"'When a man buys meat he buys bone,And when he buys land he buys stone.You must take the bad with the good.'"
THERE is something in the air of June that stirs even insentient things with a longing to blossom. Staid old universities blaze out with the gala colours of commencement week, when the month of roses is ushered in, and on every college campus the social life of the student year comes to flower in the crowning exercises of class-day.
One wonders sometimes if the roots, burrowing underground in order to fill the bush overhead with myriads of roses, have any share in the thrill of success at having produced such a wealth of sweetness and beauty. But there need be no surmise about college florescence. Faculties may beam with complacency on their yearly cluster offull-blown graduates, the very walls of the gray old universities may thrill as they echo the applause of admiring audiences, but the greatest pride is not felt within the college town itself where the student life centres. It is back in the roots that have made college life possible. Back in some parental existence that daily sinks itself farther into the commonplace in order that some son or daughter may blossom into the culture of arts and belles-lettres. The Jacqueminot that flaunts its glory over the garden wall may not sweeten life for the fibres that lift it, but the valedictorian who flaunts his diploma and degree in the classic halls of some sea-board college may be glorifying the air of some little backwoods village a thousand miles inland. Even the Cross-Roads are bound with a network of such far-reaching rootsto the commencements of Harvard and Yale.
It was Cy Akers's boy who came home this June, a little lifted up, perhaps, by the honours he had won; thoroughly impressed with the magnitude of his own knowledge and the meagreness of other peoples', but honestly glad at first to get back to the old home and neighbours.
The family pride in him was colossal. Old Cy encouraged his visits to the Cross-Roads store, inventing excuses for going which he considered the acme of subtle diplomacy. But his motives were as transparent as a child's. Illiterate himself, he wanted his neighbours to see what college had done for his boy in the way of raising him head and shoulders above them all. And the boy was good-naturedly compliant. He was as willing to show off mentallyas he had been to lend a hand in the wheat harvest, and demonstrate what football training had done for him in the way of developing muscle.
Like Perkins's oldest, his education had begun with the primer of the Cross-Roads. He could remember the time when he, too, had ignorantly believed this to be the only store in the universe, and wondered if there were enough people living to consume all its contents. Now he smiled to himself when he looked around the stuffy little room and saw the same old butter firkins crowding the—apparently—same old calico and crockery, and looked up at the half-dozen hams still swinging sociably from the low rafters.
Time had been, too, when he thought the men who gossiped around its rusty stove on Saturday afternoons kneweverything. Like Perkins's oldest, he had unquestioningly formulated the creed of his boyhood from their conversations, and he smiled again when he recalled how he had been warped in those early days by their prejudices and short-sighted opinions.
The smile extended outwardly when he walked into their midst to find them repeating the same old saws about the weather, and the way the country was going to the dogs. Yet in his salad days these time-honoured prognostications had seemed to him the wisdom of seers and sages.
Probably it was the thought that he had travelled far beyond the narrow confines of the Cross-Roads that gave his conversation a patronising tone. But the Cross-Roads refused to be patronised. He learned that on the day of his arrival. It was the firstlesson of a valuable post-graduate course. That a man away from home may be Mister Robert Harrison Hamilton Akers, with all the A. B.'s and LL. D.'s after his name that an educational institution can bestow; but as soon as he sets foot again on his native heath, where he has gone through the vicissitudes of boyhood, he is shorn of titles and degrees as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, and his strength straightway falls from him. He is nobody but Bobby Akers, and everybody remembers when he robbed birds' nests, and stole grapes, and played hooky, and was a little freckle-faced, snub-nosed neighbourhood terror. A man cannot maintain his importance long in the face of such reminiscences. No amount of university culture is going to lay the ghost of youthful indiscretions, and he might as well puthis patronising proclivities in his pocket. They will not be tolerated by those who have patted him on the head when he wore roundabouts.
It was Saturday afternoon, but it was also the and of the wheat-harvest, and the men were afield who usually gathered on the Cross-Roads porch to round up the week over their pipes and plugs of chewing tobacco. Only three chairs were tilted back against the wall, and on these, with their heels caught over the front rungs, sat Bowser, the old miller, and Robert Akers.
