Fashion and Famine

by Ann S. Stephens

It is pleasant to wait for the blessing,

With a heart free from malice and strife,

While a turkey, that's portly with dressing,

Lies, meekly awaiting the knife.

Amid all the varieties of architecture—Grecian, Gothic, Swiss, Chinese, and even Egyptian, to be met with on Long Island, there yet may be found some genuine old farms, with barns instead of carriage-houses, and cow sheds in the place of pony stables. To these old houses are still attached generous gardens, hedged in with picket fences, and teeming with vegetables, and front yards full of old-fashioned shrubbery, with thick grass half a century old mossing them over. These things, primitive, and full of the olden times, are not yet crowded out of sight by sloping lawns, gravel walks, and newly acclimated flowers; and if they do not so vividly appeal to the taste, those, who have hearts, sometimes find them softened by these relicts of the past, to warmer and sweeter feelings than mere fancy ever aroused.

One of these old houses, a low roofed, unpretending dwelling, exhibiting unmistakable evidence of what had once been white paint on the edges of its clap-boards, and crowned by a huge stone chimney, whose generous throat seemed half choked up with swallows' nests, belonged to a character in our story which the reader cannot have forgotten without breaking the author's heart.

It was autumn—but a generous, balmy autumn, that seemed to cajole and flatter the summer into keeping it company close up to Christmas. True, the gorgeous tints of a late Indian summer lay richly among the trees, but some patches of bright green were still left, defying the season, and putting aside, from day to day, the red and golden veil which the frost was constantly endeavoring to cast over them.

In front of the old house stood two maples—noble trees, such as have had no time to root themselves around your modern cottages. These maples, symmetrical as a pair of huge pine cones, rose against the house a perfect cloud of gorgeous foliage. One was red as blood, and with a dash of the most vivid green still keeping its hold down the centre of each leaf—the other golden all over, as if its roots were nourished in the metallic soil of California, and its leaves dusted by the winds that drift up gold in the valley of Sacramento. These superb trees blended and wove their ripe leaves together, now throwing out a wave of red, now a mass of gold, and here a tinge of green in splendid confusion.

All around, under these maples, the grass was littered with a fantastic carpet of leaves, showered down from their branches. They hung around the huge old lilac bushes. They fluttered down to the rose thickets, and lay in patches of torn crimson and crumpled gold among the house-leeks and mosses on the roof.

In and out, through this shower of ripe leaves, fluttered the swallows. In and out along the heavy branches, darted a pair of red squirrels, who owned a nest in one of the oldest and most stately trees. In and out, through the long, low kitchen, the parlor, the pantries, and the milk-room, went and came our old friend, Mrs. Gray, the comely huckster-woman of Fulton market. That house was hers. That great square garden at the back door was hers. How comfortable and harvest-like it lay, sloping down toward the south, divided into sections, crowded with parsnips, beets, onions, potatoes, raspberry thickets, and strawberry patches; in short, running over with a stock in trade that had furnished her market stall during the year.