels, merely to contend for ground he knew he could

never hold, to let the doctor win. It was fine to see him then, the

roused old gentleman, his eyes shining, sitting bolt upright in his

chair waving away the young man's arguments with his feeble hand.

"I think you are right, doctor, after all. I see it now. You make it

clear to me. Yes, sir, I'm groggy. I'm down, sir. Count me out."

And you should have seen the poet then in his triumph, if victory so

gracious may be called by such a name. There was no passing under the

yoke--no, no! He would gaze far out of the open window, literally

overlooking his vanquished foe, and delicately conveying thus a hint

that it was of no utter consequence which had conquered; and so

smoothing the young man's rout, he would fall to expatiating,

soothingly, remarking how natural it was to go astray on a point so

difficult, so many-sided, so subtle and profound--in short, speaking so

eloquently for his prone antagonist, expounding so many likely arguments

in defence of that lost cause, one listening would wonder sometimes who

had won.

Evenings, when Letitia's work was done, she would come and sit with us,

Robin and me, upon the steps. There in the summer moonlight we would

listen to his tales, lore of the Dartmoor and Exmoor wilds, until my

heart beat strangely at the shadows darkening my homeward way when the

clock struck ten. Grape-vines, I noted then, were the very place for an

ambush by the Doones, of whom they talked so much, Robin and Letitia!

Later, when the grapes were ripe, a Doone could regale himself,

leisurely waiting to step out, giant-wise, upon his prey! There were

innumerable suspicious rustlings as I passed, and in particular a

certain strange--a dreadful _brushing_ sound as of ghostly wings when I

squeezed, helpless, through the worn pickets!--and then I would strike

out manfully across the lawn.

One day in August--it was August, I know, for it was my birthday and

Robin had given me a rod and line--we took Letitia with us to the top of

Sun Dial, a bald-crowned hill from which you see all Grassy Fordshire

green and golden at your feet. Leaving the village, we crossed a brook

by a ford of stones and plunged at once into the wild wood, forest and

ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was leading--to show the way.

Robin followed with Letitia--to help her over the rocks and brambles and

steeper places of the long ascent, which was far more arduous than one

might think, looking up at it from the town below.

I strode on proudly, threading the narrow hunter's trail I knew by

heart, a remnant of an old wagon-lane long overgrown. I strode on

swiftly, I remember, breaking the cob-webs, parting the fragrant tangle

that beset the way--vines below, branches above me--keeping in touch the

while, vocally, when the thickets intervened, with the pair that

followed. I could hear them laughing together over the green barriers

which closed behind me, and I was pleased at their troubles among the

briers. I had led them purposely by the roughest way. Robin, stalking

across the ford, had made himself merry with my short legs, and I had

vowed secretly that before the day was out he should feel how long those

legs could be.

"I'll show you, Mr. Bob," I muttered, plunging through the brushwood,

and setting so fast a pace it was no great while before I realized how

faintly their voices came to me.

"Hello-o!" I cried.

"H'lo-o!" came back to me, but from so far behind me I deemed it wiser

to stop awhile, awaiting their approach.

The day was glorious, but quiet for a boy. The world was nodding in its

long, midsummer nap, and no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. I looked

in vain for one; but there were berries and the mottled fruit of an

antique apple-tree to while the time away--and so I waited.

I remember chuckling as I nibbled there, wondering what Mr. Bob would

say of those short legs which had outstripped him. I fancied him coming

up red and breathless to find me calmly eating and whistling between

bites--and I did whistle when I thought them near enough. I whistled

"Dixie" till I lost the pucker, thinking what fun it was, and tried

again, but could not keep the tune for chuckling. And so I waited--and

then I listened--but all the wood was still.

"Hello-o!" I cried.

There was no answer.

"Hello-o!" I called again, but still heard nothing in reply save my own

echo.

"_Hello-o!_" I shouted. "_Hello-o!_" till the wood rang, and then they

answered:

"H'lo-o!" but as faint and distant as before.

They had lost their way!

"_Wait!_" I shouted, plunging pell-mell through the bushes. "Wait where

you are! I'm coming!"

And so, hallooing all the way, while Robin answered, I made my way to

them--and found them resting on a wall.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," said Robin. "We aren't mountain-goats, you know, Bertram."

I grinned gleefully.

"I thought my legs were so short?" I said.

"And so they are," he replied, calmly, "but you go a bit too fast, my

lad--for Letty."

I had forgotten Letitia! Revenging myself on Robin, it was she alone who

had suffered, and my heart smote me as I saw how pale she was, and

weary, sitting beside him on the wall. Yet she did not chide me; she

said nothing, but sat there resting, with her eyes upon the wild-flower

which she plucked to pieces in her hand.

We climbed more slowly and together after that. I was chagrined and

angry with myself, and a little jealous that Robin Saxeholm, friend of

but a summer-time, should teach me thoughtfulness of dear Letitia. All

that steep ascent I felt a strange resentment in my soul, not that Robin

was so kind and mindful of her welfare, guiding her gently to where the

slope was mildest, but that it was not I who helped her steps. I feigned

indifference, but I knew each time he spoke to her and I saw how

trustingly she gave her hand.

