It wasn't a horde of trees at all, nothing but an old rotten stump and no good to anybody, but I felt awful bad about it as soon as she spoke that poetry—not because the old stump was any good but because my grandmother was so old and seemed to think so much of the old stump.
Me and Swatty and Bony just stood and didn't know what to say. We wished she had scolded us or something instead of feeling that way.
“Gone! Gone!” she said, letting her hands fall, as if that old stump was the only thing she ever cared for. “Gone!”
“It is not now as it has been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen
I now can see no more!”
Well, we couldn't say anything, could we, when she felt like that? We could just feel mean. It didn't matter that we knew it was just an old, rotten, no good stump, because she thought it was a tree and that we had cut it down. She shook her head, and then:
“Some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”
So then she turned and walked away with her head bent down and the tears running down her cheeks, and I stood there with the plate of graham crackers in my hand and didn't know what to do or what to say, and Bony stood and looked kind of scared. I didn't dare look after my grandmother. I just felt mean and sneaky and ashamed and sort of miserable about everything, because I knew she thought I had done it when I knew I oughtn't to have done it. At the step of the side door she stopped and looked back and then went into the house, all old and sad-looking. I guessed I had broken her heart, she felt so bad about it.
So then Bony started to go home. He didn't say anything, but he sort of edged off as if he wanted to sneak away and get out of any trouble I was in. Swatty spoke right up.
“You come back here!” he said. “You come back, or I'll show you!”
I was glad to have anybody say anything, even that.