[PINK'S PROPERTY.]
BY ELLA M. BAKER.
Miles from any church, and miles from any railway station, stood, one summer afternoon, shut up and empty, an old gray house. It had been a handsome house, and there was something comely about it yet, with its fan-light over the broad door, its many windows, its quaint roof, and its fretted cornices. But it looked like a house fast asleep. All the year it had stood just so. Last summer the rose-tree had reached out far enough to tap with prickly fingers on the panes, as if to say, "Wake up and admire me: am I to bloom unseen?" Last autumn, the grape-vine had held waiting, until it was tired, the ripened bunches on its unpruned branches. Last winter the winds had shaken rudely the doors, and casements, and the storms had beat loudly enough to rouse any dreamer, one would think. But still the old house did not stir. A hornet's nest hung undisturbed over the front door. The lilacs and syringas, the wax-ball and snow-ball bushes, cowered closer and closer to the walls, and birds built in them fearlessly. All day the oriole, which, it is said, never sings except in beautiful places, spent there his gift of melody in songs half sad, half tender. At night the whip-poor-will took the oriole's place. Little wild things from the woods went fearlessly about at twilight. They seemed all to have agreed together: "Yes, there is no make-believe about it; the place is really sound asleep. We may do what we please."
It was a great surprise, then, when on that same summer afternoon the long slumber of the house broke up. Horses' feet stamped at the gate, voices laughing and exclaiming frightened the squirrels away, windows flew up, doors were forced noisily and unwillingly open. At night-fall lamps moved flickering past the windows up stairs and down, while a broad swath of golden light swept from the open hall door.
A group of people sitting just within the door chattered merrily. They were laughing at mamma about "her property." For this place had been left to mamma as a legacy by her granduncle, who died a year ago, and mamma had chosen for this summer to let the sea-side cottage, shut up the house in town, and spend the season here before deciding about selling the place or letting it.
"So here we all are," the tall son was saying, "settling down to enjoy mamma's property like lords. This tumble-down old house—"
"Be careful how you speak of my property," smiled his mother, shaking her finger at him, "or you may run some risk of being warned off it."
"Like the hornets," said the oldest daughter, archly.
"Oh dear! I think it would have been so much nicer at the sea-side!" sighed a child's voice, discontentedly, as a bat flew by her head, and each of the party was betrayed into a shriek more or less shrill, while her brother made wild passes in the air with his hat.