FOR some occult reason, the successful merchant in small towns and villages is the confidant, if not father-confessor, of a large number of his patronesses. It may be that his flattering air of personal interest, assumed for purely business purposes, loosens not only the purse-strings but the spring that works the panorama of private affairs. Or it may be an idiosyncrasy of some classes of the mind feminine, to make no distinction between a bargain counter and a confessional. Whatever the cause, many an honest merchant can testify that it is no uncommon thing for a woman to air her domestic troubles while she buys a skirt braid, or to drag out her family skeleton with thesample of sewing silk she wishes to match.
The Cross-Roads had had its share of confidences, although as a rule the women who disposed of their butter and eggs in trade to Bowser were of the patient sort, grown silent under the repressing influence of secluded farm life. Still, Bowser, quick to see and keen to judge, had gained a remarkable insight into neighbourhood affairs in fifteen years' dealings with his public. "All things come to him who waits" if he wears an air of habitual interest and has a sympathetic way of saying "Ah! indeed!"
It was with almost the certainty of foreknowledge that Bowser counted his probable patrons as he spread out his valentines on the morning of the fourteenth of February. He had selected his comic ones with a view to thefeud that existed between the Hillock and Bond families, well knowing that a heavy cross-fire of ugly caricatures and insulting rhymes would be kept up all day by the younger members of those warring households. It was with professional satisfaction he smiled over the picture of a fat man with a donkey's head, which he was as sure would be sent by Pete Hillock to old man Bond, as if he had heard Pete's penny dropping into the cash-drawer.
"Nothing like supplying the demand," he chuckled.
It was with more than professional interest that he arranged the lace-paper valentines in the show-case, for the little embossed Cupids had a strong ally in this rustic haberdasher, whose match-making propensities had helped many a little romance to a happy issue.Drawing on his fund of private information, acquired in his rôle of confidant to the neighbourhood gossips, he set out his stock of plump red hearts, forget-me-nots, and doves; and with each addition to the festal array he nodded his head knowingly over the particular courtship it was designed to speed, or the lovers' quarrel that he hoped might be ended thereby.
There had been two weeks of "February thaw." Melting snow had made the mud hub-deep in places. There was a velvety balminess in the touch of the warm wind, and faint, elusive odours, prophetic of spring, rose from the moist earth and sap-quickened trees.
The door of the Cross-Road store stood open, and behind it, at the post-office desk, sat Marion Holmes, the old miller's granddaughter. Just outof college and just into society, she had come to spend Lent in the old place that had welcomed her every summer during her childhood. The group around the stove stared covertly at the pretty girl in the tailor-made gown, failing to recognise in the tall, stylish figure any trace of the miller's "little Polly," who used to dangle her feet from the counter and munch peppermint drops, while she lisped nursery rhymes for their edification.
She had come for the letters herself, she told Bowser, because she was expecting a whole bag full, and her grandfather's rheumatism kept him at home. Installed in the post-office chair, behind the railing that enclosed the sanctum of pigeon-holes, she amused herself by watching the customers while she waited for the mail-train.
"It's like looking into a kaleidoscope,"she told Bowser in one of the pauses of trade. "Every one who comes in gives me a different point of view and combination of opinions. Now, those valentines! I was thinking what old-fashioned things those little lace-paper affairs are, and wondering how anybody could possibly get up any thrills over them, when in walked Miss Anastasia Dill. Prim and gentle as ever, isn't she? Still getting her styles fromGodey's Lady's Booksof the early sixties; she must draw on their antiquated love stories for her sentiment, too, for she seemed lost in admiration of those hearts and darts. Whatdoyou suppose is Miss Anastasia's idea of a lover?"
Marion rattled on with all of a débutante's reckless enthusiasm for any subject under discussion. "Wouldn't he be as odd and old-fashioned as thelace valentines themselves? She'd call him asuitor, wouldn't she? I wonder if she ever had one."
Then Bowser, piecing together the fragmentary gossip of fifteen years, told Marion all he knew of Miss Anastasia's gentle romance; and Marion, idly clasping and unclasping the little Yale pin on her jacket, gained another peep into the kaleidoscope of human experiences.
"I have read of such devotion to a memory," she said when the story was done, "but I never met it in the flesh. What a pity he died while he was on such a high pedestal in her imagination. If he had lived she would have discovered that there are no such paragons, and all the other sons of Adam needn't have suffered by comparison. So she's an old maid simply because she put her ideal of a lover so high inthe clouds nobody could live up to it! Dear old Miss Anastasia!"
Bowser pulled his beard. "Such couples make me think of these here lamps with double wicks," he said. "They hardly ever burn along together evenly. One wick is sure to flare up higher than the other; you either have to keep turning it down and get along with a half light or let it smoke the chimney—maybe crack it—and make things generally uncomfortable. But here comes somebody, Miss Marion, who's burned along pretty steady, and that through three administrations. It's her brag that she's had three husbands and treated them just alike, even to the matter of tombstones. 'Not a pound difference in the weight nor a dollar in the price,' she always says."
