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Miss Primrose

Roy Rolfe Gil son

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

York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers :: MCMV1

Copyright, 1906, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

All rights rtstmd.

Published March, 1906.

Contents

PART I A Devonshire Lad

CHAPTER PAGE

I. LETITIA 3

II. LITTLE RUGBY 13

III. A POET OP GRASSY FORD 27

IV. THE SEVENTH SLICE 43

V. THE HANDMAIDEN 61

VI. COUSIN DOVE 71

VII. OP 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

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Contents

PART III Rosemary

CHAPTER PAGE

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

|LL little, white-haired, smiling ladies remind me of Letitia — Letitia Prim- rose, 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, name- less tie in after years, and always a fond par- tiality which began one day by our old green

3

Miss Primrose

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?" 4

Letitia

" 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, cheer- fully, "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

5

Miss Primrose

day and hour when I first met her ; partly that, and partly because Letitia has a better mem- ory 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 re- member 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.

6

Let it i a

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, pud- ding-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.

7

Miss Primrose

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 vil- lain in it — oh, beware, Letitia, of a pudgy, vulgar, superstitious villain wearing a charmed necklace of assafcetida to ward off evils, but pow- erless, even quite odorless against that green- eyed one! For, lo! Letitia: thy Hero standing beneath thy chamber - window in the moon- beams, is singing soprano to the gentle bellows- ings of early love!

No, I do not play the accordion, nor did I ever. I never even owned one, so I never prac- tised 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 moon- shine, 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

8

Letitia

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 house- maid, 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 9

Miss Primrose

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 mem- ories 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 Warwick- shire.

"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.

10

Let it i a

"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 Hor- ace: 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 Buckle- tons, and a very good family, too."

"David Buckleton Primrose," I read aloud.

"Lineal descendant of Dr. Charles Primrose, ii

Miss 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 Wakefieldf"

"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.

12

II

LITTLE RUGBY

[UNTING 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 13

Miss Primrose

— hard-pressed was Caesar 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, blit 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. Caesar'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.

Little Rugby

Schoolward next morning Rugby and Caesar 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 with- out 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, bois- terous 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 beam- 15

Miss Primrose

ing; 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 Har- rowell'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 flut- tered 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."

16

Little Rugby

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 Rug- beian 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 Des- tiny must do the rest.

" Let us pray."

For a moment the Professor stood there silent- ly 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,

17

Miss Primrose

"... Help us, O Father, to be kinder ..." How you loved Peter, the Professor, and your

ugly Rugby on its hill!

"... Lead us, 0 Father, to a nobler youth ..." Ay, they should know you for the man you

were, deep down in your hidden soul.

"... Give us, 0 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 Com- mentaries, strayed over the book to the braids of the Potter girl beyond, and on to the long,

18

Little Rugby

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 Cassar — 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 read- ing 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 —

Miss Primrose

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 learn- ing 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 squint- ed 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."

20

Little Rugby

"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.

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Miss Primrose

" I have heard stronger language on our play- ground here."

He paused again, adding, impressively:

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

"Just what / 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 mum- bled, 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

22

Little Rugby

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 whis- perings 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 Pro- fessor's voice, there was some such dream, and when it ended, prayer and dream together —

"After these exercises — 23

Miss Primrose

It was the Professor's voice.

" — I wish to see in my office Bertram Weath- erby 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 as- sembling 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

24

Little Rugby

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 av- erage of their age, would despoil, openly despoil — yes, I may say, ruthlessly despoil — the prop- erty of this school, descending — "

"Why, sir, what prop — "

"Descending," cried the Professor, "to van- dalism— to a vandalism which I have again and again proscribed. Over and over I have said, and within your hearing, that I would not coun- tenance 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 rep- resentative I am. Yet here I find you marring their tops with jackrknives, carving great, sprawl- ing letters — "

" But, sir, at Rug—"

"Great, ugly letters, I say, sprawling and 25

Miss Primrose

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. "Rug- by! And what of Rugby?"

"Why, at Rugby, sir—"

" And what, pray, has Rugby, or a thousand Rugby s, to do with your wilful disobedience?"

"They cut, sir—"

26

Little Rugby

" 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 gen- tlemen, 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.

27

Miss Primrose

"Well?"

The gloom of a great disappointment was in their voices.

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

Ill

A POET OF GRASSY FORD

[HE 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 3 29

Miss Primrose

modestly, I believe, were published for the first time — and I fear the last — Dsf^id 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-fash- ioned 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

30

A Poet of Grassy Ford

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 thun-

Miss Primrose

der 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 [turn- ing 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 master- piece, 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

32

A Poet of Grassy Ford

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 Rhym- ing Robin who fondly imagined that he might be another Burns.

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

33

Miss Primrose

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 in- stead of Saracens!" he said.

34

A Poet of Grassy Ford

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 spiled sheets of copy and tattered ex- changes that she might sit.

"Looks some like snow," he said.

"Yes," she assented. "I called, Mr. But- ters—"

She paused uncertainly. It was her own voice that had disconcerted her, it was so trem- ulous.

"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," stam- 35

Miss Primrose

mered 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 vent- ured.

"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."

36

A Poet of Grassy Ford

"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 be- neath 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 37

Miss Primrose

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

38

A Poet of Grassy Ford

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 Prim- rose'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 col- umn 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, The- ocritus; plural, Theocriti. No, sir, they don't

39

Miss Primrose

raise Theocriti — which is natural, of course, and reminds me — while we are on the subject — re- minds me, Miss Primrose, that I've been think- ing— 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 —

40

A Poet of Grassy Ford

patted gingerly (he had never had a daughter), patted Letitia's shaking shoulders and strove to soothe her with the only words at his com- mand: "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 criti- cising 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 gentle- man'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."

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Miss Primrose

"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.

42

IV

THE SEVENTH SLICE

T 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 an- tique title-page bearing these very words:

" Printed for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be fold at his {hop in Paul's Church- yard at the figne of the Pide Bull neere St. Auftin's Gate, 1608."

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Miss Primrose

"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

44

The Seventh Slice

version filled in wide chinks in the Butters narra- tive, 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 mis- sionary 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 Adiron- dack wilderness, I came by chance upon the blackened ashes of a fire, and sitting meditative- ly 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 4 45

Miss Primrose

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 carpen- ters 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 puz- zling her fair young mind to bring both ends together in decent comfort for that poor de- pendent 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 46

The Seventh Slice

tells me, " always making believe that it was old England in Grassy Ford, and that you were Robin Hood or Lord Somebody or Earl Some- body 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 Amer- ican. 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 door- way, 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 man- ner, for those who dwell upon the banks of that

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Miss Primrose

famous river find, it seems, something too hu- man 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 some- times, 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.

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The Seventh Slice

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

49

Miss Primrose

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, help- ing her with her housework, I remember, wiping her dishes for her, tending her fires, and weeding her kitchen-garden. There never had been s"o 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 won- ders. 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 there- after to see, he said, "what is left of America,

5°

The Seventh Slice

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 tete-a-tete, as Dr. Primrose used to say, and when debate waxed high, she would stand sometimes in the kitchen

Miss Primrose

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, doc- tor."

"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,

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The Seventh Slice

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 van- quished 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, sooth- ingly, 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

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Miss Primrose

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 brush- ing 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

54

The Seventh Slice

swiftly, I remember, breaking the cobwebs, part- ing the fragrant tangle that beset the way — vines below, branches above me — keeping in touch the while, vocally, when the thickets inter- vened, 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, plung- ing 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 ber- ries and the mottled fruit of an antique ap-

55

Miss Primrose

pie -tree to while the time away — and so I waited.

I remember chuckling as I nibbled there, won- dering 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 com- ing!"

And so, hallooing all the way, while Robin answered, I made my way to them — and found them resting on a wall.

The Seventh Slice

"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 thought- fulness 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 mild- est, 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.

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Miss Primrose

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, Ber- tram?"

"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 desper- ately till I lost my breath; I skinned both

58

The Seventh Slice

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 hand- ed 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 holi- day. Eat another, lad."

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Then I understood that gloom on Sun Dial : he was going to leave us. Boy like, 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 — well- nigh 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 be- cause of the tears she had dropped upon it, spreading the jam.

60

V

THE HANDMAIDEN

OBIN 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, s 61

Miss Primrose

my mind recited so much more glibly than his faltering tongue, I ha.d 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 rest- lessly 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. Be- fore me as I write there hangs a drawing of pretty Sally of the alley and the song. Be- tween the poet and that other younger Dev- onshire lad, they wellnigh made me an English boy.

We heard from Robin — rather, Letitia did. 62

The Handmaiden

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 Em- erson, 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 — per- haps 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 63

Miss Primrose

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 of- fence 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." 64

The Handmaiden

"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 forefinger.

"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

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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 sum- mer sun. It was damp there; the air seemed mouldy under the lindens; there was no invita- tion 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 spar- kle 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

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The Handmaiden

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 — ///// 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 al- ways 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. Im- patience for her return would make him queru- lous, 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?" 67

Miss Primrose

"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, pass- ing 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 some- times, though not for the world before her fa-

68

The Handmaiden

ther'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 Weath- erbys 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 hand- maiden 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

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Miss Primrose

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

|P 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 re- member, even the little home-made pieced and quilted coverlet they had tucked about her while she slept. She folded it, and I laid it care- fully 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

Miss Primrose

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 Bom- bay!"

"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.

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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 mar- vellously 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

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Miss Primrose

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, con- cerning whom we always used to smile and won- der, 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, dove- like.

That, my father argued, was quite unlikely, since he had never known a child to mature in keeping with a foolish, flowery, or pious Chris- tian 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,

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Cousin Dove

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 'mediaeval robe clung lovingly about her, plain but edged with pearls (seed-pearls I think they called them in the old romances),

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Miss Primrose

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 flow- ers. 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 mo- ment of youthful fancy this Lady of the Mari- golds, 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 waist- coat 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 approach- ing 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 76

Cousin Dove

rose early, I remember, and took down my fish- ing-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 morn- ing."

"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 6 77

Miss Primrose

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. Trouble- some 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 in- sects ; 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.

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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 im- patiently 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 Trouble- some 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 build- ings 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."

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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 be- fore. 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.

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Cousin Dove

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, purpose- less. Never before had vagabondage on a golden

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Miss Primrose

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 de- lights, 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."

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"You won't know ten minutes aft'er 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 re- marked, 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.'" 83

Miss Primrose

"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 laugh- ter, 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 mem- ories 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 per- ceptibly 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,

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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 mur- muring 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 straight-

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Miss Primrose

er, and my best black shoes, in whieh I always stamped the louder, and my highest, whitest collar, and my best light silk cravat — a Christ- mas 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 fin- gers, 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

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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 girjs talk so long about? I used to marvel at them, won- dering what Dove could find so merry among our currant-vines. She was a child beside Le-

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titia. 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 per- sons 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

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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 Weath- erby?"

