VII

[pg 138]VIIWithout the Time of Day“Jonathan, did you ever live without a clock,—whole days, I mean,—days and days—”“When I was a boy—most of the time, I suppose. But the family didn’t like it.”“Of course. But did you like it?”“Yes, I liked it all. I seem to remember getting pretty hungry sometimes, but it’s all rather good as I look back on it.”“Let’s do it!”“Now?”“No. Society is an enlarged family, and wouldn’t like it. But this summer, when we camp.”“How do you know we’re going to camp?”“The things we know best we don’t always know how we know.”“Well, then,—ifwe camp—”“Whenwe camp—let’s live without a watch.”“You’d need one to get there.”[pg 139]“Take one, and let it run down.”As it turned out, my“when”was truer than Jonathan’s“if.”We did camp. We did, however, use watches to get there: when we expressed our baggage, when we sent our canoe, when we took the trolley car and the train; and the watch was still going as our laden craft nosed gently against the bank of the river-island that was to be our home for two weeks. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the steep woods on the western bank had already turned the rocks in midstream from silver to gray, and dimmed the brightness of the swift water, almost to the eastern shore.“Will there be time to get settled before dark?”I asked, as we stepped out into the shallow water and drew up the canoe to unload.“Shall I look at my watch to see?”asked Jonathan, with a note of amiable derision in his voice.“Well, Ishouldrather like to know what time it is. We won’t begin till to-morrow.”“You mean, we won’t begin to stop watching. All right. It’s just seventeen and a half[pg 140]minutes after five. I’ll give you the seconds if you like.”“Minutes will do nicely, thank you.”“Lots of time. You collect firewood while I get the tent ready. Then it’ll need us both to set it up.”We worked busily, happily. Ah! The joyous elation of the first night in camp! Is there anything like it? With days and days ahead, and not even one counted off the shining number! All the good things of childhood and maturity seem pressed into one mood of flawless, abounding happiness.By dark the tent was up, the baggage stowed, the canoe secured, the fire glowing in a bed of embers, and we sat beside it, looking out past the glooms of the hemlocks across the moonlit river,—sat and ate city-cooked chicken and sandwiches and drank thermos-bottled tea.“To-morrow we’ll cook,”I said.“To-night it’s rather nice not to have to. Look at the moonlight on that rock! How black it makes the eddy below!”“Good bass under there,”said Jonathan.“We’ll get some to-morrow.”[pg 141]“Maybe.”“Well, of course, it’s always maybe, with bass. Well—I’m done—and it’s quarter to ten—late! Oh! Excuse me! Maybe you’d rather I hadn’t told you. By the way, do I wind my watch to-night or not?”“Not.”“Not it is, then. Sure you wouldn’t rather have it wound, though? We can leave it hanging in the tent. It won’t break loose and bite you.”“Yes, it would. There would be a something—a taint—”“Oh,allright!”* * * * *We slept with the murmur of the river running through our dreams,—a murmur of many voices: deep voices, high voices, grumbling voices as the stones go grinding and rolling along the ever-changing bottom,—and only half roused when the dawn chorus of the birds filled the air. That dawn chorus was something we should have been loath to miss. Through the first gray of the morning there comes a stir in the woods, an expectant tremor; a bird peeps softly and is still; then[pg 142]another, and another,“softly conferring together.”As the light grows warmer, comes a clearer note from some leader, then a full, complete song; another, and the woods are awake, flinging out their wonderful song-greeting to the morning. There is in it a prodigality of swift-changing beauty like ocean surf: a continuous and intricate interweaving of rhythms, pulses and ebbings of clear tone, beautiful phrases rising antiphonal, showerings of bright notes, moments of subsidence, almost of pause. As the light grows and sharpens, the music reaches a crescendo of exuberance, and at last dies down as real day comes, bringing with it the day’s work. On our island the leader of the chorus was almost always a song sparrow, though once or twice a wood thrush came over from the shore woods and filled the hemlock shadows with the limpid splendors of his song.Hearing the chorus through our dreams, we slept again, and when I really waked the sun was high, flecking the eastern V of our tent with dazzling patches. I heard Jonathan moving about outside, and the crackling of a new-made fire. I went to the front of the[pg 143]tent and looked out. Yes, there they were, the fire and Jonathan, in a quiet space of shade where the early coolness still hung. Beyond them, half shut out from view by the low-spreading hemlock boughs, was the open river—such gayety of swift water! Such dazzle of midsummer morning! I drew back, eager to be out in it.“Bacon and eggs, is it?”called Jonathan,“or shall I run down and try for a bass?”“Don’t!”I called. I knew that if he once got out after bass he was lost to me for the day. And now we had cut loose from even the mild tyranny of his watch. As I thought of this I went over to the many-forked tree, whose close-trimmed branches served our tent as hat-rack, clothes-rack, everything-that-can-hang-or-perch-rack, and opened Jonathan’s watch.“Well, what time is it?”Jonathan was peering in between the tent-flaps.“Twenty-two minutes before five.”“A.M., I judge. Sorry you didn’t let me wind it?”“Not a bit. I was just curious to see when it stopped, that was all.”[pg 144]“Well, now you know. Hereafter the official time for the camp is4:38—A.M.orP.M., according to taste. Come along. The bacon’s done, and I’m blest if I want to drop in the eggs.”Dropping an egg will never, I fear, be one of Jonathan’s most finished performances. He watched me do it with generous admiration.“If you could just get over being scared of them,”I suggested, as the last one plumped into the pan and set up its gentle sizzle.“No use. Iamscared of the things. I tap and tap, and nothing happens, and then I get mad and tap hard, and they’re all over the place.”By the time breakfast was over, even the coolness under the hemlocks was beginning to grow warm and aromatic. The birds in the shore woods were quieter, though out at the sunny end of our island, where the hemlocks gave place to low scrub growth, the song sparrow sang gayly now and then.“Now,”said Jonathan,“what about fishing?”“Well—let’s fish!”[pg 145]“One up stream and one down, or keep together?”“Together,”I decided.“If we go two ways there’s no telling when I’ll ever see you again.”“Yes, there is: when I’m hungry.”“No; some time after you’ve noticed you’re hungry.”“Now, if we had watches it would be so much simpler: we could meet here at, say, one o’clock.”“Simple, indeed! When did you ever look at a watch when you were fishing, unless I made you? No, my way is simple, but we stay together.”Of course, in river fishing,“together”means simply not absolutely out of sight of each other. Jonathan may be up to his arm-pits in mid-current, or marooned on a rock above a swirling eddy, while I am in a similar situation beyond calling distance, but so long as a bend in the river does not cut us off, we are“together,”and very companionable togetherness it is, too. When I see Jonathan wildly waving to attract my attention, I know he has either just caught a big bass or else just[pg 146]lost one, and this gives me something to smile over as I wonder which it is. After a time, if I am catching shiners and no bass, and Jonathan doesn’t seem to be moving, I infer that his luck is better than mine, and drift along toward him. Or it may be the other way around, and he comes to look me up. Bass are the most uncertain of fish, and no one can predict when they will elect to bite, or where. Sometimes they are in the still water, deep or shallow according to their caprice; sometimes they hang on the edges of the rapids; sometimes they are in the dark, smooth eddies below the great boulders; sometimes in the clear depths around the rocks near shore. Each day afresh,—indeed, each morning and each afternoon,—the fisherman must try, and try, and try, until he discovers what their choice has been for that special time. Yet no fisherman who has once drawn out a good bass from a certain bit of water can help feeling, next time, that there is another waiting for him there. That is one of the reasons why he is always hopeful, and so always happy. The fish he has caught, at this well-remembered spot and that, rise[pg 147]up out of the past and flick their tails at him; and all the stretches between—stretches of water that have never for him held anything but shiners, stretches of time diversified by not even a nibble—sink into pleasant insignificance.We banked our fire, stowed everything in the tent that a thunderstorm would hurt, and splashed out into the river. There it lay in all its bright, swift beauty, and we stood a moment, looking, feeling the push of the water about our knees and the warmth of the sun on our shoulders.“It makes a difference, sleeping out in it all,”I said.“You feel as if it belonged to you so much more. I quite own the river this morning, don’t you?”“Quite. But not the bass in it. Bet you don’t catch one!”“Bet I beat you!”“Bass, mind you. Sunfish don’t count. You’re always catching sunfish.”“They count in the pan. But I’ll beat you on bass. I know some places—”“Who doesn’t? All right, go ahead!”We were off; Jonathan, as usual, wading[pg 148]up to his chest or perched on a bit of boulder above some dark, slick rapid; I preferring water not more than waist-deep, and not too far from shore to miss the responses of the wood-folk to my passing: soft flurries of wings; shy, half-suppressed peepings; quick warning notes; light footfalls, hopping or running or galloping; the snapping of twigs and the crushing of leaves. Some sounds tell me who the creature is,—the warning of the blue jay, the whirr of the big ruffed grouse, the thud of the bounding rabbit,—but many others leave me guessing, which is almost better. When a very big stick snaps, I always feel sure a deer is stealing away, though Jonathan assures me that a chewink can break twigs and“kick up a row generally,”so that you’d swear it was nothing smaller than a wild bull.So we fished that day. When I caught a bass, which was seldom, I whooped and waved it at Jonathan, and when I caught a shiner, which was rather often, I waved it too, just to keep his mind occupied. Hours passed, and we met at a bend in the river where the deep water glides close to shore.[pg 149]“Hungry?”I asked.“Now you speak of it, yes.”“Shall we go back?”“How can I tell? Now, if we only had that watch we’d know whether we ought to be hungry or not.”“What does that matter, if wearehungry? Besides, if you’d had a watch, you’d have had to carry it in your teeth. You know perfectly well you wouldn’t have brought it, anyway.”“Well—then, at least when we got back, we should have known whether we ought to have been hungry or not. Now we shall never know.”“Never! Oh! Look there, Jonathan! We’re going to catch it!”A sense of growing shadow in the air had made me look up, and there, back of the steep-rising woods, hung a blue-black cloud, with ragged edges crawling out into the brightness of the sky.“Sure enough! The bass’ll bite now, if it really comes. Wait till the first drops, and see what you see.”We had not long to wait. There came that sudden expectancy in the air and the trees,[pg 150]the strange pallor in the light, the chill sweep of wind gusts with warm pauses between. Then a few big drops splashed on the dusty, sun-baked stones about us.“Now! Wade right out there, to the edge of that ledge—don’t slip over, it’s deep. I’ll go down a little way.”I waded out carefully, and cast, in the smooth, dark water already beginning to be rain-pocked. It was surprisingly shivery, that storm wind! I glanced toward shore to look for shelter—I remembered an overhanging ledge of rock—then my line went taut! I forgot about shelter, forgot about being chilly; I knew it was a good bass.I got him in—too big to go through the hole in my creel—cast for another—and another—and yet another. The rain began to fall in sheets, and the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing? The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges, all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks, but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous[pg 151]assaults of the fierce rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly, but cold—cold. And under that water the bass were biting, my rod was bending double, my reel softly screaming as I gave line, and one after another I drew the fish alongside and dipped them out with my landing net.Then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped biting. I waited long minutes; nothing happened, and all at once I realized that I was very wet and very cold. Wading ashore, I saw Jonathan shivering along up the narrow beach toward me, his shoulders drawn in to half their natural spread, neck tucked in between his collar-bones, knees slightly bent.