The newcomer was a fat, wheezy woman, spattered with mud from thehem of her skirt to the crown of her big crape bonnet, which had tipped on one side with the jolting of the wagon.
"Well, Jim Bowser!" she exclaimed, catching sight of the valentines. "Ef you ain't got out them silly, sentimental fol-de-rols again! My nephew, Jason Potter,—that's my second husband's sister's son, you know,—spent seventy-five cents last year to buy one of them silly things to send to his girl; and I says to him, 'Jason,' says I, 'efI'dbeen Lib Meadows, that would 'uv cooked your goose withme!Any man simple enough to waste his substance so, wouldn't make a good provider.' I ought to know—I've been a wife three times."
This, like all other of Mrs. Power's conversational roads, led back to the three tombstones, and started a flowof good-natured badinage on the subject of matrimony, which continued long after she had taken her noisy departure. "Well!" exclaimed Bud Hines, as the big crape bonnet went jolting down the road, "I guess there's three good men gone that could tell why heaven is heaven."
"Why?" asked Cy Akers.
"Because there's no marryin' or givin' in marriage there."
"Bud speaks feelingly!" said Cy, winking at the others. "He'd better get a job on a newspaper to write Side Talks with Henpecked Husbands."
"Shouldn't thinkyou'dwant to hear any extrys or supplements," retorted Bud. "You get enough in your own daily editions."
"St. Valentine has been generous with my little Polly," said the old miller,looking up fondly at the tall, graceful girl, coming into his room, her face aglow and her arms full of packages.
"But what's the good of it all, grandfather?" answered Marion. "I've been looking into Cupid's kaleidoscope through other people's eyes this afternoon, and nothing is rose-coloured as I thought. Everything is horrid. 'Marriage is a failure,' and sentiment is a silly thing that people make flippant jokes about, or else break their hearts with, like Mr. Bowser's double-wick lamps, that flare up and crack their chimneys. I've come to the conclusion that St. Valentine has outlived his generation."
She broke the string which bound one of the boxes that she had dropped on the table, and took out a great dewy bunch of sweet violets. As their fragrance filled the room, the old manlooked around as if half expecting to see some familiar presence; then dropped his white head with a sigh, and gazed into the embers on the hearth, lost in a tender reverie.
Presently he said, "I wish you would hand me that box on my wardrobe shelf, little girl." As Marion opened the wardrobe door, something hanging there made her give a little start of surprise. It was an old familiar gray dress, with the creases still in the bent sleeves just as they had been left when the tired arms last slipped out of them. That was ten years ago; and Marion, standing there with a mist gathering in her eyes, recalled the day her grandfather had refused to let any one fold it away. It had hung there all those years, the tangible reminder of the strong, sweet presence that had left its imprint on every part of the household.
"It is like my life since she slipped out of it," the old man had whispered, smoothing the empty sleeve with his stiff old fingers. "Like my heart—set to her ways at every turn, and left just as she rounded it out—but now—so empty!"
He lifted an old dog-eared school-book from the box that Marion brought him, a queer little "Geography and Atlas of the Heavens," in use over fifty years ago. Inside was a tiny slip of paper, time-yellowed and worn. The ink was faded, until the words written in an unformed girlish hand were barely legible:
"True as grapes grow on a vine,I will be your Valentine."
"I had put a letter into her Murray's grammar," he explained, holding up another little book. "Here is thepage, just at the conjugation of the verb 'to love.' You see I was a big, shy, overgrown boy that lost my tongue whenever I looked at her, although she wasn't fifteen then, and only reached my shoulder. This valentine was the answer that she slipped into my atlas of the heavens. I thought the sky itself had never held such a star. We walked home across the woodland together that day, never saying a word. It was the last of the February thaw, and the birds were twittering as if it were really spring. Just such a day as this. All of a sudden, right at my feet, I saw something smiling up at me, blue as the blue of my Polly's eyes. I stooped and brushed away the leaves, and there were two little violets.
"As I gave them to her I wanted to say, 'There will always be violets in my heart for you, my Polly,' but Icouldn't speak a word. I know she understood, for long years after—when she was dead—I found them here. She had pinned them on the page where my letter had lain, here on the conjugation that says, 'we love,' and she had added the word 'for ever.'"
A tear dropped on the dead violets as the old man reverently closed the book, and sat gazing again into the dying embers. There was a tremulous smile on his face. Was it backward over the hills of their youth he was wandering, or ahead to those heights of Hope, where love shall "put on immortality?"
Marion laid her warm cheek against her violets, still fragrant with the sweetness of their fresh, unfaded youth. Then taking a cluster from the great dewy bunch, she fastened it at her throat with the little Yale pin.