The whirr of reaping machines came faintly up from the fields and near by, where several acres of waving yellow grain still stood uncut, a bob-white whistled cheerily. No one was talking. "Knee-deep in June" would have voiced the thoughts of the trio, forthey were "Jes' a sort o' lazein' there," with their hats pulled over their eyes, enjoying to the utmost the perfect afternoon. Every breeze was redolent with red clover and wild honeysuckle, and vibrant with soothing country sounds.
"Who is that coming up the road?" asked the miller, as a team and wagon appeared over the brow of the hill.
"They wabble along like Duncan Smith's horses," answered the storekeeper, squinting his eyes for a better view. "Yes, that's who it is. That's Dunk on the top of the load. Moving again, bless Pete!"
As the wagon creaked slowly nearer, a feather bed came into view, surmounting a motley collection of household goods, and perched upon it, high above the jangle of her jolting tins and crockery, sat Mrs. Duncan Smith. Aclock and a looking-glass lay in her lap, and, like a wise virgin, in her hands she carefully bore the family lamp. From frequent and anxious turnings of her black sunbonnet, it was evident that she was keeping her weather eye upon the chicken-coop, which was bound to the tail-board of the wagon by an ancient clothes-line.
A flop-eared dog trotted along under the wagon. Squeezed in between a bureau and the feather bed, two shock-headed children sat on a flour barrel, clutching each other at every lurch of the crowded van to keep from losing their balance.
"Howdy, Dunk!" called the storekeeper, as the dusty pilgrims halted in front of the porch. "Where are you bound now?"
"Over to the old Neal place," answered the man, handing the reins tohis wife, and climbing stiffly down over the wheel. Going around to the back of the wagon, he unstrapped a kerosene can which swung from the pole underneath.
"Gimme a gallon of coal-ile, Jim," he said. "I don't want to be left in the dark the first night, anyway. It takes awhile to git your bearings in a strange place, and it's mighty confusing to butt agin a half-open door where you've always been used to a plain wall, and it hurts like fire to bark your shins on a rocking-chair when you're steering straight for bed, and hain't no idee it's in the road. This time it'll be a little more so than usual," he added, handing over the can. "The house backs up agin a graveyard, you know. Sort o' spooky till you git used to it."
"What on earth did you move therefor?" asked Bowser. "They say the place is ha'nted."
"To my mind the dead make better neighbours than the living," came the tart reply from the depths of the black sunbonnet. "At any rate, they mind their own business."
"Oh, come now, Mrs. Smith," began Bowser, good-naturedly. "Maybe you've been unfortunate in your choice of neighbours."
"I've had a dozen different kinds," came the emphatic answer. "This'll make the twelfth move in eight years, so you can't say that I'm speaking from hearsay."
"Twelve moves in eight years!" exclaimed Bowser, as the wagon went lurching and creaking on through the dust. "There's gipsy blood in that Dunk Smith, sure as you live. Seems like that family can't be satisfied anywhere;always thinking they can better themselves by changing, and always getting out of the frying-pan into the fire. There wa'n't no well in the place where they settled when they was first married, and they had to carry water from a spring. The muscle put into packing that water up-hill those six months would have dug a cistern, but they were too short-sighted to see that. They jest played Jack and Jill as long as they could stand it, and then moved to a place where there was a cistern already dug. But there wa'n't any fruit on that place. If they'd have set out trees right away they'd have been eating from orchards of their own planting by this time. But they thought it was easier to move to where one was already set out.
"Then when they got to a place where they had both fruit and water,it was low, and needed draining. The water settled around the house, and they all had typhoid that summer. Oh, they've spent enough energy packing up and moving on and settling down again in new places to have fixed the first one up to a queen's taste. They seem to be running a perpetual Home-seeker's Excursion. Well, such a life might suit some people, but it would never do for me."
