"There's one place in this town where all us country folks goes first," said Aunt Jane oracularly, "and that's the old drug-store on the corner yonder. Let the mare alone, and she'll go right there without guidin'."
And so she did, stopping at a corner of the square before a three-story brick building with none of the usual signs of a drug-store about it. Aunt Jane stepped out to make her purchases, and I stayed in the buggy to hold the horse, an unnecessary precaution, for old Nelly at once dropped her head in a drowsy, meditative way that showed she had no intention of leaving the familiar stopping-place.
I heard a cheery voice within giving Aunt Jane an old friend's greeting, and while she made her purchases and gossiped with the proprietor over the high, old-fashioned counter, I stared into the dark, dingy vista of the ancient store. The stone door-step, hollowed like the steps to the Blarney stone, had borne the steady tread of feet for sixty years, and the floor within was worn in the same way. At the far end of the store, I discerned a group of elderly men. Some were seated on packing-boxes, conveniently placed around the store for the use of those who desired to stay a while to rest and whittle; others reposed on the small of their backs in rickety, splint-bottomed chairs tilted against the wall, their feet on the rounds of the chairs, their knees on a level with their chins, and about them an air of profound repose that showed them to be as much a part of the store as the old iron stove. The window proclaimed the place the den of an archæologist, for it was filled with arrow-heads neatly mounted on pasteboard, Indian pottery, petrifactions, stone hammers, tomahawks, relics of aboriginal and prehistoric man that the mounds and caves of Kentucky yield up to the seeker of such buried treasure. Both within and without, the old store was like an embodiment of conservatism standing unmoved while the swift currents of modern progress were sweeping around it and beating against it.
While I was gazing and wondering, Aunt Jane came out. "I reckon you think this is a curious-lookin' place, honey," she said, as she stowed away her packages on the seat. "This old store is one o' the places that ain't changed in my memory. 'Stablished in 1847, and I don't reckon it's had a right good cleanin' from that day to this, but the best of everything a drug-store keeps is in them old dusty bottles and jars. It does me good to come to town and find one place lookin' jest like it did when me and Abram used to come on county-court days and circus days. And there's the old men sittin' around that stove. They've been there for the last twenty-five years, and they'll be there till death comes along and picks 'em up and carries 'em away. And now, child, give me the lines. I'm goin' to drive around a little while, and then we'll go home."
She took the lines and began what seemed to me an aimless ramble through the streets of the town. She grew strangely silent, and that look on her face—was it sadness or only joy in retrospect? I began to see the meaning of our ride to town. The garden-seed and other purchases were but a vain pretext. In reality, she had come to keep a tryst with the past. Now and then she remembered my presence, and would point to some place that was a link between to-day and yesterday. Here was the place in which General Buckner had made his headquarters during the Civil War; in that house Charles Sumner was once a guest; on yonder height stood a Confederate fortification, and on a similar elevation on the opposite side of town was another fort erected by a Federal commander, afterward a president; and—wondrous miracle!—the angel of peace had turned the old fort into a garden. As Aunt Jane spoke, the light of other days shone for me, too, and in its radiance the commonplace faded out of sight.
We traveled in a circle, and our ride ended where it had begun. As we paused at the drinking-fountain to let old Nelly quench her thirst, Aunt Jane leaned out of the buggy and looked wistfully up and down the square. I knew what was in her heart. She was thinking that, perhaps, this was the last time she would see the town.
"It's a curious thing, child," she said finally, "that while folks are growin' old, the towns they live in are growin' young. The town I ricollect when I was a young gyirl is the old town, and now, when I'm old, the town's young, and growin' younger and newer every day. Ain't it a pity folks can't grow young instead of growin' old?" She paused, and I felt the distance of a lifetime growing up between us.
Presently she came out of her reverie, smiling brightly. "We're lookin' at the same things, honey," she said, "but you see jest one thing, and I'm seein' double all the time. You see this square with the park in the middle and the fine four-and five-story buildin's all around it, and I see it, too; but back of it I can see the old square with the court-house in the middle of it and the scraggly locust-trees growin' around it and the market-house back of it. That market-house wasn't much to look at, but the meat they sold there was the sort a king can't git nowadays. And there was the clerk's office in front of the court-house, and the county clerk used to stand on the door-step and call out the names of the witnesses that was wanted when they was tryin' a case in court. I can see him now, holdin' up a piece o' paper to read the names off, and the sun shinin' on his gray head. And that three-story hotel over yonder on the corner—that used to be the old tavern in the days when there wasn't any railroad, and the stage'd come rumblin' up, and everybody'd come runnin' to their front doors to see who the passengers was.
"The town was so quiet in them days, child, that you could lay down in the court-house yard and go to sleep, and so little that if you put your head out o' the winder and hollered for John Smith, you'd be pretty certain to git John Smith. If he didn't hear you, some of his neighbors would, and they'd hunt him up for you. Things wasn't as well kept then as they are now. I ricollect the jimson-weeds growin' in the court-house yard, and one year the dog-fennel was so plentiful that Uncle Jim Matthews says to me, says he, 'It looks to me like the Smiths and the Joneses and the dog-fennel are about to take the town.'"
She laughed gaily and handed the reins to me. "And now, child, we've got to make tracks for home, unless we want to be out after sundown."