TRADE was dull at the Cross-Roads. Jim Bowser, his hands thrust into his pockets and his lips puckered to a whistle, stood looking through the dingy glass of his front door. March was coming in with a snow-storm, and all he could see in any direction was a blinding fall of white flakes. There were only three men behind the stove that afternoon, and one of them was absorbed in a newspaper. Conversation flagged, and from time to time Bud Hines yawned audibly.
"This is getting to be mighty monotonous," remarked the storekeeper, glancing from the falling snow to the silent group by the stove.
"March always is," answered BudHines. "The other months have some holiday in 'em; something to brighten 'em up, if it's no more than a family birthday. But to me, March is as dull and uninteresting as a mud road."
"There's the inauguration this year," suggested Cy Akers, looking up from his newspaper. "That's a big event. This paper is full of it."
"Well, now you've hit it!" exclaimed Bud, with withering scorn, as he bit off another chew of tobacco. "That is exciting! Just about as interesting as watching a man take his second helping of pie. I wouldn't go across the road to see it. Now in a monarchy, where death makes the changes, it can't get to be a cut and dried affair that takes place every four years. They make a grand occasion of it, too, with their pomp and ceremony.Look at what England's just seen. It's the sight of a lifetime to bury a queen and crown a king. But what do we see when we change Presidents? One man sliding into a chair and another sliding out, same as when the barber calls 'Next!' Humph!"
Cy Akers rubbed his chin. "Fuss and feathers! That's all it amounts to," he exclaimed. "I'm down on monopolies, and in my opinion it's the worst kind of monopoly to let one family crowd out everybody else in the king business. I like a country where every man in it has a show. Not that I'dbePresident, if they offered me double the salary, but it is worth a whole lot to me to feel that in case I did want the office, I've as good a right to it as any man living. And talk about sights—I say it's the sight of a lifetime to see a man step out from hisplace among the people, anywhere he happens to be when they call his name, take his turn at ruling as if he'd been born to it, and then step back as if nothing had happened."
Bud smiled derisively. "You only see that on paper, my boy. Men don't step quietly into offices in this country. They run for 'em till they are red in the face, and it's the best runner that gets there, not the best man. Monopoly in the king business keeps out the rabble, any how, and it gives a country a good deal more dignity to be ruled by a dynasty than by Tom, Dick, and Harry."
"Well, there's no strings tied to you," said Cy, testily, taking up his newspaper again. "When people don't like the way things are run on this side of the water, there's nothing to hinder emigration."
There was a stamping of snowy feet outside the door, and a big, burly fellow blustered in, whom they hailed as Henry Bicking. He was not popular at the Cross-Roads, having the unenviable reputation of being a "born tease," but any diversion was welcome on such a dull day.
In the catalogue of queer characters which every neighbourhood possesses, the Autocrat, Bore, and Crank may take precedence of all others alphabetically, but the one that heads the list in disagreeableness is that infliction on society known as the "born tease." One can forgive the teasing propensity universally found in boys, as he would condone the playful destructiveness of puppyhood; something requiring only temporary forbearance. But when that trait refuses to be put away with childish things it makes of the man it dominatesa sort of human mosquito. He regards every one in reach his lawful prey, from babies to octogenarians, and while he does not always sting, the persistency of his annoying attacks becomes exasperating beyond endurance.
The same motive that made Henry Bicking pull cats' whiskers out by the roots when he was a boy, led him to keep his children in a turmoil, and his sensitive little wife in tears half the time. He had scarcely seated himself by the stove when he was afforded opportunity for his usual pastime by the entrance of half a dozen children, who came tumbling in on their way home from school to warm.
He began with a series of those inane questions by which grown people have made themselves largely responsible for the pertness of the younger generation. If children of this dayhave departed from that delectable state wherein they were seen and not heard, the fault is due far more to their elders than to them. Often they have been made self-conscious, and forced into saucy self-assertion by the teasing questions that are asked merely to provoke amusing replies.
Henry Bicking's quizzing had an element of cruelty in it. His was the kind that pinches his victims' ears, that tickles to the verge of agony, that threatens all sorts of disagreeable things, for the sake of seeing little faces blanch with fright, or eyes fill with tears of pain.
"Come here, Woodpecker," he began, reaching for a child whose red hair was the grief of his existence. But the boy deftly eluded him, and the little fellow standing next in line, drying his snowball-soaked mittens,became the victim. He was dragged unwillingly to his tormentor's knee.
"What are you going to be when you're a man?" was demanded, when the first questions had elicited the fact that the child's name was Sammy Perkins, and that he was eight years old. But Perkins's oldest, having no knowledge of the grammar of life beyond its present tense indicative, hung his head and held his tongue at mention of its future potential.
"If you don't tell me you sha'n't have your mittens!" Bicking dangled them tantalisingly out of reach, until, after an agonising and unsuccessful scramble, the child was forced into a tearful reply.
Then he began again: "Which are you for, Democrats or Republicans?"
"Ain't for neither."