“You can’t be cold?”I questioned as soon as he was near enough to hear me through the slash of the rain and wind.“No, of course not; are you?”We didn’t discuss it, but ran up the bank to the rock-ledge and crouched under it, our teeth literally chattering.“Did you ever see such fishing?”I managed to stammer.[pg 152]“Great! But oh,whydidn’t I bring the whiskey bottle?”“Let’s run for camp! We can’t be wetter.”We crawled out into the rain again, and first sprinted and then dog-trotted along the river edge. No bird notes now in the woods beside us, no whirring of wings; only the rain sounds: soft swishings and drippings and gusty showerings, very different from the flat, flicking sounds when rain first starts in dry woods.Camp looked a little cheerless, but a blazing fire, started with dry stuff we had stowed inside the tent, changed things, and dry clothes changed them still more, and we sat within the tent flaps and ate ginger-snaps in great contentment of spirit while we waited for the rain to stop.It did stop, and very soon the fish were sizzling in the pan.“Of course, if we had a watch, now—”suggested Jonathan, as he carefully tucked under the pan little sticks of just the right length.“What should we know more than we do now—that we’re hungry?”I asked.[pg 153]“Well, for one thing, we’d know what time it is,”replied Jonathan tranquilly.“And for another we’d know whether it’s dinner or supper I’m cooking,”I supplemented.“But does it matter? You won’t get anything different, no matter which it is—just fish is what you’ll get. And pretty soon the sun will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a sundial for yourself.”“Oh, I don’t really care which it is.”“Do you suppose I don’t know that! And meanwhile, you might cut the bread and make some toast,—there are some good embers on your side under the pan,—and I’ll get the butter, and there we’ll be.”By the time the toast was made and the fish curling brownly away from the pan, the sun had indeed come out, at first pale and watery, then clear, and still high enough in the heavens to set the soaked earth steaming fragrantly with its heat. Odors of hemlock and wet earth mingled with odors of toast and fried fish.“Um-m! Smell it all!”I said.“What a lot we should miss if we didn’t eat in the kitchen!”[pg 154]“Or cook in the dining-room—which?”“And hear that song sparrow! Doesn’t it sound as if the rain had washed his song a little cleaner and clearer?”There followed the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain leaves behind it—a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay—the other side was steep and pathless woods—and walked down to the nearest farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the light of a low-hung moon, and across the dim water to our own island and the embers of our fire.“Oh, Jonathan! We never asked them what time it was!”I said.“I meant to—for your sake—I thought you’d sleep better if you knew.”“Too bad! Probably I should have. I thought of it, of course, but was afraid that if I asked it would spoil your day.”[pg 155]“It would take something pretty bad to spoil a day like this one,”I said.* * * * *Two days later the weather turned still and warm, the bass refused to bite, and even the sunfish lay, shy or wary or indifferent, in their shallow, sunny pools, so we resolved to walk down the river to the post-office, four miles away, for possible mail. As we sat on the steps of the little store, looking it over,—“Here’s news,”said Jonathan;“Jack and Molly say they’ll run up if we want them, day after to-morrow—up on the morning train, and back on the evening.”“Good! Tell them to come along.”“No—it’s to-morrow—letter’s been here since yesterday. I’ll telegraph.”As we tramped home we planned the day.“We’ll meet them and all walk up together,”said Jonathan.“We’d better catch some bass and leave them all hooked in a pool, ready for them to pull out,”I added;“otherwise they may not catch any. And maybe you’d better meet them and I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”[pg 156]“Nonsense! You come, and we’ll all get dinner when we get back. That’s what they’re coming for—to see the whole thing.”“But if it’s late—they’ve got to get back for that down train.”“Well—time enough.”“Oh, Jonathan! What about catching that train?”“They’ll have watches—watches that go.”“But what about our meeting them? The train arrives at10:15, they said. What does10:15look like in the sky, I wonder!”“Or rather, what does 8.45 look like? It takes an hour and a half to get there, counting crossing the river.”“Yes—dear me! Well, Jonathan, we’ll just have to get up early and go, and then wait.”“Or else take our watch to the farmhouse and set it.”“Jonathan, I will not! I’d rather start at daylight.”Which was very nearly what we did. The morning opened with a sun obscured, and I felt sure it was stealing a march on us and[pg 157]would suddenly burst out upon us from a noonday sky. We breakfasted hastily, ferried across to shore, and set a swinging pace down the road. As we walked, the sun burned through the mist, and our shadows came out, dim, long things, striding with the exaggerated gait that shadows have, over the grassy banks to our right.“I think,”said Jonathan,“it may be as late as seven o’clock, but perhaps it’s only six.”When we reached the station, the official clock registered 8.30. We strolled over to the store-and-post-office and got more letters—one from Molly and Jack saying thank you they’d come.“They don’t entirely understand our mail system up here,”said Jonathan. We got some ginger-cookies and some milk and had a second breakfast, and finally wandered back to the station to wait for the train. It came, bearing the expected two, and much friendliness.“Get our letter? There, Jack! He said you wouldn’t, but I said you would. I made him send it … four miles to walk? What fun!”It was fun, indeed, and all went well until[pg 158]after dinner, when Jack—saying,“Well, maybe we’d better be starting back for that train”—drew out his watch. He opened it, muttered something, put it to his ear, then began to wind it rapidly. He wound and wound. We all laughed.“Looks as if you hadn’t remembered to wind it last night,”said Jonathan, glancing at me.“I haven’t done that in months, hang it! Give me the time, will you, Jonathan?”said Jack.“Sorry!”Jonathan was smiling genially.“Mine’s run down too. It stopped at twenty-two minutes before five—A. M., I think.”“What luck! And Molly didn’t bring hers.”“You told me not to,”Molly flicked in.“So here we are,”said Jonathan,“entirely without the time of day.”“But plenty of real time all round us,”I said.“Let’s use it, and start.”I avoided Jonathan’s eye.We reached the station with an hour and ten minutes to spare—bought more ginger-cookies[pg 159]and more milk. As we sat eating them in the midst of the preternatural calm that marks a country railroad station outside of train times, Molly remarked brightly,—“Well, I don’t see but we got on just as well without a watch, didn’t we, Jack? Why do we need watches, anyway? Doyousee?”she turned to us.“Jack does everything by his watch—eats and breathes and sleeps by it—”Jack returned, watch in hand—he had been getting railroad time from the telegraph operator.“Want to set yours while you think of it?”he asked Jonathan.“Sorry—thank you—didn’t bring it,”said Jonathan.“By George, man, what’ll you do?”Real consternation sounded in Jack’s tones.“Oh, we’ll get along somehow,”said Jonathan.“You see, we don’t have many engagements, except with the bass, and they never meet theirs, anyhow.”When the train had gone, I said,“Jonathan, why didn’t you tell them it was my whim?”“Oh, I just didn’t,”said Jonathan.[pg 160]As Jonathan had predicted, we did get along somehow—got along rather well, on the whole. There are, of course, some drawbacks to an unwatched life. You never want to start the next meal till you are hungry, and after that it takes one or two or three hours, as the case may be, to go back to camp and get the meal ready, and by that time you are almost hungrier than you like being. But except for this, and the little matter of meeting trains, it is rather pleasant to break away from the habit of watching the watch, and it was with real regret that, on the last night of our camp, we took our watch to the farmhouse to set it.“Run down, did it? Guess you forgot to wind it. Well—we do forget things sometimes, all of us do,”the farmer’s wife said comfortingly as she went to look at the clock.“Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It’s apt to be fast, so I guess you won’t miss any trains. Father he says he’d rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don’t often get more than ten minutes wrong either way.”And to us, after our two weeks of camp,[pg 161]ten minutes’ error in a clock seemed indeed slight.“Jonathan,”I said, as we walked back along the road,“I hate to go back to clock time. I like real time better.”“You couldn’t do so many things in a day,”said Jonathan.“No—maybe not.”“But maybe that wouldn’t matter.”“Maybe it wouldn’t,”I said.[pg 162]VIIIThe Ways of Griselda“Of course you don’t know what her name is,”I said, as we stood examining the sleek little black mare Jonathan had just brought up from the city.“No. Forgot to ask. Don’t believe they’d have known anyway—one of a hundred or so.”“Well, we’ll name her again. Dear me—she’s rather plain! Probably she’s useful.”“Hope so,”said Jonathan. Then, stepping back a little, in a slightly grieved tone,“But I don’t call her plain. Wait till she’s groomed up—”“It’s that droop of her neck—sort of patient—and the way she drops one of her hips—if they are hips.”“But we want a horse to be patient.”“Yes. I don’t know that I care about having herlookso terribly much so as this. I think I’ll call her Griselda.”[pg 163]“Now, why Griselda?”“Why, don’t you know? She was that patient creature, with the horrid husband who had to keep trying to see just how patient she was. It’s a hateful story—enough to turn any one who brooded on it into a militant suffragette.”“But you can’t call a horse Griselda—not for common stable use, you know.”“Call her‘Griz’for short. It does very well.”Jonathan jeered a little, but in the family the name held. Our man Hiram said nothing, but I think in private he called her“Fan”or“Beauty”or“Lady,”or some such regulation stable name.Called by any name, she pleased us, and shewaspatient. She trotted peacefully up hill and down, she did her best at ploughing and haymaking and all the odd jobs that the farm supplied. She stood when we left her, with that same demure, almost overdone droop of the neck that I had first noticed. When I met Jonathan at the station, she stood with her nose against a snorting train, looking as if nothing could rouse her.[pg 164]“Good little horse you got there,”remarked the station agent.“Where’d you find her?”“Oh, I picked her out of a bunch down in the city,”said Jonathan casually.“I didn’t think I knew much about horses, but I guess I was in luck this time.”“Guess you know more about horses than you’re sayin’.”And Jonathan, thus pressed, admitted with suitable reluctance that hehadnow and then been able to detect a good horse by his own observation.On the way home he openly congratulated himself on his find.“I really wasn’t sure I knew how to pick out a horse,”he remarked, in a glow of retrospective modesty,“but I certainly got a treasure this time.”Griz had been with us about two weeks, and all went well. Then another horse was needed for farm work, and one was sent up—one Kit by name—a big, pleasant, rather stupid brown mare.“They do say two mares don’t git on so well together as a mare ’n a horse,”remarked Hiram.“But these are both such quiet creatures,”[pg 165]I protested, to which Hiram made no answer. Hiram seldom made an answer unless fairly cornered into it.For two or three days after the new arrival nothing happened, so far as we knew, except that Griz always laid her ears back, and looked queer about her under lip, whenever Kit was led in or out of the stall next her, while Kit always huddled up close to her manger whenever Griz was led past her heels. Once or twice Griz slipped her halter in the stall, and Hiram said there was a place on Kit that looked as if she had been kicked, but when we scrutinized Griz, neck a-droop and eyes a-blink, we found it hard to think ill of her. Besides, Jonathan was now fairly committed to the opinion that he had“got a treasure this time.”“Kit may have hurt herself lying down,”he suggested, and again Hiram made no answer.Then one night, sometime during the very small, very dark, and very sleepy hours, we were awakened by awful sounds.“What is it? Whatisit?”I gasped.Crash! Bang! Boom! The trampling of hoofs!—heavy, hollow pounding!—the[pg 166]tearing and splintering of wood!—all coming from the barn, though loud enough, indeed, to have come from the next room.Jonathan was up in an instant muttering,“Where are my rubber boots?—and my coat?”