IN THE GARDEN OF

DELIGHT

BY

L. H. HAMMOND

AUTHOR OF “THE MASTER-WORD,” “IN BLACK AND

WHITE,” ETC.

NEW YORK

THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1916,

By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY

To

LUCY AND CALDWELL

IN MEMORY OF THE WHEELED-CHAIR SUMMER

AT PEN-Y-BRYN

CONTENTS

I
A Country Child

There is one thing, at least, in this puzzling world which, though everything changes it, nothing can spoil: and that is out-of-doors. Long ago, when this place was stately old Cedarhurst instead of home-y Bird Corners, and I a wilful small girl climbing trees and tearing my frocks whenever Great-aunt Virginia and Great-aunt Letitia were both looking the other way at the same time—a coincidence as blissful as it was infrequent—I thought being outdoors was heaven enough for anybody.

In the long winter afternoons I sat by the big wood fire in the back parlor and hemmed towels and napkins—when I wasn’t pulling out yesterday’s work because Great-aunt Virginia found the stitches too big: and I looked out at the cold, bare hills, blue and beautiful against the pale sky, and longed to play over them like the winds, and to be whirled up into the air like the brown leaves which scurried about them all winter long. And in the spring, when the budding branches draped the trees with jewelled mists, all silver and green and gold and ruby-red, I wished the great-aunts had learned to play on the grass with their whole selves, instead of just with their fingers on the big old rosewood piano, which stood stiff and square in the front parlor, an instrument of torture to rebellious hands that longed to be pulling wild-flowers, and to ears tuned to catch the songs of birds. And in summer time, when the rain blotted out the hills, and every leaf of every tree sang the Song of the Rushing Winds; when the lightning ran zig-zag all over the sky and the thunder jarred the house—oh, why should great-aunts call one indoors, and shut the free winds out, and put cotton in their ears, and make little girls come away from the windows, and the chimneys, and every place where they wanted to be, instead of leaving them out in the rain to be drenched like the flowers and shake themselves dry like the birds?

And in autumn—but those memories are too painful! On frosty days the house was shut tight, the log fires kindled, and my small person swathed in insufferable flannels—flannels!—in a Tennessee October! And when I rebelled, there were fearsome tales of children who had died of pneumonia, or gone into consumption, because their misguided relatives had allowed them to play outdoors in the cold.

And yet outdoors was never more beautiful. Some of the hills were far and blue, and some were near and green, or brown with stubble, or yellow with stalks of corn. The grass in the pasture was greenest green; and when I slipped out on the back porch the sycamores down by the brook rustled their drying leaves and called me as loud as they dared. And the doves flew by in flocks, and the killdeers whirred up from the valley with wild, free cries, and the field-larks sang on the fence-posts, or lighted on the short, sweet grass, the white of their outer tail feathers shining in the sun. But Great-aunt Letitia would call me back to the parlor, where she made tea, which she and Great-aunt Virginia drank, sitting in rosewood arm-chairs, dressed in soft shimmering silks, with cobwebby lace about their throats.

I myself balanced unhappily upon one of the big square ottomans, too small to get far enough back on it to have any purchase against the slippery horsehair, and painfully conscious of Great-aunt Virginia’s eyes on my awkwardly swinging feet. I kept my place as best I could, holding a bit of egg-shell china, and sipping my odious cambric tea.

This was the chosen time to instill proper principles of conduct into my callous little soul. The gentle old aunts made a duet of it, and I always thought they practiced it together beforehand, like a “piece” on the piano. It was really very easy not to hear!

I always sat on the ottoman nearest the center table. The other was nearer the east window, and showed the long front drive bordered by the stiff lines of cedars, which gave Cedarhurst its name before the great-aunts were born. But the one by the table had the double advantage of giving me a dutiful appearance, being equally distant from both of the arm-chairs, and of allowing me, by an almost imperceptible sliding to one corner, to look out of the silver-maple window to the jug of water I kept in the center of the seven trunks, a drinking fountain for all the birds of the place. I sat very still during the duet, my head raised a little to see the lowest branches, where the birds always alighted; and I often quite forgot my cambric tea until Great-aunt Letitia gently reminded me of it. My docility touched them very much. I heard Great-aunt Letitia tell Great-aunt Virginia one day that she was afraid I would never live to grow up, my expression was so rapt when they urged my duty upon me; and she felt as though there were an invisible halo above my little brown head. I was running in through the hall when I heard this, and stopped in breathless amazement. I had no thought of eavesdropping, but I saw Great-aunt Virginia wipe her eyes; and Great-aunt Letitia almost sniffed. I sat stiller than ever after that, and rolled my eyes a little; and Great-aunt Letitia sent for the doctor, who said I needed calico dresses and mud pies. The great-aunts were shocked at first, but the doctor was firm. And after that I played outdoors unless the thermometer was very unkind and the wind in an especially dangerous quarter.

There are really two of the-most-beautiful-place-in-the-world. One of them is the real outdoors; and the other is outdoors in the Land of Make-Believe. The advantage of the real outdoors is that its loveliness is ready-made. One invents nothing; one merely opens eyes and ears and soul to drink in beauty and joy, and learns, almost without knowing it, the most curious and interesting things. The advantage of Make-Believe is that when things are as they shouldn’t be, one can instantly step over into that blessed country and make them be exactly what they should. No one ever sees you do it, either, or guesses that you can make a world in a twinkling, out of dreams. It has all the charm and mystery of a fairy ring, or fern seed, or Aladdin’s lamp. One’s body can perch on a horsehair piano stool, twisting one’s two little meat legs about its one fat leg of rosewood, and great-aunts may be sure you are practising scales most faithfully; and all the time you are really running races in the wind with charming, dirty children who tear their dresses all day long, and never had their hair in curl-papers in their lives.

And that is only the beginning. For one can learn so well the road to that dear land that one never forgets it, even in grown-up days. There is never any sickness in Make-Believe. One can walk and run there always, though one’s body lies weak and helpless, or drags slowly about, year after year, in a world that is full of pain. One can slip away from the long, black, sleepless nights into a lovely world where imagination is the motive power, and all one needs and all one longs for lie ready to one’s hand.

It was the January after I was sixteen that Cedarhurst burned down. It was a bitter cold time; and the heaviest snow I had ever seen turned my familiar world into fairyland under the winter moon.

It was Great-aunt Letitia who found the fire. She had been looking for it all her life. One of the most familiar memories of my childhood is the waking at night to hear a soft rustle past my open door—the doors were always left open that we might smell the fire when we really had one—and to see Great-aunt Letitia, her white hair tucked away under a dainty nightcap and the light of her candle bringing out soft gleams in her flowered silk dressing gown, as she followed her highbred nose to the spot where it assured her a fire had broken out. It used to frighten me at first; but I grew too accustomed to it even to wake. So it taxed my credulity to the utmost when, on that bitter night, she roused me to tell me with tense white lips that Cedarhurst was in flames.

How the fire started, we never knew. It burst through the floor of the empty guest room first, and the ceiling of the dining-room below it. But however it started, it was there; and there was no one to fight it but two fragile old ladies, a half-grown girl, and the terrified Negroes. It was before the days of rural telephones, and the house was in ruins before any one in the village knew our need. We carried the news ourselves when we drove into Chatterton in the gray dawn, shivering with cold. We were all fully dressed, of course; the great-aunts would have perished in the flames before they would have shocked the stars of heaven by appearing outdoors in the mildest disarray. And we saved the family silver, a portrait or two, great-grandmother’s sewing table, a few books, and the clothes upon our backs.

On the way to the village Great-aunt Virginia said we had much to be thankful for in that our lives were spared; but hers, had we known it, was already lost. She had stood in the snow after the flames barred all access to the house, until the roof fell in and her birthplace was a mass of ruins; and before we had been a week at the home of her nephew, Cousin William Wrenn, she had died of pneumonia, leaving Great-aunt Letitia and me, as she told us in the parting, alone and unprotected save for the Father of all, to whom she trusted us.

But Great-aunt Letitia, whom every one expected to wither and droop without her sister’s sheltering care, developed an amazing power of decision. She seemed crushed at first. But on the fourth day after Great-aunt Virginia had been laid to rest in the hillside burial ground at home, she came into the family sitting room, looking, in her deep mourning, very tall and white and frail, and announced that she had decided not to rebuild Cedarhurst, but to go to the city to live.

I could scarcely believe my ears. The city’s outmost edge was only fifteen miles away, but even the village of Chatterton, peopled largely by our own relatives, seemed crowded and bustling after the wide quiet of the fields at home. That this frail, retiring old lady should contemplate a plunge into the vortex of a city whose inhabitants were numbered by tens of thousands—really several tens—seemed madness. But her determination was fixed.

“This dear child needs the advantages of city life,” she declared. “I always found the country exceedingly quiet myself, and-er not altogether—progressive. But I deferred to Sister Virginia’s judgment. Now, however—” her voice trembled a moment, and then went on quite steadily—“the responsibility is mine, and I cannot shirk it. I think Lydia should have city advantages. I shall go there and devote myself to her education, and prepare for her entrance into society at the proper time.”