"Well, you're the littlest mugwumpI ever did see. Mugwumps ain't got any right to wear mittens. I've a notion to pitch 'em in the stove."
"Oh,don't!" begged the child. "Please, mister! I'm not a mugwump!"
The tragic earnestness of the child as he disclaimed all right to the term of reproach which he could not understand, yet repudiated because of its obnoxious sound, amused the man hugely. He threw back his head and laughed.
"Tell me who you holler for!" he continued, catching him up and holding him head downward a moment. Then goaded by more teasing questions and athreateningswing of his red mittens toward the stove door, Perkins's oldest was at last led to take a bold stand on his party platform, and publicly declare his political preference.But it was in a shaking voice and between frightened sobs.
"M-ma, she's for McKinley, an' p-pap, he's for B-Bryan, so I jus' holler for Uncle Sam!"
"Good enough for you, sonny," laughed the storekeeper. "That's true blue Americanism. Stick to Uncle Sam and never mind the parties. They've had new blades put on their old handles, and new handles put on those old blades again, till none of 'em are what we started out with. We keep on calling them 'genuine Barlows,' but it's precious little of the original Barlows we're hanging on to nowadays."
It was a woman's voice that interrupted the conversation. Mrs. Teddy Mahone had come in for some tea.
"Arrah, Misther Bicking! Give thebye his mitts! You're worrse than a cat with a mouse."
The loud voice with its rich Irish brogue drew Cy Akers's attention from his newspaper. "By the way, Bud," he exclaimed, raising his voice so that Mrs. Mahone could not fail to hear, "you were complaining about March being so dull and commonplace without any holidays. You've forgotten St. Patrick's Day."
"No, I haven't. St. Patrick is nothing to me. There's no reason I should take any interest in him."
"And did you hear that, Mrs. Mahone," asked Henry Bicking, anxious to start a war of words.
"Oh, Oi heard it, indade Oi did!" she answered with a solemn shake of the head. "It grieves the hearrt of me to hear such ingratichude. There's niver a sowl in all Ameriky but hascause to be grateful for what he's done for this counthry."
"What's he ever done?" asked Bud, skeptically. There was a twinkle in Mrs. Mahone's eyes as she answered:
"It was this way. A gude while back whin it was at the beginnin' iv things, Ameriky said to herself wan day, 'It's a graand pudding Oi'll be afther makin' meself, by a new resait Oi've just thought iv.' So she dips into this counthry for wan set iv immygrants, an' into another counthry for another batch, and after a bit a foine mess she had iv 'em. Dutch an' Frinch an' Eyetalian, Rooshian, Spaniards an' haythen Chinee, all stirred up in wan an' the same pudding-bag.
"'Somethin's lackin',' siz she, afther awhile, makin' a wry face.
"'It's the spice,' siz St. Pathrick, 'ye lift out iv it, an' the leaven. Ye'llhave to make parsinal application to meself for it, for Oi'm the only wan knowin' the saicret of where it's to be found.'
"'Then give me some,' siz she, an' St. Pathrick, not loikin' to lave a leddy in trouble, reached out from the auld sod and handed her a fair shprinklin' of them as would act as both spice an' leaven.
"'They'll saison the whole lot,' siz he, 'an' there's light-heartedness enough among them to raise the entoire heavy mass in your whole united pudding-bag.'
"'Thanks,' siz she, stirrin' us in. 'It's the makin' of the dish, sorr, and Oi'm etarnally obliged to ye, sorr. Oi'll be afther puttin' the name of St. Pathrick in me own family calendar, and ivery year on that day, it's the pick iv the land that'll take pride in addin'to me own shtars an' shtripes the wearin' o' the green.'
"Ye see, Misther Hines, ye may think ye're under no parsinal obligation to him, but down-hearted as ye are by nature, what wud ye have been had ye niver coom in conthact with the leaven of St. Pathrick at all, sorr? Oi ask ye that."
Late that night Bowser pushed his ledger aside with a yawn, and got down from his high stool to close the store. As he counted the meagre contents of the cash drawer, he reviewed the day, whose minutes had been as monotonous in passing as the falling of the snowflakes outside. It had left nothing behind it to distinguish it from a hundred other days. The same old faces! The same kind of jokes! The same round of commonplace duties! Aspirit of unrest seized him, that made him chafe against such dreary monotony.
When he went to the door to put up the shutters, the beauty of the night held him a moment, and he stood looking across the wide fields, lying white in moonlight and snow. Far down the road a lamp gleamed from the window of an upper room in the old miller's house, where anxious vigil had been kept beside him for hours. The crisis was passed now. Only a little while before, the doctor had stopped by to say that their old friend would live. Down the track a gleaming switch-light marked the place where a wreck had been narrowly averted that morning.
"And no telling how many other misfortunes we've escaped to-day," mused Bowser. "Maybe if a lightcould be swung out for each one, folks would see that the dull gray days when nothing happens are the ones to be most thankful for, after all."
