* * * * * *
It was in this humble fashion that I brought to my mother the new daughter for whom she had longed, and it was in this homely way that the Garlands and McClintocks received my wife. Amid surroundings which were without grace of art or touch of poetry, the informal and very plain ceremony took place, but the words were sincere, and the forms and features of the speakers deeply significant of the past. No matter what my mother's storms and sorrows had been, she was now at peace. With a smiling face she confronted the future.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Father's Inheritance
At half-past six on the morning following our arrival at the Homestead, my father opened the stairway door and shouted, just as he had been wont to do in the days when I was a boy on the farm—"Hamlin! Time to get up!" and with a wry grin I called to Zulime and explained, "In our family, breakfast is a full and regular meal at which every member of the household is expected promptly at seven."
It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies, doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with indigestion.
The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of the kitchen was celestial."
My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done at four o'clock."