"It is another daughter, grandmother, that Edward has brought," says some one, "for your blessing."
"Has she blue eyes, my son? Put her hand in mine, for she is my latest born, the child of my old age. Shall I sing you a song, children?" Her hand is in her pocket as of old; she is idly fumbling for a toy, a welcome gift to the children that have come again.
"Come, children, sit around the fire. Shall I sing you a song, or tell you a story? Stir the fire, for it is cold; the nights are growing colder."
The clock in the corner struck nine, the bed-time of those old days. The song of life was indeed sung, the story told, it was bed-time at last. Good night to thee, grandmother! The old-fashioned grandmother was no more, and we miss her forever. But we will set up a tablet in the midst of the memory, in the midst of the heart, and write on it only this:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF THE
OLD-FASHIONED GRANDMOTHER.
GOD BLESS HER FOR EVER.
CHAPTER IV.
OUT-DOOR PREACHING.
The miracle of Spring is beginning.
Leafless, indeed, stand the great woods, and shivering in the cold North wind. The joints of rheumatic oaks creak dismally, and there is a moan in the maples. The skeleton orchards are gray and brown upon the Southern slopes, but the sun is shining and the clock of Time ticks in the heart of May. A January fire rolls and roars up the chimney's capacious throat; the water-pail is nightly glazed with ice, but the birds are abroad and their songs are in all the air. Not a wisp of hay remains in the wide, deep bay of the barn, and the cows decline "to give down," and the lambs are going where the good lambs go, though the lilacs are budding and the willows have fringed the streams with green.
How full of the dear old music of Summer are wood, orchard and field. Even the great empty barn, with its ribs of oak, is a-twitter with swallows that dart in and out at the diamond doors in the gables, and the mud-walled cottages that are built along the rafters. The robins are singing the self-same song they sang a thousand years ago, and the finches are untarnished and golden as ever. Down by the marsh the bobo'-links are ringing their little bells, and swinging to and fro upon the little bushes that sway in the wind. The brown thrushes have built their nests in the fence-corners and the heaps of brush; a Baltimore oriole flickered like a flake of fire through the garden, this morning, and drifted away behind the barn; we frightened up a whip-poor-will yesterday, from among the withered leases, and found a blue-bird's nest with a single egg in a hollow stump in the pasture. A little gray couple are busy building in the cleft of the bar-post, and a small Trojan in speckled jacket is about to keep house on the loaded end of the well-sweep that goes up forty times a day and comes down with a bang. Why didn't the little idiot take up his quarters in the bucket! A fortnight ago, John hung his jacket upon the fence, and to-day he shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and two eggs as blue as the sky.
There is singing everywhere: from the tuft of gray grass there comes a small tune of two notes and a rest, then two more; from the second rail of the fence a gush of melody; from the roof-ridge, a solo; from the depths of the air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds and the buds make it May, and May it shall be.