And I was envious--yes, I confess it--envious of Robin for himself, he

was so stalwart; and besides, his coat and trousers set so rarely! They

were of some rough, brownish, Scotchy stuff, and interwoven with a fine

red stripe just faintly showing through--oh, wondrous fetching! Such

ever since has been my ideal pattern, vaguely in mind when I enter

tailor-shops, but I never find it. It was woven, I suppose, on some

by-gone loom; perhaps at Thrums.

Reaching the summit and drinking in the sweet, clear, skyey airs, with

Grassy Fordshire smiling from all its hills and vales for miles about

us, I forgot my pique.

"What about water?" Letitia asked.

I knew a spring.

"I'll go," said Robin. "Where is it, Bertram?"

"Oh no, you won't!" I cried, fiercely. "That's my work, Mr. Bob. You're

not the only one who can help Letitia."

He looked astonished for a moment, but laughed good-naturedly and handed

me his flask. Letitia smiled at me, and I whistled "Dixie" as I

disappeared. I hurried desperately till I lost my breath; I skinned both

knees; I wellnigh slipped from a rocky ledge, yet with all my haste I

was a full half-hour gone, and got back red and panting.

They had waited patiently. Famished as they were, neither had touched a

single mouthful. Letitia said, "Thank you, Bertram," and handed me a

slice of the bread and jam. She seemed wondrous busy in our service.

Robin was silent--and I guessed why.

"I didn't mean to be rough," I said.

"Rough?" he asked. "When were you rough, Bertie?"

"About the water."

"Oh," he said, putting his hand upon my shoulder. "I never thought of

it, old fellow," and my heart smote me for the second time that day,

seeing how much he loved me.

Letitia, weary with our hard climbing, ate so little that Robin chided

her, very gently, and I tried banter.

"Wake up! This is a picnic." But they did not rally, so I sprang up

restlessly, crying, "It's not like our other good times at all."

"What!" said Robin, striving to be playful. "Only six slices, Bertram?

This is our last holiday. Eat another, lad."

Then I understood that gloom on Sun Dial: he was going to leave us.

Boylike, I had taken it for granted, I suppose, that we would go on

climbing and fishing and playing cricket in Grassy Ford indefinitely. He

was to go, he said, on Monday.

"News from home, Mr. Bob?"

He was silent a moment.

"Well, no, Bertie."

"Then why not stay?" I urged. "Stay till September."

He shook his head.

"Eat one more slice for me," I can hear him drawling. "I'll cut it--and

a jolly fat one it shall be, Bertram--and Letty here, she'll spread it

for you." Here Mr. Bob began to cut--wellnigh a quarter of the loaf he

made it. "Lots of the jam, Letty," he said to her. "And you'll eat it,

Bertram--and we'll call it--we'll call it the Covenant of the Seventh

Slice--never to forget each other. Eh? How's that?"

Now, I did not want the covenant at all, but he was so earnest; and

besides, I was afraid Letitia might think that I refused the slice

because of the tears she had dropped upon it, spreading the jam.

V

THE HANDMAIDEN

Robin gone, I saw but little of Letitia, I was so busy, I suppose, with

youth, and she with age. The poet's lamp had burned up bravely all that

summer-time, its flame renewed by Robin's coming--or, rather, it was the

brief return of his own young English manhood which he lived again in

that fine, clean Devon lad. Robin gone, he felt more keenly how far he

was from youth and Devonshire, what a long journey he had come to age

and helplessness, and his feeble life burned dimmer than before.

Two or three years slipped by. The charm was gone which had drawn me

daily through the hole in our picket-fence. Even the doctor's Rugby

tales no longer held me, I knew them so by heart. When he began some old

beginning, my mind recited so much more glibly than his faltering

tongue, I had leaped to the end before he reached the middle of his

story. He was given now to wandering in his narratives, and while he

droned there in his chair, my own mind wandered where it listed, or I

played restlessly with my cap and tried hard not to yawn, longing to be

out-of-doors again. Many a time has my conscience winced, remembering

that eagerness to desert one who had been so kind to me, who had led my

fancies into pure-aired ways and primrose paths--a little too English

and hawthorn-scented, some may think, for a good American, but we meant

no treason. He, before Robin, had given my mind an Old-World bent never

to be altered. Only last evening, with Master Shallow and a certain

well-known portly one of Windsor fame, I drank right merrily and ate a

last year's pippin with a dish of caraways in an orchard of ancient

Gloucestershire. Before me as I write there hangs a drawing of pretty

Sally of the alley and the song. Between the poet and that other younger

Devonshire lad, they wellnigh made me an English boy.

We heard from Robin--rather, Letitia did. He never wrote to me, but

sent me his love in Letitia's letters and a book from London, _Lorna

Doone_, for the Christmas following his return. Letitia told me of him

now and then. She knew when he left Cambridge and we sent him a

present--or, rather, Letitia did--_Essays of Emerson_, which she bought

with money that could be ill-spared, and she wrote an inscription in it,

"From Grassy Fordshire, in memory of the Seventh Slice." She knew when

he went back home to Devon, and then, soon afterwards, I believe, when

he left England and went out to India. Now, she did not tell me that

wonderful piece of news till it was old to her, which was strange, I

thought. I remember my surprise. I had been wondering where Robin was

and saying to her that he must be in London--perhaps in

Parliament!--making his way upward in the world, for I never doubted

that he would be an earl some day.

