For five minutes she sang and then, with crouching steps, the cat turned tail and crawled away into the garden. The thrush ceased her singing and fluttered exhausted up to the nest.
And they write of women deserting their children!
XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
He has just reached his eightieth year. Eighty times—not conscious perhaps of them all—he has seen the wall-flowers blossom in his old garden; well-nigh eighty times has he thinned out his lettuces and his spring onions, pruned his few rose trees, weeded his gravel paths.
Now he is bent with rheumatism; his rounded back and stooping head, his tremulous knees in their old corduroy breeches, are but sorry promises of what he was. Yet with what I have been told and what I can easily imagine, it is plainly that I can see the fine stalwart fellow he has been. Until the age of seventy-two he was the carrier for our village. How many journeys he made, fair weather or foul, always up to the stroke of time, never forgetting the message for this person, the purchase for that, they will all tell you here in the village. I know nothing of his life as a carrier. It is of an old man I give you my picture—an old man awaiting the coming of death with a clear eye and a sturdy heart, enjoying the last moments of life while he may, and facing those sorrows and deprivations which come with old age in a way that many a younger man might learn and profit from.