“Jonathan!whata combination!”But he was gone, and I heard the snap of the lantern and the slam of the back door almost before the rocking-chair in the sitting-room that he had hit—and talked to—had stopped rocking. Then I heard him calling outside Hiram’s window and then he ran past our window, out to the barn. I wished he had waited for Hiram, but I had an undercurrent of pleasure in hearing him run. Jonathan’s theory is that there is never any hurry, and now and then I like to have this notion jolted up a little.Meanwhile the awful sounds had ceased. There was the rumble of the stable door, a pause, and Jonathan’s voice in conversational tones. Next came the flashing of Hiram’s lantern, and thetromp, tromp, tromp, in much quicker tempo than usual, of Hiram’s heavy boots. Hiram’s theory was a[pg 167]good deal like Jonathan’s, so this also gave me pleasure. Finally, there came the flash of another lantern, and I recognized the quick, short step of Mrs. Hiram. I smiled to myself, picturing the meeting between her and Jonathan, for I knew just how Jonathan was costumed. In two minutes I heard her steps repassing, and in five minutes Jonathan returned. He was chuckling quietly.“I guess Griz got all she needed—didn’t know either of ’em had so much spunk in ’em.”“What happened?”“Don’t know, exactly, but when I opened that door, there was Griz, just inside, no halter on, head down, meek as Moses, as far away from Kit’s heels as she could get—she’s got the mark of them on her leg and her flank.”“Is she hurt?—or Kit?”“No, not so far as we can see, not to amount to anything—except maybe Griz’s feelings.”“And what about Mrs. Hiram’s feelings?”Jonathan laughed aloud.“I was inside with Kit, and she called out to know if she could help.”“And what did you say?”[pg 168]“I said,‘Not on your life.’”“So that was why she came back. Did you really say,‘Not on your life,’ or did you only imply it in your tone, while you actually said, ‘No, thank you very much’?”“I really said it. At least, I don’t remember conversations the way you do, but I didn’t feel a bit like thanking anybody, and I don’t believe I did.”“Well, I wish I’d heard you. One misses a good deal—”“You can see the stable to-morrow. That’ll keep. They must have had a time of it! The walls are marked and splintered as high as I can reach. And I don’t believe Kit’ll cringe when Griz passes her any more.”“Of course you remember Hiramsaidtwo mares didn’t usually get on very well, and even when they’re chosen by a good judge of horses—”* * * * *After that the two did get along peaceably enough, and Jonathan assured me that all horses had these little affairs. One day we drove over to the main street of the village on an errand.[pg 169]“Will she stand?”I questioned.“Better hitch her, perhaps,”said Jonathan, getting out the rope. He snapped it into her bit-ring, then threw the other end around a post and started to make a half-hitch. But as he drew up the rope it was suddenly jerked out of his hand. He looked up and saw Griselda’s patient head waving high above him on the end of an erect and rebellious neck, the hitch-rope waggling in loops and spirals in the air, and the whole outfit backing away from him with speed and decision. He was so astonished that he did nothing, and in a moment Griz had stopped backing and stood still, her head sagging gently, the rope dangling.“Well—I’ll—be—”I didn’t try to remember just what Jonathan said he would be, because it doesn’t really matter. We both stared at Griz as if we had never seen her before. Griz looked at nothing in particular, she blinked long lashes over drowsy, dark eyes, and sagged one hip.“She’s trying to make believe she didn’t do it—but she did,”I said.“Something must have startled her,”said[pg 170]Jonathan, peering up and down the deserted street. Two roosters were crowing antiphonally in near-by yards, and a dog was barking somewhere far off.“What?”I said.“You never can tell, with a horse.”“No, apparently not,”I said, smiling to myself; and I added hastily, as I saw Jonathan go forward to her head,“Don’ttry it again, please! I’ll stay by her while you go in.Please!”For I had detected on Jonathan’s face a look that I very well knew. It was the same expression he had worn that Sunday he led the calf to pasture. He made no answer, but stood examining the hitch-rope.“No use,”he said, quietly releasing it and tossing its coil into the carriage,“It’s too rotten. If it snapped, she’d be ruined.”I breathed freer. I privately hoped that all the hitch-ropes at the farm were rotten.“Griz stands perfectly well without hitching,”I said as we drove home,“Why do you force an issue?”“I didn’t. She did. She’s beaten me. If I don’t hitch her now, she’ll know she’s master.”[pg 171]“Oh, dear!”I sighed.“Let herbemaster! Where’s the harm? It’s just your vanity.”“Perhaps so,”said Jonathan.When he agrees with me like that I know it’s hopeless.The next night he wheeled in at the big gate bearing about his shoulders a coil of heavy rope.“It looks like a ship’s cable,”I said.“Yes,”he responded, leaning his bicycle against his side, and swinging the coil over his head.“I want it for mooring purposes. Think it’ll moor Griz?”“Jonathan!”I exclaimed,“you won’t!”“Watch me,”said Jonathan, and he proceeded to explain to me the working of the tackle.One end had a ring in it, and as nearly as I remember, the plan was to put the rope around her body, under what would be her arm-pits if she had arm-pits,—horses’ joints are never called what one would expect, of course,—run the end through the ring, then forward between her legs and through the bit-ring.[pg 172]“Then, when she sets back, it cuts her in two,”he concluded cheerfully.“But you don’twanther in two,”I protested.“She won’t set back,”he responded;“at least, not more than once. To-morrow’s Sunday; I’ll have to hitch her at church.”I hoped it would rain, so we needn’t go, but we were having a drought and the morning dawned cloudless. We reached the church just on the last stroke of the bell. The women were all within; the men and boys lounging in the vestibule were turning reluctant feet to follow them.“You go right in,”said Jonathan,“I’ll be in soon.”I turned to protest, but he was already driving round to the side, and a hush had fallen over the congregation within that made it embarrassing to call. Besides, one of the deacons stood holding open the door for me.I slipped into a pew near the back, with the apologetic feeling one often has in an old country church—a feeling that one is making the ghosts move along a little. They did move, of course,—probably ghosts are always[pg 173]polite when one really meets them,—and I sat down. Indeed, I was thinking very little of ghosts that day, or of the minister either. My ears were cocked to catch and interpret all the noises that came in through the open windows on my left. My eyes wandered in that direction, too, though the clear panes revealed nothing more exciting than flickering maple leaves and a sky filmed over by veils of cloud.The moralists tell us that what we get out of any experience depends upon what we bring to it. What I brought to it that morning was a mind agog, attuned to receive these expected outside sounds. To all such sounds the service within was merely a background—a background which didn’t know its place, since it kept pushing itself more or less importunately into the foreground. I sat there, of course, with perfect propriety of demeanor, but my reactions were something like this:—Hymn 912… seven stanzas! horrors! oh!omit the 3d, 5th, and 6th—well, I should hope so!… I can’t hear a thing while this is going on!… He hasn’t come in yet![pg 174]Scripture reading for to-day—why can’t he give us the passage and let us read it for ourselves?—well, his voice is rather high and uneven, I think I could make out Jonathan’s through the loopholes in it.… There! What was that, I wonder! Sounded like shouting,—oh, why can’t he talk softly!Let us unite in prayer.Ah! now we’ll have a long, quiet time, anyway!… if only he wouldn’t pray quite so loud! Why pray aloud at all, anyway? I like the Quaker way best: a good long strip of silence, where your thoughts can wash around in any fashion that—There! No—yes—no—it’s just people going by on the road.… Maybe he’s in the back of the church now, waiting for the close of the prayer. Seems as if I had to look.… Well, he isn’t.…For thy name’s sake, amen.And then the collection, with an organ voluntary the while—now why an organ voluntary? Why not leave people to their thoughts some of the time?And at last, the sermon:—The text to which I wish to call your attention this morning—my attention, forsooth! My attention was otherwise occupied. Ah! A puff of[pg 175]warm, sweet air from behind me, and the soft, padding noise of the swinging doors, apprised me of an incomer. A cautious tread in the aisle—I moved along a little to make room.In a city church probably I should have thrown propriety to the winds and had the gist of the story out of him at once, but in a country church there are always such listening spaces,—the very pew-backs and cushions seem attentive, the hymnals creak in their racks, and the little stools cry out nervously when one barely touches them. It was too much for me. I was coerced into an outer semblance of decorum. However, I snatched a hasty glance at Jonathan’s face. It was quite red and hot-looking, but calm, very calm, and I judged it to be the calm, not of defeat nor yet of settled militancy, but of triumph. I even thought I detected the flicker of a grin,—the mere atmospheric suggestion of a grin,—as if he felt the urgent if furtive appeal in my glance. At any rate, Jonathan was all right, that was clear. And as to Griz—whether she was still one mare or two half-mares—it didn’t so much matter.[pg 176]And now for the sermon! I gathered myself to attend.As we stood up for the last hymn, I whispered,“How did it go?”“All right. She’s hitched,”was the answer.After church there was the usual stir of sociability, and when I emerged into the glare of the church steps, I saw Jonathan driving slowly around from the rear. Griz walked meekly, her head sagged, her eyes blinked.“Good quiet little horse you’ve got there,”said a deacon over my shoulder;“don’t get restless standing, the way some horses do.”“Yes, she’s very quiet,”I said.I got in, and at last, as we drove off, the flood-gates of my impatience broke:—“Well?”I said,—“well?”“Well—”said Jonathan.“Well? Tellme about it!”“I’ve told you. I hitched her.”“How did you hitch her?”“Just the way I said I would.”“Didn’t she mind?”“Don’t know.”“Did she make a fuss?”“Not much.”[pg 177]“What do you mean by much?”“Oh, she set back a little.”“Do any harm?”“No.”“Hurt herself?”“Guess not.”“Jonathan, you drive me distracted—you have no more sense for a story—”“But there was nothing in particular—”“Now, Jonathan, if there was nothing in particular,whydidn’t you get into church till the sermon was begun, and why were you so red and hot?”Jonathan smiled indulgently.“Why, of course, she didn’t care about being hitched. I thought you knew that. But it was perfectly easy.”And that was about all I could extract by the most artful questions. I took my revenge by telling Jonathan the deacon’s compliment to Griz.“He said she didn’t get restless standing, the way so many horses did. I thought of mentioning that you were a rather good judge of horses, in an amateur way, but then I thought it might seem like boasting, so I didn’t.”[pg 178]After that, of course, I didn’t really deserve to hear the whole story, but the next night I happened to be in the hammock while Jonathan was talking to a neighbor at the front gate, and he was relating the incident with detail enough to have satisfied the most hungry gossip. Only thus did I learn that Bill Howard, who had wound the rope twice round the post to give himself a little leeway, was drawn right up to the post when she set back; that they had been afraid the headstall would tear off; that they had been rather nervous about the post, and other such little points, which I had not been clever enough to elicit by my questions.Now, why? Probably a man likes to tell a story when he likes to tell it. I find myself wondering how much Odysseus told Penelope about his adventures when she got him to herself for a good talk. Is it significant that his really long story was told to the King of the Phæacians?As to Griz:—it would perhaps not be worth while to recount her subsequent history. It was a curious one, consisting of long stretches of continuous and ostentatious[pg 179]meekness, broken by sudden flare-ups which, after their occurrence, always seemed incredible. She never again“set back”when Jonathan was the one to hitch her, but this was a concession made to him personally, and had no effect on her general habits. We talked of changing her name, but could never manage it. We thought of selling her, but she was too valuable—most of the time. And when we finally parted from her our relief was deeply tinged with regret.I have sometimes wondered whether such flare-ups were not the natural and necessary means of recuperation from such depths of meekness. I have even wondered whether the original Griselda may not have—but this is not a dissertation on early Italian poetry, nor on the nature of women.