"I? The truth."

"And what was that?"

" Why, / said you were an angel, though a lit- tle frolicsome perhaps, and with beautiful au- burn hair. Did I not, my son?"

" No, sir. You thought she would be a tom- boy with red — "

"Precisely," he would interrupt. "You see, my dear, how in every particular I am corrob- orated 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. Doc- tor 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

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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 wood- land 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

Miss Primrose

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 flower- ness —

"There is the girl I might have been."

Dove, even when she seemed the very spirit of our effervescence, kept always a certain let- ter of that lovely quaintness which her name implied. She was a dove, the mater said, re- minding 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 exer- cises, 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

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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 visi- bly 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. Seat- ed 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 » 93

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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 daugh-

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ters, 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. Leav- ing 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.

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"The very spot!" I cried. "Do you remem- ber, 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; be- sides, 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 — "

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" I see," she replied, coloring. " He must have been a splendid fellow."

"He was," I said.

"Dear Letitia!" murmured Cousin Dove, gaz- ing 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 motion- less.

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.

PART II The School-Mistress

THE OLDER LETITIA

|RECISELYat half-past seven there was a faint rustling on our staircase and a moment later Letitia Prim- rose appeared at our breakfast-ta- ble smiling "Good-morning." She was dressed invariably in the plainest of black gowns with the whitest of niching about her wrists and throat, and at the collar a pin which had been her mother's, a cameo Minerva in an antique setting of vine leaves wrought in gold. The gown itself — I scarcely know how to style it, for no frill or foible of the day was ever visi- ble in its homely contour, or if existing there, had been so curbed by the wearer's mod- esty as to be quite null and void to the naked eye. Every tress of her early whitening hair lay smoothly back about her forehead, and behind was caught so neatly beneath her comb, it might

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be doubted how or if she ever slept upon it. Just so immaculate, virginal, irreproachable did the older Letitia come softly down to us every week-day morning of her life, and taking her chair between Dove's seat and mine, she would adjust her gold-rimmed glasses to better see how the night had dealt with us, and beam- ing upon us with one of the pleasantest of in- quiring smiles, would murmur —

"Well?"

She ate little, and that so unobtrusively, I used to wonder if she ate at all. I can remember her lifting her cup, but do not recall that it ever reached her lips. She had, I think, some trick of magnetism, some power of the eye that held yours at the crucial moment, so that you never really saw her sip or bite, and she never chewed, I swear, yet I never heard of her bad digestion. Eating in her was a chaste indulgence common only, I believe, to spinsterhood — a rite, commun- ionlike, rather than a feast.

When the clock struck eight, we would rise together — I for my office, Dove for farewells, Letitia for the school-room; I with a clattering chair, Dove demurely, Letitia noiselessly, to put on a hat as vague and unassuming as that

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The Older Letitia

decorous garment in which she cloaked herself from the outer world — a kind of cape and jacket, I think it was, in winter, but am not quite sure. In summer it was a cashmere shawl. Then slipping on a pair of gloves, black always and always whole, however faded, she would take up her small pearl-handled parasol, storm or shine, and that linen bag of hers, a marvellous reticule for books and manuscripts with a separate pocket in the cover-flap for a comb and mirror and extra handkerchief — though not to my knowledge; I am merely telling what was told. Nor am I telling all that was said of Letitia's panoply and raiment, the manner of which at every season, at every hour of the night and day, was characterized — if I have understood the matter — not so much by a charm of style as of precaution, a modest providence, a truly ex- quisite foresight and readiness for all emergen- cies, however perilous, so that fire nor flood nor war's alarms nor death itself, however sudden, should find her unprepared. Fire at night would merely have illumined a slender, unobtrusive figure descending a stair or ladder unabashed, decently, even gracefully arrayed in a silk kimono which hung nightly on the foot-board of her

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bed; and since for other purposes it was never worn, it remains unscorched, and, indeed, unblemished, to this very day. But for that grim hand the moment of whose clutch can never be foretold with certainty, nothing could exceed Letitia's watchfulness and care. She dressed invariably, I have said, in the plainest black, but I have heard, and on authority I could not question, that however simple and inexpensive those outer garments were, the in- ner vestments were of finest linen superimposing the softest silk. Thus — for a tendency to some heart-affection was hereditary in the Primrose family — thus could no sudden dissolution or surrender, such as might occur in an absence from home and the ministration of loving friends, be attended ever by any post-mortem embarrass- ment or chagrin, but rather would disclose a pride and delicacy of taste and consideration, the more remarkable and worthy of approval and regret, because it could never otherwise have been revealed. Nothing I know of in the way of gifts was more acceptable to Letitia Primrose than those black silk ones which she took such pains to purchase and secrete.

It was a wondrous reticule, that linen pouch 104

The Older Letitia

of which I spoke, bearing "L. P." embroidered on its outer side. I say its outer, for so she carried it always; and in years, so many I will not count them, I never knew that monogram turned in, or down. She met me with it in the doorway from which Dove watched us till we had left the gate. Mornings, for years, we went to our work together, save when an urgent matter summoned me earlier or compelled me, against my will and exercise, to drive. Morn after morn we walked together to the red brick school-house, talking of village news and the varying moods of our fickle northern weather, or perhaps of books, old ones and new ones, or of those golden memories that we shared. They were not perfunctory as I recall them, those morning dialogues. There was no abstraction about Letitia, no cursory, unweighed chattering of things so obvious as to need no comment. Every topic might be a theme for her mild elo- quence. It might be of Keats that she dis- coursed to me, or Browning or Alfred Tennyson or perhaps the Corsican, whom she hated, partly for tyranny, partly because he made her "look at him," she said; it might be the Early Church, whose records she had read and read again,

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though not one - half so much for Cuthbert's holiness, I told her, as for Fuller's quaintness, which she loved ; or it might be a March morning that we walked together, while she spoke like a poet's daughter of the first pink arbutus some grinning farm-boy had laid but yesterday upon her desk.

Why no one ever wooed and won such fervor seemed passing strange to Dove and me. With all the grace of goodness and gentle courage in which she faced the world alone, in all those years which had followed her father's death, she had never, to Dove's ken or mine, won a single suitor. Those burdens of care and sacrifice laid too soon upon her frail, young shoulders had borne early fruit — patience, wisdom, and a sweet endurance beyond her years — but on such harvest young men set small store. A taste for it comes late. It made her pleasing to her elders, but those of her own years shrank in- stinctively from its very perfectness. She had matured too soon. How then should any one so coolly virtuous know trial or passion ? Surely so young a saint could have no warm impetuous hours to remember, no sweet abandonment, no pretty idyls — had she even a spring-time to recall ?

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The Older Letitia.

Men admired her for her mind and heart, but in her presence secretly were ill at ease. Her self-dependence rendered useless their stronger arms accustomed to being leaned upon. She smiled upon them, it is true, but not as men like to be smiled upon — neither as a child, trustingly, nor as a queen, confident of their homage and gallant service. She appealed neither to their protection nor to their pride. She awoke the friend, but not the lover, in them; and so the years slipped by and she won no chivalry, be- cause she claimed none. She had but asked and but received respect.

Our raillery, harmlessly meant, was not al- ways kind, as I look back at it. It is scarcely pleasant to be reminded that among one's kind one is not preferred, yet Letitia bore all our jest- ing with steadfast pleasantry.

"Do I look forlorn? Do I look so help- less ?" she would ask. Her very smile, her voice, her step, seemed in themselves an an- swer. " What do I want with a husband then?"

"Why," Dove would say, "to make you hap- py, Letitia."

"You child: I am perfectly happy." 107

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"Well," Dove would answer, stubbornly, "to make you happier, then."

I have forgotten Letitia's answers — all but one of them:

"I lived so long with my scholar-love," she once said, sweetly, of her father, " I fear I never should be content with an ordinary man."

Dove declared that no one in Grassy Ford- shire was half worthy of her cousin ; at least, she said, she knew but one, and he was already wedded — and to a woman, she added, humbly, not half so good or wise or wonderful as Letitia. Dove stoufly held that Letitia could have mar- ried, had she wished it, and whom she would. Father would shake his head at that.

"No," he would say, "Letty is one of those women men never think of as a bride."

"But why?" Dove would demand then, loy- ally. " She is the very woman to find real hap- piness in loving and self - sacrifice. Adversity would never daunt her, and yet," my wife would say with scorn rising in her voice, " the very men who need such help and comprehension and comradeship in their careers, would pass her by, and for a chit of girl who would never be happy sharing their struggles— but only their success!"

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The Older Letitia

"My dear," father would reply, sagely, "a man glories in his power to hand a woman some- thing she cannot reach herself. Letty Primrose has too long an arm."

"But if a man once married Letitia — " Dove would protest, and father would chuckle then.

"Ah, yes, my dear, if one only would! But there's the rub. Doubtless he would find Letitia much like other women, quite willing he should reach things down to her from the highest shelf. But he must be a wise man to suspect just that — to guess what lies beneath our Letty's ap- parent self -sufficiency."

"An older man might," Dove once suggested. "A general, or a great professor, or a minister plenipotentiary. ' '

"Doubtless," he answered, "but our Grassy Ford is a narrow world, -my dear. The young sprigs in it are only silly lads, and the elder bachelors are very musty ones, I fear — and not an ambassador among them. I doubt very much if Letitia will -ever meet him — that man you mean, who might choose Letty's love through wisdom, and whose wisdom she might choose through love."

Dove's answer was a sigh, s 109

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"Bertram," she said, "you must make some real nice, elderly bachelor doctor friends, and we'll ask them to visit us."

It seemed a likely plan, but nothing came of it, and the silly lads and the musty ones alike left our Letitia more and more to friendships beyond her years. From being so much in the company of her elders, she grew in time to be more like them. Her modesty became reserve ; reserve, in turn, a certain awkwardness or shy aloofness in the presence of the other sex — primness, it was called. She had not forgotten how to smile; her talk was blithe enough with those she knew, and was still colored by her love for poetry, but it fast grew quainter and less colloquial ; there was a certain old-fashioned care and subtlety about it, a rare completeness in its phrases not at all like the crude, half-finished ones with which our Grassy Ford belles were content. It added to her charm, I think, but to the evidence as well of that maturity and self- complacency which all men seemed to fear and shun, not one suspecting that the glow beneath meant youth — youth preserved through time and trial to be a light to her, or to Love be- lated.

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The Older LetitU

Her brown hair turned to gray, her gray to white, and she still came down to us smiling good - morning ; still worshipped Keats, still scorned the upstart who made her look ; taught on, year after year, in the red brick school-house, wearing the wild flowers farm-boys gathered in the hills. Her life flowed on like a stream in summer, softly in shadow and in sun. She seem- ed content — no bitter note in her low voice, no glance of envy, malice, or chagrin in those kind gray eyes of hers, which beamed so gently upon others' loves ; we used to wonder how they might have shone upon her own.

