FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
LOVE STORIES

BY

ZONA GALE

AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1909,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
——
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
November, 1909; April, 1912.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To
MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
WISCONSIN

Certain of the following chapters have appeared in Everybody's, The American Magazine, The Outlook, The Woman's Home Companion, and The Delineator. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.

CONTENTS

Friendship Village Love Stories

I OPEN ARMS

Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their vase; and they are all white but one.

"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most dead by mistake."

"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a little shocked line troubled her forehead.

"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next months how."

So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May, and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely "To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief indulgence.

This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come, they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We too," they say, "have not been idle."

Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights. ("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow marching line of little volunteers.

I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the intruders and not they—and I own that for me the time has never wholly passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the walk—such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!—and in return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine—an isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say, it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in fellowship.

In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives, striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere civility; and I love them all—unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole village has just given to Lyddy Ember:—

"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in, though that was all elegant, but it was the Togetherness of it. I couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin' anybody to neighbour with."

It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship, comradeship, kinship—call it what you will. My neighbour and I will understand.

"I heard you was here," my neighbour said—bless her, her voice trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of her voice.

I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the wind—where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that—as is the custom of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and Meeting and Being Together.

I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell our days to their end.

My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street, and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out for us as if he knew.

"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."

My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph. But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.

"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be up to talk to you in a day or two—I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can spell like the minister."

I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!" Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of—shall I say?—brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I have seldom known this divination to fail me—though I am chary of using it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I knew that it would be Miggy.

"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the imminent; "why Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.

"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because she was a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy. 'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'—just like I've said it to you."

It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June—that May was helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do you think of your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless, usually speechless, and always without curiosity—some one, save for the tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time, moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.

... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think, because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the idea of something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her. But I am never quick enough to let her know....

When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,

"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.

"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."

"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.

"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.

I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would think that children would need to have things said out, but they are evidently closer to a more excellent way.

So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this which my neighbour called Togetherness.

II INSIDE JUNE

The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might not one finally become a June day?...

Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back and read there and made a path right away through the page.

This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old problem: The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough.

I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the matter—or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind of spiritual taking up of a claim.

How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that is the way it seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those fugitive moments when one almost knows ... what it is all about. And with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise man; and, indeed, if one idles properly—or rather, if the proper person idles—the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle until the hour yields its full blessing.

I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter, for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I did, with the proper grounds.

To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy, amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment, and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what. But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I can do to resist saying to her, "How did you get away?" It was so that she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of the spirit of the village.

There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:—

Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.

Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.

The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who gossip back.

"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And this was the best news that she could have given me.

It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the village. She has gone to the city to nurse some distant kinswoman more lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope. But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.

I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.

"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship Village."

My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious duties and incident fatigue, is as impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.

"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like the country?" she asked.

I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her economic fitness than that she is so trim and still and wistful, with such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes. Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head. How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her this, either.

"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a hired girl. They will get married. But I say, let 'em."

At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the flat pieces sent to the laundry."

"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"

"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.

"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas Moor—that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him. He'll be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he has got a good position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell. Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."

"Signs?" I hazarded.

"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted, love or a demon or whatever it be.

And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall, to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that pail becoming a person! And my neighbour tells me that the Qualifying Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without end.

"The young folks will couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds, in a manner of spontaneous impression, "I think it's nice. And it's nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it. It kind o' binds the soil."

My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk—these informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet, burdened of no conventions or upholstery or perhaps even words, and there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself looking forward.

Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even hear the absurd words.

"My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I never know.

You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh—"

the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.

To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I waited, and,

"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like something hurts you, ain't it?"

I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so, but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the village.

"He's come here in the year," she explained—and, save about the obvious import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said, "he seems to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame—for Peter's sake. Peter Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in this town, say what you want."

On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally," she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not to miss Peter Cary.

"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to work—it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and got up his lunch before I come out—I don't have my breakfast till the men folks get out of the way."

I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all, so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the real business of life—to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they arrive, lacking the cloud, it is true, but magnificently equipped to settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot pancake on a friend's ear with an Æsculapian savoir faire, for their efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh—"don't you wish you had?" What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be entered upon it!

In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who looked up from the foundation that he mortared; I have seen it often and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,—run under good conditions,—may not be a way out as well. At all events, the look was still in Peter's face.

Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush, and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.

"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."

There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I would trust their reasons for either.

My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering how it is in other places. Is it possible that men in general go away to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves her in the hope of a good kill.

And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my neighbour looked at me with a smile—or, say, with two-thirds of a smile—as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by it to impart too much.

"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a symptom.

"Miggy?" I said with interest—and found myself nodding to this new relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?

"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come here."

Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,

"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.

Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and drooped.

"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.

"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round. Now almost more than at night. Well—I don't know; both times."

I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.

"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter. Want a pink?"

Thus tacitly excused—how true her instinct was, courteously to put the three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!—I have come back to my house and my own breakfast.

"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the country?"

My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.

"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.

But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal, not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party, on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant, flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum of the village talk—in every house the intimate, revealing confidences of the Family, quick with hope or anxiety or humour or passion, animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.

The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight, something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get near to June?