"But such a life has some things in its favour," put in Rob Akers, always ready to debate any question that offered, for the mere pleasure of arguing. "It keeps a man from getting into a rut, and develops his ability to adapt himself to any circumstance. A man who hangs his hat on the same peg for fifty or sixty years gets to be so dependent on that peg that he would be uncomfortable if it were suddenly denied him.Now Dunk Smith can never become such a slave to habit. Then, too, moving tends to leave a man more unhampered. He gradually gets rid of everything in his possessions but the essentials. He hasn't a garret full of old claptraps, as most people have who never move from under their ancestral roof-trees. You saw for yourself, one wagon holds all his household goods and gods.
"It is the same way with a man mentally. If he stays in the spot where his forefathers lived, in the same social conditions, he is apt to let his upper story accumulate a lot of worn-out theories that he has no earthly use for; all their old dusty dogmas and cob-webbed beliefs. He will hang on to them as on to the old furniture, because he happened to inherit them. If he would move once in awhile, keepup with the times, you know, he'd get rid of a lot of rubbish. It is especially true in regard to his religion. All those old superstitions, for instance, about Jonah and the whale, and Noah's ark and the like.
"He hangs on to them, not because he cares for them himself, but because they were his father's beliefs, and he doesn't like to throw out anything the old man had a sentiment for. Now, as I say, if he'd move once in awhile—do some scientific thinking and investigating on his own account—he'd throw out over half of what he holds on to now. He'd cut the most of Genesis out of his Bible, and let Job slide as a myth. One of the finest bits of literature, to be sure, that can be found anywhere, but undoubtedly fiction. The sooner a man moves on untrammelled, I say, by those old heirloomsof opinion, the better progress he will make."
"Toward what?" asked the old miller, laconically. "Dunk's moving next door to the graveyard." There was a twinkle in his eye, and the young collegian, who flattered himself that his speech was making a profound impression, paused with the embarrassing consciousness that he was affording amusement instead.
"The last time I went East to visit my grandson," said the old man, meditatively, "his wife showed me a mahogany table in her dining-room which she said was making all her friends break the tenth commandment. It was a handsome piece of furniture, worth a small fortune. It was polished till you could see your face in it, and I thought it was the newest thing out in tables till she told me she'd rummagedit out of her great-grandmother's attic, and had it 'done over' as she called it. It had been hidden away in the dust and cobwebs for a lifetime because it had been pronounced too time-worn and battered and scratched for longer use; yet there it stood, just as beautiful and useful for this generation to spread its feasts on as it was the day it was made. Every whit as substantial, and aside from any question of sentiment, a thousand times more valuable than the one that Dunk Smith drove past with just now. His table is modern, to be sure, but it's of cheap pine, too rickety to serve even Dunk through his one short lifetime of movings.
"I heard several lectures while I was there, too. One was by a man who has made a name for himself on both sides of the water as a scientist and a liberal thinker. He took upGenesis, all scratched and battered as it is by critics, and showed us how it had been misunderstood and misconstrued. And by the time he'd polished up the meaning here and there, so that we could see the original grain of the wood, what it was first intended to be, it seemed like a new book, and fitted in with all the modern scientific ideas as if it had been made only yesterday.
"There it stood, like the mahogany table that had been restored after people thought they had stowed it away in the attic to stay. Just as firm on its legs, and as substantial for this generation to put its faith on, as it was in the days of the Judges.
"Take an old man's word for it, Robert, who has lived a long time and seen many a restless Dunk Smith fling out his father's old heirlooms, in hisfever to move on to something new. Solid mahogany, with all its dust and scratches, is better than the modern flimsy stuff, either in faith or furniture, that he is apt to pick up in its stead."
THE booming of distant cannon had been sounding at intervals since midnight, ushering in the Fourth, but Bowser, although disturbed in his slumbers by each reverberation, did not rouse himself to any personal demonstration until dawn. Then his patriotism manifested itself in a noisy tattoo with a hammer, as he made the front of his store gay with bunting, and nailed the wordWelcomeover the door, in gigantic letters of red, white, and blue.
When he was done, each window wore a bristling eyebrow of stiff little flags, that gave the store an air of mild surprise. The effect was wholly unintentional on Bowser's part, and, unconscious of the likeness to humaneyes he had given his windows, he gazed at his work with deep satisfaction.