One day in August — it was again that anni- versary birthday around which half my memo- ries of her seem to cling — she gave me a copy of In Memoriam, and bought for herself the linen for another reticule. Neatly, and in the fashion of our grandmothers' day, she worked upon it her initials, L. and P., in Old-English letters, old- rose and gold.

"What," I asked, "is the figure meant for?"

"The figure? Where?"

"In the background there — the figure seven, in the lighter gold."

She bent to study it.

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Miss Primrose

"There is a seven there," she said. "I must have used a lighter silk."

"Then shall you alter it?" I asked.

"No," she answered. "It is now too late."

"She means the figure," I explained to Dove.

"The letters also," Dove murmured, softly, as we turned away.

II

ON A CORNER SHELF

IT five minutes to four o'clock the red school -house gave no sign of the redder Hfe beating within its walls. The grounds about it, worn brown by hundreds of restless feet and marked in strange diagrams, the mystic symbols of hop-scotch, marbles, and three-old- cat, were quite deserted save for sparrows busy with crumbs from the mid-day luncheon-pails. Five minutes' later, one listening by the picket- fence might have heard faintly the tinkling of little bells, and a rising murmur that with the opening of doors burst suddenly into a tramping of myriad feet, while from the lower hallway two marching lines came down the outer stair, primly in step, till at the foot they sprang into wild dis- order, a riot of legs and skirts, with the shouts and shrieks and shrill whistlings of children

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Miss Primrose

loosed from bondage. When the noisy tide had swept down the broad walk into the street, Letitia might be seen following smilingly, her skirts surrounded by little girls struggling for the honor of being nearest and bearing her reticule. At the end of happy days Letitia 's face bore the imprint of a sweet contentment, as if the love she had given had been returned twofold, not only in the awkward caresses of her little ones, but in the sight of such tender buds opening day by day through her patient care into fuller knowledge of a great bright world about them. She strove earnestly to show them more of it than the school-books told; she aimed higher than mere correctness in the exercises, those anxious, careful, or heedless scribblings with which her reticule was crammed. In the geog- raphy she taught there were deeper colorings than the pale tints of those twenty maps the text-book held ; greater currents flowed through those green and pink and yellow lands than the principal rivers there, and in the plains between them greater harvests had been garnered, accord- ing to her stories, than the principal products, principal exports — principal paragraphs learned by rote and recited senselessly.

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Drawing, in Letitia's room, it was charged against her by one named Shears, who had the interests of the school at heart and jaw, had become a subterfuge for teaching botany as well.

"For draggin' in a study," as he told a group on the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, "not deluded in the grammar-grade curricu- lum!"

He paused to let the word have full effect.

"For wastin' the scholais' time and gettin' their feet wet pokin' around in bogs and marshy places, a-pullin' weeds! And for what? — why, by gum, to draw 'em!"

His auditors chuckled.

"What," he asked, "are drawin'-books for?"

His fellow-citizens nodded intelligently.

"And even when she does use the books," cried Mr. Samuel Shears, "she won't let 'em draw a consarned circle or cross or square, without they tell her some fool story of Michael the Angelo!"

The crowd laughed hoarsely.

"And who was Michael the Angelo?" asked Mr. Shears, screwing his face up in fine derision and stamping one foot, rabbit-like, by way of

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emphasis to his scorn. "Who was this here Michael the Angelo?"

Four men spat and the others shuffled.

"A Dago!" roared Shears, and the crowd was too much relieved to do more than gurgle. "What does my son care about Michael the Angelo?"

Letitia admitted, I believe, that his son didn't.

"And furthermore," said Mr. Shears, insinu- atingly, "what I want to know is: why has she got them pitchers a- hanging around the school- room walls? Pitchers of Dago churches and Dago statures — and I guess you know what Dago statures are — I guess you know whether they're dressed like you and me! — I guess you fellows know all right — and if you don't, there's them that do. And, in conclusion, I want to ask right here: who's a-payin' for them there decorations?"

Mr. Shears spat, the crowd spat, and they adjourned.

Now, there may have been a dozen prints re- lieving the ugliness and concealing the cracks in the school-room walls, but all quite innocent, as I recall them: "Socrates in the Market-

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Place," "The Parthenon," "The Battle of Salamis," "Christian Martyrs," a tragic moment in the arena of ancient Rome, "St. Peter's," I suppose, " St. Mark's by Moonlight," and of stat- ues only one and irreproachable, the "Moses" of Michael Angelo. His "David" was Letitia's joy, but she never dreamed, I am sure, of its exhibition in a grammar-school, though I have heard her declare (shamelessly, Mr. Shears would say) that were it not for a Puritan weak- ness of eyesight hereditary in Grassy Ford, that lithe Jew's ideal figure would be a far better lesson to her boys than all the text-books in physiology.

"Might it not incite them to sling-shots?" queried Dove, softly.

" I don't agree with you," said Letitia, lost in her theme, and noting only the fact, and not the nature, of the opposition. " I don't agree with you at all. It would teach them the beauty of manly — Why do you laugh?"

If Shears could have heard her! His informa- tion, such as it was, had been derived from his only son, a youth named David, "not by An- gelo," Letitia said, and hopelessly indolent, whose only fondness was for sticking pins into

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smaller boys. He was useful, however, as a barometer in which the rise or fall of his surly impudence registered the parental feeling against her rule.

Shears and his kind held that the proper study of mankind was arithmetic. What would he not have said at the corner of Main and Cling- stone streets, had he known that Letitia was trifling with Robinson's Complete? — that be- tween its lines, she was teaching (surreptitiously would have been his word), an original, elemen- tary course in ethics, a moral law of honesty, fair-dealing, and full-measure, so that all exam- ples, however intricate, were worked out rigidly to the seventh decimal, by the Golden Rule !

Red geraniums bloomed in her school-room window, and on a corner-shelf, set so low that the children easily might have leaned upon it, lay Webster and another book — always one other; though sometimes large and sometimes small, now green, now red, now blue, now yellow, but always seeming to have been left there care- lessly. Every volume bore on its fly-leaf two names — "David Buckleton Primrose," written in a bold, old-fashioned script in fading ink, and below it "Letitia Primrose," in a smaller, finer

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but no less quaint a hand. That book, what- ever its name and matter, had been left there purposely, you may be sure. Letitia remem- bered how young Keats drank his first sweet draught of Homer and became a Greek; how little lame Walter poured over border legends to become the last of the Scottish minstrels; and how that other, that English boy, swam the Hellespont in a London street, to climb on its farther side, that flowery bank called poesy. It was her dream that among her foster-children, as she fondly called them, there might be one, perhaps, some day — some rare soul waiting rose- like for the sun, who would find it shining on her school-room shelf. So she dropped there weekly in the children's way, as if by accident, and without a word to them unless they asked, books which had been her father's pride or her own young world of dreams — books of all times and mental seasons, but each one chosen with her end in mind. They were beyond young years, she admitted frankly, as school years go, but when her Keats came, she would say, smiling, they would be bread-and-wine to him ; milk and wild-honey they had been to her.

"Suppose," said Dove, "it should be a girl 119

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who bears away sacred fire from your shelf, Letitia?"

"Yes, it might be a girl," replied the school- mistress. " Perhaps — who knows ? — another ' Shakespeare's daughter ' !" And yet, she added, and with the faintest color in her cheeks, know- ing well that we knew her preference, she rather hoped it would be a boy.

Few could resist that book waiting by the dictionary ; at least they would open it, spell out its title-page, flutter its yellowing leaves, looking for pictures, and, disappointed, close it and turn away. But sometimes one more curious would stop to read a little, and now and then, to Le- titia's joy, a lad more serious than the rest would turn inquiringly to ask the meaning of what he found there; then she would tell its story and loan the volume, hoping that Johnny Keats had come at last.

No one will ever know how many subtle lures she set to tempt her pupils into pleasant paths, but men and women in Grassy Ford to-day re- member that it was Miss Primrose who first said this, or told them that, and while her discipline is sometimes smiled at — she was far too trusting at times, they tell me — doubtless, no one is the 120

On a Corner Shelf

worse for it, since whatever evil she may have failed to nip, may be balanced now by the good • of some lovely memory. Bad boys grown tall remembering their hookey-days do not forget the woman they cajoled with their forged excuses; and it is a fair question, I maintain, boldly, as one of that guilty clan, whether the one who put them on an honor they did not have, or, let us say, had mislaid temporarily — whether the rec- ollection of Letitia Primrose and her innocence is not more potent now for good than the crimes she overlooked, for evil.

Sometimes I wonder if she was half so blind as she appeared to be, for as we walked one Sab- bath by the water-side, with the sun golden on the marshes, and birds and flowers and caress- ing breezes beguiling our steps farther and farther from the drowsy town, I remember her saying :

"It is for this my boys play truant m the spring-time. Do you wonder, Bertram?"

For the best of reasons I did not. I was thinking of how the springs came northward to Grassy Fordshire when I was a runaway; and then suddenly as we turned a bend in Trouble- some, there was a splash, and two bare feet sank

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modestly into the troubled waters. There was a bubbling, and then a head emerged dripping from all its hairs. Young David Shears had dived in the nick of time.

Ill

A YOUNGER ROBIN

JHEN our boy was born we named him Robin Weatherby, after that elder Robin who had charmed my 'youth. If his babyhood lacked I aught of love or discipline, it was neither Dove's fault nor Letitia's, for Robin's mother had ideas and a book on childhood, and dear Letitia did not need a book. In fact, she clashed with Dove's. I, as physician-in-ordinary to my child — for in dire emergencies in my own family I always employ an old-fogy rival — was naturally of some little service in consultation with the two ladies and the Book. Of the char- acters of these associates of mine, I need only say that Dove was ever an anxious soul, the Book a truthful but at times a vague one, while Letitia was all that could be desired as guide, philosopher, and friend. Alarming symptoms

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might puzzle others, but never her ; they might, even to myself, even to the Book, bode any one of twenty kinds of evil; to her they pointed solely, solemnly to one — that one, alas! which had carried off some dear child of her school.

Dove, I am sure, had never been impatient with Letitia, but now, such was the tension of these family conferences and such the gravity of the case involved, there were times, I noted, when the cousins addressed each other with the most exquisite and elaborate courtesy, lest either should think the other in the least disturbed. For example, there was that little affair of con- solation— a sort of rubber make-believe with which young Robin curbed and soothed his appe- tite and invited pensiveness. Microbes, Letitia said, were —

Dove interposed to remind her that the things were boiled just seven —

Germs, Letitia argued, were not to be trifled with.

"Just seven times a week, my dear," said Dove, triumphantly.

"And besides," Letitia continued, undis- mayed, " they will ruin the shape of the child's mouth."

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" But how ?" cried Dove. " Pray tell me how, my love, when they are made in the very iden- tical im — "

"And modern doctors," Letitia stated with some severity, "are doing away with so many foolish notions of our grandmothers."