"Oh no," Letitia said, when I mentioned London. "He is in India."

"India! Mr. Bob in India?"

"Yes. He went--why, he went last autumn! Didn't you know?"

No, I did not know. Why, I asked, and as reproachfully as I could make

the question--why had she never told me?

She must have forgotten, she replied, penitent--there were so many

things to remember.

True, I argued, but she ought at least to have charged her mind with

what was to me such important news. Mr. Bob and I were dear, dear

friends, I reminded her. He had gone to India, and I had not known!

She knew it, she said, humbly. She would never forgive herself. I did

not go near her for days, I remember, and long afterwards her offence

still rankled in my mind. Had she not spread that slice on Sun Dial,

never to forget? When next I saw her I made a rebuking point of it,

asking her if she had heard from Robin. She shook her head. Months

passed and no letter came.

"We don't see you often any more, Bertram," her father said to me one

day.

"No," I stammered. "I'm--"

"Busy studying, I suppose," he said.

"Yes, sir; and ball-games," I replied.

"How do you get on with your Latin?" he inquired, feebly.

"We're still in Virgil, sir."

"Ah," he said, but without a trace of the old vigor the classics had

been wont to rouse in him. "That's good--won'erful writer--up--"

He was pointing with his bony fore-finger.

"Yes?" I answered, wondering what he meant to say. He roused himself,

and pointed again over my shoulder.

"Up there--on the--s'elf."

He was so ghastly white I thought him dying and called Letitia.

"'S all right, Bertram," he reassured me, patting my hand. I suppose he

had seen the terror in my face. He smiled faintly. "'M all right,

Bertram."

Outside the apple-trees were blooming, I remember, and he lived,

somehow, to see them bloom again.

My conscience winces, as I say, to think how I twirled my cap by my old

friend's bedside, longing to be gone; yet I comfort myself with the hope

that he did not note my eagerness, or that if he did he remembered his

own boyhood and the witchery of bat and ball. Not only was the poet's

life-lamp waning, not only was Letitia burdened with increasing cares,

fast aging her, the mater said, but I was a child no longer; a youth,

now, mindful of all about me, and seeing that neighbor household with

new and comprehending eyes.

The very house grew dismal to me. The boughs outside were creeping

closer--not to shelter it, not to cool it and make a breathing nook for

a lad flushed with his games in the summer sun. It was damp there; the

air seemed mouldy under the lindens; there was no invitation in the

unkempt grass; toads hopped from beneath your feet, bird-songs came to

you, but always, or so it seemed to me, they came from distance, from

the yards beyond.

There within, across that foot-worn threshold which had been a goal for

me in former years, there was now a--not a poet any longer, or Rugby

boy, but only a sick old man. Upon a table at his side his goblets

stood, covered with saucers, and a spoon in each. His drugs were watery;

there was no warmth in them, no sparkle even when the sun came

straggling in, no wine of life to be quaffed thirstily--only a tepid,

hourly spoonful to be feebly sipped, a sop to death.

Even with windows open to the breeze the air seemed stifling to the lad

I was. The sunlight falling on the faded carpet seemed always ebbing to

a kind of shadow of a glow. The clock, that ugly box upon the shelf,

ticked dreadfully as if it never would strike a smiling hour again. The

china ornaments at its side stood ghastly mute, and hideous

flowers--_ffff!_ those waxen faces under glass! If not quite dead, why

were they kept so long a-dying there? Would no kind, sunny soul in mercy

free them from their pallid misery? I was a Prince of Youth! What had I

to do with tombs? I fled.

Even Letitia, kind as ever to me, seemed always busy and

preoccupied--sweeping, dusting, baking, cleansing those everlasting pots

and pans, or reading to her father, who listened dreamily, dozing often,

but always waking if she stopped. Content to have her at his side

because discontent to have her absent, even for the little while her

duties or the doctor's orders led her, though quite unwillingly, away.

Impatience for her return would make him querulous, which caused her

tears, not for its failing consciousness of her devotion, but for its

warning to her of his gentle spirit's slow decline despite her care.

"Where have you been so long, Letitia?"

"So long, father? Only an hour gone."

"Only an hour? I thought you would never come."

"See, father, I've brought you a softer pillow," she would say, smiling

his plaints into oblivion. It was the smile with which she had caught

the grape-thief by the fence, the one with which she had charmed a

Devonshire lad, now gone three years and more--the tenderest smile I

ever saw, save one, and the saddest, though not mournful, it was so

genuine, so gentle, and so unselfish, and her eyes shone lovingly the

while. Its sadness, as I think now of it, lay not so much in the smile

itself as in the wonder of it that she smiled at all.

The mater--was she not always mother to the motherless?--was Letitia's

angel in those weary days, carried fresh loaves of good brown bread to

her, a pot of beans, or a pie, perhaps, passing with them through the

hole in the picket-fence. I can see her now standing on Letitia's

kitchen doorstep with the swathed dish in her hands.

"The good fairy," Letitia called her; and when she was for crying--for

cry she must sometimes, though not for the world before her father's

eyes--she shed her tears in the kitchen in the mater's arms. So it was

that while I was yet a school-boy an elder sister was born unto our

house and became forever one of the Weatherbys by a tie--not of blood, I

have said before, yet it was of blood, now that I come to think of

it--it was of gentle, gentle human blood.