But the expression was an appropriate one, considering all the astonishing sights the old store was to look upon that day. In the woodland across the railroad track, just beyond Miss Anastasia Dill's little cottage, preparations were already begun for a grand barbecue. Even before Bowser had finished tacking up his flags, the digging of the trench had begun across the way, and the erection of a platform for the speakers. In one corner of the woodland a primitive merry-go-round had already been set in place, and the first passenger train from the city deposited an enterprising hoky-poky man, a peanut and pop-corn vender, and a lank black-bearded man with an outfit for taking tin-types.
By ten o'clock the wood-lot fence was a hitching-place for all varieties of vehicles, from narrow sulkies to cavernous old carryalls. A haze of thick yellow dust, extending along the pike as far as one could see, was a constant accompaniment of fresh arrivals. Each newcomer emerged from it, his Sunday hat and coat powdered as thickly as the wayside weeds. Smart side-bar buggies dashed up, their shining new tops completely covered with it. There was a great shaking of skirts as the girls alighted, and a great flapping of highly perfumed handkerchiefs, as the young country beaux made themselves presentable, before joining the other picnickers.
Slow-going farm wagons rattled along, the occupants of their jolting chairs often representing several generations, for the drawing power of aFourth of July barbecue reaches from the cradle to the grave.
The unusual sight of such a crowd, scattered through the grove in gala attire, was enough of itself to produce a holiday thrill, and added to this was the smell of gunpowder from occasional outbursts of firecrackers, the chant of the hoky-poky man, and the hysterical laughter of the couples patronising the merry-go-round, as they clung giddily to the necks of the wooden ostriches and camels in the first delights of its dizzy whirl.
"Good as a circus, isn't it?" exclaimed Robert Akers, pausing beside the bench where the old miller and the minister sat watching the gay scene. "I'm having my fun walking around and taking notes. It is amusing to see how differently the affair impresses people, and what seems tomake each fellow happiest. Little Tommy Bowser, for instance, is in the seventh heaven following the hoky-poky man. He gets all that people leave in their dishes for helping to drum up a crowd of patrons. Perkins's boy sticks by the merry-go-round. He has spent every cent of his own money, and had so many treats that he's spun around till he's so dizzy he's cross-eyed. One old fellow I saw back there is simply sitting on the fence grinning at everything that goes by. He's getting his enjoyment in job lots."
"Sit down," said the minister, sociably moving along the bench to make room beside him for the young man. "Mr. Holmes and I are finding our amusement in the same way, only we are not going around in search of it. We are catching at it as it drifts by."
"What has happened to Mrs. Teddy Mahone?" exclaimed Rob, as a red-faced woman with an important self-conscious air hurried by. "She seems ubiquitous this morning, and as proud as a peacock over something. One would think she were the mistress of ceremonies from her manner."
"Or hostess, rather," said the miller. "She met me down by the fence on my arrival, and held out her hand as graciously as if she were a duchess in her own drawing-room, and I an invited guest.
"'Gude marnin' to yez, Mr. Holmes,' she said. 'I hope ye'll be afther enjyin' yerself the day. If anything intherferes wid yer comfort ye've but to shpake to Mahone about it. He's been appintedconstablefor the occasion, ye understhand. If I do say it as oughtn't, he can carry the title wid the best av'im; him six fut two in his stockin's, an' the shtar shinin' on his wes'cut loike he'd been barn to the job.'
"Then she turned to greet some strangers from Morristown, and I heard her introducing herself as Mrs.ConstableMahone, and repeating the same instructions she had given me, to report to her husband, in case everything was not to their liking."
Both listeners laughed at the miller's imitation of her brogue, and the minister quoted, with an amused smile:
"'For never title yet so mean could prove,But there was eke a mind, which did that title love.'
It is a pity we cannot dress more of them in 'a little brief authority.' It seems to be a means of grace to a certain class of Hibernians. It has Americanised the Mahones, for instance.You'll find no patriots on the ground to-day more enthusiastic than Mr. and Mrs. Constable Mahone. Fourth of July will be an honoured feast-day henceforth in their calendar. It is often surprising how quickly a policeman's buttons and billy will make a good citizen out of the wildest bog-trotter that ever brandished a shillalah."