[pg 138]VIIWithout the Time of Day“Jonathan, did you ever live without a clock,—whole days, I mean,—days and days—”“When I was a boy—most of the time, I suppose. But the family didn’t like it.”“Of course. But did you like it?”“Yes, I liked it all. I seem to remember getting pretty hungry sometimes, but it’s all rather good as I look back on it.”“Let’s do it!”“Now?”“No. Society is an enlarged family, and wouldn’t like it. But this summer, when we camp.”“How do you know we’re going to camp?”“The things we know best we don’t always know how we know.”“Well, then,—ifwe camp—”“Whenwe camp—let’s live without a watch.”“You’d need one to get there.”[pg 139]“Take one, and let it run down.”As it turned out, my“when”was truer than Jonathan’s“if.”We did camp. We did, however, use watches to get there: when we expressed our baggage, when we sent our canoe, when we took the trolley car and the train; and the watch was still going as our laden craft nosed gently against the bank of the river-island that was to be our home for two weeks. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the steep woods on the western bank had already turned the rocks in midstream from silver to gray, and dimmed the brightness of the swift water, almost to the eastern shore.“Will there be time to get settled before dark?”I asked, as we stepped out into the shallow water and drew up the canoe to unload.“Shall I look at my watch to see?”asked Jonathan, with a note of amiable derision in his voice.“Well, Ishouldrather like to know what time it is. We won’t begin till to-morrow.”“You mean, we won’t begin to stop watching. All right. It’s just seventeen and a half[pg 140]minutes after five. I’ll give you the seconds if you like.”“Minutes will do nicely, thank you.”“Lots of time. You collect firewood while I get the tent ready. Then it’ll need us both to set it up.”We worked busily, happily. Ah! The joyous elation of the first night in camp! Is there anything like it? With days and days ahead, and not even one counted off the shining number! All the good things of childhood and maturity seem pressed into one mood of flawless, abounding happiness.By dark the tent was up, the baggage stowed, the canoe secured, the fire glowing in a bed of embers, and we sat beside it, looking out past the glooms of the hemlocks across the moonlit river,—sat and ate city-cooked chicken and sandwiches and drank thermos-bottled tea.“To-morrow we’ll cook,”I said.“To-night it’s rather nice not to have to. Look at the moonlight on that rock! How black it makes the eddy below!”“Good bass under there,”said Jonathan.“We’ll get some to-morrow.”[pg 141]“Maybe.”“Well, of course, it’s always maybe, with bass. Well—I’m done—and it’s quarter to ten—late! Oh! Excuse me! Maybe you’d rather I hadn’t told you. By the way, do I wind my watch to-night or not?”“Not.”“Not it is, then. Sure you wouldn’t rather have it wound, though? We can leave it hanging in the tent. It won’t break loose and bite you.”“Yes, it would. There would be a something—a taint—”“Oh,allright!”* * * * *We slept with the murmur of the river running through our dreams,—a murmur of many voices: deep voices, high voices, grumbling voices as the stones go grinding and rolling along the ever-changing bottom,—and only half roused when the dawn chorus of the birds filled the air. That dawn chorus was something we should have been loath to miss. Through the first gray of the morning there comes a stir in the woods, an expectant tremor; a bird peeps softly and is still; then[pg 142]another, and another,“softly conferring together.”As the light grows warmer, comes a clearer note from some leader, then a full, complete song; another, and the woods are awake, flinging out their wonderful song-greeting to the morning. There is in it a prodigality of swift-changing beauty like ocean surf: a continuous and intricate interweaving of rhythms, pulses and ebbings of clear tone, beautiful phrases rising antiphonal, showerings of bright notes, moments of subsidence, almost of pause. As the light grows and sharpens, the music reaches a crescendo of exuberance, and at last dies down as real day comes, bringing with it the day’s work. On our island the leader of the chorus was almost always a song sparrow, though once or twice a wood thrush came over from the shore woods and filled the hemlock shadows with the limpid splendors of his song.Hearing the chorus through our dreams, we slept again, and when I really waked the sun was high, flecking the eastern V of our tent with dazzling patches. I heard Jonathan moving about outside, and the crackling of a new-made fire. I went to the front of the[pg 143]tent and looked out. Yes, there they were, the fire and Jonathan, in a quiet space of shade where the early coolness still hung. Beyond them, half shut out from view by the low-spreading hemlock boughs, was the open river—such gayety of swift water! Such dazzle of midsummer morning! I drew back, eager to be out in it.“Bacon and eggs, is it?”called Jonathan,“or shall I run down and try for a bass?”“Don’t!”I called. I knew that if he once got out after bass he was lost to me for the day. And now we had cut loose from even the mild tyranny of his watch. As I thought of this I went over to the many-forked tree, whose close-trimmed branches served our tent as hat-rack, clothes-rack, everything-that-can-hang-or-perch-rack, and opened Jonathan’s watch.“Well, what time is it?”Jonathan was peering in between the tent-flaps.“Twenty-two minutes before five.”“A.M., I judge. Sorry you didn’t let me wind it?”“Not a bit. I was just curious to see when it stopped, that was all.”[pg 144]“Well, now you know. Hereafter the official time for the camp is4:38—A.M.orP.M., according to taste. Come along. The bacon’s done, and I’m blest if I want to drop in the eggs.”Dropping an egg will never, I fear, be one of Jonathan’s most finished performances. He watched me do it with generous admiration.“If you could just get over being scared of them,”I suggested, as the last one plumped into the pan and set up its gentle sizzle.“No use. Iamscared of the things. I tap and tap, and nothing happens, and then I get mad and tap hard, and they’re all over the place.”By the time breakfast was over, even the coolness under the hemlocks was beginning to grow warm and aromatic. The birds in the shore woods were quieter, though out at the sunny end of our island, where the hemlocks gave place to low scrub growth, the song sparrow sang gayly now and then.“Now,”said Jonathan,“what about fishing?”“Well—let’s fish!”[pg 145]“One up stream and one down, or keep together?”“Together,”I decided.“If we go two ways there’s no telling when I’ll ever see you again.”“Yes, there is: when I’m hungry.”“No; some time after you’ve noticed you’re hungry.”“Now, if we had watches it would be so much simpler: we could meet here at, say, one o’clock.”“Simple, indeed! When did you ever look at a watch when you were fishing, unless I made you? No, my way is simple, but we stay together.”Of course, in river fishing,“together”means simply not absolutely out of sight of each other. Jonathan may be up to his arm-pits in mid-current, or marooned on a rock above a swirling eddy, while I am in a similar situation beyond calling distance, but so long as a bend in the river does not cut us off, we are“together,”and very companionable togetherness it is, too. When I see Jonathan wildly waving to attract my attention, I know he has either just caught a big bass or else just[pg 146]lost one, and this gives me something to smile over as I wonder which it is. After a time, if I am catching shiners and no bass, and Jonathan doesn’t seem to be moving, I infer that his luck is better than mine, and drift along toward him. Or it may be the other way around, and he comes to look me up. Bass are the most uncertain of fish, and no one can predict when they will elect to bite, or where. Sometimes they are in the still water, deep or shallow according to their caprice; sometimes they hang on the edges of the rapids; sometimes they are in the dark, smooth eddies below the great boulders; sometimes in the clear depths around the rocks near shore. Each day afresh,—indeed, each morning and each afternoon,—the fisherman must try, and try, and try, until he discovers what their choice has been for that special time. Yet no fisherman who has once drawn out a good bass from a certain bit of water can help feeling, next time, that there is another waiting for him there. That is one of the reasons why he is always hopeful, and so always happy. The fish he has caught, at this well-remembered spot and that, rise[pg 147]up out of the past and flick their tails at him; and all the stretches between—stretches of water that have never for him held anything but shiners, stretches of time diversified by not even a nibble—sink into pleasant insignificance.We banked our fire, stowed everything in the tent that a thunderstorm would hurt, and splashed out into the river. There it lay in all its bright, swift beauty, and we stood a moment, looking, feeling the push of the water about our knees and the warmth of the sun on our shoulders.“It makes a difference, sleeping out in it all,”I said.“You feel as if it belonged to you so much more. I quite own the river this morning, don’t you?”“Quite. But not the bass in it. Bet you don’t catch one!”“Bet I beat you!”“Bass, mind you. Sunfish don’t count. You’re always catching sunfish.”“They count in the pan. But I’ll beat you on bass. I know some places—”“Who doesn’t? All right, go ahead!”We were off; Jonathan, as usual, wading[pg 148]up to his chest or perched on a bit of boulder above some dark, slick rapid; I preferring water not more than waist-deep, and not too far from shore to miss the responses of the wood-folk to my passing: soft flurries of wings; shy, half-suppressed peepings; quick warning notes; light footfalls, hopping or running or galloping; the snapping of twigs and the crushing of leaves. Some sounds tell me who the creature is,—the warning of the blue jay, the whirr of the big ruffed grouse, the thud of the bounding rabbit,—but many others leave me guessing, which is almost better. When a very big stick snaps, I always feel sure a deer is stealing away, though Jonathan assures me that a chewink can break twigs and“kick up a row generally,”so that you’d swear it was nothing smaller than a wild bull.So we fished that day. When I caught a bass, which was seldom, I whooped and waved it at Jonathan, and when I caught a shiner, which was rather often, I waved it too, just to keep his mind occupied. Hours passed, and we met at a bend in the river where the deep water glides close to shore.[pg 149]“Hungry?”I asked.“Now you speak of it, yes.”“Shall we go back?”“How can I tell? Now, if we only had that watch we’d know whether we ought to be hungry or not.”“What does that matter, if wearehungry? Besides, if you’d had a watch, you’d have had to carry it in your teeth. You know perfectly well you wouldn’t have brought it, anyway.”“Well—then, at least when we got back, we should have known whether we ought to have been hungry or not. Now we shall never know.”“Never! Oh! Look there, Jonathan! We’re going to catch it!”A sense of growing shadow in the air had made me look up, and there, back of the steep-rising woods, hung a blue-black cloud, with ragged edges crawling out into the brightness of the sky.“Sure enough! The bass’ll bite now, if it really comes. Wait till the first drops, and see what you see.”We had not long to wait. There came that sudden expectancy in the air and the trees,[pg 150]the strange pallor in the light, the chill sweep of wind gusts with warm pauses between. Then a few big drops splashed on the dusty, sun-baked stones about us.“Now! Wade right out there, to the edge of that ledge—don’t slip over, it’s deep. I’ll go down a little way.”I waded out carefully, and cast, in the smooth, dark water already beginning to be rain-pocked. It was surprisingly shivery, that storm wind! I glanced toward shore to look for shelter—I remembered an overhanging ledge of rock—then my line went taut! I forgot about shelter, forgot about being chilly; I knew it was a good bass.I got him in—too big to go through the hole in my creel—cast for another—and another—and yet another. The rain began to fall in sheets, and the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing? The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges, all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks, but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous[pg 151]assaults of the fierce rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly, but cold—cold. And under that water the bass were biting, my rod was bending double, my reel softly screaming as I gave line, and one after another I drew the fish alongside and dipped them out with my landing net.Then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped biting. I waited long minutes; nothing happened, and all at once I realized that I was very wet and very cold. Wading ashore, I saw Jonathan shivering along up the narrow beach toward me, his shoulders drawn in to half their natural spread, neck tucked in between his collar-bones, knees slightly bent.“You can’t be cold?”I questioned as soon as he was near enough to hear me through the slash of the rain and wind.“No, of course not; are you?”We didn’t discuss it, but ran up the bank to the rock-ledge and crouched under it, our teeth literally chattering.“Did you ever see such fishing?”I managed to stammer.[pg 152]“Great! But oh,whydidn’t I bring the whiskey bottle?”“Let’s run for camp! We can’t be wetter.”We crawled out into the rain again, and first sprinted and then dog-trotted along the river edge. No bird notes now in the woods beside us, no whirring of wings; only the rain sounds: soft swishings and drippings and gusty showerings, very different from the flat, flicking sounds when rain first starts in dry woods.Camp looked a little cheerless, but a blazing fire, started with dry stuff we had stowed inside the tent, changed things, and dry clothes changed them still more, and we sat within the tent flaps and ate ginger-snaps in great contentment of spirit while we waited for the rain to stop.It did stop, and very soon the fish were sizzling in the pan.“Of course, if we had a watch, now—”suggested Jonathan, as he carefully tucked under the pan little sticks of just the right length.“What should we know more than we do now—that we’re hungry?”I asked.[pg 153]“Well, for one thing, we’d know what time it is,”replied Jonathan tranquilly.“And for another we’d know whether it’s dinner or supper I’m cooking,”I supplemented.“But does it matter? You won’t get anything different, no matter which it is—just fish is what you’ll get. And pretty soon the sun will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a sundial for yourself.”“Oh, I don’t really care which it is.”“Do you suppose I don’t know that! And meanwhile, you might cut the bread and make some toast,—there are some good embers on your side under the pan,—and I’ll get the butter, and there we’ll be.”By the time the toast was made and the fish curling brownly away from the pan, the sun had indeed come out, at first pale and watery, then clear, and still high enough in the heavens to set the soaked earth steaming fragrantly with its heat. Odors of hemlock and wet earth mingled with odors of toast and fried fish.“Um-m! Smell it all!”I said.“What a lot we should miss if we didn’t eat in the kitchen!”[pg 154]“Or cook in the dining-room—which?”“And hear that song sparrow! Doesn’t it sound as if the rain had washed his song a little cleaner and clearer?”There followed the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain leaves behind it—a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay—the other side was steep and pathless woods—and walked down to the nearest farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the light of a low-hung moon, and across the dim water to our own island and the embers of our fire.“Oh, Jonathan! We never asked them what time it was!”I said.“I meant to—for your sake—I thought you’d sleep better if you knew.”“Too bad! Probably I should have. I thought of it, of course, but was afraid that if I asked it would spoil your day.”[pg 155]“It would take something pretty bad to spoil a day like this one,”I said.* * * * *Two days later the weather turned still and warm, the bass refused to bite, and even the sunfish lay, shy or wary or indifferent, in their shallow, sunny pools, so we resolved to walk down the river to the post-office, four miles away, for possible mail. As we sat on the steps of the little store, looking it over,—“Here’s news,”said Jonathan;“Jack and Molly say they’ll run up if we want them, day after to-morrow—up on the morning train, and back on the evening.”“Good! Tell them to come along.”“No—it’s to-morrow—letter’s been here since yesterday. I’ll telegraph.”As we tramped home we planned the day.“We’ll meet them and all walk up together,”said Jonathan.“We’d better catch some bass and leave them all hooked in a pool, ready for them to pull out,”I added;“otherwise they may not catch any. And maybe you’d better meet them and I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”[pg 156]“Nonsense! You come, and we’ll all get dinner when we get back. That’s what they’re coming for—to see the whole thing.”“But if it’s late—they’ve got to get back for that down train.”“Well—time enough.”“Oh, Jonathan! What about catching that train?”“They’ll have watches—watches that go.”“But what about our meeting them? The train arrives at10:15, they said. What does10:15look like in the sky, I wonder!”“Or rather, what does 8.45 look like? It takes an hour and a half to get there, counting crossing the river.”“Yes—dear me! Well, Jonathan, we’ll just have to get up early and go, and then wait.”“Or else take our watch to the farmhouse and set it.”“Jonathan, I will not! I’d rather start at daylight.”Which was very nearly what we did. The morning opened with a sun obscured, and I felt sure it was stealing a march on us and[pg 157]would suddenly burst out upon us from a noonday sky. We breakfasted hastily, ferried across to shore, and set a swinging pace down the road. As we walked, the sun burned through the mist, and our shadows came out, dim, long things, striding with the exaggerated gait that shadows have, over the grassy banks to our right.“I think,”said Jonathan,“it may be as late as seven o’clock, but perhaps it’s only six.”When we reached the station, the official clock registered 8.30. We strolled over to the store-and-post-office and got more letters—one from Molly and Jack saying thank you they’d come.“They don’t entirely understand our mail system up here,”said Jonathan. We got some ginger-cookies and some milk and had a second breakfast, and finally wandered back to the station to wait for the train. It came, bearing the expected two, and much friendliness.“Get our letter? There, Jack! He said you wouldn’t, but I said you would. I made him send it … four miles to walk? What fun!”It was fun, indeed, and all went well until[pg 158]after dinner, when Jack—saying,“Well, maybe we’d better be starting back for that train”—drew out his watch. He opened it, muttered something, put it to his ear, then began to wind it rapidly. He wound and wound. We all laughed.“Looks as if you hadn’t remembered to wind it last night,”said Jonathan, glancing at me.“I haven’t done that in months, hang it! Give me the time, will you, Jonathan?”said Jack.“Sorry!”Jonathan was smiling genially.“Mine’s run down too. It stopped at twenty-two minutes before five—A. M., I think.”“What luck! And Molly didn’t bring hers.”“You told me not to,”Molly flicked in.“So here we are,”said Jonathan,“entirely without the time of day.”“But plenty of real time all round us,”I said.“Let’s use it, and start.”I avoided Jonathan’s eye.We reached the station with an hour and ten minutes to spare—bought more ginger-cookies[pg 159]and more milk. As we sat eating them in the midst of the preternatural calm that marks a country railroad station outside of train times, Molly remarked brightly,—“Well, I don’t see but we got on just as well without a watch, didn’t we, Jack? Why do we need watches, anyway? Doyousee?”she turned to us.“Jack does everything by his watch—eats and breathes and sleeps by it—”Jack returned, watch in hand—he had been getting railroad time from the telegraph operator.“Want to set yours while you think of it?”he asked Jonathan.“Sorry—thank you—didn’t bring it,”said Jonathan.“By George, man, what’ll you do?”Real consternation sounded in Jack’s tones.“Oh, we’ll get along somehow,”said Jonathan.“You see, we don’t have many engagements, except with the bass, and they never meet theirs, anyhow.”When the train had gone, I said,“Jonathan, why didn’t you tell them it was my whim?”“Oh, I just didn’t,”said Jonathan.[pg 160]As Jonathan had predicted, we did get along somehow—got along rather well, on the whole. There are, of course, some drawbacks to an unwatched life. You never want to start the next meal till you are hungry, and after that it takes one or two or three hours, as the case may be, to go back to camp and get the meal ready, and by that time you are almost hungrier than you like being. But except for this, and the little matter of meeting trains, it is rather pleasant to break away from the habit of watching the watch, and it was with real regret that, on the last night of our camp, we took our watch to the farmhouse to set it.“Run down, did it? Guess you forgot to wind it. Well—we do forget things sometimes, all of us do,”the farmer’s wife said comfortingly as she went to look at the clock.“Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It’s apt to be fast, so I guess you won’t miss any trains. Father he says he’d rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don’t often get more than ten minutes wrong either way.”And to us, after our two weeks of camp,[pg 161]ten minutes’ error in a clock seemed indeed slight.“Jonathan,”I said, as we walked back along the road,“I hate to go back to clock time. I like real time better.”“You couldn’t do so many things in a day,”said Jonathan.“No—maybe not.”“But maybe that wouldn’t matter.”“Maybe it wouldn’t,”I said.