There was an old nurse now to share Letitia's vigils, but only the

daughter's tender hands knew how to please. She scarcely left him.

Doctor or friends met the same answer, smiling but unalterable: she

would rather stay. Not a night passed that she did not waken of her own

anxiety to slip softly to his bedside. He smiled her welcome, and she

sat beside him with his poor, thin hand in hers, sometimes till the dawn

of day.

Day by day like that, all through the silent watches of the darkened

world, that gentle handmaiden laid her sacrifice upon the altar of her

duty, without a murmur, without one bitter word. It was her youth she

laid there; it was her girlhood and her bloom of womanhood, her first,

her very last young years--sparkle of eyes, rose and fulness of maiden

cheeks, the golden moments of that flower-time when Love goes choosing,

playtime's silvery laughter and blithe, untrammelled song.

"'Titia," he said to her, "there's no poem--'alf so beaut'ful--'s your

love, m' dear."

The words were a crown to her. He set it on her bowed head with his

trembling fingers.

"Soft--brown 'air," he murmured. He could not see how the gray was

coming there.

Spring came, scenting his room with apple blooms; summer, filling it

with orient airs--but he was gone.

VI

COUSIN DOVE

Up in the attic of the Primrose house one day, I was helping Letitia

with those family treasures which were too antiquated for future usage,

but far too precious with memories to cast out utterly--discarded laces,

broken fans, pencilled school-books, dolls and toys that had been

Letitia's, the very cradle in which she had been rocked by the mother

she could not remember, even the little home-made pieced and quilted

coverlet they had tucked about her while she slept. She folded it, and I

laid it carefully in a wooden box.

"How shall we fill it?" I asked her, gazing at the odds and ends about

my feet.

"With these," she said, bringing me packages of old newspapers, each

bundle tied neatly with a red ribbon, too new and bright ever to have

been worn. I glanced carelessly at the foolish packages, as I thought

them--then suddenly with a new interest.

"Why," I said, "they're papers from Bombay!"

"Yes," she answered.

"Where Robin is?" I asked.

There was no reply from the garret gloom.

"Did Mr. Bob send them?"

She was busy in a chest.

"What did you ask, Bertram?" she inquired, absently.

"Did Mr. Bob send these Bombay papers?"

"Oh," she answered, "those?"

She paused a moment.

"No," she told me.

"Oh," said I, much disappointed, "I thought he might. They're last

year's papers, too, some of them."

"Do they fill the box?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "Shall I nail the cover on?"

"Oh, don't _nail_ it," she protested, shuddering. "We won't put any

cover on, I think; at least--not yet."

Long before Dr. Primrose died he had planned with Letitia what she

should do without him. His home then would be hers, and she was to sell

it and become a school-mistress, the one vocation for which his

classical companionship had seemed to fit her and to which her own

book-loving mind inclined. Left alone then she tried vainly to dispose

of her little property, living meanwhile with us next door to it, and

gradually, chiefly with my own assistance and the mater's, packing and

storing the few possessions from which she could not bring herself to

part. To Editor Butters she presented an old edition of _King Lear_; to

me, not one, but many of her father's best-loved books, which she

fancied might be of charm and use to me.

Of relatives across the sea Letitia knew little beyond a few strange

names she had heard her father speak, and in her native and his adopted

land she had no kinsfolk she had ever seen save a distant cousin as far

removed from her in miles as blood, and remembered chiefly as a

marvellously brocaded waistcoat with pearl buttons, to which she had

raised her timorous eyes on his only visit to her father years ago.

Apparently, this little girl had gone no farther up. She could never

remember a face above that saffron vest, and, what was still more

remarkable, considering her shyness, was never certain even of the

knees and boots that must have been somewhere below.

Now the yellow waistcoat, whose name was George--Cousin George

McLean--had a daughter Dove, or Cousin Dove, as Letitia called her,

concerning whom we always used to smile and wonder, so that in course of

time myths had grown up about the girl whom none of us had ever seen and

of whom we had no notions save the idle fancies suggested by her odd,

sweet, unforgettable little name.

The mater had always said that she must be a quaint and demure little

thing--in short, dovelike.

That, my father argued, was quite unlikely, since he had never known a

child to mature in keeping with a foolish, flowery, or pious Christian

name. He had never known a human Lily to grow up tall and pale and

slender, or a Violet to be shy and modest and petite, or a Faith or Hope

or Patience to be singularly spiritual and mild. For example, there was

Charity B----, of Grassy Ford, who hinted that heaven was Presbyterian,

and that she knew folks, not a thousand miles off, either, who would

never be--Presbyterians, my father said; and so, he added, it was

dollars to dough-nuts that Cousin Dove was not at all dovelike, but a

freckled and red-haired, roistering, tomboy little thing.

Letitia had a notion, she scarce knew how or why, that Cousin Dove was

not birdlike, but like a flower, she said--a white-and-pink-cheeked

British type with fluffy yellow hair and a fondness for candy, trinkets,

and even boys.

