A MEADOW STREAM
It was October, the days were short, and I had early to seek a stopping-place for the night. It still lacked something of supper-time when I put my horse out at one of the farm-houses, and I took the opportunity for a walk on the village street. The damp gloom of evening had settled down. There were lights in the windows and movements at the barns, and a team or two was jogging homeward along the road. Westward, in plain sight across the river, was the heavy spur of a mountain, dark against the evening sky. A single little light was trembling on the summit of the crag. This came from a building known as “the prospect house.” The proprietor lives there the year around, and from Sunderland’s snug street, on cold winter nights, the light is still to be seen sending out shivering rays into the frosty darkness.
A HOME UNDER THE ELMS
I returned presently to the house and had supper. That finished, the small boy of the family brought a cup of boiled chestnuts, and while we munched them, explained how he had picked up eighty-one quarts of nuts so far that year. In his pocket the boy had other treasures. He pulled forth a handful of horse-chestnuts, and told me they grew on a little tree down by the burying-ground.
“The boys up at our school make men of ’em,” he said. “They take one chestnut and cut a face on it like you do on a pumpkin for a jack-o’-lantern. That’s the head. Then they take a bigger one and cut two or three places in front for buttons, and make holes to stick in toothpicks for legs, and they stick in more for arms, and with a little short piece fasten the head on the body. Then they put ’em up on the stove-pipe where the teacher can’t get ’em, and they stay there all day. Sometimes they make caps for ’em.” He got out his jack-knife and spent the rest of the evening manufacturing these queer little men for my benefit.
A DOOR-STEP GROUP
The next morning I turned eastward and went along the quiet, pleasant roads, now in the woods, now among pastures where the wayside had grown up to an everchanging hedge of bushes and trees. Much of the way was uphill, and I sometimes came out on open slopes which gave far-away glimpses over the valley I had left behind.