“Jonathan, did you ever live without a clock,—whole days, I mean,—days and days—”

“When I was a boy—most of the time, I suppose. But the family didn’t like it.”

“Of course. But did you like it?”

“Yes, I liked it all. I seem to remember getting pretty hungry sometimes, but it’s all rather good as I look back on it.”

“Let’s do it!”

“Now?”

“No. Society is an enlarged family, and wouldn’t like it. But this summer, when we camp.”

“How do you know we’re going to camp?”

“The things we know best we don’t always know how we know.”

“Well, then,—ifwe camp—”

“Whenwe camp—let’s live without a watch.”

“You’d need one to get there.”

“Take one, and let it run down.”

As it turned out, my“when”was truer than Jonathan’s“if.”We did camp. We did, however, use watches to get there: when we expressed our baggage, when we sent our canoe, when we took the trolley car and the train; and the watch was still going as our laden craft nosed gently against the bank of the river-island that was to be our home for two weeks. It was late afternoon, and the shadows of the steep woods on the western bank had already turned the rocks in midstream from silver to gray, and dimmed the brightness of the swift water, almost to the eastern shore.

“Will there be time to get settled before dark?”I asked, as we stepped out into the shallow water and drew up the canoe to unload.

“Shall I look at my watch to see?”asked Jonathan, with a note of amiable derision in his voice.

“Well, Ishouldrather like to know what time it is. We won’t begin till to-morrow.”

“You mean, we won’t begin to stop watching. All right. It’s just seventeen and a half[pg 140]minutes after five. I’ll give you the seconds if you like.”

“Minutes will do nicely, thank you.”

“Lots of time. You collect firewood while I get the tent ready. Then it’ll need us both to set it up.”

We worked busily, happily. Ah! The joyous elation of the first night in camp! Is there anything like it? With days and days ahead, and not even one counted off the shining number! All the good things of childhood and maturity seem pressed into one mood of flawless, abounding happiness.

By dark the tent was up, the baggage stowed, the canoe secured, the fire glowing in a bed of embers, and we sat beside it, looking out past the glooms of the hemlocks across the moonlit river,—sat and ate city-cooked chicken and sandwiches and drank thermos-bottled tea.

“To-morrow we’ll cook,”I said.“To-night it’s rather nice not to have to. Look at the moonlight on that rock! How black it makes the eddy below!”

“Good bass under there,”said Jonathan.“We’ll get some to-morrow.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, of course, it’s always maybe, with bass. Well—I’m done—and it’s quarter to ten—late! Oh! Excuse me! Maybe you’d rather I hadn’t told you. By the way, do I wind my watch to-night or not?”

“Not.”

“Not it is, then. Sure you wouldn’t rather have it wound, though? We can leave it hanging in the tent. It won’t break loose and bite you.”

“Yes, it would. There would be a something—a taint—”

“Oh,allright!”

* * * * *

We slept with the murmur of the river running through our dreams,—a murmur of many voices: deep voices, high voices, grumbling voices as the stones go grinding and rolling along the ever-changing bottom,—and only half roused when the dawn chorus of the birds filled the air. That dawn chorus was something we should have been loath to miss. Through the first gray of the morning there comes a stir in the woods, an expectant tremor; a bird peeps softly and is still; then[pg 142]another, and another,“softly conferring together.”As the light grows warmer, comes a clearer note from some leader, then a full, complete song; another, and the woods are awake, flinging out their wonderful song-greeting to the morning. There is in it a prodigality of swift-changing beauty like ocean surf: a continuous and intricate interweaving of rhythms, pulses and ebbings of clear tone, beautiful phrases rising antiphonal, showerings of bright notes, moments of subsidence, almost of pause. As the light grows and sharpens, the music reaches a crescendo of exuberance, and at last dies down as real day comes, bringing with it the day’s work. On our island the leader of the chorus was almost always a song sparrow, though once or twice a wood thrush came over from the shore woods and filled the hemlock shadows with the limpid splendors of his song.