III MIGGY

I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed, it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles within my sleep. I have the clock always with me. It is a little voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race, wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my clock in its musical maximum of noon.

Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the time.

"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had stood, arms folded.

"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.

Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket; but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become a kind of apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.

Miggy stood regarding me intently.

"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the door," she observed; "I thought it was you."

I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one nature is never mistaken for the other.

"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.

"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning to get the feeling."

"I beg your pardon. To get—what?" I asked.

"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better—like it was something alive inside you. That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm real glad I'm living."

As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.

"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is still a hill.)

"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."

"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.

"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."

"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And what made you think so?"

"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead. And I think so because I generally think I can do anything—except mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"

"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could do that?"

"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back. Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads caved in on one side—same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd be on the mathematics corner."

I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.

"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.

But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.

"Oh," she said, "I forgot. I meant to tell you first."

"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.

"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."

She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder—arms whose slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.

"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.

"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all laugh about us and act like it was a pity."

For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that she was "in trouble." I own that,—save with my neighbour, and Calliope, and a few more whom I love—here in the village I miss the simple good breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do the cities.

"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy. Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.

Miggy nodded—three little nods which seemed to settle everything.

"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."

So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of informing them.

"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."

"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me that I wish sometime to meet Peter."

"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"

"My dear child!" I exclaimed.

"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being one."

I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her—not by now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.

"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh. "Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your best."

"But it is," I told her.

"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do just exactly what you're told. Your best tells you how to do itself."

At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial utterance.

We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it often is, my one and my eleven and nobody else's. For, as between the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time and space were the only considerations.

When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of unconquerable timidity.

"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them done—would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em. But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just squirming and keeping still about 'em—but tell me?"

"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught her smile—that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to come as near as may be to the others.

I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea, who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another. Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long for one another to be near.

Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock, because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock, because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a clock—which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.

IV SPLENDOUR TOWN

Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went with me to the other end of the bridge.

I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear: for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our "table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings believing itself to be alone.

These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an objective point—including the new iron bridge—to which to take guests. But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward, is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I know, I know. You see that we do not yet live the river, as an ancient people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties, our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars, our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the Northmen were fellowed of the sea.

Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this fellowship and the fellowship of more.

"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away for a party"—in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a roll and wait for a fairy, and be a society."

We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love best to hear her in these fancyings.

"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."

I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan, her parasol—a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a phalanx?

We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face, it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them—yes, and our drug stores, too.

The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes, these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar, Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand, ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the voice of the little child, singing in the garden.

"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I have finished this story.

"Yes," I tell her.

"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.

Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.

"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to housekeep that garden."

"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.

"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."

I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics, learning—there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow, flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.

I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little Child something of what I thought to do—breaking in upon the old woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say, one foot in the universe.

"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head, "I'm real glad you're going to be here. I dread saying anything."

Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.

The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little Child:—

"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if she lived here."

She looked everywhere and answered:—

"In the water tower in those woods."

"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.

"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.

"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.

She looked long out across the water.

"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:—

"I love to stand in this great air

And see the sun go down.

It shows me a bright veil to wear

And such a pretty gown.

Oh, I can see a playmate there

Far up in Splendour Town."

I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment almost always turned away.

Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings. It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.

If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.

Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this moment, and to that.

But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.

"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."

"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.

I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you." Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another milieu is taste.

"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or wise or not averse to becoming either.

I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply. Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.

"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.

"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she means more than she knows that she means.

"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go back this minute."

"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests, for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil their walk.

"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.

Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society? I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I think I get the first sign from you—and you—and you, about this table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what might it not have been?

"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."

"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.

Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.

"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."

Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official trysting-place for all sweethearts.

We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child running home.

"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."

"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with you."

She looked up with puzzled eyes.

"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."

"But it is not easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."

"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."

"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed—I hope you are not sending regrets."

Miggy laughed out suddenly.

"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society. Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."

I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.

"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.

"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you live along and you find out 'most everything."

I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save by the companionship of the village—the village that has somehow taught Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?

My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.

"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of 'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."

"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.

"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much, and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."

"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter entirely."

She surprised me by her seriousness.

"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."

I wondered why not, but I said nothing.

"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You know about him?"

I did know—who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets, shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....

"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.

She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look questioned me.

"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...." Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.

This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces, taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is, like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the evolution of ages. To tame it—there is a task for all the servants of the new order.

Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of sunset in her face—the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant spirit signalled to me—and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.

"But you don't want to be free from Little Child. It is almost as if she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.

Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some answer there.

"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.

"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."

And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.

"But if she was—that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"

"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.

Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.

"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of—her, till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean Margaret."

It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of what she felt that she was speaking of it.

"How does she look?" I asked.

"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."

"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it. Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.

"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.

"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and not much afraid of folks and real happy."

"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"No," she said; "if I do—I never can think him out real plain. Margaret I can most see."

And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.

I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:—

"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can see."

She was not an instant in deciding.

"Why, sunset," she said.

"Promise me," said I—said we!—"that you will remember Now. And that after to-night, when you see a sunset—always, always, till she comes—you will think about her. About Margaret."

Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny, wandering spirit....

Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.