APRIL sunshine of mid-afternoon poured in through the open door of the Cross-Roads. The usual group of loungers had gathered around the rusty stove. There was no fire in it; the day was too warm for that, but force of habit made them draw their chairs about it in a circle, as if this common centre were the hub, from which radiated the spokes of all neighbourly intercourse.
The little schoolmistress was under discussion. Her short reign in District No. 3 had furnished a topic of conversation as inexhaustible as the weather, for her régime was attended by startling changes. Luckily for her, the young ideas enjoyed being taught to shoot at wide variance from the targets set upby parental practice and tradition, else the tales told out of school might have aroused more adverse criticism than they did.
"You can't take much stock in her new-fangled notions," was the unanimous opinion at the Cross-Roads. She had "put the cart before the horse" when she laid the time-honoured alphabet on the shelf, and gave the primer class a whole word at a mouthful, before it had cut a single orthographic tooth on such primeval syllables as a-b ab.
"Look at my Willie," exclaimed one of the district fathers. "Beating around the bush with talk about a picture cow, and a real cow, and a word cow, and not knowing whether B comes after W or X. At his age I could say the alphabet forwards or backwards as fast as tongue could go without a slip."
"She's doneonesensible thing," admitted Cy Akers. "They tell me she's put her foot down on the scholars playing April fool tricks this year."
"I don't see why," said Henry Bicking. "It has been one of the customs in this district since the schoolhouse was built. What's the harm if the children do take one day in the year for a little foolishness? Let them have their fun, I say."
"But they've carried it too far," was the answer. "It's scandalous they should be allowed to abuse people's rights and feelings and property as they have done the last few years. First of April doesn't justify such cutting up any more than the first of August."
"She's got Scripture on her side," said Squire Dobbs. "You know Solomon says, 'As a mad man who castethfirebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man that deceiveth his neighbour and saith, am I not in sport?'"
"She can't stamp out such a deep-rooted custom in one day," protested Bicking.
"You can bet on the little school-ma'am every time," laughed Bowser. "My daughter Milly says they didn't have regular lessons yesterday afternoon. She had them put their books in their desks.
"Said they'd been studying about wise men all their lives, now they'd study about fools awhile; the fools of Proverbs and the fools of history.
"She read some stories, too, about a cruel disappointment and the troubles brought about by some thoughtless jokes on the first of April. Mighty interesting stories, Milly said. You could have heard a pin drop, and someof the girls cried. Then she drew a picture on the blackboard of a court jester, in cap and bells, and asked if they wouldn't like a change this year. Instead of everybody acting the fool and doing silly things they'd all be ashamed of if they'd only stop to think, wouldn't they rather she'd appoint just one scholar to play the fool for all of them, as the old kings used to do.
"They agreed to that, quick enough, thinking what fun they'd have teasing the one chosen to be it. Then she said she'd appoint the first one this morning who showed himself most deserving of the office. Milly says from the way she smiled when she said it, they're all sure she means to choose the first one who plays an April Fool joke. She'd put it so strong to 'em how silly it was, that there ain't a child in school you could hire to runthe risk of being appointed fool for the day. So I think she's coming out ahead as usual."
"After all," said Bud Hines, "there's some lessons to be got out of those old tricks we used to play. For instance, the pocketbook tied to a string. Seems to me that everything in life worth having has a string tied to it, and just as I am about to pick it up, Fate snatches it out of my hands."
"Don't you believe it, Buddy," said Bowser, cheerfully; "you take notice those pocketbooks on strings are always empty ones, and they don't belong to us, so we have no business grabbing for them or feeling disappointed because we can't get something for nothing."
But Bud waved aside the interruption mechanically.
"Then there's thegiftswith stringstied to 'em," he continued. "My wife has a rich aunt who is always sending her presents, and writing, 'Understand this is foryou, Louisy. You're too generous, and I don't want anybody but your own deserving self to wear this.' Now out in the country here, my wife doesn't have occasion to wear handsome clothes like them once a year, while they'd be the very thing for Clara May, off at Normal School. But not a feather or a ribbon can the child touch because her great-aunt bought them expressly for her ma. Goodness knows she'd have a thousand times more pleasure in seeing Clara May enjoy them, than knowing they were lying away in bureau drawers doing nobody any good. When she takes 'em out at house-cleaning times I say, 'Ma,' says I, 'deliver me from gifts with strings tied to 'em. I'd ratherhave a ten-cent bandanna, all mine, to have and to hold or to give away as pleased me most, than the finest things your Aunt Honigford's money could buy, if I had to account to her every time I turned around in them.'
"When I give anything Igiveit, and don't expect to come back, spying around ten years afterward to see if it's worn out, or cracked, or faded, or broken. That's my doctrine."
