When I got home, I found that there was to be blueberry pudding for dinner—and my brother was gone for the day!
CHAPTER XVI
WEST INJY LANE
Every one called it "West Injy Lane," but some of the property holders had put up a sign-post with the words, "Washington Avenue."
There was never a Washington Avenue which looked so little like one. A pleasant old road,—it had not greatly changed its appearance since the day when the man for whom it had been renamed passed by. It meandered along, innocent of sidewalks, and bordered, right and left, with grass. A pond at one end was musical all the spring and summer,—first with the high notes of the "peepers," then with the soprano trilling of toads, and finally with the gruff performances of basso-profundo bullfrogs.
Cows and sheep nibbled the grass at the sides of the road, or grazed in the meadows beyond the stone walls. There were only five or six farm-houses throughout the mile and a half of the lane, and their barns stood open all summer, while the swallows flashed in and out. Solemn files of white ducks waddled down to the pond, where they spread devastation among the minnows and polliwogs, and then waddled contentedly back again, clapping their yellow bills as if smacking their lips. Their bills and feet gleamed in the sunlight.
It does not seem that any kind of weather but bright sunshine ever prevailed in West Injy Lane. Certainly, Ed Mason and I did not see how it could be improved. At one end, near the pond, was the country grocery where you could get weighed on the scales, and buy jumbles (shaped like an elephant) at two for a cent. Near the other end was Haskell's Field,—a hallowed spot, for it always contained one or two grass-covered rings, the relics of circuses past and the promise of circuses to come.
Midway between the two, and in front of one of the houses, was a gigantic and half-ruined elm, already celebrated in legend and verse. Its romantic story never impressed us, except to make me wonder how it happened that when the young man had stuck a willow branch into the ground in front of his sweetheart's dwelling, an elm tree should have sprouted therefrom.