As for myself, I had two notions as a boy--one for the forum, the other

for my cell. The first was simply that Cousin Dove was pale and tall and

frigid beyond endurance. I could see her, I declared, going to church

somewhere with two little black-and-gilt books held limply in her

hand--and she had green eyes, I said. On the other hand, privately, I

kept a far different portrait in mind--a gilded one, rather a golden

vision by way of analogy, I suppose, for was not Dove the veritable

daughter of a gorgeous, saffron-hued brocade? From yellow waistcoat to

cloth of gold is but a step for a bookish boy. She was tall and stately,

I told myself; and as I saw her then, her mediæval robe clung lovingly

about her, plain but edged with pearls (seed-pearls I think they called

them in the old romances), and she had a necklace of larger pearls,

loops of them hanging a golden cross upon her bosom. Her face was

radiant, her eyes blue, her hair golden, and she wore a coronal of

meadow flowers. I do not mean that I really fancied Cousin Dove was so

in flesh and blood, but such to me was the spirit of her gentle name,

the spell of which had conjured up for me in some rare moment of

youthful fancy this Lady of the Marigolds, this Christmas-card St. Dove.

In the midst of Letitia's sad uprooting of her old garden, as she called

the only home she had ever known, a letter came from the yellow

waistcoat conveying surprising news. Dove herself was leaving for Grassy

Ford to persuade her cousin to return with her and dwell henceforth with

the McLeans. A thrill ran through our little household at the thought of

that approaching maid of dreams. Now we should know, the mater said,

that the girl was dovelike. "Humpf!" was my father's comment. Letitia

trembled, she said, with a return of her childish awe of the yellow

waistcoat. I myself was stirred--I was still in teens, and dreaded girls

I had never met.

On the July morning that was to bring her, I rose early, I remember,

and took down my fishing-rod.

"Not a bad idea, either," remarked my father, as he stood watching me.

"Still," he added, "there's no hurry, Bertram. She'll want to change her

dress first, you know."

I made no answer.

"It's a bit selfish though," he continued, "to be carrying her off this

way the very first morning."

"Mother," I said, coolly, "will you put up some sandwiches? I may not be

back till dark."

"Why, Bertram! Going fishing on the day--"

"I don't really see what that's got to do with it," I interrupted. "Must

I give up all my fun because a mere girl's coming?"

"No, Bertram," said my father, in his kindest tones. "Go, by all means,

and here [he was rummaging in the bookcase drawer]--here, my son, take

these along, these old field-glasses. They may come handy. You can see

our yard, you know, from the top of Sun Dial--and the front porch.

Splendid fishing up on Sun Dial--"

But I was off.

"Bertram! Bertram!" called my mother, but I did not heed her. I stopped

at a grocery for cheese and crackers, and strode off to the farthest

brook--farthest, I mean, from Sun Dial. Troublesome Brook, it was

called, not so much for the spring freshets that spread it over the

lower meadows as for the law-suits it had flowed through in its fickle

course between two town-ships and good farm-lands. Under its willows I

cooled my wrath and disentangled my knotted tackle. The stream flowed

silently. There was no wind, no sound, indeed, but the drone of insects;

all about me was a world in reverie, mid-summer-green save for the

white and blue above and the yellow wings of vagrant butterflies and the

sun golden on the meadows. Many a time I have fished in that very spot.

It is a likely one for idleness and for larger fish than any I ever

caught there, and waiting for them as a boy I used to read in the little

pocket-fitting books I dote on to this day--they fit the hand so warmly,

unlike their bigger brethren, who at the most give you three-fingers'

courtesy. There on that same moist bank I have sounded deeper pools than

Troublesome's, and have come home laden with unlooked-for spoil that

glistens still in a certain time-worn upper creel of mine.

But I had no book that day, having forgotten one in my hurried parting,

and I had not yet mastered that other tranquil art of packing little

bowls with minced brown meditation--so I was restless. The world seemed

but half awake. I chafed at the stillness. Before, I had found it

pleasant; now it nettled me. I frowned impatiently at my cork dozing on

the waters. I roused it savagely, and gazed up at the sun.

"Queer," I said to myself. "Queer it should be so late this

morning"--but I did not mean the sun.

Trains from the West glide into Grassy Ford on a long curve following

the trend of Troublesome and the pastoral valley through which it runs.

It is a descending grade down which the cars plunge roaring as though

they had gathered speed rather than slackened it, and as though they

would run the gantlet of the ugly buildings and red freight-cars that,

from the windows of the train, are all one sees of our lovely town. Now

the Black Arrow was the pride of the X., Y. & Z., and all that summer

had arrived in the nick of its schedule time.

"Funny," said I to myself, looking at the sun. "Funny it should be late

this morning."

I pulled up my hook and cast it in again. My cork shook itself--yawned,

I was about to say, and settled down again as complacently as before.

Leisurely the ripples widened and were effaced among the shadows.

What right had any one to assume that I had not long planned to go

a-fishing that very morning?

I pulled up my line again.

Even a father should not presume on the kinship of his son.

I dropped my bait into a likelier hole.

Besides, I was not a child any longer, to be bullyragged by older

people. Had I not gone fishing a hundred times?--yet no one had ever

deemed it odd before.

My float drifted against a snag. I jerked it back.

It was the only unpleasant trait my father had.

Again I squinted at the sun. "Queer," said I, "it should be so late this

morning." I pulled up my--

Hark! _That_ was a whistle! There would be just time to reach the open

if I ran!