Marion Holmes, driving along the country road in the old miller's antiquated chaise, drew rein in front of a low picket gate, overhung by mammoth snowball bushes. Down the path, between the rows of budding lilacs and japonicas, came an old gentleman in a quaintly cut, long-tailed coat. He was stepping along nimbly, although he leaned hard on his gold-headed cane.
"'A man he was to all the country dear,'" quoted Marion softly to herself as the minister's benign face smiled a greeting through his big square-bowed spectacles. "I know he must have been Goldsmith's friend, and I wish I dared ask him how long he lived in the Deserted Village." But all she called out to him as he stopped with a courtly bow, under the snowball bushes, was a cheery good morning and an invitation to take a seat beside her if he wanted to drive to the Cross-Roads store.
"Thank you, Miss Polly," he answered, "that is my destination. I am on my way there for a text."
"For a what?" exclaimed Marion in surprise, turning the wheel for him to step in beside her.
"For a text for my Easter sermon," he explained as they drove on in thewarm April sunshine. "Ah, I see, Miss Polly, you have not discovered the school of philosophers that centres around the Cross-Roads store. Well, it's not to be wondered at; few people do. I spent a winter in Rome, when I was younger, and one of my favourite walks was up on the Pincian Hill. The band plays in the afternoons, you know, and tourists flock to see the queen drive by. There is a charming view from the summit—the dome of St. Peters against the blue Italian sky, the old yellow Tiber crawling along under its bridges from ruin to ruin, and the immortal city itself, climbing up its historic hills. And on the Pincio one meets everybody,—soldiers and courtiers, flower girls and friars, monks in robes of every order, and pilgrims from all parts of the world.
"The first time I was on the hill,as I wandered among the shrubbery and flowers, I noticed a row of moss-grown pedestals set along each side of the drive for quite a distance. Each pedestal bore the weather-beaten bust of some old sage or philosopher or hero.
"They made no more impression on my mind then, than so many fence-posts, but later I found a workman repairing the statuary one day. He had put a new nose on the mutilated face of an old philosopher, and that fresh white nasal appendage, standing out jauntily in the middle of the ancient gray visage, was so ludicrous I could not help smiling whenever I passed it. I began to feel acquainted with the old fellow, as day after day that nose forced my attention. Sometimes, coming upon him suddenly, the only familiar face in a city full of strangers, I felt that he was an oldfriend to whom I should take off my hat. Then it became so that I rarely passed him without recalling some of his wise sayings that I had read at college. Many a time he and his row of stony-eyed companions were an inspiration to me in that way.
"It was so that I met these men at the Cross-Roads. They scarcely claimed my attention at first. Then one day I heard one of them give utterance to a time-worn truth in such an original way that I stopped to talk to him.
"Trite as it was, he had hewn it himself out of the actual experiences of his own life. It was the result of his own keen observation of human nature. Set as it was in his homely, uncouth dialect, it impressed me with startling force. Then I listened to his companions, and found that they, too, were sometimes worthy of pedestals.Unconsciously to themselves they have often given me suggestions for my sermons. Ah, it's a pity that the backwoods has no Pincio on which to give its philosophers to posterity!"
Half an hour later as they drove homeward, Marion glanced at her companion. "No text this time," she laughed, breaking the reverie into which the old minister had fallen. "Your sages said nothing but 'good morning, sir,' and there wasn't a single suggestion of Easter in the whole store, except the packages of egg dyes, and some impossible little chocolate rabbits. Oh, yes,—those two little boys playing on the doorstep. Tommy Bowser had evidently taken time by the forelock and sampled his father's dyes, for he had a whole hatful of coloured eggs, and was teaching that little Perkinsboy how to play 'bust.' He was an apt scholar, for while I watched he won five of Tommy's eggs and never cracked his own. You should have seen them."
"Oh, I saw them," said the minister, with a smile. "It was those same little lads who suggested the text for my Easter sermon."
Marion gave a gasp of astonishment. "Would you mind telling mehow?" she exclaimed.
"It came about very naturally. There they stood with their hands full of the Easter eggs, with never a thought of what they symbolised—the breaking shell—the rising of this little embryo earth-existence to the free full-winged life of the Resurrection. They were too intent on their little game, on their small winnings and losings, to have a thought for higher things. As Iwatched them it occurred to me how typical it was of all the children of men, and instantly that text from Luke flashed into my mind: 'Their eyes were holden.' Do you remember? It was when the two disciples went down to Emmaus. I often picture it," mused the old man after a little pause. "The green of the olive groves, the red and white of the blossoming almond-trees, the late afternoon sunshine, and those two discouraged fishermen trudging along the dusty road. They were turning away from a lost cause and a buried hope, too absorbed in their overwhelming grief to see that it was the risen Lord Himself who walked beside them. Not till the end of their journey did they know why it was that their hearts had burned within them as He talked with them by the way. Their eyes were holden.
"How typical that is, too, Miss Polly. Sometimes we go on to the end of life, missing the comfort and help that we might have had at every step, because we look up at our Lord only through eyes of clay, and hold communion with him as with a stranger. Yes, I shall certainly make that the subject of my Easter sermon, Miss Polly. Thank you for helping me discover it."
