Old Wonder-Eyes, and Other Stories for Children

by L. K. Lippincott; Grace Greenwood

I then begged my mother to let me sit out on the front step, "to see the wagons and folks go by," I said; but in reality, I am afraid, I only wanted to show my new trowsers. She said I might, and tied my hat on for me. I had not been there many minutes, before along came half a dozen of the youngest of the village boys, among them my cousin Philip, two years older than I. So long as I was in frocks, they had only condescended to greet me now and then in passing, with a—"Well, little 'un!"

But now I had emerged from the chrysalis of frocks—I was a boy—one of themselves, and entitled to consideration. So they stopped to talk with me, and look at my trowsers. They quite took down my pride by saying, in a patronizing tone—"They'll do for the first ones." But I remembered what Wangie had said, and managed to still keep up my grand feeling.

Presently they said they were going over into the meadow, to gather violets and buttercups, and asked me to go with them.

I said, quickly—"I'll go ask"—I was going to say "I'll go ask mother," but, just then, came the proud remembrance of my trowsers, and I thought to myself—"I am too big and too old to be asking mother every time I want to do anything; I'll go without asking." So I took Philip's hand, and off we started.

We went up a little hill and clambered through a fence, and there lay the meadow before us—oh, so lovely!—its rich robe of green grass pinned with buttercups—buttercups that seemed to have made captive the sunbeams that brought them life, so golden-bright and beautiful they were; and violets, upon which in tribute to their modesty, the sky had bestowed its color with its dew. Everything was in the first glad impulse of a new life.

The hill ran around two sides of this meadow, and right at the junction of the two sides, about half way down the slope, there was a little spring of clearest, coolest water. The half of a small barrel, with the head knocked out, had been sunk down about the fountain, and the space around it filled in tightly with gravel. By this means the little spring was forced to fill up the barrel, into which the people dipped their pitchers and buckets, before it got a chance to go idling, and singing, and splashing, as it did afterwards, away through the green grass, over the white pebbles, to the great dark woods beyond the meadow.

The owner of this spring, to protect it from the sun in hot weather, and to keep the cows away from it, when they were pasturing in the meadow, had built a little stone wall and arch around and partly over the barrel. The front part of this wall slanted backward (like the top of a gig or chaise when it is pushed half way back), so that the top of the archway, which was nicely sodded and seemed like a part of the hill, came directly over the barrel; to this front wall an old outside cellar-door had been hung; but rust and much use had broken its hinges, and, at the time I write of, it had to be lifted off and on. That morning, for some reason, they had not put it on, after getting water, but had left it up on the archway, with about one-third of it reaching over the edge.

After we had tired of gathering flowers, we all went up to this spring to drink, and see an old bull-frog that had lived there all alone for years. He used to sit up in a dark corner, on a large stone, all the summer through. He had never, in the memory of the oldest of us, been seen anywhere but upon that one stone, and he sat so still that he seemed more like a statue of a frog, than a real, live one. After sunset, above all the other "voices of the night," you could hear his deep bass through half the length of the village. We used to call him the village "Watchman," because his croaking sounded so exactly like the cry of watchmen—"All's well!" "All's well!"

I had heard Philip describe the "Watchman's" great eyes that never winked, and his ghostly stillness; I had heard his cry too, and it was with not a little awe—I am not sure there was not some fear mixed with the awe—that I approached the domicil of this village-wonder—this patron-saint of the spring. Philip pointed up into the dark corner, and at first I could only see two great solemn eyes; but presently I could make out the white throat, webbed feet, and dingy green back of the famous animal.