"Yet our fathers and mothers," Dove replied, "were very fair specimens of the race, my dear. Shakespeare, doubtless, was rocked in a cradle, and his brains survived. They were quite in- tact, I think you will admit. He wasn't joggled into—"

" Yet who knows what he might have written, dear love," answered Letitia, "if he had been permitted to lie quite —

" You try to make a child go to sleep, my dar- ling, without something!" my wife suggested. "Just try it once, my dear."

"Cradles," said Letitia — but at this juncture I stepped in, authoritatively, as the father of my child. It is due to Dove, I confess gladly, and partly to Letitia also, that this fatherhood has been so pleasant to look back upon. Robin's mouth is very normal, as even Letitia will admit, I know, as she would be the last person in the world to say that his brains had suffered any in 9 125

Miss Primrose

the joggling. Somehow, by dint of boiling the consolation I suppose, and by what-not formu- lae, we got him up at last on two of the sturdiest, little, round, brown legs that ever splashed in mud-puddle — Dove's Darling, my Old Fellow, and Letitia's Love.

Love she called him in their private moments, and other names as fond, I have no doubt ; pub- licly he was her Archer, her Bowman, her Robin Hood. She, it was, who purchased him bow- and-arrows, and replaced for him without a mur- mur, three panes in the library windows and a precious little wedding vase. The latter cost her a pretty penny, but she reminded us that a boy, after all, will be a boy ! She took great pride in his better marksmanship and sought a suit for him, a costume that should be traditional of archers bold.

"Have you cloth," she asked, "of the shade called Lincoln green?"

The clerk was doubtful.

"I'll see," she said. "Oh, Mr. Peabody! Mr. Peabody!"

"Well?" asked a man's voice hidden be- hind a wall of calicoes. " Well ? What is it?"

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"Mr. Peabody, have we any cloth called Abraham — "

"Not Abraham Lincoln," Letitia interposed, mildly. "You misunderstood me. I said Lin- coln green."

"Same thing," said the clerk, tartly.

Mr. Peabody then emerged smilingly from be- hind his wall.

"How do you do, Miss Primrose," said he. "What can we do for you this morning?" Le- titia carefully repeated her request. He shook his head, while the young clerk smiled trium- phantly.

"No," he said. "You must be mistaken. I have never even heard of such a color — and if there was one of that name," he added, with evident pride in his even tones, "I should cer- tainly know of it. We have other greens — "

Letitia flushed.

."Why," she explained, "the English archers were accustomed to wearing a cloth called Lin- coln green."

Mr. Peabody smiled deprecatingly.

" I never heard of it," he replied, stiffly ; " and, as I say, I have been in the business for thirty years."

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"But don't you remember Robin Hood and his merry men?"

"Oh!" exclaimed the merchant, a great light breaking in upon him. "You mean the fairy stories! Ha, Jia! Very good. Very good, in- deed. Well, no, Miss Primrose, I'm afraid we can hardly provide you with the cloth that fairies—

"Show me your green cloths — all of them," said Letitia, her cheeks burning.

" Certainly, Miss Primrose. Miss Baggs, show Miss Primrose all of our green cloths — all of them."

"Light green or dark green?" queried Miss Baggs, who had been delighted with the whole affair.

Letitia pondered. There had been some rea- son, she reflected, for Robin Hood's choice of gear.

"Something," she said, at last — "something as near to the shade of foliage as you can give me."

"I beg pardon?" inquired Miss Baggs.

"The color of leaves," explained Letitia.

"Well," Miss Baggs retorted, smartly, "some leaves are light, and some are dark, and some leaves are in-between."

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There was a dangerous gleam in Letitia's eyes. "Show me all your green cloths," she requested, curtly — "all of them." Miss Baggs obeyed.

"I suppose it really isn't Lincoln green, you know," Letitia said, when she had brought the parcel home with her and had spread its con- tents upon the sofa, " but I hope you'll like it, Dove. It is the nearest to tree-green I could find."

It was, indeed.

Now, Dove had never heard of a boy in green, and had grave doubts, which it would not do, however, to even hint to dear Letitia ; so made it was, that archer-suit, though by some strange freak of fancy that caused Letitia keen regret, Robin, dressed in it, could seldom be induced to play at archery, always insisting, to her dis- comfiture, that he was Grass!

"When you grow up, my bowman," she once told him, "I'll buy you a white suit, all of flan- nel, and father shall teach you to play at cricket in the orchard."

"But crickets are black," cried Robin, whose eye for color, or the absence of it, I told Letitia, was bound to ruin her best-laid English plans.

It was good to see them, the Archer Bold and 129

Miss Primrose

the Gray Lady walking together, hand-in-hand — the one beaming up, the other down ; the one so subject to sudden leaps and bounds and one- legged hoppings to avoid the cracks, the other flurried lest those wild friskings should disturb the balance she had kept so perfectly all those years till then.

In their walks and talks lay many stories, I am sure — things which never will be written unless Letitia turns to authorship, for which it is a little late, I fear; but even then she would never dream of putting such simple matters down. She does not know at all the delicious Lady of the Linen Reticule, who, to herself, is commonplace enough. She might, perhaps, make a tale or two of the Archer in Lincoln Green, but what is the romance of an archer without the lady in it ?

One drowsy afternoon on a Sunday in summer- time I stretched myself in my easy-chair with another for my slippered feet. My dinner had ended pleasantly with a love-in-a-cottage pud- ding which had dripped blissfully with a heaven- ly cataract of golden sauce. Dove had gone out on a Sabbath mission, rustling away in a gown sprinkled with rose-buds — one of those summer

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things in which it is not quite safe for any woman to risk herself in this wicked world.

Such shallow thoughts were passing through my mind as Dove departed, and when the front gate clicked behind her, I opened a charming novel and went to sleep. I know I slept, for I walked in a path I have never seen. I should like to see it, for it must be beautiful in the spring-time. It was a kind of autumn when I was there. I was dragging my feet about in the yellow leaves, when a senile hollyhock leaned over quietly and tickled me on the ear. As I brushed it away I heard it giggling. Then a twig of pear-tree bent and trifled with my nose, which is a thing no gentleman permits, even in dreams, and I brushed it smartly. Then I heard a voice — I suppose the gardener's — telling some- thing to behave itself. Then I swished again among the leaves. How long I swished there I have no notion, but I heard more voices by-and- by, and I remember saying to myself, "They are behind the gooseberries." They did not know, of course, that I was there, else they had talked more softly.

"No," said he, " you be the horsey." "Oh no," said the other, "I'd rather drive." 131

Miss Primrose

"No, you be the horsey."

"Sh! Let me drive."

"I said you be the horsey."

"I be the horsey?"

"Yes. Whoa, horsey! D'up! Whoa! D'up!"

Then all was confusion behind the gooseberries and the horsey d'upped and whoaed, and whoaed and d'upped, till I all but d'upped. I did move, and the noise stopped.

How long I slept there I do not know, but I heard again those voices behind the vines, though more subdued now, mere tender under- tones like lovers in a garden seat. Lovers I sup- posed them, and, keeping still, I listened:

"But I'm not your little boy," said one, "because you haven't any."

"Oh yes, you are," replied the other, confi- dently. "You're my little boy because I love you."

"But why don't you ask God to send you a little boy all your own, just four years old like me, so we could play together ? Why don't you ?"

" Because," the reply was, " you're all the little boy I need."

" But if you did ask God and the angel brought you a little boy, then his name would be Billie."

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"Oh, would it?"

" Yes, his name would be Billie, because now Billie is the next name to Robin."

"What do you mean by the next name to Robin?"

"Why, 'cause now, first comes Robin, and then comes Billie, and then comes Tommy, or else Muffins, if you turn the corner — unless he's a girl — and then he's Annie."

"What?" gasped the second voice. "I don't understand."

" Well, then," the first voice answered, wearily, "call him Johnny."

I know at the time the explanation seemed quite clear to me, as it must have been to the second speaker, for the colloquy ended then and there. I might have peeked through the goose- berries and not been discovered, I suppose, but just then I went out shooting flamingoes with a friend of mine, and when I got back, some time that day, the gooseberry-vines were thick with rose-buds. And while I was gone a brook had come — you could hear it plainly on the other side — and I was surprised, I remember, and angry with my aunt Jemima (I never had an Aunt Jemima) for not telling me. I listened

Miss Primrose

awhile to the tinkle-tinkling till presently the burden changed to a

" Tra, la, la, Tra, la, la,"

over and over, till I said to myself, "These are the Singing Waters the poets hear!" So I tip- toed nearer through the crackling leaves, and touching the rose- vines very deftly for fear of thorns, again I listened. My heart beat faster.

" It is an English linn!" I said, astonished, for there were words to it, English words to that singing rivulet! I could make out "gold" and "rue" and "youth."

"Some woodland secret!" I told myself; so I listened eagerly, scarcely breathing, and little by little, as my ears grew more accustomed to the sounds, I heard the song, not once, but often, each time more clearly than before :

" Many seek a coronet, Many sigh for gold, Some there are a-seeking yet — (Never thought of you, my pet!) — Now they're passing old.

" Many yearn for lovers true, Some for sleep from pain,

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Seeking laurel, some find rue — (Oh, they never dreamed of you!) — Now want youth again.

"Crown and treasure, love like Peace and laurel -tree, Have I all, oh! world of mine — (Soft little world my arms entwine) — Youth thou art to me."

_, It seemed familiar, yet I could not place the song, till at last it came to me that Dr. Primrose wrote it for his only child, a kind of lullaby which he used to chant to her. '* Then I remembered how all that while I had been listening with my eyes shut, and so I opened them to find the singer — and saw Letitia with Robin sleeping in her arms.

IV

HIRAM PTOLEMY

IE afternoon in a spring I am I thinking of, passing from my office to the waiting - room beyond it, I found alone there a little old 1 gentleman seated patiently on the very edge of an old-fashioned sofa which occu- pied one corner of the room. He rose politely at my entrance, and, standing before me, hat in hand, cleared his throat and managed to articulate :

"Dr. Weatherby, I believe." I bowed and asked him to be seated, but he continued erect, peering up at me with eyes that watered behind his steel-bowed spectacles. He was an odd, unkempt figure of a man ; his scraggly beard barely managed to screen his collar-button, for he wore no tie; his sparse, gray locks fell quite to the greasy collar of his coat, an antique 136

Hiram Ptolemy

frock, once black but now of a greenish hue ; and his inner collar was of celluloid like his dickey and like the cuffs which rattled about his lean wrists as he shook my hand.

"My name is Percival — Hirarn De Lancey Percival," he said. "De Lancey was my moth- er's name."

"Will you come into my office, Mr. Percival?" I asked.

"No — no, thank you — that is, I am not a patient," he explained. " I just called on my way to — "

He wet his lips, and as he said "New York" I fancied I could detect beneath the casual man- ner he assumed, no inconsiderable self-satisfac- tion, accompanied by a straightening of the bent shoulders, while at the same moment he touched with one finger the tip of his collar and thrust up his chin as if the former were too tight for him. With that he laid his old felt hat among the magazines on my table and took a chair.

"The fact is," he continued, "I am a former protege of the late Rev. David Primrose, of whom you may — "

He paused significantly.

Miss Primrose

"Indeed!" I said. "I knew Dr. Primrose very well. He was a neighbor of ours. His daughter — "

My visitor's face brightened visibly and he hitched his chair nearer to my own.

" I was about to ask you concerning the — the daughter," he said. "Is she—?"

"She lives with my family," I replied. "Le- titia— "

"Ah, yes," he said; "Letitia! That is the name — Letitia Primrose — well, well, well, well. Now, that's nice, isn't it? She lives with you, you say."

"Yes," I explained, "she has lived with my family since her father's death."

" He was a remarkable man, sir," Mr. Percival declared. " Yes, sir, he was a remarkable man. Dr. Primrose was a pulpit orator of unusual power, sir — of unusual power. And something of a poet, sir, I believe."

"Yes," I assented.

"I never read his verse," said the little old gentleman, "but I have heard it said that he was a fine hand at it — a fine hand at it. In fact, I—"

He paused modestly.

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"I am something of a writer myself."

"Indeed!" I said.

"Oh yes; oh yes, I — but in a different line, sir, I—"

Again he hesitated, apparently through hu- mility, so that I encouraged him to proceed.

"Yes?" I said.

" I — er — in fact, I — " he continued, shyly.

"Something philosophical," I ventured.

"Yes; oh yes," he ejaculated. "Well, no; not that exactly."

"Scientific then, Mr. Percival."

He beamed upon me.

" Well, now, how did you guess it ? How did you guess it?" he exclaimed.

"Oh, I merely took a chance at it," I replied, modestly.

"Well, now, that's remarkable. Say — you seem to be a clever young fellow. Are you — are you interested — in science?" he inquired, sitting forward on the very edge of his chair.

"Well, as a doctor, of course," I began.

"Of course, of course," he interposed, "but did you ever take up ancient matters to any extent?"

"Well, no, I cannot say that I have."

Miss Primrose

"Latin and Greek, of course?" suggested Mr. Percival.

"Oh yes, at college — Latin and Greek."

"Dr. Weatherby," said my visitor, his eyes shining, "I don't mind telling you: I am a — "

He wetted his lips and glanced nervously about him.

"We are quite alone," I said.

"Dr. Weatherby, I am an Egyptologist!"

"You are?" I answered.

"Yes," he replied. "Yes, sir, I am an Egyp- tologist."

"That," I remarked, "is a very abstruse de- partment of knowledge."

"It is, sir," replied the little old gentleman, hitching his chair still nearer, so that leaning forward he could pluck my sleeve. " I am the only man who has ever successfully deciphered the inscriptions on the great stone of Iris- Iris!"

"You don't say so!" I exclaimed.

"I do, Dr. Weatherby. I am stating facts, sir. Others have attempted it, men eminent in the learned world, sir, but I alone — here in my bosom — '

He tapped the region of his heart, where a lump suggested a roll of manuscript. " I alone,

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Dr. Weatherby, have succeeded in translating those time-worn symbols. Dr. Weatherby" — he lowered his voice almost to a whisper — "it has been the patient toil of seven years!"

He sprang back suddenly in his chair, and drawing a red bandanna from his coat-tails pro- ceeded to mop his brow.

"Mr. Percival," I said, cordially, looking at my watch, "won't you come to dinner?" His eyes sparkled.

"Well, now, that's good of you," he said. "That's very good of you. I was intending to go on to New York to-night by the evening-train, but since you insist, I might wait over till to- morrow."

"Do so," I urged. "You shall spend the night with us. Letitia will be delighted to see an old friend of her father, and my wife will be equally pleased, I know. Have you your grip with you?"

"It is just here — behind the lounge," said Mr. Percival, springing forward with the agility of a boy and drawing from beneath the flounce of the sofa-cover a small valise of a kind now seldom seen except in garrets or in the hands of such little, old-fashioned gentlemen as my guest.

Miss Primrose

It had been glossy black in its day, but now was sadly bruised and a little mildewed with over- much lying in attic dust. In the very centre of the outer flap, which buckled down over a shallow pocket, intended, I suppose, for comb and brush, was a small round mirror, dollar- sized, which by some miracle had escaped the hand of time.

"By- the- way," I said, as we entered my buggy, "you haven't told me — "

He interrupted me, smiling delightedly.

"Why I am going to New York?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, sir, I'll tell you. I'll tell you, doctor, and it's quite a story."

"Where is your home, Mr. Percival?"

"Sand Ridge," he said, "has been my home, but I expect to reside hereafter in — "

He wetted his lips and pulled at his collar again —

"In New York, sir."

On our drive homeward he told his story. Early in manhood he had been a carpenter by day, by night a student of the ancient languages, which he acquired by dint of such zeal and sacri- fice that Dr. Primrose, then in the zenith of his 143

Hiram Ptolemy

own career, discovering the talents of the poor young artisan, urged and aided him to obtain a pulpit in a country town. He proved, I im- agine, an indifferent preacher, drifting from place to place, and from denomination to de- nomination, to become at last a teacher of Greek and Latin in the Sand Ridge Normal and Col- legiate Institute. Whatever moments he could spare from his academic duties, he had devoted eagerly to Egyptian monuments, and more par- ticularly to that one of Iris - Iris which had baffled full half a century of learned men.

"But how did you do it?" I inquired. He wriggled delightedly in the carriage-seat.

"Doctor," he said, "how does a man perform some marvellous surgical feat, which no one had ever done, or dreamed of doing, before? Eh?"

"I see," I replied, nodding sagely. "Such things are beyond our ken."

"I did it," he chuckled. "I did it, doctor. And now, sir — " .

He paused significantly.

"You are going to New York," I said.

"Exactly. To—"

"Publish," I suggested.

"The very word!" he cried. "Doctor, I am M3

Miss Primrose

going to give my discovery to the world — to the world, sir! — not merely for the edification of savants, but for the enlightenment of my fellow- men."

"By George!" I said, "that's what I call phil- anthropy, Mr. Percival."

"Well, sir," he replied, modestly, "all I ask — all I ask in return, sir, is that I may be per- mitted to spend the remainder of my days, rent free and bread free, in some hall of learning, that I may edit my books and devote myself to further research undismayed by the — the—

"Wolf at the door," I suggested.

"Exactly," he replied. "That's all I ask."

" It is little enough," I remarked.

" Doctor," he said, solemnly, " it is enough, sir, for any learned man."

When I reached home with my unexpected guest, Dove and Letitia smilingly welcomed him ; I say smilingly, for there was that about the little old gentleman which defied ill -humor. He seemed shy at first, as might be expected of a bachelor-Egyptologist, but the simple manners he encountered soon reassured him. I led him to our best front bedroom, where he stood, dazzled apparently by the whiteness and ruffles

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all about him, and could not be induced to set down his valise till he had spread a paper care- fully upon the rug beneath it.

"Now, I guess I'll just wash up," he said, "if you'll permit me," looking doubtfully at the spotless towels and the china bowl decorated with roses, which he called a basin. I assured him that they were there to use.

It was not long before we heard him wander- ing in the upper halls, and hastening to his rescue I found him muttering apologies before a door through which apparently he had blundered, looking for the staircase. Safe on the lower floor again, Letitia put him at his ease with her kind questions about Egyptology, and the de- lighted scientist was in the midst of a glowing narrative of the great stone of Iris - Iris when dinner was announced. It was evident that Dove's table quite disconcerted him with its superfluity of glass and silver, and dropping his meat-fork on the floor, he strenuously resisted all Dove's orders to replace it from the pantry.

" No, no, dear madam," he exclaimed, pointing to the shining row beside his plate, " do not dis- turb yourself, I pray. One of these extras here will do quite as well."

Miss Primrose

During the dinner Letitia plied him with further questions till he wellnigh forgot his plate in his elation at finding such sympathetic auditors. Dove considerately delayed the courses while he talked on, bobbing forward and back- ward in his chair, his slight frame swayed by his agitation, his face glowing, and his beard bris- tling with its contortions.

" Never," he told me afterwards, as we passed from the dining-room arm-in-arm — "never have I enjoyed more charming and intelligent con- versation— never, sir ! "

I offered him cigars, but he declined them, observing that while he never used "the weed," he had up-stairs in his valise, if we would permit him —

We did so, though none the wiser as to what he meant, for he did not complete his sentence, but, bowing acknowledgment, he briskly disap- peared, to return at once without further mishap in our deceitful upper hallway — reappearing with a paper bag which he untwisted and offered gallantly to the ladies.

"Lemon-drops," he said. "Permit me, Mrs. Weatherby. Oh, take more, Miss Letitia — do, I beg ; they are quite inexpensive, I assure you —

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Hiram Ptolemy

quite harmless and inexpensive. Help yourself liberally, Mrs. Weatherby. Lemon - drops, as you are doubtless aware, doctor, are the most healthful of sweets, and as a — have another, Miss Primrose, do ! — as a relaxation after the day's toil are much to be preferred, if you will pardon my saying so, Dr. Weatherby — much to be preferred to that poisonous cigar you are smoking there."

"Quite right, Mr. Percival," I assented.

"They are very nice," Dove said.

"Oh, they are delicious!" cried Letitia.

"Are they not?" said the little man, delighted with his hospitality, and so I left them — two ladies and an Egyptologist sucking lemon-drops and talking amiably of the great stone of Iris- Iris — while I attended on more modern matters, but with regret. I returned, however, in time to escort the scientist to his bedroom, where he opened his valise' and took from it a faded cotton night-gown, which with a few papers and a Testament seemed its sole contents. His books, he explained, had gone on by freight. As I turned to leave him he said, earnestly:

"Doctor, my old friend's daughter is a most remarkable woman, sir — a most remarkable woman."

M7

Miss Primrose

"She is, indeed," I assented.

"Why," said he, "she evinced an interest in the smallest detail of my work! Nothing was too trivial, or too profound for her. I was astonished, sir."

"She is a scholar's daughter, you must re- member, Mr. Percival."

"Ah!" said he. "That's it. That's it, doc- tor. And what an ideal companion she would make for another scholar, sir! — or any man."

Next morning I was called into the country before our guest had risen, and when I returned at noon he had gone, leaving me regretful mes- sages. I heard then what had happened in my absence. Hiram Ptolemy — it is the name we gave to our Egyptologist — had awakened soon after my departure and was found by Dove walking meditatively in the garden. After breakfast, while my wife was busy with little Robin, Letitia listened attentively to a further discourse can the Iris-Iris, which, she was told, bore on its surface a glorious message from the ancient to the modern world.

"It will cause, dear madam," said the scien- tist, his eyes dilating and his voice trembling with emotion, " a revolution in our retrospective 148

Hiram Ptolemy I

vision; it will bring us, as it were, face to face with a civilization that will shame our own!"

Letitia told Dove there was a wondrous dig- nity in the little man as he spoke those words. Then he paused in his eloquence.

"Miss Primrose," he said, "permit me to pay you a great compliment : I have never in my life had the privilege — of meeting a woman — of such understanding as your own. You are re- markably— remarkably like your learned and lamented father."

"Oh, Mr. Percival," Letitia said, flushing, "you could not say a kinder thing."

"And yet," said the scientist, "you — you are quite unattached, are you not?"

"Quite— what, Mr. Percival?"

"Unattached," he repeated, "by ties of — the affections?"

" Oh, quite," she answered, " quite unattached, Mr. Percival."

"But surely," he said, "you still have — '

He paused awkwardly.

"Oh," said Letitia, "I shall never marry, Mr. Percival — if you mean that."

He bowed gravely.

" Doubtless, dear madam — you know best." 149

A. P. A.

|NE spring a strange infection spread through the land and appeared suddenly in our corner of it. First 'a rash became a matter of discus- !sion in our public places, but was not thought serious until the journals of the larger cities brought us news that set our town aflame with apprehension. Half our citizens broke out at once in a kind of measles, not, how- ever, of the common or school-boy sort — that speckled cloud with a silver lining of no-more- school-till-it's-over — nor yet that more malignant type called German measles. It was, in fact, quite Irish in its nature, generally speaking, and in particular it was what might be termed anti- papistical — for, hark you ! it had been discovered that the Catholics were arming secretly to take the world by storm !

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There are many Romanists in Grassy Ford. St. Peter's steeple, tipped with its gilded cross, towers higher than our Protestant spires, and on the Sabbath a hundred farmers tie their horses beneath its sheds and follow their womenfolk and flocks of children in to mass. In those days Father Flynn was the priest, a youngish, round- faced man, who chanted his Latin with a rich accent derived from Donegal, and who was not what is called militant in his manner, but was, in fact, the mildest-spoken of our Grassy Ford divines. He held aloof from those theological disputes which sometimes set his Protestant brethren by the ears, declining politely all in- vitations to attend the famous set debates be- tween our Presbyterian and Universalist min- isters, which ended, I remember, in a splendid God-given victory for — the one whose flock you happened to be in. Father Flynn only smiled at such encounters; he was not belligerent, and while his parish might with some good reason be described as coming from fine old fighting stock, it had never given evidence, so far as I am aware, of any desire to use cold steel, its warm, red, hairy fists having proven equal to those little emergencies which sometimes arise

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— more particularly on a Saturday night, at Riley's. But when it was whispered, then spoken aloud, and finally charged openly on the street corners and even in letters to the Gazette, then edited by Butters 's son, that Father Flynn was training a military company in the base- ment of St. Peter's church, that the young Ro- manists had been armed with rifles, and that ammunition was being stored stealthily and by night under the very altar! — and this by order from the Vatican, where a gigantic plot was brewing to seize the New World for the Pope !— then it was shrewdly observed by those who held the rumors to be truth that Father Flynn did have the look of a conspirator and that he walked with a military ease and swing.

The priest and his flock denied the charges with indignant eloquence, but without con- vincing men like Shears, who argued that the guilty were ever eager to deny. Shears himself was of no persuasion, religious or otherwise, but belonged by nature to the great party of the Opposition, whose village champion he was, whether the issue was the paving of a street or a weightier matter like the one in hand, of pro- tecting the nation, as he said, from the treason

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of its citizens and the machinations of a decaying power eager to regain its ancient sway! He was a lawyer by profession, but one whose time hung heavily on his hands, and, frequenting village shops where others like him gathered daily to argue and expound, he would hold forth glibly on any theme, the chief and awe-inspiring quality of his eloquence being an array of for- midable statistics, culled Heaven knows where, but which few who listened had the knowledge or temerity to oppose. He was now brimming with figures concerning Rome — ancient, medi- aeval, or modern Rome: "Gentlemen, you may take your choice; I'm your man." He was armed also, by way of climax and reserve, should statistics fail to convince his auditors, with some strange stories having a spicy flavor of Boccaccio, which he told in a lowered voice as illustrations of what had been and what might be again should priests prevail.

To hear him pronounce the Eternal City's name was itself ominous. His mouth, always a large one, expanded visibly as he boomed out "R-rome!" discharging it as from a cannon's muzzle, and with such significance and effect that many otherwise sanguine men began to

Miss Primrose

suspect that there might be truth in his solemn warnings. Lights had been seen in St. Peter's church at night ! Catholic youths did hold some kind of drill there on certain week-day evenings ! And, lastly, it was pointed out, Father Flynn himself had ceased denials!

"And why?" Shears asked. "Why, gentle- men? I'll tell ye! — /'// tell ye! — orders from R-rome! You mark my words — orders from Rome!"

Apprehension grew. A society was formed, with Shears at it's head, to protect the village, and assist, if need be, the State itself. Meetings were held — secret and extraordinary sessions— in the Odd Fellow's Block. Watches were set on the priest's house and on St. Peter's. Reso- lute men stood nightly in the shrubbery near the church lest guns and cartridges should be added to the stores already there. Zealous Protestant matrons of the neighborhood supplied hot coffee to the midnight sentinels. All emergencies had been provided for. At a given signal — three pistol-shots in quick succession, and the same repeated at certain intervals — the Guards of Lib- erty would assemble, armed, and march at once in two divisions, a line of skirmishers under Tommy '54

A. P. A. I

Morgan, the light-weight champion of Grassy Fordshire, followed by the main body in com- mand of Shears. No one, however, was to fire a shot, Shears said — "not a shot, gentlemen, till you can see the whites of their eyes. Remember your forefathers!"

Every night now half the town pulled down its curtains and opened doors with the gravest caution.

"Who's there?"

"Peters, you fool."

"Oh, come in, Peters. I thought it might be—"

" I know: you thought it might be the Pope."

It was considered wise to take no chances. Assassination, it was widely known, had ever been a favorite method with conspirators, espe- cially at Rome, and Shears made it plain, in the light of history, that "the vast fabric," as he loved to call the Romish world, was composed of men who, certain of absolution, would murder their dearest friends if so commanded by cipher orders from the Holy See!

Meanwhile, in Grassy Ford, friendships of years were crumbling. Neighbors passed each other without a word ; some sneered, some jeered, some

Miss Primrose

quarrelled openly in the street, and there were fisticuffs at Riley's, and in the midst of this civil strife some one remembered — Shears himself, no doubt — that Dago pictures hung shamelessly on the walls of a public school-room!

"Michael the Angelo" had been a Catholic!

What if Letitia Primrose were the secret ally of the Pope ! . . .

"But she's not a Catholic," said one.

"She's Episcopalian," said another.

"What's the difference?" inquired a third.

"Mighty little, 7 can tell ye," said Colonel Shears. "The thing's worth seein' to."

A knock on Letitia 's door that afternoon was so peremptory that she answered it in haste and some trepidation, yet was not more surprised by the sudden summons than by the man who stepped impressively into the school-room. The pupils turned smilingly to David Shears.

"Your father!" they whispered.

It was, indeed, Colonel Samuel Shears, of the Guards of Liberty. He declined the chair Le- titia offered him.

"No," he said, majestically, " I thank you. I prefer" — and here he thrust up his chin by way of emphasis — "to stand." 156

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The school giggled.

"Silence!" said Letitia. "I am ashamed."

Colonel Shears coolly surveyed the array of impudent youths before him, or perhaps not so much surveyed it as turned upon it, slowly and from side to side, the calm defiance of his massive jowls. He was well content with that splendid mug of his, which he carried habitually at an angle and elevation well calculated to spread dismay. Upon occasion he could render it the more remarkable by a firm compression of the under- lip, pulled gravely down at the corners into what old Butters used to say was a plain attempt "to out -Daniel Webster." The resemblance ended, however, in the regions before described. His brow, it should be stated, did not attest the majesty below them, nor did his small eyes glower with any brooding, owl-like light of wis- dom, as he supposed, but bulged rather with a kind of fierce bravado, as if perpetually he were saying to the world:

"Did I hear a snicker?"

Colonel Shears surveyed the school, and then, more slowly, the pictures on the walls about him, turning sharply and fixing his gaze upon Letitia.

Miss Primrose

[Point One: She was clearly ill at ease.]

[Point Two: A guilty flush had overspread her features.]

"These pictures — " said Colonel Shears, with a wave of his hand in their direction. " Who — if I may be so bold" — and here he raised his voice to the insinuating higher register — "who, may I inquire, paid for them?"

"I did, Mr. Shears," Letitia answered.

" A-ah ! You paid for them ?"

"I did."

"Very good," he replied. "And now, if I may take the liberty to — '

"Pray don't apologize, Mr. Shears."

The Colonel's crest rose superior to the in- terruption.

"If I may be permitted," he said, "to repeat my humble question — may I ask, was it your money — that bought — the pictures?"

"It was."

"Your own?"

"My own."

"You are remarkably generous, Miss Prim- rose."

"I think not," said Letitia, with increasing dignity. " You will pardon me, Mr. Shears, if I 158

A. P. A.

continue with my classes. After school I shall be at liberty to discuss the matter. Meanwhile, won't you be seated?"

Colonel Shears for the second time declined, but asked permission, humbly he said, to ex- amine the works of art upon the walls. His request was granted, and Letitia proceeded with her class. When the inspector had made a critical circuit of the room, and not without certain significant clearings of his throat and some sharp glances intended to catch Letitia unawares, he sniffed the geraniums in the win- dow and picked up a book lying on the corner shelf. He glanced idly at its title and — started ! — gasped ! — and then, horrified, and as if he could not believe his bulging eyes, which fairly pierced the covers of the little volume, he read aloud, in a voice that echoed through the school-room:

" The Lays of Ancient Rome — by Thomas — Babington — Macaulay !"

Letitia, whose back was turned, jumped at the unexpected roar behind her, and the Colonel, perceiving that evidence of what he had sus- pected, now strode forward with an air of tri- umph, tapping the Lays with his heavy fore- finger.

Miss Primrose

"Pardon me," he said, his countenance illu- mined by a truly terrible smile of accusation, "but when, may I ask, did these here heathen tales become a part of the school curriculum?"

"They are not a part of it," replied Letitia.

"Ah! They are not part of it ! You admit it, then? Then may I ask when you made them a part of it, Miss Primrose?"

"The stories of Roman heroes— ' Letitia be- gan.

"That is not my question. That is not my humble question. When did these here Rom- ish—"

"Mr. Shears," Letitia interposed, flushed, but speaking in a quiet tone she sometimes used, and which the Colonel might well have heeded had he known her, " I observe that you are not familiar with Macaulay. I shall be pleased to loan you the volume, to take home with you and read at leisure. You will find it charming."

