CHAPTER II.—NEIGHBORS.
Onoway House stood on the Centerville Road, on a farm of about four acres. All of the land was not worked, just the part that was laid out as a garden and a small orchard of peach trees. The rest was open meadow running down to the river. It had originally been a much larger farm—Old Deacon Waterhouse’s place—but after his death it had been divided up and sold in sections. Onoway House was the original home built by the deacon when he bought the farm as a young man. It was a very old place, large and rambling, and full of queer corners and passageways, and a big echoing cobwebby attic, crowded with old furniture and trunks. The house had been sold with all its furnishings at the Deacon’s death, and the old things were still in the rooms when the Bartletts bought it twenty-five years later. This made it unnecessary for the Gardiners, when they came, to bring any of their own furniture. The Bartletts had never lived on the place, hiring a caretaker to work the garden, and it was the sudden departure of this man that had given Migwan her chance.
On either side of Onoway House was a farm of much larger proportions. To the right there stood a big, homelike looking farmhouse painted white, with porches and vines and a lawn in front running down to the road; on the left was a smaller house, painted dark red, with a vegetable bed in front. The garden at Onoway House had been given a good start and the strawberries and asparagus and sundry other vegetables were ready to market when Migwan took possession. The Winnebagos looked on the gardening as a grand lark and pitched in with a will to help Migwan make her fortune from the ground.
“Did you ever see anything half so delicate as this little new pea-vine?” asked Migwan, puttering happily over one of the long beds.
“Or anything half so indelicate as this plantain bush?” asked Nyoda, busily grubbing weeds. “‘Scarce reared above the parent earth thy tender form,’” she quoted, “‘and yet with a root three times as long as the hair of Claire de Lorme!’”
“Burns would relish hearing that line of his applied to weeds,” said Migwan, laughing. “I wonder what he would have written if he had turned up a plantain weed with his plough instead of a mountain daisy.”
“He wouldn’t have turned up a plantain weed,” said Nyoda, with a vicious thrust of the long knife with which she was weeding, “it would have turned him up.”
Migwan rose from the ground slowly and painfully. “Oh dear,” she sighed, “I wonder if Burns ever got as stiff in the joints from close contact with Nature as I am?”
“He certainly must have,” observed Nyoda, straining her muscles to uproot the weedy homesteader, “haven’t you ever heard the slogan, ‘Omega Oil for Burns?’”
Migwan laughed as she straightened up and held her aching back. “Earth gets its price for what earth gives us,” she quoted, with a mixture of ruefulness and humor.