That next Sunday as Marion sat in church beside the old miller, her gaze wandered from the lilies in the chancel to the faces of the waiting congregation. Bud Hines was there and Bowser, Cy Akers, and even Perkins's oldest, whose game of "bust" had suggested the helpful sermon of the morning. Marion studied the serious, weather-beaten faces with new interest. "It is not in spiritual things alonethat our eyes are holden," she said to herself. "I have been looking at only the commonplace exterior of these people. It takes a man like the old minister to recognise unpedestalled virtues and to set them on the Pincio they deserve."
THE old saying that "there are always two sides to a story" has worn a deep rut into the popular mind. It has been handed down to us so often with an air of virtuous rebuke, that we have come to regard the individual who insists on his two-sided theory as the acme of all that is broad-minded and tolerant. But in point of fact, if two sides is all he sees, he is only one remove from the bigot whose mental myopia limits him to a single narrow facet.
Even such a thing as a May-day picnic is polyhedral. The little schoolmistress, who was the chief promoter of the one at the Cross-Roads, would have called it a parallelopiped, if she had been there that morning, to haveseen the different expressions portrayed on the faces of six people who were interested in it.
The business side of the picnic appealed to Bowser. As he bustled around, dusting off cases of tinned goods that he had long doubted his ability to dispose of, and climbed to the top shelves for last summer's shop-worn cans of sardines and salmon, as he sliced cheese, and counted out the little leathery lemons that time had shrivelled, his smile was as bland as the May morning itself. One could plainly see that he regarded this picnic as a special dispensation of Providence, to help him work off his old stock.
There were no loungers in the store. Field and garden claimed even the idlest, and only the old miller, who had long ago earned his holiday, sat in the sun on the porch outside, with his chairtipped back against the wall. At intervals a warm breath from the apple orchard, in bloom across the road, touched his white hair in passing, and stirred his memory until he sat oblivious of his surroundings. He was wholly unmindful of the gala stir about him, save when Polly recalled his wandering thoughts. She, keenly alive to every sensation of the present, stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder, while she waited for her picnic basket to be filled.
"Isn't it an ideal May-day, grandfather?" she exclaimed. "It gives me a real Englishy feeling of skylarks and cuckoos and cowslips, of primroses and village greens. I think it is dear of the little school-ma'am to resurrect the old May-pole dance, and give the children some idea of 'Merrie old England' other than the dates and dust of its ancient history." Unconsciouslybeating time with light fingertips on the old man's shoulder, she began to hum half under her breath:
"'And then my heart with rapture thrills,And dances with the daffodills-o-dills—And dances with the daffodils!'"
Suddenly she broke off with a girlish giggle of enjoyment. "Listen, grandfather. There's little Cora Bowser up-stairs, rehearsing her speech while she dresses. Isn't it delicious to be behind the scenes!"
Through an open bedroom window, a high-pitched, affected little voice came shrilly down to them: "'If you'rewa-king, call meearly!Call meearly, mother dear!'"
"Now, Cora," interrupted the maternal critic, "you went and forgot to make your bow; and how many times have I told you about turningyour toes out? You'll have to begin all over again." Then followed several beginnings, each brought to a stop by other impatient criticisms. There were so many pauses in the rehearsal and reminders to pay attention to manners, commas, and refractory ribbons, that when Cora was finally allowed to proceed, it was in a tearful voice punctuated with sobs, that she declared, "'To-morrow will be the ha-happiest day of all the g-glad new year.'"
"'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,'" quoted the old miller with a smile, as Mrs. Bowser's parting injunction reached their ears.
"Now, Cora, for goodness' sake, don't you forget for one minute this whole enduring day, that them daisies on your crown came off your teacher's best hat, and have to be put back on.If you move around much to the picnic you might lose some of 'em. Best keep pretty quiet anyway, or your sash will come unpinned, and the crimp will all get out of your hair. Wish I'd thought to iron them plaits before I unbraided 'em. They'd have been lots frizzier."
It was a very stiffly starched, precise little Queen o' the May who came down the steep back stairs into the store. She stepped like a careful peacock, fearing to ruffle a feather of her unrivalled splendour. Her straight flaxen hair, usually as limp as a string, stood out in much crimped profusion from under her gilt paper crown. Polly could not decide whether the pucker on the little forehead came from anxiety concerning the borrowed daisies which starred her crown, or the fact that it was too tightlyskewered to the royal head by a relentless hat-pin.
One of the picnic wagons was waiting at the door, and as Bowser lifted her in among her envious and admiring schoolmates, Polly saw with sympathetic insight which of its many sides the picnic parallelopiped was presenting to the child in that proud moment. The feeling of supreme importance that it bestowed is a joy not permitted to all, and rarely does it come to any mortal more than once in a lifetime.