Hearing the chorus through our dreams, we slept again, and when I really waked the sun was high, flecking the eastern V of our tent with dazzling patches. I heard Jonathan moving about outside, and the crackling of a new-made fire. I went to the front of the[pg 143]tent and looked out. Yes, there they were, the fire and Jonathan, in a quiet space of shade where the early coolness still hung. Beyond them, half shut out from view by the low-spreading hemlock boughs, was the open river—such gayety of swift water! Such dazzle of midsummer morning! I drew back, eager to be out in it.

“Bacon and eggs, is it?”called Jonathan,“or shall I run down and try for a bass?”

“Don’t!”I called. I knew that if he once got out after bass he was lost to me for the day. And now we had cut loose from even the mild tyranny of his watch. As I thought of this I went over to the many-forked tree, whose close-trimmed branches served our tent as hat-rack, clothes-rack, everything-that-can-hang-or-perch-rack, and opened Jonathan’s watch.

“Well, what time is it?”Jonathan was peering in between the tent-flaps.

“Twenty-two minutes before five.”

“A.M., I judge. Sorry you didn’t let me wind it?”

“Not a bit. I was just curious to see when it stopped, that was all.”

“Well, now you know. Hereafter the official time for the camp is4:38—A.M.orP.M., according to taste. Come along. The bacon’s done, and I’m blest if I want to drop in the eggs.”

Dropping an egg will never, I fear, be one of Jonathan’s most finished performances. He watched me do it with generous admiration.“If you could just get over being scared of them,”I suggested, as the last one plumped into the pan and set up its gentle sizzle.

“No use. Iamscared of the things. I tap and tap, and nothing happens, and then I get mad and tap hard, and they’re all over the place.”

By the time breakfast was over, even the coolness under the hemlocks was beginning to grow warm and aromatic. The birds in the shore woods were quieter, though out at the sunny end of our island, where the hemlocks gave place to low scrub growth, the song sparrow sang gayly now and then.

“Now,”said Jonathan,“what about fishing?”

“Well—let’s fish!”

“One up stream and one down, or keep together?”

“Together,”I decided.“If we go two ways there’s no telling when I’ll ever see you again.”

“Yes, there is: when I’m hungry.”

“No; some time after you’ve noticed you’re hungry.”

“Now, if we had watches it would be so much simpler: we could meet here at, say, one o’clock.”

“Simple, indeed! When did you ever look at a watch when you were fishing, unless I made you? No, my way is simple, but we stay together.”

Of course, in river fishing,“together”means simply not absolutely out of sight of each other. Jonathan may be up to his arm-pits in mid-current, or marooned on a rock above a swirling eddy, while I am in a similar situation beyond calling distance, but so long as a bend in the river does not cut us off, we are“together,”and very companionable togetherness it is, too. When I see Jonathan wildly waving to attract my attention, I know he has either just caught a big bass or else just[pg 146]lost one, and this gives me something to smile over as I wonder which it is. After a time, if I am catching shiners and no bass, and Jonathan doesn’t seem to be moving, I infer that his luck is better than mine, and drift along toward him. Or it may be the other way around, and he comes to look me up. Bass are the most uncertain of fish, and no one can predict when they will elect to bite, or where. Sometimes they are in the still water, deep or shallow according to their caprice; sometimes they hang on the edges of the rapids; sometimes they are in the dark, smooth eddies below the great boulders; sometimes in the clear depths around the rocks near shore. Each day afresh,—indeed, each morning and each afternoon,—the fisherman must try, and try, and try, until he discovers what their choice has been for that special time. Yet no fisherman who has once drawn out a good bass from a certain bit of water can help feeling, next time, that there is another waiting for him there. That is one of the reasons why he is always hopeful, and so always happy. The fish he has caught, at this well-remembered spot and that, rise[pg 147]up out of the past and flick their tails at him; and all the stretches between—stretches of water that have never for him held anything but shiners, stretches of time diversified by not even a nibble—sink into pleasant insignificance.

We banked our fire, stowed everything in the tent that a thunderstorm would hurt, and splashed out into the river. There it lay in all its bright, swift beauty, and we stood a moment, looking, feeling the push of the water about our knees and the warmth of the sun on our shoulders.

“It makes a difference, sleeping out in it all,”I said.“You feel as if it belonged to you so much more. I quite own the river this morning, don’t you?”

“Quite. But not the bass in it. Bet you don’t catch one!”

“Bet I beat you!”

“Bass, mind you. Sunfish don’t count. You’re always catching sunfish.”

“They count in the pan. But I’ll beat you on bass. I know some places—”

“Who doesn’t? All right, go ahead!”

We were off; Jonathan, as usual, wading[pg 148]up to his chest or perched on a bit of boulder above some dark, slick rapid; I preferring water not more than waist-deep, and not too far from shore to miss the responses of the wood-folk to my passing: soft flurries of wings; shy, half-suppressed peepings; quick warning notes; light footfalls, hopping or running or galloping; the snapping of twigs and the crushing of leaves. Some sounds tell me who the creature is,—the warning of the blue jay, the whirr of the big ruffed grouse, the thud of the bounding rabbit,—but many others leave me guessing, which is almost better. When a very big stick snaps, I always feel sure a deer is stealing away, though Jonathan assures me that a chewink can break twigs and“kick up a row generally,”so that you’d swear it was nothing smaller than a wild bull.

So we fished that day. When I caught a bass, which was seldom, I whooped and waved it at Jonathan, and when I caught a shiner, which was rather often, I waved it too, just to keep his mind occupied. Hours passed, and we met at a bend in the river where the deep water glides close to shore.

“Hungry?”I asked.

“Now you speak of it, yes.”

“Shall we go back?”

“How can I tell? Now, if we only had that watch we’d know whether we ought to be hungry or not.”

“What does that matter, if wearehungry? Besides, if you’d had a watch, you’d have had to carry it in your teeth. You know perfectly well you wouldn’t have brought it, anyway.”

“Well—then, at least when we got back, we should have known whether we ought to have been hungry or not. Now we shall never know.”

“Never! Oh! Look there, Jonathan! We’re going to catch it!”A sense of growing shadow in the air had made me look up, and there, back of the steep-rising woods, hung a blue-black cloud, with ragged edges crawling out into the brightness of the sky.

“Sure enough! The bass’ll bite now, if it really comes. Wait till the first drops, and see what you see.”

We had not long to wait. There came that sudden expectancy in the air and the trees,[pg 150]the strange pallor in the light, the chill sweep of wind gusts with warm pauses between. Then a few big drops splashed on the dusty, sun-baked stones about us.

“Now! Wade right out there, to the edge of that ledge—don’t slip over, it’s deep. I’ll go down a little way.”

I waded out carefully, and cast, in the smooth, dark water already beginning to be rain-pocked. It was surprisingly shivery, that storm wind! I glanced toward shore to look for shelter—I remembered an overhanging ledge of rock—then my line went taut! I forgot about shelter, forgot about being chilly; I knew it was a good bass.

I got him in—too big to go through the hole in my creel—cast for another—and another—and yet another. The rain began to fall in sheets, and the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing? The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges, all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks, but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous[pg 151]assaults of the fierce rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly, but cold—cold. And under that water the bass were biting, my rod was bending double, my reel softly screaming as I gave line, and one after another I drew the fish alongside and dipped them out with my landing net.

Then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped biting. I waited long minutes; nothing happened, and all at once I realized that I was very wet and very cold. Wading ashore, I saw Jonathan shivering along up the narrow beach toward me, his shoulders drawn in to half their natural spread, neck tucked in between his collar-bones, knees slightly bent.

“You can’t be cold?”I questioned as soon as he was near enough to hear me through the slash of the rain and wind.

“No, of course not; are you?”

We didn’t discuss it, but ran up the bank to the rock-ledge and crouched under it, our teeth literally chattering.

“Did you ever see such fishing?”I managed to stammer.

“Great! But oh,whydidn’t I bring the whiskey bottle?”

“Let’s run for camp! We can’t be wetter.”

We crawled out into the rain again, and first sprinted and then dog-trotted along the river edge. No bird notes now in the woods beside us, no whirring of wings; only the rain sounds: soft swishings and drippings and gusty showerings, very different from the flat, flicking sounds when rain first starts in dry woods.

Camp looked a little cheerless, but a blazing fire, started with dry stuff we had stowed inside the tent, changed things, and dry clothes changed them still more, and we sat within the tent flaps and ate ginger-snaps in great contentment of spirit while we waited for the rain to stop.

It did stop, and very soon the fish were sizzling in the pan.

“Of course, if we had a watch, now—”suggested Jonathan, as he carefully tucked under the pan little sticks of just the right length.

“What should we know more than we do now—that we’re hungry?”I asked.

“Well, for one thing, we’d know what time it is,”replied Jonathan tranquilly.

“And for another we’d know whether it’s dinner or supper I’m cooking,”I supplemented.“But does it matter? You won’t get anything different, no matter which it is—just fish is what you’ll get. And pretty soon the sun will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a sundial for yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t really care which it is.”

“Do you suppose I don’t know that! And meanwhile, you might cut the bread and make some toast,—there are some good embers on your side under the pan,—and I’ll get the butter, and there we’ll be.”

By the time the toast was made and the fish curling brownly away from the pan, the sun had indeed come out, at first pale and watery, then clear, and still high enough in the heavens to set the soaked earth steaming fragrantly with its heat. Odors of hemlock and wet earth mingled with odors of toast and fried fish.

“Um-m! Smell it all!”I said.“What a lot we should miss if we didn’t eat in the kitchen!”

“Or cook in the dining-room—which?”

“And hear that song sparrow! Doesn’t it sound as if the rain had washed his song a little cleaner and clearer?”

There followed the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain leaves behind it—a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay—the other side was steep and pathless woods—and walked down to the nearest farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the light of a low-hung moon, and across the dim water to our own island and the embers of our fire.

“Oh, Jonathan! We never asked them what time it was!”I said.“I meant to—for your sake—I thought you’d sleep better if you knew.”

“Too bad! Probably I should have. I thought of it, of course, but was afraid that if I asked it would spoil your day.”

“It would take something pretty bad to spoil a day like this one,”I said.

* * * * *

Two days later the weather turned still and warm, the bass refused to bite, and even the sunfish lay, shy or wary or indifferent, in their shallow, sunny pools, so we resolved to walk down the river to the post-office, four miles away, for possible mail. As we sat on the steps of the little store, looking it over,—“Here’s news,”said Jonathan;“Jack and Molly say they’ll run up if we want them, day after to-morrow—up on the morning train, and back on the evening.”

“Good! Tell them to come along.”

“No—it’s to-morrow—letter’s been here since yesterday. I’ll telegraph.”

As we tramped home we planned the day.“We’ll meet them and all walk up together,”said Jonathan.

“We’d better catch some bass and leave them all hooked in a pool, ready for them to pull out,”I added;“otherwise they may not catch any. And maybe you’d better meet them and I’ll have dinner ready when you get back.”

“Nonsense! You come, and we’ll all get dinner when we get back. That’s what they’re coming for—to see the whole thing.”

“But if it’s late—they’ve got to get back for that down train.”

“Well—time enough.”

“Oh, Jonathan! What about catching that train?”

“They’ll have watches—watches that go.”

“But what about our meeting them? The train arrives at10:15, they said. What does10:15look like in the sky, I wonder!”

“Or rather, what does 8.45 look like? It takes an hour and a half to get there, counting crossing the river.”

“Yes—dear me! Well, Jonathan, we’ll just have to get up early and go, and then wait.”

“Or else take our watch to the farmhouse and set it.”

“Jonathan, I will not! I’d rather start at daylight.”