She turned abruptly to the class behind her.

"We will take for to-morrow's lesson the ex- amples on page one hundred and thirty-three."

The Colonel glared a moment at the stiff little back before him, and then at the book, which he slipped resolutely into his pocket. A dozen 1 60

At P* At /

strides brought him to the door, where he turned grandly with his hand upon the knob.

"I bid you," he said, with a fine, ironical lowering of the under-lip, and bowing slightly, "good-day, ma'am," and the door closed noisily behind him. There was a tittering among the desks. Young David Shears, red - faced and scowling, dropped his eyes before his school- mates' gaze. Letitia tapped sharply on her bell.

That evening the president of the school- board called and talked long and earnestly with Letitia in our parlor. Mr. Roach was a furniture dealer by trade, a leading citizen by profession — a tight, little, sparrow-like man, who had risen by dint of much careful eying of the social and political weather to a place of honor in the vil- lage councils. He was considered safe and con- servative, which was merely another way of saying that he never committed himself on any question, public or private, till he had learned which way the wind was blowing. He smiled a good deal, said nothing that anybody could remember, and voted with the majority. Out of gratitude the majority had rewarded him, and he -was now the custodian of our youth — the 161

Miss Primrose

sentinel, alert and fearful of the slightest shadow, starting even at the sound of his own footfall on the Ramparts of the Republic, as Colonel Shears once called our public schools. He had come, therefore, under the shadow of the night, but out of kindness, as he himself explained, to advise the daughter of an old friend — and in a voice so low and cautious that Dove, seated in the room beyond, heard nothing but a soothing murmur in response to Letitia's spirited but re- spectful tones. In departing, however, he was heard to say :

" Oh, by-the-way — er — I think you had better not mention my calling, Miss Primrose. Better not mention it, I guess. It — er — hum — might do harm, you know. You understand."

"Perfectly," replied Letitia. "Good-night." When the door was closed she turned to Dove.

"What do you think that little — that man wants?" she asked.

"Don't know, I'm sure."

" Wants me to take down all my pictures — "

"Your pictures!"

"Yes — and remove all books but text-books from the school-room. And listen: he says my geraniums — fancy! my poor little red gera-

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niums ! — are ' not provided for in the cur- riculum."

"The curriculum!" cried Dove, hysterically.

"The curriculum," replied Letitia, without a smile. "Do you know what I asked him?" She leaned her chin upon her hands and gazed at Dove's laughing face across the table. " Do you know what I asked that man?"

"No."

"I asked him if Samuel Luther Shears was provided for in the curriculum."

"You didn't say Luther, Letitia!"

"I did— I said Luther."

"Darling! And what did he say to that?"

Letitia smiled.

"What could he say, my love?"

VI

TRUANTS IN ARCADY

HE excitement vanished as it had come, in our tranquil air. A few keen April nights had been suffi- cient for the sentinels in the lilac- bushes, who wearied of yawning at St. Peter's silent and gloomy walls. Their ardor and the matrons' midnight coffee cooling together, they were withdrawn, and the Guards themselves, though they had no formal mus- tering-out, forgot their fears and countersigns and met no more. Friendships were renewed. Neighbors nodded again across their fences. Protestant housewives dropped Catholic- vended sugar into their tea, and while there were men like Shears, who still in dreams saw candles burn- ing, St. Peter's arsenal became a quiet parish church again.

Untouched by the whirlwind's passing, Le- 164

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titia's window-garden went on blooming red, her pictures still hung defiantly on the walls, and classic fiction tempted our youth to her corner shelf. Colonel Shears, however, in that single visit to the school-room, had found new texts for his loquacity, and, our courts failing as usual to furnish him with sufficient cases to engross his mind, he devoted himself with new ardor to our public welfare, and recalled eloquently, to those who had time to listen, the little, old, red school- house of their youth, the simpler methods of the old school-masters, who had no fads or foibles beyond the birch, and who achieved, he said — witness his hearers, to say nothing of his hum- ble self — results to which the world might point with' satisfaction if not with pride. Had the modern schools produced an Abraham Lincoln, he wished to know ?

" Not by a jugful," was his own reply. " You may talk about your kindergartens, and your special courses, and your Froebel, and your Delsarte, and you may hang up your Eyetalian pictures on the wall, and stick up geraniums in your windows — but where is your Abraham ? That's what I ask, gentlemen. I tell you, the schools they had when you and I were boys —

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gentlemen, they were ragged — they were ragged, as we were — but they turned out men ! And you mark my words: there ain't any old maid in Grassy Ford, with all her ancient classics, and her new methods, and her gimcracks and flower- pots, that '11 ever — produce — an Honest — Abe!"

I am told that the crowd agreed with him so heartily and with such congratulatory delight that he was emboldened to announce himself then and there as a candidate for the school- board. Though he failed of election, there was always a party in Grassy Ford opposed to new- fangled methods in the schools. Letitia herself was quite aware that even among her fellow- teachers there were those who smiled at her geraniums, and there had been some criticism of her manner of conducting classes. Shears was fond of relating how a visitor to her room had found a class in fractions discussing robins' eggs! Letitia explained the matter simply enough, but the fact remained for the Colonel to enlarge upon.

"A lesson," he said, "in Robinson's Complete Arithmetic, page twenty-seven, may end in some- body's apple-tree, or the top of Sun Dial, or Popocatapetl, or Peru! Gentlemen, I maintain that such dilly-dallying is a subversion of the — 166

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"Subversion!" growled old man Butters, who still came out on sunny days with the aid of his cane. " I calculate you mean it's not right."

"That," said the orator, suavely, "is the meaning I intended to convey, Mr. Butters."

"Well, then, you're wrong," grumbled the old man. "Why, that there girl" -he called her so till the day he died, this side of ninety — "that there girl's a trump, Sam Shears, / tell ye. She teaches Robinson and God A'mighty, too!"

Letitia was often now in the public eye; her teaching was made a campaign issue, though all her nature shrank from such contests. It was easy to attack her manner of instruction, and sometimes difficult to defend it — it had been so subtle in its plan, and so unusual in its execu- tion, and, moreover, time alone could disclose what fruits would ripen from its flowery care. Old Mr. Butters had put roughly what Dr. Prim- rose himself had taught:

" Dearly beloved, in the fountains of learning, no less than in the water-brooks, His lilies blow."

" Wouldst thou love God?" he asked, in the last sermon that he ever wrote, " First, love His handiwork."

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It was his daughter's motto. It hung on the walls of her simple chamber, with others from her "other poets," as she used to call them— little rubrics printed for her in red and gold at the " Pide Bull." That handiwork of God which she still called Grassy Fordshire was so full of marvels to this poet's daughter, there were so many flowers in it, the birds there sang so blithe- ly, its waters ran with such tremulous messages echoed by woods and whispered by meadow- grasses, its skies, melting into glowing promises in the west, shone thereafter with such jewelled truths, she could hold no text-books higher than her Lord's.

It was not mere duty that drew her morn after morn, year after year, to the red - brick school-house. All the tenderness, all those eager hopes and fears which she lavished so upon her labor, meant life and love to her, for she truly loved them — those troops of laughing, heedless children, passing like flocks of birds, stopping with her for a little twittering season to seize her bounty and, as it seemed to her, fly on gay- ly and forget.

. It may be that I write prejudiced in her favor, but I write as one knowing the dream of a wom-

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an's lifetime to set those young feet straight in pleasant paths, to open those wondering eyes to the beauty of an ancient world about them, in every leaf of it, and wing — in the earth below and the sky above it, and there not only in the flawless azure, but in the rain-clouds' gloom.

"Dark days are also beautiful," she used to tell them. " Had you thought of that ?"

They had not thought of it. It was one of those subtler things which text-books do not say; but Letitia taught them, and a woman of Grassy Ford, when sore bereft, once said to me: "Dark days, doctor, are also beautiful. Miss Primrose told us that, when we went to school to her. It was of clouds she spoke, but I re- membered it — and now I know."

"Oh, Miss Primrose," Johnny Murray used to say. " Do you remember when I went to school to you? Do you remember where I sat — there by the window? Well, it's awfully funny, but do you know, I never add or multiply or sub- tract but I smell geraniums."

Perhaps, the Colonel would reply, that was why Johnny Murray deserted the ledgers he was set to keep — the scent of the flowers in them proved too strong for him. It may be so, for

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little things count so surely ; it may be the rea- son he is to-day a sun-browned farmer instead of a lily-white clerk in his father's store. From the geraniums in a school-room window to a thousand peach-trees blooming in a valley is a long journey, but it was for just such journeys that Letitia taught, and not merely for that shorter one which led through her petty school- room to the grade above.

Letitia tells me that sitting there at her higher desk above those rows of heads, she used to think of them as flowers, and of her school-room as a garden. Often then it would come to her how pleasant a task it was to tend the roses there — golden - haired Laura Vane, and Alice Bishop, and Isabel Walton, and handsome, black- eyed Tommy Willis, whose pranks are famous in Grassy Fordshire still; then, at the doting thought of them, her heart would smite her, and she would turn to those other homelier flowers. It must have been in some such moment of re- pentance that Susan Leary, chancing to raise her eyes to her adored school-mistress, found Letitia smiling so amiably upon her that the girl blushed, and from that hour grew more mind- ful of her scolding looks ; her freckled face was

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scrubbed quite glossy after that, her dress was neater, her ribbons tied, till by-and-by, to Le- titia's wonder and reward, she found in that beaming Irish face upturned to her, color and fragrance for her very soul.

Young Peter Bauer was a German sprout transplanted steeragewise to a corner of the garden, and slow in budding, his face as blank as the blackboard-wall he grew beside ; but one fine morning, at a single question in the B geog- raphy, it burst into roseate bloom.

"Teacher, teacher, I know dot! Suabia ist in Deutschland. Mein vater ist in Deutschland! Ich bin—"

And after that Peter was a poppy on Friday afternoons, reading essays on his fatherland. Thus, honest gardener that Letitia was, she trained and pruned, disdaining nothing because of weediness, believing that what would bear a leaf would bear a flower as well. To leave at four o'clock, to return at nine and find one open which had been shut before! — is it not the gar- dener's morning joy ?

It was not alone the plants which refused to grow for her that caused her pain. These at least she had never loved, however patiently

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she had cared for them. There were wayward beauties in her garden who on tenderer stalks bore longer thorns. She learned, in her way, the lesson mothers learn in theirs, who sometimes love and toil and sacrifice unceasingly, and wait, years or forever, for reward.

"Remember, Miss Primrose, you are not a mother," snapped a certain sharp- tongued ma- tron of our town who had disagreed with her.

"Oh," said Letitia, "but I have loved so many children. I am a kind of mother."

"Mother!" cried the matron.

"Yes," Letitia answered. "I am a mother — without a child."