Argument was of no avail. When I avouched my preference for the country she said quietly that I knew nothing of the city yet, and that every one should try more than one side of life before making a final choice. She was very gentle, but Great-aunt Virginia herself could not have been more inflexible. We went, to the envy of my cousin, Billy Wrenn, and to my own silent and passionate grief.

As I grew older, Aunt Letitia grew younger—younger, that is, in her ideas and in her desires for me. She cared far more than I about my clothes, and took a livelier interest in possible lovers. I understood, beneath this late blossoming of pleasure in what she called gay life, the starved aspirations of her own youth, shut away in the seclusion of her beautiful home during the many years of her widowed mother’s invalidism and morbid grieving for her husband. There were times when her dead-and-gone girlhood rose to life in her eyes, and a soft color tinged her delicate cheeks, as she imagined for me some small social triumph or admired me in some new dress. I divined that she was immensely interested in my men friends, though her shyness in discussing them was even greater than her interest. I wondered often if she had a love-story of her own; but I never knew. My own love-story, when it came, gave her great happiness; and for three years after my marriage she lived with us in great content, and passed out at last in utter peace.

My husband is known in our family circle as the Peon, since he entered into a contract to work for me without wages for life. He brought into our home at our marriage his brother’s orphaned child, David Bird, a little fellow four years of age, who flatly refused to call me auntie and dubbed me Mammy Lil. That was many years ago; and as the time has passed the Peon and I have realized with deepening gratitude our debt to the little child who has given our home its crowning joy. But for David we would have been childless, growing old alone; for we owe Caro to David, too. I have never flattered myself that we could have captured and held the heart of that tricksey birdling if David had not added to our attractions childhood’s lure to a child.

For our years in the city, however, we found David sufficient in himself. He has grown up like the Peon’s own son, sturdy, steady, large of body and of heart. He has stood well in his classes without much effort; but more because it is his disposition to do thoroughly whatever he does at all than because of any great love for books. He is deliberate in manner, and somewhat slow of speech; and his steady gray eyes seem made to look facts in the face. He has always moved in straight lines, mentally and physically, cutting through obstacles which Caro would flutter around in a twinkling; yet somehow he arrived at the goal in time to secure whatever he set out to obtain. He was rather too solemn as a child, and regarded me, apparently, somewhat as the Peon did at times, with an air of amused and affectionate tolerance. I used to hunt through his small personality for the spark of fun I was sure lay hidden there, and as the years passed I caught the glint of it more and more frequently; but it was really Caro who brought it out into the open, and set it, a perpetual signal, in his eyes.

I found it easy to awaken in him my own love of outdoors, and together we made friends with such birds as could be enticed to our shady yard in the city’s outer circle. We were sworn comrades in our enmity to the English sparrows, and the bond of a common foe was one of the many things that drew us into a fellowship unusually close. The Peon used to say that no boy came to genuine manhood without something in the way of an evil to hate and to fight; and for my part I joyfully set up the English sparrows as the embodiment of all wickedness, to be destroyed beak and tail. My own objections to them were the result of long watching; but David’s hatred sprang to life full-fledged the morning we found four of the wretched bullies fighting one small chickadee, which hung head downward from a twig of privet, his eyes shut tight, his claws clenched, and his throat and breast exposed to his enemies’ vicious bills. I think some deep thirst for justice seized the child’s soul at sight of the helpless victim, and ever since he has been mindful of weak things in a way surprising in a boy so ruggedly strong.

He has been wonderfully mindful of me, always. Long before we left the city I had learned to enjoy outdoors from a cot under the trees in the back yard. The pain which was to be by turns my companion, my jailer, and my emancipator had already laid upon me an iron hand. I was up and about when the Peon was at home; but when he came in unexpectedly he learned to look for me under the drooping silver maples in the yard; and my old-time love of birds was an easy explanation of the many-cushioned cot and the long hours I daily spent upon it.

David filled the birds’ drinking fountain for me when he came home to leave his books and get his bat or his football; and I would lie there, watching my visitors, wondering at the variety of birds to be seen in a city yard, and wishing the sparrows’ duels were less on the harmless French order. They never fought because they needed to do it; it was always for something perfectly futile and foolish. They would leave all the food I could scatter to tear one crumb from a neighbor. For it is English sparrow nature never to be satisfied with what they have, to want only what some one else is enjoying, and to get it for themselves if they can. David and I were fully agreed that if anything more hateful was ever created we wished to be spared acquaintance with it.

II
Bird Corners

It is to Uncle Milton that I owe our return to the country, and all the delights of Bird Corners.

Uncle Milton is an inheritance from my great-aunts and Cedarhurst, where he had the finest flowers and the most flourishing vegetable garden in the country. He is a lean old Negro, tall, and straight as a pine. His features are finely cut; and with his gray hair, long gray moustache, regular features, and skin like polished bronze, he makes a distinguished appearance, even in his old blue jeans. He is a real lover of the outdoor world, and the earth and the plants know it. He bends over the flower-beds lovingly, with eyes that see, not dirt, but all dirt’s possibilities of beauty and life. There is never a plant set carelessly nor a seed that falls by chance. No wonder all he touches grows!

That he went to town with Great-aunt Letitia, and stayed there afterward with me, spoke eloquently of the strength of affection between us. But after my great-aunt’s death he did not accept the situation without constant protests, and the advice which my youth and ignorance demanded.

“You ain’t got no mo’ business in de city dan I is, Miss Lil,” he said spring after spring, as I sat on the grass by the flower-beds and watched his fork go in and out like clock-work, leaving behind it long rows of fresh-turned earth. “You done los’ all dem roses you had in yo’ face at home. Ef Miss Ferginny done lived she wouldn’ put up wid dis foolishness not er minute.”

“But the city is more convenient for Mr. Bird,” I would explain. “Some day when he is rich enough he expects to give up business, and then we will go back.”

“He’ll be givin’ up his wife fus’ news you know,” growled the old man, stopping to thin the thick border of violets. “An’ he’ll be goin’ to bury you dar by Miss Ferginny and Miss ’Titia befo’ he goes retirin’ from business ef he don’ look out. We-all got er plenty ter live on now—you got er plenty widout his’n; en ef you ain’t, I kin make er plenty outen dat groun’. Hit’s de riches’ lan’ in Davis’son county. I made hit pay befo’, en I kin do hit agin, stidder was’in’ it on po’ white-trash renters like you all do. But I ’clare to gracious, Miss Lil, ef you-all don’ go, I will. I been mixin’ up wid town niggers till I’m plumb wo’ out wid ’em. Dis is de las’ spring Milton’ll fix yo’ flowers in dis mizzable little cramped-up lot.”

He had said this so often that I regarded it as one of Nature’s regular spring processes; and beyond a sudden deeper stirring of my constant homesickness, his threats passed unnoticed. But one February morning he came out and stood by my cot under the trees with a face at once elated and downcast.

“Are you going to begin the spring work today?” I asked in delight.

He looked embarrassed.

“Hit’s sorter early to rake dem leaves offen de beds yit,” he said. Then he hesitated. “I ’spec I ain’t gwinter be able ter do de wuk no mo’.”

“Are you sick?” I asked anxiously. Then I saw the new look in his face, and gasped. “You’re going to the country!” I cried.

“Yassum, I is. I can’t stan’ it yere no longer, Miss Lil: I’m er gittin’ too ole fer town; I des bleeged ter go out whar God made de worl’ en breathe free en be er man ergin, befo’ I die.”

The years had slipped from him like a cloak. I looked at him enviously—just as an English sparrow might look at some bird of stronger flight, I reflected suddenly, and scowled at one of my greedy kinsman in the walk, trying to gobble all the best crumbs at once.

“I’m glad for you,” I said honestly. “When do you go?”

“When my mont’s out. But I hates ter go, Miss Lil.”

“What am I to do here?” I demanded, the sparrow in me refusing to be quenched altogether.

“I’ll do de bes’ I kin,” he said. “I been lookin’ roun’ fer you all winter. But dese town niggers is a onery set, fer sho’. When you-all comes home Milton’s comin’ back.”

“Never mind,” I said; “we’ll manage somehow.”

I closed my eyes because they were getting full of tears. He moved away, and I let the tears come. I wanted the country, too; and more and more as my illness grew, and it became increasingly difficult to take my part in the busy city life. The more one’s bodily freedom is restricted by weakness and pain, the more one longs for the unconfined spaces of earth and air, for wide horizons and sweeping winds, and wings that flash far up into the sunshine, above the shadows where one must lie, conning the hard lesson of patient idleness. And I wanted Uncle Milton—the visible link between me and that dear world of hill and sky for which I longed. Return to it seemed so bright a possibility while another heart, even this old Negro’s, held it as dear as I. If he went from me he would leave my hope bereft. I lay with closed eyes, absorbed in longing for that dear receding vision of delight.

