Darkness fell about him as he sat, his head fallen between his hands, the side rays of the post-office lamp only seeming to draw the shadows closer. Presently he pulled himself together, lighted the other lamps in office and workshop, talking to himself in an argumentative strain as he walked about. One man came in for a paper of tobacco and another for some stamps, but seeing that the postmaster was preoccupied, they did not linger.
"That's just what I'll do," he said, as though after arguing with some one he had suddenly achieved a conclusion. Again seating himself before the desk and selecting a particular key from the chain he continued the conversation with the opponent who, being speechless, could not contradict. "When I was a boy, I always was scheming to write a book some day that should be printed out like them in Squire Oldys's study. The printing won't be compassed, but I can write out all that happens from that night on concerning the child, and the village doings, so's it'll be there plain and no hearsay when she comes to read it and I'm not here perhaps. Yes, and I must not forget discretion in the doing of it. Mr. Esterbrook lent me some books of Mr. Pepys's, his remarks on his own and neighborhood doings. They were fine and edifying in parts, but lacked the discreetness and holding back I always find in Mr. Plutarch. I wonder anyhow, if in the beginning books weren't written just for the sake of talking to some one."
After searching in a cupboard under the desk, Gilbert drew out a large ledgerlike volume, bound in sheep. The cover was worn merely by lying for years side by side with its shelf mates. The pages within were of thick smooth paper, finely ruled. Gilbert tried several pens, quill and steel, and finally brought a new one from the office; then slowly and painfully he inscribed on the first page:—
As it was written—by Oliver G. Gilbert for Julia Poppea, beginning March 10, 1862. Next he took his two precious Lincoln letters from their drawer and fastened them between the first and second pages by corner strips of gummed paper. Then began the diary.
Two hours passed ere he had finished the first week, but as time went on, he would naturally grow more brief—the more action the fewer words.
By the first of May the reconstructed post-office household was accepted as a matter of course, Satira Pegrim having leased her farm for a three years' term to 'Lisha Potts, and stored her furnishings in the empty half hayloft of the post-office barn. When urged by Potts to sell her farm, she had answered: "No, Gilbert or I either one of us may feel called to marry, then what's to do? 'Cause I wouldn't be number four to Deacon Green with his white chin whiskers, and his 'it's all for the best' and other heartless sayings when number one, two, and three was took, or, I claim, clean froze to death, isn't to say I'm set against the institution. To camp 'longside of an ice pond isn't marriage. I never did like lizards, real or human, since brother Cotton Mather put one down my neck in Sunday-school the day sister Clarissy Harlow 'sperienced religion and I screeched so folks thought I had it too."
On May Day itself, Poppea emerged from the hands of Satira Pegrim clad in the first attempts for many a year of that good woman in fashioning clothes for a child. The result was a sunbonnet of brown-and-white-checked gingham, a sack-shaped slip of the same material, reenforced by the species of extension-legged underwear called pantalets, below which came a glimpse of sturdy ankles and feet shod in stout ties. This being the universal garb of children of her age and station all over Newfield County, the color of the gingham being diversified.
Miss Emmy Felton had protested and begged to be allowed to keep the child in dainty nainsook and dimities, ribbons, and flowery hats, but Gilbert had stood firm that in clothing at least she must be like the neighborhood children, as he expressed it. Thus Poppea began life at Harley's Mills without pretence, having for guardian Mack, who was fast developing into a brown-and-white hound of medium size, a trace of setter blood showing in the grain of his hair, and having the forethought and human intelligence that is more often found in dogs of unknown parentage than in pampered thoroughbreds.
The parapet that made a barrier between the Angus garden and Gilbert's home acres was finished. A series of massive stone urns, filled with foliage plants that topped it, seemed in the half light of night and morning like seneschals in plumed helmets, keeping watch over the doings of those humbly encamped below, whom they suspected, but might not displace. Yet what does Nature care for such distinctions and boundaries? She does not even stop to snap her fingers at them, but simply keeps on surrounding, overlapping, or undermining all barriers that oppose her plans.