Later, in subsequent wanderings around the grounds, the young collegian spied the little schoolmistress helping to keep guard over the cake-table. He immediately crossed over and joined her. She was looking unusually pretty, and there was an amused gleam in her eyes as she watched the crowds, which made him feel that she was viewing the scene from his standpoint; that he had found a kindred spirit.
"What incentive to patriotism doyou see in all this, Miss Helen?" he asked, when he had induced her to turn over her guardianship of the cake-table to some one else, and join him in his tour among the boisterous picnickers.
"None at all—yet," she answered. "I suppose that will come by and by with the songs and speeches. But all this foolishness seems a legitimate part of the celebration to me. You remember Lowell says, 'If I put on the cap and bells, and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart.' It takes a barbecue and its attendant attractions to draw a crowd like this. See what a hotch-potch it is of all nationalities. Now that Schneidmacher family never would have driven ten miles in this heatand dust simply to hear the band play 'Hail, Columbia,' and Judge Jackson make one of his spread-eagle speeches on the Duty of the American Citizen. Neither would the O'Gradys or any of the others who represent the foreign element in the neighbourhood. Even Young America himself, the type we see here, is more willing to come and bring his best girl on account of the diversions offered."
"Well, that may be so," was the reluctant assent, "but if this is a sample of the Fourth of July observances all over the country I can't help feeling sorry for Uncle Sam. Patriotism has sadly degenerated from the pace that Patrick Henry set for it."
"The old miller says not," answered the little schoolmistress. "I made that same complaint last Washington's Birthday, when I was trying to work myschool up to proper enthusiasm for the occasion. He recalled the drouth of the summer before when nearly every well and creek and pond in the township went dry. Cattle died of thirst, gardens dried up like brick-kilns, and people around here were almost justified in thinking that the universe would soon be entirely devoid of water. The skies were like brass, and there was no indication of rain for weeks. But one day there was a terrific earthquake shock. It started all the old springs, and opened new ones all over this part of the country, and the water gushed out of the earth where it had been pent up all the time, only waiting for some such touch to call it forth. 'And you're afraid that patriotism is going dry in this generation,' he said to me. 'But it only takes some shock like the sinking of theMaine, or some suddenmenace to the public safety, to start a spring that will gush from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate. There is a deep underground vein in the American heart that no drouth can ever dry. Maybe it does not come to the surface often, but it can always be depended on in time of need.'"
The speakers for the day began to arrive, and Rob, seeing the crowds gravitating toward the grand stand, took the little schoolmistress to the bench where the miller had stationed himself.
"Watch that old Scotchman just in front of us," whispered the girl, "Mr. Sandy McPherson. Last Thanksgiving there was a union service in the schoolhouse. After the sermon 'America' was sung, and that old heathen stood up and roared out through it all, at the top of his voice, every word of 'GodSave the Queen!' Wasn't that flaunting the thistle in our faces with a vengeance? I am sure that he will repeat the performance to-day. Think of the dogged persistence that refuses to succumb to the fact that we have thrown off the British yoke! The very day we are celebrating that event, he'll dare to mix up our national hymn with 'God Save the King.'"
It was as she had predicted. As the band started with a great clash of brazen instruments, and the whole company rose to the notes of "America," Sandy McPherson's big voice, with its broad Scotch burr, rolled out like a bass drum:
"'Thy choicest gifts in store,Onhimbe pleased to pour.Long mayhereign.'"
It drowned out every voice around him. "He ought to be choked," exclaimedRob, in righteous indignation, as they resumed their seats. "To-day of all days! The old Tory has been living in this country for forty-five years, and a good living he's gotten out of it, too, for himself and family. Nobody cares what he sings on his own premises, but he might have the decency to keep his mouth shut on occasions of this kind, if he can't join with us."
There was a gleam of laughter in the little schoolmistress's eyes as she replied: "If the truth were known I have no doubt but that this Fourth of July celebration is very like the pie in Mother Goose's song of sixpence, when her four and twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie. If this pie could be opened, and the birds begin to sing according to their sentiments, there would be a wonderful diversity oftunes. One would be twittering the 'Marseillaise,' and another 'Die Wacht am Rhein,' and another echoing old Sandy's tune. America was in too big a hurry to serve her national pie, I am afraid. Consequently she put it in half prepared, and turned it out half baked. The blackbirds should have had their voices tuned to the same key before they were allowed to become vital ingredients of such an important dish."
"In other words," laughed Rob, "you'd reconstruct the enfranchisement laws. Make the term of probationary citizenship so long that the blackbird would have time to change his vocal chords, or even the leopard his anarchistic spots, before he would be considered fit to be incorporated in the national dish. By the way, Miss Helen, have you heard Mrs. Mahone'sallegory of the United Pudding bag? You and she ought to collaborate. Get the storekeeper to repeat it to you sometime."
"You needn't laugh," responded the little schoolmistress, a trifle tartly. "You know yourself that scores of emigrants are given the ballot before they can distinguish 'Yankee Doodle' from 'Dixie,' and that is only typical of their ignorance in all matters regarding governmental affairs. Too many people's idea of good citizenship is like the man's 'who kept his private pan just where 'twould catch most public drippings.' There is another mistaken idea loose in the land," she continued, after a moment. "That is, that a great hero must be a man who has a reputation as a great soldier. I wish I had the rewriting of all the school histories. They are better now thanwhen I studied them, but there is still vast room for improvement. I had to learn page after page of wars. Really, war and history were synonyms then as it was taught in the schools. Every chapter was gory, and we were required to memorise the numbers killed, wounded, and captured in every battle, from the French and Indian massacres, down to the last cannon-shot of the sixties. That is all right for government records and reference libraries, but when we give a text-book to the rising generation, the accounts of battles and the glorifying thereof would be better relegated to the foot-notes. It is loyal statesmanship that ought to be exalted in our school histories. We ought to make our heroes out of the legislators who cannot be bribed and public men who cannot be bought, and the honest private citizen wholivesfor his country instead of dying for it."
The old miller beside her applauded softly, leaning over to say, as the overture by the band came to a close with a grand clash, "If ever the blackbirds are tuned to one key, Miss Helen, America will know whom to thank. Not the legislators, but the patriotic little schoolma'ams all over their land who are serving their country in a way her greatest generals cannot do."
All day the Cross-Roads store raised its bristling eyebrows of little flags, till the celebration came to a close. Savoury whiffs of the barbecued meats floated across to it, vigorous hand-clapping and hearty cheers rang out to it between the impassioned words of excited orators. Later there were the fireworks, and more rag-time music bythe band, and renewed callings of the hoky-poky man. But before the moon came up there was a great backing of teams and scraping of turning wheels, and a gathering together of picnic-baskets and stray children.
"Well, it's over for another year," said Bowser, welcoming the old miller, who had crossed the road and taken a chair on the porch to wait until the crowds were out of the way.
"Those were fine speeches we had this afternoon, but seemed to me as if they were plumb wasted on the majority of that crowd. They applauded them while they were going off, same as they did the rockets, but they forget in the next breath." As Bowser spoke, a rocket whizzed up through the tree tops, and the old miller, looking up to watch the shining trail fade out, saw that the sky was full of stars.
"That's the good of those speeches, Bowser," he said. "'To leave a wake, men's hearts and faces skyward turning.' I hadn't noticed that the stars were out till that rocket made me look up. The speeches may be forgotten, but they will leave a memory in their wake that give men an uplook anyhow."
"GUESS who's come to board at the Widder Powers's for the month of August?" It was Bowser who asked the question, and who immediately answered it himself, as every man on the porch looked up expectantly.
"Nobody more nor less than amultimillionaire!The big boot and shoe man, William A. Maxwell. Mrs. Powers bought a bill of goods this morning as long as your arm. It's a windfall forher. He offered to pay regular summer-resort-hotel prices, because she's living on the old farm where he was born and raised, and he fancied getting back to it for a spell."
"Family coming with him?" queried Cy Akers, after a moment's meditationover the surprising fact that a millionaire with the world before him should elect such a place as the Cross-Roads in which to spend his vacation.
"No, you can bet your bottom dollar they're not. And they're all abroad this summer orhe'dnever got here. They'd had him dragged off to some fashionable watering-place with them. But when the cat's away the mice'll play, you know. Mrs. Powers says it is his first visit here since his mother's funeral twenty years ago, and he seems as tickled as a boy to get back.
"Yesterday evening he followed the man all around the place while she was getting supper. She left him setting up in the parlour, but when she went in to ask him out to the table, he was nowhere to be seen. Pretty soon he came walking around the corner of thehouse with a pail of milk in each hand, sloshing it all over his store clothes. He'd done the milking himself, and seemed mightily set up over it."
"Lawzee! Billy Maxwell! Don't I remember him?" exclaimed Bud Hines. "Seems like 'twas only yesterday we used to sit on the same bench at school doin' our sums out of the same old book. The year old man Prosser taught, we got into so much devilment that it got to be a regular thing for him to say, regular as clock-work, almost, 'I'll whip Bud Hines and Billy Maxwell after the first arithmetic class this morning.' I don't s'pose he ever thinks of those old times since he's got to be one of the Four Hundred. Somehow I can hardly sense it, his bein' so rich. He never seemed any smarter than the rest of us. That's the way of the world, though,seesaw, one up and the other down. Of course it's my luck to be the one that's down. Luck always was against me."
"There he is now," exclaimed the storekeeper, and every head turned to see the stranger stepping briskly along the platform in front of the depot, on his way to the telegraph office.
He had the alertness of glance and motion that comes from daily contact with city corners. If there was a slight stoop in his broad shoulders, and if his closely cut hair and beard were iron gray, that seemed more the result of bearing heavy responsibilities than the token of advancing years. His immaculate linen, polished low-cut shoes, and light gray business suit would have passed unnoticed in the metropolis, but in this place, where coats and collars were in evidence only on Sunday, theygave him the appearance of being on dress parade.
Perkins's oldest eyed him as he would a zebra or a giraffe, or some equally interesting curiosity escaped from a Zoo. He had heard that his pockets were lined with gold, and that he had been known to pay as much as five dollars for a single lunch. Five dollars would board a man two weeks at the Cross-Roads.
With his mouth agape, the boy stood watching the stranger, who presently came over to the group on the porch with smiling face and cordial outstretched hand. Despite his gray hair there was something almost boyish in the eagerness with which he recognised old faces and claimed old friendships. Bowser's store had been built since his departure from the neighbourhood, so few of the congenialspirits accustomed to gather there were familiar to him. But Bud Hines and Cy Akers were old schoolfellows. When he would have gone up to them with old-time familiarity, he found a certain restraint in their greeting which checked his advances.
If he thought he was coming back to them the same freckle-faced, unconventional country lad they had known as Billy Maxwell, he was mistaken. He might feel that he was the same at heart; but they looked on the outward appearance. They saw the successful man of the world who had outstripped them in the race and passed out of their lives long ago. They could not conceive of such a change as had metamorphosed the boy they remembered into the man who stood before them, without feeling that a corresponding change must havetaken place in his attitude toward them.
They were not conscious that this feeling was expressed in their reception of him. They laughed at his jokes, and indulged in some reminiscences, but he felt, in a dim subconscious way, that there was a barrier between them, and he could never get back to the old familiar footing.
He turned away, vaguely disappointed. Had he dared to dream that he would find his lost youth just as he had left it? The fields and hills were unchanged. The very trees were the same, except that they had added a few more rings to their girth, and threw a larger circling shade. But the old chums he had counted on finding had not followed the same law of growth as the trees. The shade of their sympathies had narrowed, not expanded,with the passing years, and left him outside their contracted circle.
Perkins's oldest, awed by reports of his fabulous wealth, could hardly find his tongue when the distinguished visitor laid a friendly hand on his embarrassed tow head, and inquired about the old swimming-hole, and the mill-dam where he used to fish. But the boy's interest grew stronger every minute as he watched him turning over the limited assortment of fishing tackle. The men he knew had outlived such frivolous sports. It was a sight to justify one's gazing open-mouthed,—a grown man deliberately preparing for a month's idleness.