“Don’ you see how bad she wanter go, Marse John?” said Uncle Milton again, close beside me. I sprang up in amazement, to find him and the Peon by my cot. “She ain’t gwine ter say a word ef she think hit’ll discommerdate you; but de chile’s e’en erbout breakin’ her heart fer de country, same as I is.”

“Uncle Milton,” I began indignantly; but the old man brushed my words aside.

“You en Marse John fight hit out, honey,” he said. “Mek ’er tell de trufe, Marse John. Hit’s you en her fer it now; Milton’s done his bes’.”

He turned deliberately and walked out of the yard.

It did not take the Peon long to get the facts, to answer all my objections as to the inconvenience to himself, and to settle finally our immediate return. We would rebuild Cedarhurst at once.

“Oh, no,” I cried, “not Cedarhurst! Let us build our own home, all sunshine and out-of-doors! It isn’t the old house that I love; it was too cold and stately and dark—such an indoors kind of house. It’s the hills I’m homesick for, and the sky, and the biggest maple, and the pasture, and the sycamores down by the brook.”

“But we can’t sleep in the maple,” objected the Peon, “nor eat in the pasture when it rains. There must be a house.”

“Oh, of course. But let it be our house—not Great-aunt Virginia’s. You may really build it any way you please if only you will have porches enough, and so many windows that wherever you sit you can lift your eyes and look right out, miles and miles and miles. And I’d like all the rooms to have a southern exposure, of course, on account of the breeze and the sun, and east windows for winter mornings, and west windows for the sunsets. I don’t care about the rest.”

“I insist upon bath-rooms and a kitchen,” said the Peon; “mere scenery is not a sufficient sanitary basis for life. But what shall we call it—Cedarhurst?”

“Oh, no! Just a plain, every day, home-y name—something that belongs to us and the birds. Why, we’re Birds ourselves, Peon, dear. Let’s be sociable and call it Bird Corners.”

“But there aren’t any corners,” said the practical Peon; “the place lies straight along the pike.”

That is a man’s way. He thinks he must face facts and shape his course accordingly, poor slave to the visible that he is. But a woman conquers facts by turning her back upon them, and playing they are something else.

“The birds will make the corners,” I explained patiently. “Before I’ve been putting out crumbs a month there’ll be bird pikes cutting through the place at every conceivable angle, and crossing each other under that seven-trunked maple where my cot will be. And if that won’t be bird corners, what will?”

So we prepared for our homing flight. Uncle Milton went out at once to trim the trees and prune the shrubbery and vines; and the occasional days he bestowed on us in town were full of delight for me, filled as they were with reports of progress at home. For it was home, before dirt had been broken for the house; the city dwelling was a mere temporary shelter.

“De jonquils out home is showin’ up fine,” he announced one morning in mid-February; “hit’s time to sorter stir up dese yere lazy town flowers. En I’ll trim de trees, too, seein’ I’m ’bout done wid ’em out home. I ’spec de city folks what’ll live yere atter we-all gone’ll want what little dab er trees dey got in dis yard.”

He looked scornfully at the back yard, generous in size, after the fashion of our Southern cities, and shaded with fine old trees. But a little later, high in the hackberry, his love of all earth-rooted things swept contempt from his heart, and his dark old face shone with happiness as he wielded the hatchet with rhythmic strokes.

That is always the beginning of the spring work—the severance of death from life, that life may rise again, even out of death. Where would life draw this dead matter next? To darkness first, to growth most surely, and perchance, some day, to wings. And the dark old man with the happy face was servitor of life—life for the dead as for the living; for death is but the underside of life.

We went home early in May. The house would not be finished until October; but outdoors was all ready for us, and we could not waste the summer for lack of a house.

“You know,” I argued to the Peon, “we had a beautiful time in the mountains last summer; and we slept in a two-roomed cottage with only weather-boarding between us and the trees outside. Why can’t we have a shed with a gasoline stove, and a couple of tents to live in?”

So we had them. The Peon and David drove in to Chatterton daily and took the train for business and school; and I fed the birds and followed Uncle Milton, and drank in the changing beauties of earth and sky. And all summer we watched our home grow, from cellar to roof-tree, till it became a thing complete, and fitted into the landscape for which it was designed.

We set it on the old home’s hill, which overlooked the countryside, and faced it toward the sunrising. The dark lines of cedars which had bordered the approach to the old house were left at one side, and the road, curving from their upper end, swept into full sunshine and passed under a great beech, which spread its tiers of leaves above the doorway. It is an unpretentious house, rambling about pretty much as it pleases in its efforts to give southern and eastern and western exposures to all the rooms. Porches are everywhere, and the windows either open on them, like doors, or stop a little above the floor at low, cushioned seats, which tempt one to sink down and wonder once again at the beauty of this fair country of middle Tennessee. There are no curtains at the windows, nor mats of vines outside. But up the widely-separated columns of the porches run clematis and jasmines which cross the great openings in narrow bands, above and below. So all summer the fretwork of green leaves frames the landscape, a perfect, yet everchanging picture in each of the wide spaces. The east end of the living-room is of glass, and my flowers flourish there in winter time. In my own room the bed stands in a deep recess formed all of windows on the three sides. A low seat runs under them within reach of the bed. All through the dark, sleepless night I can lie there and watch for the first paling of the eastern sky, and follow the level light as it moves softly along the southern hills, creating the shadows which make the light so clear.

It must be confessed that some of the kin at Chatterton thought my wits astray that first summer, and the Peon but a soft-headed, poor-spirited creature for giving way to my whimsies. Camping out was not as popular then as it is now; and the older members of the family did not hesitate to commiserate the Peon and David. That they professed to enjoy our long picnic only added to the heinousness of my folly.

Cousin Chadwell Grackle and his wife were among my first callers. Cousin Chad is always to the front when anything new crops up in the family. He has cried the sins and shortcomings of the whole usual order so long that even he is half bored with them, and the prospect of something new to criticise whets his social appetite to the keenest possible edge. Cousin Jane is his reflection and echo. If she were not, even her stolid nerves could scarcely have endured his painful type of piety without disaster.

They drove up one sunshiny morning, after they had seen the Peon and David pass on their way to town. I was on the cot under the biggest maple. Its seven trunks fall apart like long-stemmed flowers in a vase, spreading into a great green tent whose leafy curtains droop in a circle full seventy feet across.

The blackbirds were my principal guests that morning, a sanctimonious crew in sleek black coats, solemn, censorious, and self-satisfied to the last degree. All birds which walk instead of hopping are awkward-looking; but none are as preposterous as the blackbirds, because none of them put on such sanctified airs. As they moved about this morning, their heads thrust meekly forward, ducking modestly as they stepped, they appeared to be meditating on their neighbors’ sins. But they had their tribe’s keen eye for the main chance, and it was a swift bird and a wary one which secured a big crumb with these feathered Chadbands in the yard.

I looked up at the sound of wheels and nearly choked with swallowing my laughter. Cousin Chad and Cousin Jane did look so sleek and proper, that as I rose to meet them I could not refrain from throwing some extra crumbs on the grass for possible additions to my breakfasting guests.

They descended ponderously and looked at me with the apprehensive scrutiny one might bestow on a lunatic who is liable to break out immediately in a fresh place.

“How are you, Lyddy?” inquired Cousin Jane, with sepulchral anxiety. Cousin Chad, busy with the hitching-post, listened with his back as well as with his ears. They both know perfectly that I have always been Lil to everyone except the great-aunts, and that Lyddy has been an abomination to the entire family connection, and especially to me, since they first invented it in my childhood. That is why they stick to it. They believe in chastenings, do my cousins, the Grackles—particularly when they are the chasteners.

“I’m perfectly well,” I answered, with added emphasis to my usual formula. “Come and sit down. There’s no need to ask how you and Cousin Chad are; you look the picture of health.”

“Appearances don’t do to go by, Lyddy,” she answered solemnly, sinking ponderously on a creaking campstool. “Chadwell’s been havin’ sciatica, and I’ve stayed awake nights with him till I’m just about worn out. But I’ve never made my afflictions an excuse for shirkin’ my duty. We came over to say that as you seem to be without a roof over your heads we’d take you to board till your house is finished—if it ever is.”

She glanced contemptuously at the amorphous piles of building material just beyond us.

“You can have the second spare bed-room upstairs,” put in Cousin Chad. “It’s more to my interest to put you in the front one; but livin’ comes high any way you take it, and I want to consider you. I reckon John ain’t able to spend much, with all this building on hand. The back room’s small, but you three can make out in it. If you want the other, of course it will cost more. You can come over this evening after John gets home, and he and I can settle the terms after supper.”

I kept my face quite straight, and made a handsome contribution to current fiction.

“It’s so kind of you. John will appreciate it as much as I. But we really enjoy camping, and would not give it up even for those lovely rooms of yours, Cousin Chad. Thank you so much.”