I ran.

Breathless, I made the meadow fence and clambered up--and saw her train

go by. Yes, I--I waved to it. Suppose she had seen me! I was only some

truant farm-boy on a rail.

Her train ran by me in a cloud of dust and clattered on among the

freight-cars. I heard the rumble die away, but the bell kept ringing.

The brakeman, doubtless, would help her off--Letitia would be waiting

with out-stretched arms--girls are such fools for kissing--and then

father would take her bag, and the surrey would whisk her off to the

mater, bareheaded at the gate. Rails are sharp sitting; let us look at

the cork again.

It was calm as ever and nestling against a snag. I pulled up my line

till the bait emerged, limp, unnibbled. Savagely I swished it back--it

caught in the willows. I pulled. It would not budge. In a sudden rage I

whipped out my pocket-knife, severed the cord as high above me as I

could reach, and wrapping the remnant about my rod, turned townward.

A dozen yards from the faithless stream, I remembered my cheese and

crackers, and went back for them, and started off again, purposeless.

Never before had vagabondage on a golden morning seemed irksome to me.

It was not that I wished to see Cousin Dove, but merely that I had no

desire to do anything else--a different matter. Only one way was really

barred to me, since in point of pride I could not go homeward till the

sun sank, yet all other ways seemed shorn somehow of their old delights,

I knew so well every stick and stone of them.

While I was dallying thus, irresolute, I thought of "The Pide Bull" and

my old friend Butters. It was inspiration. In twenty minutes (mindful of

my father's eyes meanwhile) I had reached the shop.

"Hello," he growled, as I appeared. "You here again?"

"Yep."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing."

"Humpf! Help yourself, then."

"Mr. Butters, what kind of type is this?"

"What type?"

"This type."

"What good '11 it do to tell you? You won't remember it, if I do."

"Yes, I will."

"You won't know ten minutes after I tell you."

"Go on, Mr. Butters. Tell me."

"Well, if you must know, it's b'geois."

"B-what?"

"B'geois, I tell you, and I won't tell you again, either."

"How do you spell it, Mr. Butters?"

"Say, what do you think I am? I haven't got time to sit here all day and

answer questions."

"But how do you spell it, Mr. Butters?"

"Dictionary's handy, isn't it?"

"You ought to know how to spell it," I remarked, fluttering the

dictionary.

"Who said I didn't know how to spell it?"

"You told me to look it up."

"Did, hey? And what d' I do it for? D' you think I've got time to be

talking to every young sprig like you?"

"Here it is, Mr. Butters. It's spelled b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s."

"Precisely," said the editor--"b-o-u-r-g-o-i-s, bur-joyce."

"No--g-_e_-o-i-s, Mr. Butters."

"Just what I said."

"You left out the 'e.'"

"Why, confound you, what do you mean by telling me I don't know my own

business?"

"I was only fooling, Mr. Butters. You did say the 'e,' of course."

"You're a liar!" he promptly answered. "I didn't say the 'e,' and you

know it!"

He broke off into a roar of triumphant laughter, but well I knew who had

won the day. He was mine--he and "The Pide Bull," and the story of his

wife's uncle's old yellow rooster, and the twenty legends of Tommy Rice,

the sexton, who "stuttered in his walk, by George!"--yes, and the famous

narrative of how Mr. Butters thrashed the barkeep--all, all his darling

memories were mine till sunset if I chose to listen.

He took me to luncheon at the Palace Hotel near by his shop, and

afterwards mellowed perceptibly over his pipe, as we sat together in the

clutter of paper about his desk waiting for the one-o'clock whistle to

blow him to work again.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Eighteen," said I, half ashamed I was no more.

"Beautiful age," he mused, nodding his head and stroking his warm, black

bowl. "Beautiful age, my boy." He spoke so mildly that I waited, silent

and a little awed to have come so near him unawares, and feeling the

presence of some story he had never told before.

But the whistle blew one o'clock and he rose and put on his apron, and

went back to his case again, talking some nonsense about the weather;

and though I lingered all afternoon, he was nothing but the old, gruff

printer, and never afterwards did I catch him nooning and thinking of

the age he said was beautiful.

It was six when I took up my fishing-tackle and went home to supper,

whistling. I found the mater in the kitchen.

"Ah," she said. "What luck, Bertram?"

"None," I replied. "The fish weren't biting."

"_Oh_, that's too bad. You must be tired."

"I am, and hungry. Is father home?"

"Not yet. Come, you must meet--"

But I ran up the kitchen staircase to the hall above. Safe in my room, I

could hear a murmuring from Letitia's. Hers was a front room, mine a

rear one, and a long hall intervened, so I made nothing of the voices.

I scrubbed and lathered till my nose was red and shining beautifully.

Then I drew on my Sunday suit, in which I always stood the straighter,

and my best black shoes, in which I always stamped the louder, and my

highest, whitest collar, and my best light silk cravat--a Christmas

present from Letitia, a wondrous thing of pale, sweet lavender, 'in

which not Solomon--though it _would_ hike up behind. It was not like

other ties, and while I was struggling there I heard the supper knell. I

pulled fiercely. The soft silk crumpled taut--and the bow stuck up seven

ways for Sunday. So I unravelled it again--looped it once more with

trembling fingers, for I heard the voices on the stairs, and jerked it

into place--but what a jumble!

