The Plum Tree

SHE WAS AT THE STATION IN HER PHAETON TO MEET ME
Copyright 1905 The Bobbs-Merrill Company
March

We can hold out six months longer,—at least six months. My mother's tone made the six months stretch encouragingly into six long years.
I see her now, vividly as if it were only yesterday. We were at our scant breakfast, I as blue as was ever even twenty-five, she brave and confident. And hers was no mere pretense to reassure me, no cheerless optimism of ignorance, but the through-and-through courage and strength of those who flinch for no bogey that life or death can conjure. Her tone lifted me; I glanced at her, and what shone from her eyes set me on my feet, face to the foe. The table-cloth was darned in many places, but so skilfully that you could have looked closely without detecting it. Not a lump of sugar, not a slice of bread, went to waste in that house; yet even I had to think twice to realize that we were poor, desperately poor. She did not hide our poverty; she beautified it, she dignified it into Spartan simplicity. I know it is not the glamour over the past that makes me believe there are no women now like those of the race to which she belonged. The world, to-day, yields comfort too easily to the capable; hardship is the only mould for such character, and in those days, in this middle-western country, even the capable were not strangers to hardship.
When I was young, she went on, and things looked black, as they have a habit of looking to the young and inexperienced, —that put in with a teasing smile for me,— I used to say to myself, 'Well, anyhow, they can't kill me.' And the thought used to cheer me up wonderfully. In fact, it still does.
I no longer felt hopeless. I began to gnaw my troubles again—despair is still.
Judge Granby is a dog, said I; yes, a dog.
Why 'dog'? objected my mother. Why not simply 'mean man'? I've never known a dog that could equal a man who set out to be 'ornery.'
When I think of all the work I've done for him in these three years—