"Butters," Shears used to grumble, "never could learn that he was old enough to stop his jawing and meddling around the town, till they dug his grave for him; then he shut up fast enough."
"Well, then," said Caleb Kane, another character, "we'll sure enough have to send for the sexton."
Colonel Shears eyed Caleb with suspicion.
"What for?" he asked.
"Why, to get a word in edgewise, Sam'l," Caleb replied, and the Colonel rose, shifted his cigar, and sauntered homeward.
"Mostly comedies," said the one we call Johnny Keats, when I urged him to write the stories of his native town; yet, as I told him, there are tragedies a-plenty too in Grassy Fordshire, though the dagger in them is a slower torture than the short swift stab men die of in a literary way. Our heroic deaths are done by inches, as a rule, so imperceptibly, so often with jests and smiles in lieu of fine soliloquies, that our own neighbors do not always know how rare a play the curtain falls on sometimes among our hills.
If I do not die in harness, if, as I often dream of doing, I turn my practice over to some younger man—perhaps to Robin, who shows some signs of following in his father's steps—I shall write the story of my native town; not in the old way, embellished, as Butters would have termed it, with family photographs of the leading citizens and their houses and cow-sheds, and their wooden churches, and their corner stores with the clerks and pumpkins in array before them—not in that old, time-honored, country manner, but in the way it comes to me as I look backward and think of the heroes and heroines and the clowns and villains I have known. I shall need something to keep me from "jawing and meddling around the town"; why not white paper and a good stub pen, while I smoke and muse of my former usefulness. I suppose I shall never write the chronicle; Johnny Keats could, if he would; and I would, if I could—thus the matter rests, while the town and its tales and I myself grow old together. Even Johnny Keats, who was a boy when Letitia taught in the red brick school-house, has a thin spot in his hair.
Had Dove but lived—it is idle, I know, to say what might have been, had our Grassy Fordshire been the same sweet place it was, before she went like other white birds—"southward," she said, "but only for a winter, Bertram—surely spring comes again."
This I do know: that I should have had far less to tell of Letitia Primrose, who might have gone on mooning of a better world had Dove not gone to one, leaving no theories but a son and husband to Letitia's care. It was not to the oracle that she intrusted us, but to the woman—not to the new Letitia but to the old, who had come back to us in those vigils at my wife's bedside.