"Bertram! Bertram!" It was father's voice. "Supper, Bertram."

"In a minute."

The face in the glass was red as a sunset in harvest-time. The eyes I

saw there popped wildly.

"Bertram!"

"Yes; I hear you! [Confound it.]"

"Supper, Bertram. We are all waiting."

I deigned no answer.

Then father rang. Oh, I knew it was father. I looped desperately and

hauled again like a sailor at his cordage, and so, muttering, wrung out

a bow-knot. Then in the mirror I took a last despairing look, leaped for

the doorway, slipped, stumbled, and almost fell upon the stairs, hearing

below me a lusty warning--"Here he comes!"--and so emerged, rosy, a

youth-illumined, with something lavender, they tell me, fluttering in my

teeth (and something blood-red, I could tell them, trembling in my

heart).

And there she was!

There she stood in the smiling midst of them, smiling herself and giving

me her hand--Cousin Dove--Cousin Dove McLean, at the first sight of whom

my shyness vanished.

"Your tie, my son, seems a trifle--"

So _this_ was Cousin Dove?--this was the daughter of the golden

waistcoat--this brown-eyed school-girl with brown--no, as I lived!--red

hair.

VII

OF HAMADRYADS AND THEIR SPELLS

It was a golden summer that last of my youth at home, with Cousin Dove

to keep us forever smiling. She was just eighteen and of that blessed

temperament which loves each day for its gray or its sunny self. She

coaxed Letitia out-of-doors where they walked much in the mater's garden

with their arms about each other's waist. Letitia's pace was always

deliberate, while Dove had the manner of a child restrained, as if some

blithe and skipping step would have been more pleasant, would have

matched better her restless buoyancy, her ever upturned beaming face as

she confided in the elder woman--what? What do girls talk so long about?

I used to marvel at them, wondering what Dove could find so merry among

our currant-vines. She was a child beside Letitia. She had no memories

to modulate that laughing voice of hers, no tears to quench the twin

flames dancing in her eyes, and never an anxious thought in those days

to cast its shadow there where her hair--red, I first called it; it was

pure chestnut--brown, I mean, with the red just showing through, and

wondrous soft and pretty on the margin of her fair white forehead, where

it clung like tendrils of young scampering vine reddening in the April

sun. Even Letitia, whose Present seemed always twilit, was tempted

by-and-by into claiming something of that heritage of youth of which she

had been so long deprived. From mere smiling upon her gay young cousin

she fell to making little joyous venturings herself into our frolics,

repartees, and harmless badinage--"midsummer madness," father called

it--a sort of scarlet rash, he said, which affected persons loitering on

starlit evenings on the porch or wandering under trees. He was the soul

of our table banter, and after supper sat with us on the steps smoking

his cigar and "devilling," as he said, "you younger caps and bells."

Whom he loved he teased, after the fashion of older men, and Dove was

the chief butt of that rude fondness. It was not his habit to caress,

but his eyes twinkled at his fair victim.

"And to think, Dove," he was wont to say-when she had charmed him, "that

Bertram here swore that you carried prayer-books and had green eyes!"

"And what did you prophesy, Uncle Weatherby?"

"I? The truth."

"And what was that?"

"Why, _I_ said you were an angel, though a little frolicsome perhaps,

and with beautiful auburn hair. Did I not, my son?"

"No, sir. You thought she would be a tomboy with red--"

"Precisely," he would interrupt. "You see, my dear, how in every

particular I am corroborated by my son."

Into these quiet family tournaments, Letitia, as I have said, was slowly

drawn, but it was a new world to her and she was timid in it. Doctor

Primrose had been endowed with wit, even with a quiet, subtle humor in

which his daughter shared, but beneath their lighter moments there had

flowed always an undercurrent of that sad gravity which tinged their

lives together. If they were playful in each other's company, it was

out of pity for each other's lot, his in his chair, hers by its side,

rather than because they could not help the jest. It was meant to cheer

each other--that kind of tender gayety which, however fanciful, however

smiling, ends where it begins--in tears unshed. Waters in silent

woodland fountains, all untouched by a single gleam from the sky above

the boughs, lose sometimes their darker hues and turn to amber beneath

the fallen leaves--but they are never golden like the meadow pools; they

never flash and sparkle in the sun.

Letitia was not yet thirty; life stretched years before her yet; so,

coaxed by Cousin Dove and me, she gave her hands to us, half-delighted,

half-afraid. Here now, at last, were holidays, games, tricks, revels,

the mummery and masque, the pipe and tabor--all the rosy carnival of

youth. Her eyes kindled, her heart beat faster as we led her on--but at

the first romp failed her. It was beautiful, she pleaded--only let her

smile upon it as from a balcony--she could not dance--she had never

learned our songs.

We did not urge her. She sat with the mater and smiled gladly upon our

mirth. In all the frolics of that happy summer her eyes were always on

Cousin Dove, as if, watching, she were thinking to herself--enviously,

often sadly, I have no doubt, but through it all lovingly and with a

kind of pride in that grace and flowerness--

"There is the girl I might have been."

Dove, even when she seemed the very spirit of our effervescence, kept

always a certain letter of that lovely quaintness which her name

implied. She _was_ a dove, the mater said, reminding us for the

hundredth time of her old prediction--a dove always, even among the

magpies; meaning, I suppose, father and myself.