Had they been her children, it had been easier to forgive their thoughtlessness. Offended some- times by her discipline, they said plain things of her lack of pretty youth; they whispered lies of her; she shed some tears, I know, over those scribblings which she intercepted or found for- gotten on the school - room floor. Then her garden was the abode of shadows, her efforts vain there. Sometimes, for solace, she sought out Dove, but the habit of lonely thinking had grown upon her; it had been enforced by her maidenhood .

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While I am not a herb -doc tor by diploma, I am one by faith, simples have wrought such speedy cures in my own gray hours, and Grassy- Fordshire is so green with them that a walk by Troublesome or a climb on Sun Dial is in itself a marvellous remedy, aromatic and ano- dyne. In my drives to patients beyond the town, I have been seized suddenly by a kind of fever. There are no pills for it, or powders, or any drugs in all the bottles on my shelves — but a jointed fishing-rod and line kept in the bottom of a doctor's buggy is efficacious if applied in time. Often when that spell was on me I have turned Pegasus towards the nearest stream, and while he nibbled, one hour on a scented bank, fish or not — sixty drops from the grass-green phial of a summer's day — has restored my soul. Clattering home again at double - quick, Peg- asus's ears on end, his nostrils quivering, my buggy thumping over thank - you - ma'ams, I would not be a city leech for a brown-stone front and a brass name-plate upon my door.

In some such pleasant hooky-hour in spring I had cast, sullenly enough, but was now hum- ming to myself, in tune with Troublesome, when a twig snapped behind the willows. Some cow,

Miss Primrose

thought I, and kept my eyes upon the stream. Another twig: I turned inquiringly. There, by the water-side, and all unmindful of my presence, was Letitia Primrose.

I bit my pipe clean through. I would have called at once, but something stopped me. She stood quietly by the brook, gazing at the stones on which it played and sang. Her shoulders drooped a little, her face seemed tired and pale. She turned and saw me.

"Bertram!" Her face was guilty.

" Hello!" I said, lighting my pipe.

"You here, Bertram?"

"Yes," I replied, casting again. "How is it you're here? No school, Letitia?"

She hesitated.

"No patients, doctor?" she asked, softly.

"No patients dying," I retorted. We eyed each other.

"I had a headache," she said, meekly, seat- ing herself upon a log. "And I have a substi- tute."

"There are other doctors," I remarked.

Suddenly she rose.

"I think," she said, "I'll just stroll that way, if you don't mind, Bertram."

Truants in Arcady

"Not at all," I replied. "I know how you feel, Letitia. That's why I come here."

"Do you?" she asked. "Then this isn't your first—"

"Nor my twentieth offence," I replied, laugh- ing. She sighed.

"I'm glad of that. It's my first — really. I feel like a criminal."

I pointed with my broken pipe-stem.

"You'll find the best path there," I said.

"I think I'll stay, if you don't mind, Ber- tram."

"Stay, by all means," I replied, and went on fishing. Letitia was the first to speak.

"It's hard always trying to be — dominant," she remarked, "isn't it?"

"Why, I rather like it," I replied.

"You are a man," she said. "Men do, I believe. But I, I get so tired sometimes" — she bit her lip — "of being master." She laughed nervously. "That's why I ran away."

Presently she went on speaking.

"If we could only be surrounded by such things as these, always, how serene our lives might be. Don't smile. It's my old sermon of environment, I know ; but why are you here ? —

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and why am I? I try my best to keep the beautiful before my children's eyes, to tempt them into lovely thinking. Bertram, I believe, heart and soul, in the power of beauty. I am so sure of it, I know I should be a stronger teacher if I were young and beautiful myself — or even pretty, like Helen White."

"She is a mere wax doll," I said.

"But children like pretty faces," she replied. " Look! You have a fish!"

It was a snag, but while I was busy with it she rose.

"Wait," I said, "I'll drive you home."

"No, thank you, Bertram. I'd rather walk. My head is better now. Good-bye."

I did not urge her. When she had gone I picked up a slip of paper from the path where she had passed. It was a crumpled half of a blue- ruled leaf torn from some pupil's tablet, and, scrawled upon it in a school-girl's hand, I read :

" DEAR EDNA,— Don't mind the homely old thing. Everybody says she's fifty if she's a day. No one would marry her, so she had to teach school."

It was written, Dove told me afterwards, by one of the rose-girls in Letitia's garden.

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VII

PEGGY NEAL

Y aunt Miranda, who was wise in many things, used to maintain that a woman ceased to be charming only when she thought she had I ceased to be so ; that age had noth- ing whatever to do with the matter — and so saying, she would smile so bewitchingly upon me that I was forced inevitably to the conclu- sion that she bore her fifty years much better than many women their paltry score. Letitia was not so sanguine; she laid more stress upon the spring-time. I have heard her say that there was nothing lovelier in the world than a fair young girl full of pure spirits as a rose-cup full of dew. She would turn in the street to look at one ; she liked them to be about her ; her own face grew more winning in such comrade- ship, and when she was given a higher school-

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room, where the girls wore skirts to their shoe- tops and put up their hair, it was an almost childish pleasure which she displayed. It was this very preference for exquisite maidenhood that explained her fondness for Peggy Neal. It was not scholarship which had won the teacher's heart, for Peggy was an indifferent student, as Letitia herself confessed, but she was a plump and brown-eyed, pink-cheeked country girl who always smiled and who had that grace of inno- cence and bloom of health which are the witchery of youth. She was a favorite with school-boys, a belle of theirs at straw-rides, dances, and taffy- pulls, and other diversions of our Grassy Ford- shire teens, where, however, her gentle ways, her readiness to follow rather than to lead, her utter incapability of envy or spiteful speech made her beloved of girls as well. She was the amiable maiden whom men look twice at, yet whose sis- ters are never quite jealous, holding her charm to be mere pinkish prettiness and beneath the envy of superior minds like theirs. Peggy was the sort of girl Letitia had never been, roseate with the kind of youth Letitia had never known, and it enchanted her as a joy and beauty which had been denied.

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Neal, the father, was a drunken farmer, whose wife was chiefly responsible for the crops they planted, and who, being strong and abler than her shiftless spouse, was usually to be seen in the field and garden directing and aiding the hired man. Peggy was the only child. She helped her mother in the kitchen, fed the chickens, skimmed the milk, sold the butter, and let her father in o' nights. He was a by- word in the village. Occasional revivalists prayed for him publicly upon their knees, but without effect. His wife could have told them how futile that method was; she had tried it herself in more hopeful years. She had tried rage also, but it left her bitter and sick of life, and Pat the drunk- er; so wisely she had fallen back upon resigna- tion, though not of the apathetic sort, and had made herself mistress of the farm, where her husband was suffered to spend his nights if he chose, or was able to walk so far from the tavern where he apent his days.

For Peggy the mother had better dreams. She knew that the girl was beautifu', and she knew also what beauty, however born, might win for itself in a wider world than her own had been. Peggy, therefore, was to finish school,

Miss Primrose

however the farm might suffer by her absence and the expense of such simple dress as her village friendships would require. Nature might marry Thrift or Money, thought the hard-faced woman in the faded sunbonnet; silk and lace and a new environment might make a queen of this beggar-maid, her last hope in a life of hope- lessness. Proudly she watched her daughter flower into village fame, guarding that fairness with jealous eyes.

"Daughter," she would say, "where is your hat?"

"Mamma, I like the sun."

" Nonsense. . Go straight and fetch it and put it on. Do you want to be speckled like your ugly old mother- hen?"

It was a care and pride that would have turned another and far less lovely head than Peggy's, yet in spite of it this country school-girl ripened sweetly. Driving on country visits I usecl to meet her by the way, walking easily and hum- ming to herself the while, her books and luncheon swinging at her side — a perfect model for ro- mantic painters who run to milk-maids, or, as Letitia used to say, the veritable Phyllis of old English song.

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The mother rose at dawn; she toiled by sun- light and by lamplight; her face grew haggard, her figure gaunter, her voice sharper with bitter irony, her heart harder save in that one lone corner which was kept soft — solely for her child. Peggy, I believe, was the only living thing she smiled upon. Neighbors dreaded her cutting tongue ; her husband was too dazed to care.

Time went by. In spite of that stern resolve in the woman's nature, and all her labor and frugal scheming, what with the failure of crops and her lack of knowledge of their better care, and an old encumbrance whose interest could be barely met on the quarter-days that cast their shadows on the whole round year, the farm declined. Letitia's gifts from her own wardrobe were all that kept Peggy Neal in school. It was a word from Letitia also that raised the cloud on the mother's face when despair was darkest there. Might not summer-boarders, Letitia asked, bear a surer, more golden harvest than those worn- out fields?

"Summer-boarders!" cried Mrs. Neal, with a grim irony in her voice. But she repeated it — "Summer-boarders," in a milder tone, and the plan was tried.

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The first ones came in June. They descended noisily from the fast express, lugging bags and fishing-rods and guns. Some of them stared; some young ones whistled softly at the fair driver of that old two-seated buckboard wait- ing to bear them to the farm. They greeted effusively — for the daughter's sake — the hard- mouthed woman who met them at the door, striving her best to smile a welcome. She it was who showed them their plain but well- scrubbed chambers, while their minds were at the barn.

Pastures and orchards bore strange fruit that summer: white-faced city clerks in soft, pink shirts smoked cigarettes and browned in the sun ; freckled ladies set up their easels in the cow-lot ; high-school professors asked one another puzzling questions, balanced cannily on the topmost rail of the Virginia fence, and all — all, that is, to a man — helped Peggy carry in the milk, helped Peggy churn, helped Peggy bake, helped Peggy set the table, and clear it, and wipe the dishes, and set them safely away again in the dim pantry — helped Peggy to market, and Peggy to church : so rose her star.

The mother watched, remembering her own 182

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girlhood. Its romance, seen through a mist of gloomy years, seemed foolish now. There might be happiness in human life — she had never known any. There was a deal of nonsense in the world called love, she knew, and there was a surer thing called money. Peggy should wait for it.

The mother watched, smiling to herself sar- donically, secretly well-pleased — smiling because she knew quite well that these callow sprigs had far less money than negligees; well-pleased be- cause she guessed that soon enough a man with both would be hovering about sweet Peggy's dairy. It was a humorous thing to her that all these city men should think it beautiful — that dampish, sunless spot where the milk-cans stood waist-deep in cresses.

She kept sharp eyes upon her daughter, and farm-house duties filled Peggy's days to their very brim. There must be no loitering by star- light, either. Mother and daughter now slept together in the attic store-room, for the new farming had proved a prosperous thing.

The summer was not like other summers. There was life and gayety up at Neal's: strum- ming of banjos and the sound of laughter and

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singing on the porch, much lingering in ham- mocks under the pine-trees, moonlit jaunts in the old hay-rick, lanterns moving about the barn and dairy, empty bowls on the buttery table when Mrs. Neal came down at dawn, and half-cut loaves in the covered crocks.

September came and the harvest had been gathere