“Won’t you set down a spell and hev’ a glass of milk?” she asked; “set down in the shade there, and I’ll get it in a jiffy. What’s the sense of standing in a blazing sun like this?”
She whisked off and presently returned with the milk and a plate of New England cookies.
“I’ve got to go back to my jell,” she said. “When you get ready to go just put the things on the porch. My soul! I was took when you began talking about boarders. For I’ve said, and said often, ‘If boarders comes, I go.’ But visitors! We’ve always heaps of company, and I’ll go bail no house I do for’ll ever be took short of things to put on the table; the most unexpectedest company that ever drove up that avenue was always set down to a liberal table; when you go down the road about a mile, just look towards the right, and you’ll see a brown frame-house, with a lightning-rod on it. That’s Abiron Ranger’s. Cut across the fields. It’s shorter.”
“Thanks,” said Sidney; “what delicious milk.”
“Yes—Boss don’t give chalk and water, she don’t,” said Miss Tribbey, and went off to her kitchen.
“A poor, slim jack of a man,” she soliloquised, ladling out her jelly. “My soul! There’s a mighty difference between him and Lanty—but there—his kind don’t grow on every bush. Clear Lansing he is, through and through, and there never was no runts among the Lansings.”
For a few minutes Sidney rested in the porch, his eyes dwelling upon the undulating grain before him. To one more experienced in these matters, its burnished gold would have told sad tales of the terrible drouth which had scorched the country side, but to him it appeared the very emblem of peace and plenty.
What field of the cloth of gold was ever equal in splendour to this?
He rose and passed down the dusty road. Upon one hand the panicles of an oat field whispered together, upon the other stretched the barren distances of a field known far and near as Mullein Meadow, these weeds and hard shiny goat grass being all that grew upon it.
Sidney did not grasp the significance of its picturesque grey boulders, nor think how dear a possession it was at the price of the taxes upon it. After Mullein Meadow came a little wood, thick with underbrush, in the shadow of which a few brackens were yet green; and fronting the wood a hayfield, with a patch of buckwheat in full bloom in one corner, showing against the dim greenness of the hay like a fragrant white handkerchief fallen from an angel’s hand.