It was not all play that summer. I was to enter college in the fall, and

I labored at exercises, helped not a little by a voice still saying:

"That's right, my boy. Remember what Dr. Primrose said when he gave you

Horace."

Now was I under the spell of that ancient life which had held him

thralled to his very end. Mine were but meagre vistas, it is true, but I

caught such glimpses of marble beauty through the pergola of Time, as

made me a little proud of my far-sightedness. Seated with Dove and

Letitia beneath a favorite oak, half-way up Sun Dial, I discoursed

learnedly, as I supposed, only to find that in classic lore the poet's

daughter was better versed than I. She brightened visibly at the sound

of ancient names; they had been the music of her father's world, and

from earliest childhood she had listened to it. Seated upon the grass,

I, the school-boy, expounded text-book notes. She, the daughter of "Old

David Homer," as Butters called him, told us bright tales of gods and

heroes, nymphs and flowers and the sailing clouds shell-pink in the

setting sun. They had been to her what _Mother Goose_ and _Robinson

Crusoe_ had been to me; they had been her fairy stories, told her at eve

ere she went to bed; and now as she told them, an eager winsomeness

crept upon her, her voice was sweeter, her face was glorified with

something of that roseate light in which her scenes were laid; she was a

child again, and Dove and I, listening, were children with her, asking

more.

She sat bolt-upright while she romanced for us. I lay prone before her

with my chin upon my hands, nibbling grass-stalks. Dove, like Letitia,

sat upon the turf, now gazing raptly with her round brown eyes at the

story-teller's face, now gazing off at the purple woodland distance or

at Grassy Ford's white spires among the elms below.

"Why, Letty, you're a poetess," Dove once said, so breathlessly that

Letitia laughed. "And I," Dove added, "why, I don't know a single

story."

"Why should you know one?" replied Letitia, pinching Dove's rueful face.

"Why tell an idyl, when you can live one, little Chloe, little wild

olive? You yourself shall be a heroine, my dear."

Idling there under distant trees for refuge from the August sun, which

burns and browns our Grassy Fordshire, crumbling our roads to a gray

powder and veiling with it the green of way-side hedge and vine--idling

there, Dove was a creature I had never seen before and but half-divined

in visions new to me. Fair as she seemed under our roof-tree, there in

the woodland she was far the lovelier. Young things flowered about us,

their fragrance scenting the summer air. Like them her presence wore a

no less subtle spell. It was an ancient glamour, though I did not know

it then, it seemed so new to me--one which young shepherds felt,

wondering at it, in the world's morning; and since earth's daughters,

then as now, with all their fairness, could scarce be credited with such

wondrous witchery, those young swains came home breathless from the

woodland with tales of dryads and their spells. Maiden mine, in the

market-place, you are only one among many women, though you be beautiful

as a dream, but under boughs the birds still sing those songs the first

birds sang--there it is always Eden, and thou art the only woman there.

On my nineteenth birthday three climbed Sun Dial as three had climbed it

once before. Leaving the village we crossed the brook by that self-same

ford of stones, and plunged at once into the forest and ancient orchard

that clothed the slope. I was not leading now, but helping them, Dove

and Letitia, over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the

ascent. Threading as before that narrow trail I knew by heart, I broke

the cob-webs and parted the fragrant tangle that beset our way, vines

below, branches above us. It was just such another August noon, and the

world was nodding; no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. We stopped for

breath, resting upon a wall shaded by an ancient oak.

"The very spot!" I cried. "Do you remember, Letitia, how you and Robin

rested here?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you remember how I called to you, and came running back?"

"Yes."

"I'd been waiting for you under an apple-tree. How I should like to see

old Robin now!"

"Who was Robin?" asked Cousin Dove, and so I told her of the Devonshire

lad. During my story Letitia wandered, as she liked to do, searching for

odd, half-hidden flowers among the grasses. Soon she was nowhere to be

seen, nor could we hear her near us.

"Letitia was fond of Robin, was she not?" asked Cousin Dove.

"Oh yes," I said. "So were we all."

"But I mean--don't you think she may have loved him?"

"Oh," I said, "I never thought of that; besides, Letitia never had time

for--"

Dove opened wide her eyes.

"Must you have time for--"

"I mean," I stammered, "she was never free like--you or me; we--"

"I see," she replied, coloring. "He must have been a splendid fellow."

"He was," I said.

"Dear Letitia!" murmured Cousin Dove, gazing thoughtfully at the wilted

flower she held. The wood which had been musical with voices was

strangely silent now. It was something more than a mere stillness. It

was like a spell, for I could not break it, though I tried. Dove, too,

was helpless. There was no wind--I should have known had one been

blowing--yet the boughs parted above her head, and a crown fell shining

on her hair!--her hair, those straying tendrils of it, warm and ruddy

and now fired golden at that magic touch--her brow, pure as a nun's,

beneath that veiling--the long, curved lashes of her hidden eyes--her

cheeks still flushed--her lips red-ripe and waiting motionless.

She raised her eyes to me!--a moment only, but my heart leaped, for in

that instant it dawned upon me how all that vision there--flesh, blood,

and soul--was just arm's-length from me!

It was--I know.