Cousin Jane’s rubicund complexion assumed a purplish hue.

“Do you intend to kill that delicate child of Henry Bird’s, making him sleep out in the weather all summer?” she demanded.

“No,” I said, considering; “I don’t intend to kill him, exactly. And he isn’t at all delicate.”

“Well, he will be by the time you get through with him—if he ain’t dead,” broke in Cousin Chad. “Lyddy, it’s my duty to speak plainly, and I’ll not shirk it. Letitia spoiled you from the time you were born, and John Bird seems bent on keeping it up. David will pay the penalty for it. We do a very different part by the orphan the Lord made it our duty to take charge of, I can assure you. Caroline Wrenn’s health is taken care of, with a view to her future usefulness as a Christian. But of course you’ll stick to your own ways.—Well, I’ve warned you: my conscience is clear. Come, Jane: we’d better be going.”

“I’m glad your conscience is clear, Cousin Chad. I know that’s a comfort to you, if I’m not. But we can be good friends, can’t we, even though our ideas are different?”

“I shall not turn my back upon you if you’re in trouble, Lyddy, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “I hope I know my duty better than that. But when you want help again you must ask for it. I don’t intend to offer it.”

“That’s a bargain, then,” I said; “and we must both remember it.”

Cousin Jane looked at me sharply, but Cousin Chad was already heaving her into the buggy, and she turned to get a good grip on the side. The vehicle creaked as she settled in it, and groaned when Cousin Chad sank beside her.

“Good-bye, Lyddy,” she said. “We’ve done our best. I hope you won’t regret it.”

This quite upset me, and after the cedars hid them I lay laughing until the thought of poor little Caro suddenly sobered me. What were they doing to Billy’s child? I must make friends with Cousin Jane, somehow, and entice the little thing over to Bird Corners as much as possible.

There was no one else whom our erratic manner of life really scandalized, except Cousin Jason Blue; and he, as he took occasion to tell me when he met me out driving one day with Caro, never made a fool of himself like Chad Grackle by meddling. If a woman wanted to follow her nature and behave like a lunatic, and her husband chose to allow it, it was none of his business; so he shrugged his shoulders and passed on.

Cousin Jason and the Grackles are the only kin I have in all Chatterton whose kinship I would discount if I could; but there is no denying they belong in the family. Cousin Chad’s father was my grandmother’s third half-cousin on my father’s side; and Cousin Jason’s mother was Cousin Lysander Hilliard’s step-daughter by his second marriage: there could scarcely be anything plainer than that.

And if Cousin Jason had his drawbacks, there are none about his half-sister, Grace, fifteen years his junior, and, except Ella, the dearest friend I have. She married George Wood soon after I married the Peon, and they have a daughter, Milly, about the age of Caro Wrenn.

David took kindly to country life, and to his numerous cousins-by-marriage. There were plenty of boys among them; and though at first they resented David’s city ways, their respect for him grew immensely when they found how far he could bat a ball; and after he had whipped Bob White in single combat he was admitted to Chatterton boydom as a comrade in full fellowship. There was no particular reason for his fighting Bob, so far as we dull grown-ups could discover, except that Bob was the leader of his set, and a fight was considered the necessary initiation to membership. As soon as this was made clear to him, David had painstakingly trodden on Bob’s toes, and the preliminaries were arranged at once. The boys were excellent friends, before and afterward; and the Peon would not allow me to discuss the matter with David. They talked it out in private, and reached some amicable male conclusion of their own.

Of the girl cousins David was loftily tolerant, excepting Caro Wrenn. She was five years old the spring we came back to the country, when David was half-past nine. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father, Billy Wrenn, had gone to Colorado three years afterward, to die there of consumption. He made Cousin Chad Caro’s guardian before he died, knowing, as we all did, Cousin Chad’s remarkable ability in reaping financial harvests from even the smallest investments; but he left the child herself with her mother’s sister, Sally Martin, never dreaming that death would again bereave the little creature of a mother’s love. Sally died, quite suddenly, less than a year after Billy; and Cousin Chad and Cousin Jane, intent, as usual, on doing their impeccable duty, assumed sole care of the little heiress, and installed her in their own childless and virtuous home.

A more incongruous setting for her could scarcely have been found. She was a tiny creature, with rose-leaf skin, great hazel eyes, a mop of red-brown curls, and a mouth where laughter bubbled all day long. Quick and bird-like in all her movements, she flitted in and out of the most unexpected recesses in the twinkling of an eye, with endless flutterings of hands and skirts and sweet gurglings of suppressed laughter. Almost from her cradle she sang—queer little soft croonings which slipped into tunes before she could speak their words. Cousin Jane scarcely knew what to make of her, and was torn between a sincere desire to do her Spartanly-Christian duty by her, and her solemn puzzlement over what she considered the child’s combination of depravity and charm. Even Cousin Jane could not be very severe with her; but she had an uneasy sense of spoiling her every time she forebore the rod, so that I found her more than willing to turn the child over to me for the greater part of the time.

This arrangement gave my revered relative ample warrant for looking closely into my household affairs and reproving me for everything she did and didn’t discover; it was her duty to know all about a place where dear Caroline spent so much of her time. And when Caro departed from Cousin Jane’s ideals, as she did with every movement of body and mind, it was a great relief to my pious cousin to be able publicly to disavow all responsibility for the child’s shortcomings. What, as she constantly inquired, could one expect of Caroline when that scatter-brained Lyddy would persist in encouraging the child in her flightiness? She published abroad her own powerlessness to control either Caro or the situation, and openly washed her hands of the consequences.

Caro and I bore up as best we could, and the Peon and David stood by us nobly. David, indeed, was ready to fight his idol’s battles with Cousin Jane herself. In fact, he grew up with a lack of respect for that excellent lady which tempted her to assume the role of a prophet, in which capacity she dwelt at large on the penitentiary as David’s ultimate place of residence. Caro always responded to these prognostications that, if Davy went to the penimtentium, she would go, too, as soon as she was big enough, and keep house for him, and make the cook give them ice-cream every day that came. And so the matter rested.

III
In Make-Believe

It is four years since I wrote those last words. Not long after, Caro went away to school. David went North to college that year, and was only coming home for the regular holidays. He still held to his boyhood preference, and was determined to be a scientific farmer: and since the Peon and I were to have him with us always, we wanted him to have a few years quite away from us in which to make his own adjustments to life. So they left us the same week, David with all a boy’s love to hold him back, and a young man’s eagerness to urge him away; and Caro in as nearly easterly weather as her sunny nature ever experienced.

It was Cousin Jane who first decided on Caro’s banishment. For the sake of her own peace of mind she had of late years resigned the child almost entirely to me; but every now and then she had what Caro called a “qualm spell.” During these painful periods Caro resided with the Grackles, strictly, not even coming over to take lunch with me. She arose at five and extinguished her light at nine; and pinned on the wall beside her bureau, in Cousin Jane’s firm handwriting, was a schedule of useful occupations for each of the intervening sixteen hours.

She had so much time for devotions, so much for meals, so much for school, for study, for “domestic occupations,” for “improving and useful reading,” and for “practical sewing.” Cousin Jane never allowed precious time wasted on fancy work; and if she thought it was all like the awful things she had in her parlor I don’t in the least blame her for thinking it wicked.

However, Caro’s time was laid out for her as exactly as the squares on a checker-board. She fed the chickens, argued with the old biddies who wanted to “set” in the wrong place, and wheedled the arrogant old Buff Orpington, who ruled the hens and Cousin Jane with ease and contempt, into doing whatever she wanted of him. She made butter that drew near-smiles to Cousin Jane’s stiff lips, and evolved cakes that called forth lectures to Cousin Chad on the sin of gluttony. She sewed, without a murmur, or a particle of trimming, undergarments of good, reliable, ever-wearing domestic. She was always foresighted enough to make ample allowance for their shrinking when washed; whereby she both pleased Cousin Jane and insured an excellent fit for little black Josie when she returned to us with a halo of virtue above her red-brown curls. She read history till she could put me to the blush. She washed the best tea-cups and the Persian cat. She dusted the parlor daily. And from her early childhood she made irreproachable jam.

It really was excellent training for her; thorough good discipline, as Cousin Jane would say; especially as it was interspersed with “spells of Bird-Cornering,” during which she sojourned with the Peon and me. For the period of discipline always followed an accustomed round. It began with a Cousin Jane all severity, lynx-eyed to drag poor Caro’s delinquencies to light and overcome them by unsparing criticism. But Caro has always made play of everything, finding by the talisman of her own happy heart the hidden beauty, or laughter, of the ugliest and solemnest things. She did all Cousin Jane found for her to do—which is saying a good deal—not only cheerfully, but with whole-souled delight, as if it were her very meat and drink. Doing it that way, she did it beyond criticism; and Cousin Jane would begin to relax, unwillingly, unable to find a flaw, yet with an uneasy feeling that something must be wrong, or Caro couldn’t possibly be enjoying herself so much. When she set herself to mortify Caro’s girlish vanity the child met her more than half-way. She did her best to “slick” her curls, and donned shapeless gingham aprons as joyously as though they were made of jewels and lace. Cousin Jane would find herself being mollified to the point of indulgence in spite of herself; and about that time Caro would come flying into the yard at Bird Corners and drop fluttering beside me, her eyes shining with the pure joy of living and the love of living things.

