The wife’s sorrowful eyes turned always to her husband, but seemed at the same time to try to guard his empty sleeve from our glances. He, with a larger patience, was unconscious of it.
They told us a good thing; that two lads, sons of a minister in a neighboring town, have built a little camp in Jacob’s woods. They come over often to spend the night, and sometimes stay a week, and are great company. They come to Jacob for milk, butter, and eggs, and often spend the evening. The week before they had shot two coons, and they are busy mounting them, under his directions.
Jacob’s face has a great peace in it, that of a man who has given everything in him to the place he lives in, and held nothing back. His beautiful, lonely little holding of wood and field and lake is better, for the work he has put into it, than when his father left it to him. He has cleared more fields, enriched the land, and drained the lower meadows. His son will have it after him. I have seldom seen a place which seemed more entirely home.
Jacob had cut the hay in his upper meadow early (he has to take his son’s or a neighbor’s help when he can get it), and it was already piled in sweet-smelling haycocks as we drove by, but the water meadows, where the purple fringed orchids and loosestrife grow in among the grasses, were still uncut. It was dusk, and the fireflies were out. Thousands of them flashed their soft radiance low over the perfumed meadow, and the fragrance of sweet rush and of the open water came to us from the lake.
CHAPTER XI—IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS
The population of a district can never be classified. Once again, “folks are folks,” and the smallest hamlet shows infinite variety. Yet here and there the individual quality of a neighborhood seems as marked as that of the different belts and communities of trees which clothe the land about it.
Watson’s Hill, Ridgefield, and Weir’s Mills are fine up-standing neighborhoods, with good houses, big barns, fresh paint, and bright milk cans catching the sun; but in near-by folds of the hills, where the ridges slope up into higher country, there are poor and scattered farms and farmhouses which are no more than shanties. A neighborhood six miles from a big town may be more rustic than another twice as far. It is partly the soil, partly inheritance, and surely it is a third part influence. The land of our Silvester’s Mills Quakers is not specially good, but the impulse imparted by three or four industrious good families is the foundation of its marked prosperity.
A Swede and an Italian have lately taken up two farms which were considered quite run out, one in North Ridgefield, six miles from us, and the other at the top of a long hill on the Tresumpscott Road.