Which was very nearly what we did. The morning opened with a sun obscured, and I felt sure it was stealing a march on us and[pg 157]would suddenly burst out upon us from a noonday sky. We breakfasted hastily, ferried across to shore, and set a swinging pace down the road. As we walked, the sun burned through the mist, and our shadows came out, dim, long things, striding with the exaggerated gait that shadows have, over the grassy banks to our right.

“I think,”said Jonathan,“it may be as late as seven o’clock, but perhaps it’s only six.”

When we reached the station, the official clock registered 8.30. We strolled over to the store-and-post-office and got more letters—one from Molly and Jack saying thank you they’d come.“They don’t entirely understand our mail system up here,”said Jonathan. We got some ginger-cookies and some milk and had a second breakfast, and finally wandered back to the station to wait for the train. It came, bearing the expected two, and much friendliness.“Get our letter? There, Jack! He said you wouldn’t, but I said you would. I made him send it … four miles to walk? What fun!”

It was fun, indeed, and all went well until[pg 158]after dinner, when Jack—saying,“Well, maybe we’d better be starting back for that train”—drew out his watch. He opened it, muttered something, put it to his ear, then began to wind it rapidly. He wound and wound. We all laughed.

“Looks as if you hadn’t remembered to wind it last night,”said Jonathan, glancing at me.

“I haven’t done that in months, hang it! Give me the time, will you, Jonathan?”said Jack.

“Sorry!”Jonathan was smiling genially.“Mine’s run down too. It stopped at twenty-two minutes before five—A. M., I think.”

“What luck! And Molly didn’t bring hers.”

“You told me not to,”Molly flicked in.

“So here we are,”said Jonathan,“entirely without the time of day.”

“But plenty of real time all round us,”I said.“Let’s use it, and start.”I avoided Jonathan’s eye.

We reached the station with an hour and ten minutes to spare—bought more ginger-cookies[pg 159]and more milk. As we sat eating them in the midst of the preternatural calm that marks a country railroad station outside of train times, Molly remarked brightly,—

“Well, I don’t see but we got on just as well without a watch, didn’t we, Jack? Why do we need watches, anyway? Doyousee?”she turned to us.“Jack does everything by his watch—eats and breathes and sleeps by it—”

Jack returned, watch in hand—he had been getting railroad time from the telegraph operator.“Want to set yours while you think of it?”he asked Jonathan.

“Sorry—thank you—didn’t bring it,”said Jonathan.

“By George, man, what’ll you do?”Real consternation sounded in Jack’s tones.

“Oh, we’ll get along somehow,”said Jonathan.“You see, we don’t have many engagements, except with the bass, and they never meet theirs, anyhow.”

When the train had gone, I said,“Jonathan, why didn’t you tell them it was my whim?”

“Oh, I just didn’t,”said Jonathan.

As Jonathan had predicted, we did get along somehow—got along rather well, on the whole. There are, of course, some drawbacks to an unwatched life. You never want to start the next meal till you are hungry, and after that it takes one or two or three hours, as the case may be, to go back to camp and get the meal ready, and by that time you are almost hungrier than you like being. But except for this, and the little matter of meeting trains, it is rather pleasant to break away from the habit of watching the watch, and it was with real regret that, on the last night of our camp, we took our watch to the farmhouse to set it.

“Run down, did it? Guess you forgot to wind it. Well—we do forget things sometimes, all of us do,”the farmer’s wife said comfortingly as she went to look at the clock.“Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It’s apt to be fast, so I guess you won’t miss any trains. Father he says he’d rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don’t often get more than ten minutes wrong either way.”

And to us, after our two weeks of camp,[pg 161]ten minutes’ error in a clock seemed indeed slight.

“Jonathan,”I said, as we walked back along the road,“I hate to go back to clock time. I like real time better.”

“You couldn’t do so many things in a day,”said Jonathan.

“No—maybe not.”

“But maybe that wouldn’t matter.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t,”I said.

[pg 162]VIIIThe Ways of Griselda“Of course you don’t know what her name is,”I said, as we stood examining the sleek little black mare Jonathan had just brought up from the city.“No. Forgot to ask. Don’t believe they’d have known anyway—one of a hundred or so.”“Well, we’ll name her again. Dear me—she’s rather plain! Probably she’s useful.”“Hope so,”said Jonathan. Then, stepping back a little, in a slightly grieved tone,“But I don’t call her plain. Wait till she’s groomed up—”“It’s that droop of her neck—sort of patient—and the way she drops one of her hips—if they are hips.”“But we want a horse to be patient.”“Yes. I don’t know that I care about having herlookso terribly much so as this. I think I’ll call her Griselda.”[pg 163]“Now, why Griselda?”“Why, don’t you know? She was that patient creature, with the horrid husband who had to keep trying to see just how patient she was. It’s a hateful story—enough to turn any one who brooded on it into a militant suffragette.”“But you can’t call a horse Griselda—not for common stable use, you know.”“Call her‘Griz’for short. It does very well.”Jonathan jeered a little, but in the family the name held. Our man Hiram said nothing, but I think in private he called her“Fan”or“Beauty”or“Lady,”or some such regulation stable name.Called by any name, she pleased us, and shewaspatient. She trotted peacefully up hill and down, she did her best at ploughing and haymaking and all the odd jobs that the farm supplied. She stood when we left her, with that same demure, almost overdone droop of the neck that I had first noticed. When I met Jonathan at the station, she stood with her nose against a snorting train, looking as if nothing could rouse her.[pg 164]“Good little horse you got there,”remarked the station agent.“Where’d you find her?”“Oh, I picked her out of a bunch down in the city,”said Jonathan casually.“I didn’t think I knew much about horses, but I guess I was in luck this time.”“Guess you know more about horses than you’re sayin’.”And Jonathan, thus pressed, admitted with suitable reluctance that hehadnow and then been able to detect a good horse by his own observation.On the way home he openly congratulated himself on his find.“I really wasn’t sure I knew how to pick out a horse,”he remarked, in a glow of retrospective modesty,“but I certainly got a treasure this time.”Griz had been with us about two weeks, and all went well. Then another horse was needed for farm work, and one was sent up—one Kit by name—a big, pleasant, rather stupid brown mare.“They do say two mares don’t git on so well together as a mare ’n a horse,”remarked Hiram.“But these are both such quiet creatures,”[pg 165]I protested, to which Hiram made no answer. Hiram seldom made an answer unless fairly cornered into it.For two or three days after the new arrival nothing happened, so far as we knew, except that Griz always laid her ears back, and looked queer about her under lip, whenever Kit was led in or out of the stall next her, while Kit always huddled up close to her manger whenever Griz was led past her heels. Once or twice Griz slipped her halter in the stall, and Hiram said there was a place on Kit that looked as if she had been kicked, but when we scrutinized Griz, neck a-droop and eyes a-blink, we found it hard to think ill of her. Besides, Jonathan was now fairly committed to the opinion that he had“got a treasure this time.”“Kit may have hurt herself lying down,”he suggested, and again Hiram made no answer.Then one night, sometime during the very small, very dark, and very sleepy hours, we were awakened by awful sounds.“What is it? Whatisit?”I gasped.Crash! Bang! Boom! The trampling of hoofs!—heavy, hollow pounding!—the[pg 166]tearing and splintering of wood!—all coming from the barn, though loud enough, indeed, to have come from the next room.Jonathan was up in an instant muttering,“Where are my rubber boots?—and my coat?”“Jonathan!whata combination!”But he was gone, and I heard the snap of the lantern and the slam of the back door almost before the rocking-chair in the sitting-room that he had hit—and talked to—had stopped rocking. Then I heard him calling outside Hiram’s window and then he ran past our window, out to the barn. I wished he had waited for Hiram, but I had an undercurrent of pleasure in hearing him run. Jonathan’s theory is that there is never any hurry, and now and then I like to have this notion jolted up a little.Meanwhile the awful sounds had ceased. There was the rumble of the stable door, a pause, and Jonathan’s voice in conversational tones. Next came the flashing of Hiram’s lantern, and thetromp, tromp, tromp, in much quicker tempo than usual, of Hiram’s heavy boots. Hiram’s theory was a[pg 167]good deal like Jonathan’s, so this also gave me pleasure. Finally, there came the flash of another lantern, and I recognized the quick, short step of Mrs. Hiram. I smiled to myself, picturing the meeting between her and Jonathan, for I knew just how Jonathan was costumed. In two minutes I heard her steps repassing, and in five minutes Jonathan returned. He was chuckling quietly.“I guess Griz got all she needed—didn’t know either of ’em had so much spunk in ’em.”“What happened?”“Don’t know, exactly, but when I opened that door, there was Griz, just inside, no halter on, head down, meek as Moses, as far away from Kit’s heels as she could get—she’s got the mark of them on her leg and her flank.”“Is she hurt?—or Kit?”“No, not so far as we can see, not to amount to anything—except maybe Griz’s feelings.”“And what about Mrs. Hiram’s feelings?”Jonathan laughed aloud.“I was inside with Kit, and she called out to know if she could help.”“And what did you say?”[pg 168]“I said,‘Not on your life.’”“So that was why she came back. Did you really say,‘Not on your life,’ or did you only imply it in your tone, while you actually said, ‘No, thank you very much’?”“I really said it. At least, I don’t remember conversations the way you do, but I didn’t feel a bit like thanking anybody, and I don’t believe I did.”“Well, I wish I’d heard you. One misses a good deal—”“You can see the stable to-morrow. That’ll keep. They must have had a time of it! The walls are marked and splintered as high as I can reach. And I don’t believe Kit’ll cringe when Griz passes her any more.”“Of course you remember Hiramsaidtwo mares didn’t usually get on very well, and even when they’re chosen by a good judge of horses—”* * * * *After that the two did get along peaceably enough, and Jonathan assured me that all horses had these little affairs. One day we drove over to the main street of the village on an errand.[pg 169]“Will she stand?”I questioned.“Better hitch her, perhaps,”said Jonathan, getting out the rope. He snapped it into her bit-ring, then threw the other end around a post and started to make a half-hitch. But as he drew up the rope it was suddenly jerked out of his hand. He looked up and saw Griselda’s patient head waving high above him on the end of an erect and rebellious neck, the hitch-rope waggling in loops and spirals in the air, and the whole outfit backing away from him with speed and decision. He was so astonished that he did nothing, and in a moment Griz had stopped backing and stood still, her head sagging gently, the rope dangling.“Well—I’ll—be—”I didn’t try to remember just what Jonathan said he would be, because it doesn’t really matter. We both stared at Griz as if we had never seen her before. Griz looked at nothing in particular, she blinked long lashes over drowsy, dark eyes, and sagged one hip.“She’s trying to make believe she didn’t do it—but she did,”I said.“Something must have startled her,”said[pg 170]Jonathan, peering up and down the deserted street. Two roosters were crowing antiphonally in near-by yards, and a dog was barking somewhere far off.“What?”I said.“You never can tell, with a horse.”“No, apparently not,”I said, smiling to myself; and I added hastily, as I saw Jonathan go forward to her head,“Don’ttry it again, please! I’ll stay by her while you go in.Please!”For I had detected on Jonathan’s face a look that I very well knew. It was the same expression he had worn that Sunday he led the calf to pasture. He made no answer, but stood examining the hitch-rope.“No use,”he said, quietly releasing it and tossing its coil into the carriage,“It’s too rotten. If it snapped, she’d be ruined.”I breathed freer. I privately hoped that all the hitch-ropes at the farm were rotten.“Griz stands perfectly well without hitching,”I said as we drove home,“Why do you force an issue?”“I didn’t. She did. She’s beaten me. If I don’t hitch her now, she’ll know she’s master.”[pg 171]“Oh, dear!”I sighed.“Let herbemaster! Where’s the harm? It’s just your vanity.”“Perhaps so,”said Jonathan.When he agrees with me like that I know it’s hopeless.The next night he wheeled in at the big gate bearing about his shoulders a coil of heavy rope.“It looks like a ship’s cable,”I said.“Yes,”he responded, leaning his bicycle against his side, and swinging the coil over his head.“I want it for mooring purposes. Think it’ll moor Griz?”“Jonathan!”I exclaimed,“you won’t!”“Watch me,”said Jonathan, and he proceeded to explain to me the working of the tackle.One end had a ring in it, and as nearly as I remember, the plan was to put the rope around her body, under what would be her arm-pits if she had arm-pits,—horses’ joints are never called what one would expect, of course,—run the end through the ring, then forward between her legs and through the bit-ring.[pg 172]“Then, when she sets back, it cuts her in two,”he concluded cheerfully.“But you don’twanther in two,”I protested.“She won’t set back,”he responded;“at least, not more than once. To-morrow’s Sunday; I’ll have to hitch her at church.”I hoped it would rain, so we needn’t go, but we were having a drought and the morning dawned cloudless. We reached the church just on the last stroke of the bell. The women were all within; the men and boys lounging in the vestibule were turning reluctant feet to follow them.“You go right in,”said Jonathan,“I’ll be in soon.”I turned to protest, but he was already driving round to the side, and a hush had fallen over the congregation within that made it embarrassing to call. Besides, one of the deacons stood holding open the door for me.I slipped into a pew near the back, with the apologetic feeling one often has in an old country church—a feeling that one is making the ghosts move along a little. They did move, of course,—probably ghosts are always[pg 173]polite when one really meets them,—and I sat down. Indeed, I was thinking very little of ghosts that day, or of the minister either. My ears were cocked to catch and interpret all the noises that came in through the open windows on my left. My eyes wandered in that direction, too, though the clear panes revealed nothing more exciting than flickering maple leaves and a sky filmed over by veils of cloud.The moralists tell us that what we get out of any experience depends upon what we bring to it. What I brought to it that morning was a mind agog, attuned to receive these expected outside sounds. To all such sounds the service within was merely a background—a background which didn’t know its place, since it kept pushing itself more or less importunately into the foreground. I sat there, of course, with perfect propriety of demeanor, but my reactions were something like this:—Hymn 912… seven stanzas! horrors! oh!omit the 3d, 5th, and 6th—well, I should hope so!… I can’t hear a thing while this is going on!… He hasn’t come in yet![pg 174]Scripture reading for to-day—why can’t he give us the passage and let us read it for ourselves?—well, his voice is rather high and uneven, I think I could make out Jonathan’s through the loopholes in it.… There! What was that, I wonder! Sounded like shouting,—oh, why can’t he talk softly!Let us unite in prayer.Ah! now we’ll have a long, quiet time, anyway!… if only he wouldn’t pray quite so loud! Why pray aloud at all, anyway? I like the Quaker way best: a good long strip of silence, where your thoughts can wash around in any fashion that—There! No—yes—no—it’s just people going by on the road.… Maybe he’s in the back of the church now, waiting for the close of the prayer. Seems as if I had to look.… Well, he isn’t.…For thy name’s sake, amen.And then the collection, with an organ voluntary the while—now why an organ voluntary? Why not leave people to their thoughts some of the time?And at last, the sermon:—The text to which I wish to call your attention this morning—my attention, forsooth! My attention was otherwise occupied. Ah! A puff of[pg 175]warm, sweet air from behind me, and the soft, padding noise of the swinging doors, apprised me of an incomer. A cautious tread in the aisle—I moved along a little to make room.In a city church probably I should have thrown propriety to the winds and had the gist of the story out of him at once, but in a country church there are always such listening spaces,—the very pew-backs and cushions seem attentive, the hymnals creak in their racks, and the little stools cry out nervously when one barely touches them. It was too much for me. I was coerced into an outer semblance of decorum. However, I snatched a hasty glance at Jonathan’s face. It was quite red and hot-looking, but calm, very calm, and I judged it to be the calm, not of defeat nor yet of settled militancy, but of triumph. I even thought I detected the flicker of a grin,—the mere atmospheric suggestion of a grin,—as if he felt the urgent if furtive appeal in my glance. At any rate, Jonathan was all right, that was clear. And as to Griz—whether she was still one mare or two half-mares—it didn’t so much matter.[pg 176]And now for the sermon! I gathered myself to attend.As we stood up for the last hymn, I whispered,“How did it go?”“All right. She’s hitched,”was the answer.After church there was the usual stir of sociability, and when I emerged into the glare of the church steps, I saw Jonathan driving slowly around from the rear. Griz walked meekly, her head sagged, her eyes blinked.“Good quiet little horse you’ve got there,”said a deacon over my shoulder;“don’t get restless standing, the way some horses do.”“Yes, she’s very quiet,”I said.I got in, and at last, as we drove off, the flood-gates of my impatience broke:—“Well?”I said,—“well?”“Well—”said Jonathan.“Well? Tellme about it!”“I’ve told you. I hitched her.”“How did you hitch her?”“Just the way I said I would.”“Didn’t she mind?”“Don’t know.”“Did she make a fuss?”“Not much.”[pg 177]“What do you mean by much?”“Oh, she set back a little.”“Do any harm?”“No.”“Hurt herself?”“Guess not.”“Jonathan, you drive me distracted—you have no more sense for a story—”“But there was nothing in particular—”“Now, Jonathan, if there was nothing in particular,whydidn’t you get into church till the sermon was begun, and why were you so red and hot?”Jonathan smiled indulgently.“Why, of course, she didn’t care about being hitched. I thought you knew that. But it was perfectly easy.”And that was about all I could extract by the most artful questions. I took my revenge by telling Jonathan the deacon’s compliment to Griz.“He said she didn’t get restless standing, the way so many horses did. I thought of mentioning that you were a rather good judge of horses, in an amateur way, but then I thought it might seem like boasting, so I didn’t.”[pg 178]After that, of course, I didn’t really deserve to hear the whole story, but the next night I happened to be in the hammock while Jonathan was talking to a neighbor at the front gate, and he was relating the incident with detail enough to have satisfied the most hungry gossip. Only thus did I learn that Bill Howard, who had wound the rope twice round the post to give himself a little leeway, was drawn right up to the post when she set back; that they had been afraid the headstall would tear off; that they had been rather nervous about the post, and other such little points, which I had not been clever enough to elicit by my questions.Now, why? Probably a man likes to tell a story when he likes to tell it. I find myself wondering how much Odysseus told Penelope about his adventures when she got him to herself for a good talk. Is it significant that his really long story was told to the King of the Phæacians?As to Griz:—it would perhaps not be worth while to recount her subsequent history. It was a curious one, consisting of long stretches of continuous and ostentatious[pg 179]meekness, broken by sudden flare-ups which, after their occurrence, always seemed incredible. She never again“set back”when Jonathan was the one to hitch her, but this was a concession made to him personally, and had no effect on her general habits. We talked of changing her name, but could never manage it. We thought of selling her, but she was too valuable—most of the time. And when we finally parted from her our relief was deeply tinged with regret.I have sometimes wondered whether such flare-ups were not the natural and necessary means of recuperation from such depths of meekness. I have even wondered whether the original Griselda may not have—but this is not a dissertation on early Italian poetry, nor on the nature of women.