“I’m back again, Mammy Lil,” she would laugh, whirling about on one toe. “Cousin Jane hasn’t scolded me for four days, and yesterday she almost patted my head; so I knew she thought I’d had training enough for the present, and I’d be coming back home in a jiffy. They’re so good to me in their funny way I’m most ashamed to be glad to come home to you—but I am, all the same. Where’s Josie? I’ve made three new petticoats and a night gown for her, out of muslin strong enough to climb trees.”

The truth was that when Caro came back to me it was because Cousin Jane had detected in her own soul symptoms of the child’s being made an idol: she had to get rid of her to recover her own moral poise. But she still intended to do her full duty by her: so when Caro was fifteen she was sent to boarding school, to remain at least five years. By that time Cousin Jane hoped to have re-established her own imperturbability without unduly exposing her charge to the dangerous influences of Bird Corners.

We had a battle royal concerning the school she should go to, and to this day Cousin Jane thinks she won. She really has no more idea about schools than a chinquapin worm, living fat and contented in its own sufficient little world; and I knew she’d be for sending the child to some fifth-rate country “college” where she’d be taught poor music and worse French, and be worked to death learning things the way they aren’t. So I wrote, ostentatiously, for the catalogue of one of the most exclusive, nonsensical, and extravagant “finishing schools”; and privately ordered sent to Cousin Jane one from the school I wished Caro to attend. It was a sensible place where she’d be taken care of, and given a chance to grow up to the best of herself in body and mind. I plead for the finishing school, and sniffed diligently at the other, even advocating the dreaded “college” as preferable; whereby I had the comfort of having Caro sent where I wanted her, with Cousin Jane’s mind so definitely set on keeping her there that I knew her education was provided for.

Caro rebelled against going. For the first time in her life she did not want to please us.

“You’re not well enough to do without me and David, too, Mammy Lil,” she insisted; “it’s just a pretense that you don’t need me; and I don’t care whether I’m educated or not.”

She yielded to the inevitable between tears and laughter.

“Anyway,” she reflected, “there’s Make-Believe left: you’ll never get rid of me there, will you? I’ll come there every day of the world, and David, too: and ten times a day if you want me.”

It was a genuine relief to have her go; it was becoming most difficult to blind her bright eyes to my illness. It was much simpler to keep up appearances with the Peon, who left home early and returned late, and who was often called away for days together. If I sat up as usual when he was in the house it was becoming necessary to lie quite still all day.

For weeks after the children left I enjoyed being alone, and the freedom from effort which it brought. But as the winter wore on, the loneliness proved a lure to introspection and self-pity—those quicksands of despair which encircle the country of enforced idleness; and as I lay under my windows or beneath the trees I began, for pleasure and companionship, to write the story of our happy life and of the children’s growing up. But the note-book proved desperately heavy, and the few pages I filled took weeks instead of days; until at last I ceased the effort until I should be stronger, as I had ceased so many other things in this journeying into the Land of Idleness.

I made a new acquaintance that winter—a wretched little blue devil to whom I gave the name of Grumpy, and with whom I battled from morning till night, and especially from night till morning. It is not pain that blue devils thrive on—I had proved that all these many years; it is idleness that gives them their chance for mischief—the helpless idleness of utter exhaustion, when one’s thoughts hang vacant, and body nor mind can longer force its way past the wall of pain to move, however slowly, in the beautiful outside world of human effort and achievement.

So Grumpy came to Bird Corners. Satan himself knows no self-respecting devil would have stayed on the premises after the way I treated the creature; but blue devils respect neither themselves nor anybody else. An hour after I had flung him out by the heels he would bob up by the sofa in the finest fettle imaginable, grinning at my exhaustion from our late encounter. The most I ever could be sure of doing was keeping him invisible to every one else; but he made up for that in the nights. Still, one adjusts one’s self to the inevitable in time; and blue devils are all in the day’s work, I suppose, like the dentist or a cold in one’s head. One gets through with the visitation somehow, and laughs afterward because, for the time, at least, it is over.

When the children came home in the summer there was trouble, of course. Doctors came and went, though I had privately done my full duty by them long before; and I swallowed a deal of nasty stuff which did absolutely no good, except that it soothed the feelings of the family.

By the end of the summer David was insisting on something radical; and when he went back to college he took me with him, and deposited me in a northern sanitarium, where I was to lie flat on my back three months, and be made over as good as new.

This was not only radical, but revolutionary. Chatterton had never before furnished an inmate for a sanitarium. The word, indeed, was commonly understood as a polite euphemism for a lunatic asylum. The sentiments of the kin ranged all the way from Grace Wood’s anxious hopefulness to Cousin Jane’s frank curiosity concerning what new kind of craziness Lyddy had been up to now, to make John Bird feel like she had to be shut up in a private mad-house. She took my part, however, so far as to say, both to my face and behind my back, that I wasn’t a mite crazier than I’d been all my life; and if folks could get along with me this long it did look like a pity they couldn’t put up with me a while longer, and save disgracing the family. There was nothing the matter with me, Cousin Jane opined, beyond being spoiled to death, and lazy; and, anyway, it was flying in the face of Providence to go on living if your time had come to die.

As to going North, she never did believe in wasting money on conceited Yankee doctors when there were so many struggling physicians at home, to say nothing of the heathen in foreign lands who were dropping into hell-fire so many a minute for lack of any kind of doctors, good or bad, to keep them alive until the missionaries could get to them.

“But it’s no use preachin’ to selfish ears,” she concluded, drawing her heavy silk wrap about her ample shoulders and settling her bonnet strings. “I’ve been wastin’ my breath, of course.”

It seemed a pity that she should, whether from my point of view or her own; so I smiled as sympathetically as I could, and offered my cheek for her farewell salute. She bestowed it impressively.

“Well, good-bye, Lyddy. I suppose I won’t see you again in this life; an’ in the other one failin’ wits won’t trouble us, I trust. I want you to know I don’t hold any of your foolishness against you, child: I reckon you never did have sense like the rest of us.”

She went out with her ponderous, firm tread, and Caro flitted to my side, her head thrown up, ruffling like an angry wren.

“Mammy Lil, its a shame you made me promise to be good! Do let me run after her and——” She caught my eye and broke into bubbling laughter, dropping her head on my pillows and snuggling her little nose under my chin.

“Of course it’s funny,” she admitted presently; “and if you will laugh, I have to. But I can’t see how she can be so wooden-headed and yet be alive.”

“She isn’t alive very much, poor soul!” I answered, soberly enough. “I don’t think anybody really lives except so far as they understand life—and people. When you think of it in that way, Cousin Jane has lived in a closer confinement all her life than I’ll be when I get to the asylum.”

That was three years ago, and more, and I am here at the sanitarium yet, though the Peon is coming to take me home next month. It was I who set the limit of my stay at three months, when I came; I was determined to be well by that time. I even had Caro put my note-book in my trunk, because I expected to fill it before I came back. That is why I am writing this chapter, a few lines at a time, on good days: I am determined to do something that I planned doing, before I go back.

It would take more note-books than my trunk could hold to tell the story of the kindness shown me here; of the patience, skill, and resourcefulness which have fought for me when I could no longer fight for myself. And it is good to be in a place like this for awhile, to learn what human nature is capable of under racking, tearing strain. The courage one finds, the high-hearted endurance of plain, ordinary people, the brave good cheer of men and women whose pain-lined faces choke one’s throat with tears! I have seen these things so often these last eighteen months—or at least in so much of them as I could be carried, lying flat in a wheeled-chair, out on one of the balconies, where I could catch glimpses of the struggles that were going on around me.

It is not all loss, this suffering. Sickness does bring out hidden ugliness and weakness, for it searches soul and body to the inmost core. But there is more good hidden than there is evil; and in the stress of suffering the most ordinary people blossom into a loveliness of soul which reveals them as of the company of the saints. Life is so narrow and commonplace to the average experience that it can only make a narrow and commonplace appeal. “The trivial round, the common task” has, for so many, no large connections; and the depths of their natures are never stirred until their every-day world lies in ruins about them, and to live at all they must discover new resources in

“—that true world within the world we see,”

and gain a true perspective and a new horizon.

And the funny folk in a place like this—they would fill volumes, too! Of course they are pitiful; but I never could see the harm of laughter over pitifulness, if only one doesn’t laugh unkindly. For some of them never find new resources. Disaster leads them, not to discovery, but to an impasse; and they revenge themselves on the inexplicable by endless incongruities of thought and action.

The patient who really helped me most was a dear old lady who, though forbidden, like the rest, to talk to me, felt it her heaven-sent mission to cheer me up. Whenever she saw me deposited on the porch she flew out, wringing her hands in sympathy, and exclaiming, “Oh, what is life without health!” It really is a good deal when you come to think of it; and the old lady’s reiterations elicited a string of mental replies as long as from western New York to Bird Corners, and kept me in ammunition for Grumpy.

For Grumpy has been at this sanitarium for three years and seven weeks. But the Peon has been here, too, and David—and Cousin Jane! Caro I have not seen in all these years: Cousin Jane doesn’t consider it decent for a young girl to be allowed in a place where women may be seen in the halls in kimonos, and men are allowed to sit in wheeled-chairs on the balconies, shamelessly clad in their bath robes, with heaven knows what garments, or lack of garments, underneath. Caro should not set foot in the place; and no entreaties could move her. But Caro has written, every week of the world; and, to make up for my not having her, Cousin Jane paid me a visit herself. She felt it her duty, she said, to find out what kind of a place it was that John Bird had shut Lyddy up in; and if the rest of the family wouldn’t look after me, she would. So she came, suspicious and inquisitorial, and melted visibly under the tactful suavity of the physician in charge,—“the Head,” as we called him. She even began to help him, ministering to the patients after a fashion all her own. She had it out with one of them, a metaphysical lady, a very unorthodox person, and left her in a state of collapse. In no uncertain tones she expressed her views on hen-pecking to another, an elderly lady with a liver and a youthful husband. I don’t know what would have happened further if I had not been inspired to beguile her into going down into the treatment rooms for a Turkish bath. She came up purple with wrath, and began to pack her trunk, declaring that she washed her hands of the place forever; and if I wanted to stay there and have my morals corrupted, I could; but for her part she was going back to her own bathtub, and the religion she was brought up in. And go she did, that night.

For myself, these three years must remain in the silence in which they have been spent. The pain I wish to forget; today’s pain is enough. And the helplessness and idleness, so much worse than the pain—that too, I would shut from my memory. But the kindness which has filled these years—that is an eternal possession. And the loveliness of this little valley is mine always, cut off as it is in my thoughts as a place apart from all my real world and life, shut in and hidden by its beautiful circling hills. I have called it the Enchanted Valley, because it seemed sometimes as if some spell had caught and bound me to it forever. But now that I am to go free at last I can forget all that, and remember only the enchantment of its beauty, and the kindness of those who dwell in it. The Land of Make-Believe, too, is as near me as under the trees at home. I have had beautiful times in Make-Believe, day and night, and especially at night. I have seen Caro there, you may be sure! I made a jingle about it not long ago which tells the real story of these long years better than anything else I could write.

IN MAKE-BELIEVE

Oh, beautiful country of Make-Believe,

Where in childhood I learned to play!

I’m not bound fast to a bed—not I!

Nor racked with pain till I want to cry:

I’m over the hills and away!

Poor body that lies here and cannot sleep,

I’m sorry to leave you so;

But the children are calling from far away;

In Make-Believe, where it’s time to play,

And you can’t walk, you know.

I fly on the wings of thought, myself,

While the wind shrieks behind me “Wait!”

For he never can fly as fast as thought,

And, he howls because he thinks he ought;—

But here I am at the gate.

No narrow, smothering walls for me,

Nor life shut in from the sky,

When Make-Believe is all outdoors,

With beautiful grass instead of floors,

And to reach it one needs but try.

There is ice back there; but in Make-Believe

There’s just what you happen to choose:

Soft spring-time colors with silver sheen,

Or cool wood-reaches of summer green,

Or the sparkle of autumn dews.

Oh, the woodland rambles in Make-Believe!

The fields where daisies grow!

The level light on the evening hills,

The wild bird-song that leaps and thrills,

And the rose of the sunset’s glow!

How the children chatter in Make-Believe,

Just as at home they do!

How close they cuddle, with laugh and kiss,

To tell their secrets, nor ever miss

Aught else if they have but you!

All the people you love are in Make-Believe,

The living, and those called dead;

And all the people you’d like to know—

The wise of the earth, both high and low,

And the heroes of days long fled.

And they know what’s worth while in Make-Believe

That to give is the blessed way;

That courage, and laughter, and love, are wise;

That the sun shines back of the cloudiest skies;

That there’s end to the longest day.

They talk of high things in Make-Believe,

And they love e’en the tiniest joke

And they take you sailing o’er land and sea;

And they’d know all the places you’d like to be

If never a word you spoke.

But the sun is up in that wintry world;

And the nurse will put in her head

And ask, “Is the pain any better, my dear?

Did you sleep a little? The doctor’s here.”—

Well, so am I here——in bed!

And now it is mid-November, for the weeks have passed by as I lay here, writing a bit as I could; and I am to be home Thanksgiving morning; not home in Make-Believe, but home in real Bird Corners, down in Tennessee! David is there, for good, now, running the farm as he planned, but helping the Peon in his office, too; and Caro is coming home for Christmas, and to stay “forever,” she says, in June; and I am to get well—some day—at home. I can walk quite a little already—twenty yards sometimes; and the bad days are better than they used to be, and farther apart. Even Grumpy must admit that good bad days are encouraging!

All the people you love in Make-Believe? Not quite all—not Ella. Somehow I can’t look for her there any more; not since the day the letter came back unopened. We were together in Make-Believe always before that. But when I see her again it will be when Make-Believe will have disappeared, with the world we see, and the real world will be plain to sight. But everybody else was there—even pious, pompous Cousin Chad, and foolish, kind-hearted, exasperating Cousin Jane.

And now it’s day after tomorrow, and the Peon is coming in four days!

IV
The Dark O’ the Year

November 30th. The deepest joys can never be put into words; but lying here in my own dear room, close under the long windows which form its eastern side, and looking out across the valley to the familiar hills beyond, I know there is one spot on the map more beautiful than anything Make-Believe can show. The Peon and David left me only an hour ago—the real ones, I mean; and out on the lawn Uncle Milton is pretending to rake invisible leaves, looking towards my windows every few minutes to assure himself that I am really here.

Near the wall of honeysuckle along the pasture fence the cardinal and his wife are flitting about, just as I left them three years ago; and in the lilac outside my window, where all the spring-time beauty sleeps safe in the sheltering buds, a Carolina wren proclaims the triumph of days to come. His spring song is a bubbling rhapsody of present love and delight; but his winter song is vibrant with the joy of things unseen. He sings as one who carries spring in his heart always, as vivid a reality in December as when all the woods are green. To doubts, questions and hopes he has one answer, and he gives it joyously under the darkest skies. Will earth awake again? Will sunshine come? Will life reign in evident triumph, and winter and darkness pass? Sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sure! The rich notes thrill with the joy of assurance, and shake him bodily as he stands with up-thrown head and pulsing throat, wagging from beak to tail.

But like many another of the sons of the prophets, his gift of open vision lies close to his love of fun. His tail jerks with a wildness suggestive of broken gearings in his little insides, as he dashes into his score again accelerando, singing it da capo with a comical exaggeration of his former style. Sure-ly, sure-ly, sure-ly, sure! He cocks his head, flirts his tail, gives me a sharp look from his sharper eye, and whisks around the house in a twinkling.

And Grace Wood is coming to see me tomorrow! I have been good and waited until I am quite rested, and now I am to have my reward. But I did not know until I came home that George died two years ago. There were never two people happier together than they; and yet she has gone on writing to me all this time, the same sunshiny, hopeful, heartening letters she sent me when I first left home. That was always Grace’s way; everything that came to her, hurt or pleasure, went out from her again only as help to somebody who needed it.

I haven’t seen Cousin Jane yet, and David says she’s been simmering for days and is liable to boil over any minute. She came an hour after I reached home, though requested to stay away until I sent for her; but the Peon caught her at my door and turned her back. She insisted she had something of the greatest importance to explain to me; but the Peon is an awesome person when he does lay down the law, and she hasn’t been back since. I can’t help wondering if it is something about Caro—though it can’t be, for I’ve been Caro’s “mother-confessor” too long to be learning anything about her from Cousin Jane. Besides, Caro will be here herself in three more weeks—after all these years and years!

December 9th. Grace came, her old dear self, unchanged except that the look of detachment from herself was deepened in her clear, sweet eyes, and about her smiling, tender mouth.

We spoke of George as if he were still with her—as indeed I think he is—and of Milly, now quite grown, and sharing with Caro the honors of Chatterton belledom.

We had a beautiful time together, and chatted and giggled as we have done these forty years whenever occasion offered; and she went away promising to come soon again if I would keep on getting better. And so I would have done but for Cousin Jane. She was driving down the pike and saw Grace, with her own eyes, coming through the gate. She drove on down the road a bit till Grace was out of sight, and then swooped down on me like a blackbird on a worm. Josie tried to stop her at the front door; but she had known Josie from her pickaninny days; and if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered, for Cousin Jane is not a person to be frustrated by darkies.

She knocked once, sepulchrally, on my door, and opened it on the instant. She wore her best Sunday air, and eyed me like a familiar of the Holy Office about to put a heretic through a course of sprouts.

“Well, Lyddy,” she began, settling weightily into Grace’s chair, “so you lived to get back home, after all. I hope you’re as grateful to Providence as you ought to be.”

Her tone made it evident that, though she might hope it, she certainly didn’t expect it.

“You’ve gone off mightily in your looks,” she continued; “not that you weren’t always sorter peaked an’ skinny-lookin’—‘slender,’ Letitia used to call it! Do you think your mind’s gettin’ straight any?”

“It’s straight, what there is of it,” I said; “but I’m tired just now, Cousin Jane; I can’t talk very well. You see Grace has been here——”

“Didn’t I see her?” she demanded indignantly. “That’s why I came. If you can see a chatterer like her, I reckon you can see me. I told John Bird I wanted to see you about Caroline.”

My tired eyes opened at once.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Caroline is gettin’ grown-up; she was nineteen last June. I’ve tried my best to keep beaux and foolishness away from her, but everything in town, looks like, was after her last summer; and the worst of it was, Caroline liked it.”

The corners of my mouth took an upward curve.

“You wait till I get through, missy, an’ you’ll be laughin’ the other side of your mouth. Caroline is hail-fellow-well-met with every boy in this town except David Bird; and she knows perfectly well, for I told her, that Chadwell and I and you and John Bird intend her to marry David.”

The room swam round, and I closed my eyes. Speech was impossible.

“Good land, Lyddy! Don’t go to faintin’—I didn’t know you were such a baby. You needn’t get so scared, child. Jane Grackle is pretty safe to get her own way, and long as your way’s my way you’ll get yours, too. She’ll marry him yet; young folks haven’t any sense; they need managin’, and I——”

“For heaven’s sake don’t try to manage Caro,” I gasped. “And as for telling her I intended her to marry David—go, before you say something else that will make forgiveness impossible!”

Cousin Jane turned purple. I saw that as my eyes closed again. She rose stiffly, with rustling skirts.

“If I didn’t know you’d lost what little sense the Lord gave you, Lyddy Bird, I’d box your ears for your impudence. I’ll go when I get ready, miss. I didn’t tell Caroline you said you intended her to marry David—I know you’ve never said a word about it: I just took it as a matter of course. Chadwell and I feel it our duty to provide for her—not in money, of course; she has quite a tidy little fortune of her own, and of course you and John Bird expect to leave David all you’ve got; they won’t need anything from us. But we want to see her settled: an’ David’s steady an’ reliable an’ a real good business boy, for all you’ve raised him so harum-scarum; an’ it stands to reason, with your keepin’ Caroline all the time like you did, an’ throwin’ away the good stout clothes I provided for her to waste your own money in fol-de-rols, an’ good as adoptin’ her, you might say, that you’d picked her out for David an’ meant to leave them your money. Don’t you?”

I swept together my floating wits, steadied them with a supreme effort, and considered for an instant, while I felt Cousin Jane’s angry stare battering at my closed lids. I must tell her something, and nothing.

“Caro and David are like our own children,” I said weakly; “we want their happiness, and nothing else. If they love one another as brother and sister, it’s quite to be expected, don’t you think? Whatever made you think we wanted a marriage, brought up as they have been?”

“Do you mean you won’t leave them the money?”

“I mean money has nothing to do with it. We expect to do all we can for them, and to let them be happy in their own ways, not in ours.”

“Well, any way suits Caroline that’s not my way an’ that makes mischief—I can see that plain enough, an’ I told her so. I scolded her good. An’ it’s my opinion David’s in love with her. I caught him lookin’ at her one day when they were fishin’ down by the mill, an’ I just happened to go by in the buggy. I couldn’t get a word out of him when I asked him about it; an’ when I told him I’d given Caroline a talkin’-to, an’ I’d set my head on his havin’ her, he glared at me as if I was tryin’ to murder him, an’ told me to let Caroline alone, an’ let her marry whoever she wanted to. He ain’t been near me since, an’ won’t hardly speak to me; an’ Caroline behaved like a spitfire when I went to her about it. But I believe David’s willin’ if she’d be—but she ain’t, yet. You may as well know there’s goin’ to be trouble when she comes home. It ain’t like it used to be; an’ you’d better get up out of that bed an’ be gettin’ ready to help straighten things out.”

How much longer she would have stayed there I don’t know. Her voice, near and strident as it was, was drifting off into a world that seemed far away, when the door opened with soft quickness and David was in the room.

Before he could speak Cousin Jane was lumbering away, his eyes driving her like bayonets. He poured out something and held it to my lips, and then sat stroking my hand as gently as Caro could have done. And for days and nights I lay here in the clutch of the old weakness and the old pain, and scarcely heeding either in the blackness of this new fear. I have been trying for days to write it all down, thinking maybe I could face it better so, and find some way of deliverance from Cousin Jane’s cataclysmic diplomacy.

That Caro should marry David! Has there ever been a time when I didn’t hope for it? And I have never said it, even to the Peon himself, for fear the very walls should carry the secret and make the hope impossible: and now! If Jane Grackle—but there’s no use railing; when one’s hopes are in ruins it takes all one’s strength to face the disaster; if I waste mine in reproaches I shall turn coward, and then Grumpy will rule my world.

December 17th. Gray days, with sullen skies which will neither shine nor storm. The mocking-birds have entered their winter silence, and eye me indifferently as they hop about under my windows picking up the crumbs which Josie scatters daily for my feathered guests. They never come together at this time of the year. Each goes his own path in solitude as well as in silence. But the flickers are more sociable, and the wrens are always in pairs. The cardinal and his wife come together every morning, she gently indifferent as usual, and he the devoted lover of all the year around.

Over in the pasture the meadow-larks sing half-heartedly, and a titmouse protests sturdily against their sentimental pathos. He is pecking at a magnolia seed tucked under his toes as he sits in the beech at breakfast. “Here! Here! Here! Here!” he exclaims. He believes in making the best of things, does the titmouse, and holds his crest as high these dark, raw days as when he goes courting in a world that is in gala attire for the occasion.

And if the pain isn’t better yet, the weakness is; and that is always the worst part of it. I shall be out in my wheeled-chair yet, by the time Caro comes. And as to Cousin Jane’s nonsense, she may make mischief—has made it, evidently; but if they’re really made for each other, as I have hoped for so long, surely an old woman’s foolish tongue can never ruin their lives. Sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sur-e-ly, sure! Oh, bless the little red-brown seer! He tilts on the lilac bush a second, winks at me distinctly, and is off with a whisk of his tail which says plainly, “Don’t be more of a fool than you must be, old pal!” and I won’t.

December 24th. How full of happiness one’s world can be! Caro is not much bigger than her feathered namesake out of doors, but the place overflows with her presence.

I was afraid Cousin Jane wouldn’t let her stay here after the late unpleasantness, and was lying on the south porch the other day, trying to devise some way to make my peace with her, when she drove around the house and over the grass, and stopped her buggy close to my chair.

“Oh, Cousin Jane, I’m so glad to see you!” I exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting to ask you to let Caro come straight to me and stay with us while she’s at home. I haven’t had her for three years, Cousin Jane; and I can make it all right with her about David, I’m sure.”

“I knew you could do something if you were a mind to try,” she said, with her severest kiss-of-peace manner, which always aroused an unreasonable combativeness in my unregenerate soul. “I am perfectly willing, Lyddy, to let by-gones be by-gones. I never bear malice, even against ill-tempered folks. I came over to say if you’d do what you could with Caroline, I’d let her stay here. She always was keen to please you—why, I never could see; but she is; and I’ll not let my personal feelin’s stand in the way when it comes to dischargin’ my duty to that poor motherless girl. She can come.”

“Thank you, Cousin Jane,” I said heartily.

“You’re welcome, Lyddy, you’re welcome: I don’t hold anything against you. I want to set you a Christian example: maybe it’ll have some effect on you, now you’re all broken down with havin’ too much of your own way. Looks like, with all the afflictions the Lord’s sent on you, an’ old as you are, you might be learnin’ better.”

I suppose I am a sinner; but somehow, all my life, whenever Cousin Jane takes her religion in both hands and tries to ram it into me in her best pile-driver manner, my own scuttles off and dives into the first rat-hole it can find; and I have a dreadful time dragging it out again and making it help me behave. So I took a long look at the blackbirds under the maple, piously jabbing the English sparrows to discourage their greediness about crumbs, before I said soberly:

“I don’t believe the Lord sent me any afflictions. I think He just tries to teach me how to get the good out of what comes, and to rise by it. I think that’s one of His special jobs in this world—trying to turn our afflictions into wings.”