If the boy could have seen the jointed rods, the reels, the flies, all the expensive angler's outfit left behind in the Maxwell mansion; if he could have known of the tarpon this manhad caught in Florida bays, and the fishing he had enjoyed in northern waters, he would have wondered still more; wondered how a man could be considered in his right mind who deliberately renounced such privileges to come and drop a common hook, on a pole of his own cutting, into the shallow pools of the Cross-Roads creek.
After his purchases no one saw him at the store for several days, but the boy, dodging across lots, encountered him often,—a solitary figure wandering by the mill stream, or crashing through the woods with long eager strides; lying on the orchard grass sometimes with his hat pulled over his eyes; leaning over the pasture bars in the twilight, and following with wistful glance the little foot-path stretching white across the meadows. A pathetic sight to eyes wise enough tosee the pathos,—a world-weary, middle-aged man in vain quest of his lost boyhood.
On Sunday, Polly, looking across the church from her place in the miller's pew, recognised the stranger in their midst, and straightway lost the thread of the sermon in wondering at his presence. She had gone to school with his daughter, Maud Maxwell. She had danced many a german with his son Claude. They lived on the same avenue, and passed each other daily; but this was the first time she had seen him away from the shadow of the family presence, that seemed to blot out his individuality.
She had thought of him only as Maud's father, a simple, good-natured nonentity in his own household. A good business man, but one who could talk nothing but leather, and whoseonly part in the family affairs was to furnish the funds for his wife and children to shine socially.
"Oh, your father's opinion doesn't count," she had heard Mrs. Maxwell say on more than one occasion, and the children had grown up, unconsciously copying her patronising attitude toward him. As Polly studied his face now in the light of other surroundings, she saw that it was a strong, kindly one; that it was not weakness which made him yield habitually, until he had become a mere figurehead in his own establishment. It was only that his peace-loving nature hated domestic scenes, and his generosity amounted to complete self-effacement when the happiness of his family was concerned.
His eyes were fixed on the chancel with a wistful reminiscent gaze, andPolly read something in the careworn face that touched her sympathy. "Grandfather," she said, at the close of the service, "let's be neighbourly and ask Mr. Maxwell home to dinner with us. He looks lonesome."
She was glad afterward that she had suggested it, when she recalled his evident pleasure in the old man's company. There were chairs out under the great oak-trees in the yard, and the two sat talking all afternoon of old times, until the evening shadows began to grow long across the grass. Then Polly joined them again, and sat with them till the tinkle of home-going cowbells broke on the restful stillness of the country Sabbath.
"All the orchestras in all the operas in the world can't make music that sounds as sweet to me as that does," said Mr. Maxwell, raising his head fromthe big armchair to listen. Then he dropped it again with a sigh.
"It rests me so after the racket of the city. If Julia would only consent, I'd sell out and come back to-morrow. But she's lost all interest in the old place. I'm country to the core, but she never was. She took to city ways like a duck to water, just as soon as she got away from the farm, and she laughs at me for preferring katydids to the whirr of electric cars."
A vision rose before the old miller of a little country girl in a pink cotton gown, who long ago used to wait, bright-eyed and blushing, at the pasture bars, for Billy to drive home the cows. Many a time he had passed them at their trysting-place. Then he recalled the superficial, ambitious woman he had met years afterward when he visited his son. He shookhis head when he thought of her renouncing her social position for the simple pastoral life her husband longed to find the way back to. Presently he broke the silence of their several reveries by turning to Polly.
"What's that piece you recited to me the other night, little girl, about old times? Say it for Mr. Maxwell." And Polly, clasping her hands in her lap, and looking away across the August meadows, purple with the royal pennons of the ironweed, began the musical old poem:
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,Way down the darkening dingleThe cows come slowly home.(And old-time friends and twilight playsAnd starry nights and sunny daysCome trooping up the misty ways,When the cows come home.)"'And over there on Merlin HillHear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill.And the dewdrops lie on the tangled vines,And over the poplars Venus shines,And over the silent mill."'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,With ting-aling and jingleThe cows come slowly home.(Let down the bars, let in the trainOf long-gone songs and flowers and rain,For dear old times come back again,When the cows come home.)'"
Once as Polly went on, she saw the tears spring to his eyes at the line "and mother-songs of long-gone years," and she knew that the