But for every Haman, no matter how resplendent, sits an unmoved Mordecai in the king's gate. So to this little Sheba of the Cross-Roads there was one who bowed not down. Perkins's oldest, on the front seat beside the driver, had no eyes for her. He scarcely looked in her direction. Hisglances were all centred on the baskets which Bowser was packing in around his feet. He smelled pickles and pies and ham sandwiches. He knew of sundry tarts and dressed eggs in his own basket, and wild rumours had reached his ears that Miss Polly intended to stand treat to the extent of Bowser's entire stock of bananas and candy. Aside from hopes of a surreptitious swim in the creek and a wild day in the woods, his ideas of a picnic were purely prandial.
Across the road, Miss Anastasia Dill, peeping through the blinds, watched the wagon rattle off with its merry load. Long after the laughing voices had passed beyond her hearing, she still stood there, one slender hand holding back the curtain, and the other shading her faded blue eyes, as she gazed absently after them. It was the sunshine of anotherMay-day she was looking into. Presently with a little start she realised that she was not out in the cool green woods with a May-basket in her hands, brimming over with anemones. She was all alone in her stuffy little parlour, with its hair-cloth furniture and depressing crayon portraits. And the canary was chirping loudly for water, and the breakfast cups were still unwashed. But for once, heedless of her duties, even unmindful of the fact that she had left the shutters open, and the hot sun was streaming across her cherished store carpet, she drew a chair up to the marble-topped centre table, and deliberately sat down. There was a pile of old-fashioned daguerreotypes in front of her. She opened them one by one, and then took up another that lay by itself on a blue beaded mat. So the face it dimly pictured held asacred place, apart, in her memory. When her eyes had grown misty with long gazing, she lifted a book from its place beside the family Bible. It was bound in red leather, and it had a quaint wreath of embossed roses around the gilt letters of its title, "The Album of the Heart." It was an autograph album, and as she slowly turned the pages she remembered that every hand that had traced a sentiment or a signature therein had once upon a time gathered anemones with her in some one of those other May-days.
Then she turned through the pages again. Of all that circle of early friends not one was left to give her a hand-clasp. She had friends in plenty, but the old ones—the early ones—the roots of whose growth had twined with hers in the intimacy known only to childhood, were all gone. TheMay-day picnic brought only a throb of pain to gentle Miss Anastasia, for to her it was but the lonely echo of a "voice that was still."
Bud Hines watched the wagon drive away with far different emotions. He had happened to come into the store for a new hoe, as the gay party started. "It's all foolishness," he grumbled to the miller, "to lose a whole day's schooling while they go gallivanting around the country for nothing. They'll ride ten miles to find a place to eat their dinner in, and pass by twenty on the way nicer than the one they finally pick out. They'd better be doing sums in school, or grubbing weeds out of the garden, instead of playing 'frog in the meadow' around a fool British May-pole."
He looked around inquiringly as if he expected his practical listener toagree with him. But all the sympathy he got from the old miller was one of the innumerable proverbs he seemed to keep continually on tap. "'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' Bud. Life is apt to be little but sums and grubbing for the youngsters by and by, so let them make the most of their May-days now."
The sequels of picnics are also polyhedral. Miss Anastasia, lingering at her front gate in the early twilight, that she might enjoy to the last moment the orchard odours that filled all the balcony outdoors, heard the rattle of returning wheels. She had had a pleasant day, despite the tearful retrospection of the morning, for she had attended the great social function of the neighbourhood, the monthly missionary tea. It had brought immeasurablecheer, and now she was returning with a comfortable conviction that she was to be envied far above any of her neighbours. The consciousness of having on her best gown, of being the mistress of the trim little home to which she was going, of freedom from a hundred harassing cares that she had heard discussed that afternoon, all combined to make her supremely contented with her lot.
"Poor children," she sighed, as the tired, dirty little picnickers were lifted from the wagon across the road. "They look as if the game hadn't been worth the candle. I'm glad that I've outgrown such things."
Perkins's oldest, having soaked long in the cold creek, and sampled every dinner-basket with reckless abandon till he could sample no more, sat doubled up in the straw of the wagon-bed.He was white about the mouth, and had he been called upon to debate the time-worn question, "Resolved, that there is more pleasure in pursuit than in possession," the tarts and sandwiches of that day's picnic would have furnished several dozen indisputable arguments for the affirmative.
The dishevelled little queen sat beside him, tired out by her day's wild frolic, with starch and frizzes all gone.
As she was lifted over the wheel, and put down on the doorstep, a limp little bunch of woe, Miss Anastasia heard her bewailing her fate. She had lost the stars from her crown, the borrowed daisies that must be reckoned for on the morrow. The amused listener smiled to herself under cover of the twilight, as she heard Bowser's awkward attempts at consolation, for all the comfort that he could muster wasan old saw learned from the miller: "Never mind, Cora, pa's mighty sorry for his little girl. But you know: