Next to the Eastmans’, beyond their orchard, comes a neat small farm, with a long wide stone wall, where grapes are trained, owned once by two queer old sisters, the Misses Pushard, or as we have it, the Miss Pushhards. (A Huguenot name, pronounced Pushaw by the older generation.) They went to Lyceum in their young days, and, a rare thing then so far in the country, they had a piano. This gave them “a great shape.” Poor ladies, with their piano! Years later they were in straitened circumstances, and anxious to sell it, but to their indignation nobody wanted it, or not at the price they thought fitting; so, one night, they chopped it up, and hid the pieces. Thus they were not left with the instrument on their hands; and they had not accepted an unworthy price for their treasure. All this was learned years afterwards from some old papers. The fragments of the piano were found in the cistern.
The last farm on the road is owned by Sam Marston and his dear wife, Susan; who, though you never would think it (except for a little remaining crispness of speech), was born in England, in Essex, and came as a young English housemaid—dear me, how long ago now!—to the Homestead, eight miles away, by the River. Sam Marston worked there in the stables, and lost his heart promptly, and after four or five years of characteristic Yankee courting, leisurely, but humorously determined, Susan made up her mind, and said “yes,” and came out to the farm, with her fresh print gowns, her trimness and stanchness, and her abiding religion.
Susan keeps also her fixed ideas of the “quality.” She is now a power in her whole neighborhood. She and Sam, alas, have no children, a great sorrow, but the young people growing up near her show the reflection of her uprightness and that of her Sam. But after all these years she is still an exotic. The Sunday-school which she has gathered about her is strictly Church of England. The children learn their catechism, and “to do their duty in life in that station into which it shall please God to call them”; and they are instructed perfectly clearly as to their betters!
The other day we drove out to her farm. We were going to climb Eastman Hill, after Lady’s Slippers, and then were to have supper with Susan.
The sky was very deep blue, with flocks of little white clouds sailing. The woods were still all different shades of light and bright green, and the apple trees were in full blossom. The barn swallows were skimming and pouring low about the green fields in their effortless flight. I think I never drove through so smiling a country.
The house is a long low brick one, with dormer windows, in the midst of an old orchard. There is a fence and a hedge, and a brick path leads to the door. There are lilac bushes at the corner of the house, and cinnamon roses and yellow lilies on each side of the doorway.
Susan came out, laughing, and nearly crying, with pleasure, to welcome us. She “jumped” us down with her kind hands, and took all our wraps. We went as far as the house, asking questions and chattering, and then Susan showed us our way, an opening in the screen of the woods reached by a path through the orchard, and stood shading her eyes with her hand to look after us.
We followed a bit of mossy old corduroy road, through moist rich woods, and then began to climb among a wood of beeches. Soon the rock began to crop out in small cliffs, and we found different treasures, the little pale pink corydalis, a black-and-white creeper’s nest in a ferny cleft between two rocks, quantities of twin-flower, and then, rising a beech-covered knoll, we came on our first Lady’s Slippers. The glade ahead was thronged with them. They spread their broad light-green leaves like wings, and their beautiful heads bent proudly. They grew sometimes singly, sometimes in clumps of fifteen or twenty blossoms, and were scattered over the whole glade as if a flight of rose-colored butterflies had just alighted.
We came on this same sight seven different times; this lovely company scattered over the slope among the rocks, where the ridge broke out into low gray pinnacles among the beeches.
When at last we could make up our minds to climb down, following the white thread of a waterfall, into the deeper woods, we found Painted Trilliums, bright white and painted with crimson, with Jack-in-the-pulpits, both grown to a great size in the rich mould, amongst a green mist of uncurling ferns.