“Well, we all know you’re sorter half-cracked, Lyddy,” said Cousin Jane, with a manner intended to be genial. She was evidently bent on not quarreling. “Just do your best for Caroline.” She gathered up the reins.

“Cousin Jane,” I said quickly, “don’t say a word more to Caro about—those things. Please.”

“I’ll do as I see fit, Lyddy,” she answered stiffly. “Bein’ willin’ to let you help don’t mean I can trust you to manage things. Well, good-bye. Do try to get up an’ take some exercise; it’ll do you good. I’m a worker, myself, an’ always was; an’ you see how strong I am—not but what I could complain if I wanted to, like some.” She disappeared around the house, tucking her buggy-robe closely around her with one hand as she drove.

So yesterday morning I was out on the front porch, watching the road with my glasses; and there they came, whirling in from the pike in the open car, the top being down that I might see her afar off. Caro was driving, and David beamed beside her, while the Peon beamed on the back seat.

The whole place feels her presence, and overflows with her music, her laughter, her sweet and tricksy ways. She is off with the young folks in Chatterton now, helping with the Christmas tree at the church; but before she left she wheeled me out to my cot under the maple tree—or superintended Uncle Milton’s doing it, while she fluttered about with the pillows, and scolded us for letting her do all the work. She scattered crumbs for the birds, just as she used to, and then cuddled down on the same little stool where she used to sit, her curly brown head on my pillows. Not Make-Believe any more, thank heaven, but Caro, and the real Bird Corners!

We were silent awhile, and then she began to talk—all the loving nonsense and little intimate confidences that had always come when we were alone. But not a word of David, nor of Cousin Jane. I could not let our first talk begin a silence between us, so I told her what had happened. She had flushed a little at first, but her laughter bubbled as she kissed me.

“Sweet Mammy, don’t you think I know Cousin Jane? I knew you never said it, nor meant it. And I’m sure you’d let me marry the man in the moon, if I wanted to. I did get mad with her for talking to David—that rather passed bounds. But David’s a darling, and as sensible as can be. We thrashed it all out afterwards, and we aren’t going to make ourselves unhappy because Cousin Jane’s a born donkey and can’t help it. Don’t you bother about it a minute. We’ll both of us get married some of these days, and you’ll have four children to love you instead of two.”

“And there isn’t anybody else yet?” I asked, my face turning to hers as I lay, and her clear eyes looking into mine.

“I don’t think there is with David,” she said, considering; “but as for me—Mammy Lil, would you rather be a young man’s darling, or marry a very old and rich and apoplectic gentleman, worry him to death fast, and be happy and independent forever after?”

“Who is the young man?”

“Oh, anybody; I haven’t decided; but I suppose I could get one. You know I wrote you about the boys last summer, and how wild Cousin Jane was. She was more fun than the boys. You don’t really want me to marry, do you? I’m having such a good time.” She sat up and waved her hand. “There’s Milly, and I must go. Now, lie here and be good till I get back, and I’ll never marry anybody you don’t want me to.” And she ran down to the gate, pinning her hat on as she went.

December 30th. Note-books are superfluous when I can have Caro. It is so good to see one so pretty, so eager, so joyous, so young in body and soul. She is the very spirit of youth, with her swift, outgoing life, her quick response to it on all sides, her gay resourcefulness in the little emergencies of her small world. I forget my body, and all its pain-worn helplessness, while she dances through the house. It doesn’t matter so much that I must watch in idleness while the life I love sweeps by, if somebody else has my own vivid joy in it—a joy unhampered by weariness or pain. No wonder the girls can’t stir without her, nor resent it that she draws the boys as honey draws flies.

I can’t see that she cares to draw any one of them yet, though she dearly loves to draw them all. She is in that kitten stage which comes to every girl alive. She wants to play, and she finds the new game fascinating. What the boys find it doesn’t concern her yet; she is exploring the possibilities of the game.

How David feels toward her is more than I can tell. He is as frankly fond of her as when he used to carry her across the muddy places down by the brook, and tell her fairy tales while they popped corn by the winter fire. But as to that look in his eyes whereof Cousin Jane prated—well, I’ve never seen it; and I rather doubt if she did either.

Yet somehow I can’t help the uneasy feeling that she has hoodooed my secret hopes. She never had influence enough to counteract anything other members of the family might elect to do; but whomever she sided with was a subject for condolence. She could never be suppressed when she espoused a cause, and her well-meant activities were invariably fatal to the best-laid plans. What have I done that, in addition to all my other afflictions, Cousin Jane should thrust herself upon me as an ally? I had counted so comfortingly upon her opposition. David was never fond of her, and it is only of late years that she has ceased to predict for him a future of State support. It isn’t that she’s fond of the boy now; it’s because Cousin Chad found out how he managed that affair for the Peon last winter, and because the farm here at Bird Corners is becoming one of the show places, agriculturally, of this part of the State. And if a richer suitor appears she’ll discard David like an old shoe.

I confess I am taking great comfort in the very apparent devotion of David’s old antagonist, Robert White. He is older than David, and is advancing rapidly in one of the largest banks in the city, of which his father is an important director. Bob is a nice fellow, little spoiled by prosperity, and his prospective fortune quite overshadows David’s—in fact, he is one of the “catches” of this part of the State. He has been staying out here at his father’s ever since Caro came home, and makes no secret of the reason. If Cousin Jane becomes aware of him she will espouse his cause, con amore, and my own hopes will have a rosier appearance. Poor Bob! I don’t bear him a bit of malice; but I must shunt Cousin Jane off on somebody!

January 5th. Caro left us last night, protesting as she went, and insisting that she would come home in defiance of everybody if I had any more backsets. But we all want her to finish the year under her new singing-master: her voice is really wonderful, and she ought not to stop yet. The six months will be gone before we know it; and then she will come to stay.

For myself, I have stored up delight enough in these ten days to brighten this dark January weather for weeks to come. And the days are already lengthening. Spring is on the way, in fact—and summer won’t be far behind.

January 10th. What winter colors could bedeck the world I never knew until today!

First came the rain—a soft, misty down-dropping which fell noiselessly on the half-frozen earth, softening the icy ridges in the road beyond the porch, till they crunched under Uncle Milton’s heavy feet and splashed into the water collecting in their ruts. Long before sunset they wheeled me back to my room, where the thickening clouds shut us into a twilight gloom, through which the north wind’s voice cut icily.

By morning the clouds were gone, and with them had vanished the work-a-day earth. In its place is a world of faery, of glitter, of fire, of pallid white. Over all the fields the snow lies thick, down to the very edge of the brook. But above the snow, from the smallest weed whose skeleton shakes in the bitter wind to the topmost twig of the tallest tree, is silver and fire and ice. The stubble is all one elfin glitter; and beyond the gate, along the pike, where dried golden-rod, poke-berry, mustard, and all earth’s wild outcast beauty blossomed months before, are billows of frost-wrought loveliness as pure as pearls and as delicate as the fronds of ferns.

Overhead the sky is deepest blue, rich foil and background for the trees, all silver here, all glitter there, and everywhere starred with flashing points of red and blue and orange, as some jagged point of ice catches the sunlight and tears it into dazzling shreds of color.

Deep blue, overhead; but everywhere along the horizon a soft, colorless, distant sky, across which the half-congealed moisture of the air draw its dimming yet invisible veil. The hills are pale, aloof; but here and there the low sun strikes them and smites the glory of their tree-tops into a halo of pearl and fire about their brows. And what may be the beauty of life more abundant when the beauty of life withdrawn clutches the heart like this?

January 13th. There is nobody to fellowship with today but the blackbirds and the English sparrows. David is off lecturing at some farmers’ institutes, and the Peon left this morning for a week’s trip. Grumpy is here, as usual, and the pain in my spine; but I am not of a mind to fellowship with them; they can sulk together in the corner if they want to.

Eh, but when the dark shuts out even the scandal-mongering sparrows, the room is a bit empty and lonesome-looking! Grumpy and the back don’t count; they are both in the skeleton-closet. But the key seems lost, and they have an unpleasant way of peeping through the crack of the door. There’s no sense in staying here this night, so it’s ho, for Make-Believe for me!

January 15th. When one can’t have the big things one wants, one can at least play with the little things one has; and in doing so may learn with growing thankfulness how great a resource a little thing may become.

There are so many playthings in the world—no need is left unsupplied. When one is too ill to think and too weak to look, there are fleeting glimpses, through half-shut lids, of blue sky beyond one’s windows, of a drifting cloud, a flash of wings, or the waving of boughs in the wind; beautiful pictures which return uncalled-for to float above that sea of pain wherein one rocks, and to steady one with a half-consciousness of an upper world of beauty and peace, real, though beyond one’s reach.

And when one can think a little—oh, so many things! One cannot possibly be cut off from life if one’s heart be in it. It isn’t the moving of one’s body that counts, but the clasping of life with the heart. We really live to the exact extent we care, and so find the interest with which every atom and phase of life is stored.