“Of course you don’t know what her name is,”I said, as we stood examining the sleek little black mare Jonathan had just brought up from the city.

“No. Forgot to ask. Don’t believe they’d have known anyway—one of a hundred or so.”

“Well, we’ll name her again. Dear me—she’s rather plain! Probably she’s useful.”

“Hope so,”said Jonathan. Then, stepping back a little, in a slightly grieved tone,“But I don’t call her plain. Wait till she’s groomed up—”

“It’s that droop of her neck—sort of patient—and the way she drops one of her hips—if they are hips.”

“But we want a horse to be patient.”

“Yes. I don’t know that I care about having herlookso terribly much so as this. I think I’ll call her Griselda.”

“Now, why Griselda?”

“Why, don’t you know? She was that patient creature, with the horrid husband who had to keep trying to see just how patient she was. It’s a hateful story—enough to turn any one who brooded on it into a militant suffragette.”

“But you can’t call a horse Griselda—not for common stable use, you know.”

“Call her‘Griz’for short. It does very well.”

Jonathan jeered a little, but in the family the name held. Our man Hiram said nothing, but I think in private he called her“Fan”or“Beauty”or“Lady,”or some such regulation stable name.

Called by any name, she pleased us, and shewaspatient. She trotted peacefully up hill and down, she did her best at ploughing and haymaking and all the odd jobs that the farm supplied. She stood when we left her, with that same demure, almost overdone droop of the neck that I had first noticed. When I met Jonathan at the station, she stood with her nose against a snorting train, looking as if nothing could rouse her.

“Good little horse you got there,”remarked the station agent.“Where’d you find her?”

“Oh, I picked her out of a bunch down in the city,”said Jonathan casually.“I didn’t think I knew much about horses, but I guess I was in luck this time.”

“Guess you know more about horses than you’re sayin’.”And Jonathan, thus pressed, admitted with suitable reluctance that hehadnow and then been able to detect a good horse by his own observation.

On the way home he openly congratulated himself on his find.“I really wasn’t sure I knew how to pick out a horse,”he remarked, in a glow of retrospective modesty,“but I certainly got a treasure this time.”

Griz had been with us about two weeks, and all went well. Then another horse was needed for farm work, and one was sent up—one Kit by name—a big, pleasant, rather stupid brown mare.

“They do say two mares don’t git on so well together as a mare ’n a horse,”remarked Hiram.

“But these are both such quiet creatures,”[pg 165]I protested, to which Hiram made no answer. Hiram seldom made an answer unless fairly cornered into it.

For two or three days after the new arrival nothing happened, so far as we knew, except that Griz always laid her ears back, and looked queer about her under lip, whenever Kit was led in or out of the stall next her, while Kit always huddled up close to her manger whenever Griz was led past her heels. Once or twice Griz slipped her halter in the stall, and Hiram said there was a place on Kit that looked as if she had been kicked, but when we scrutinized Griz, neck a-droop and eyes a-blink, we found it hard to think ill of her. Besides, Jonathan was now fairly committed to the opinion that he had“got a treasure this time.”“Kit may have hurt herself lying down,”he suggested, and again Hiram made no answer.

Then one night, sometime during the very small, very dark, and very sleepy hours, we were awakened by awful sounds.“What is it? Whatisit?”I gasped.

Crash! Bang! Boom! The trampling of hoofs!—heavy, hollow pounding!—the[pg 166]tearing and splintering of wood!—all coming from the barn, though loud enough, indeed, to have come from the next room.

Jonathan was up in an instant muttering,“Where are my rubber boots?—and my coat?”

“Jonathan!whata combination!”

But he was gone, and I heard the snap of the lantern and the slam of the back door almost before the rocking-chair in the sitting-room that he had hit—and talked to—had stopped rocking. Then I heard him calling outside Hiram’s window and then he ran past our window, out to the barn. I wished he had waited for Hiram, but I had an undercurrent of pleasure in hearing him run. Jonathan’s theory is that there is never any hurry, and now and then I like to have this notion jolted up a little.

Meanwhile the awful sounds had ceased. There was the rumble of the stable door, a pause, and Jonathan’s voice in conversational tones. Next came the flashing of Hiram’s lantern, and thetromp, tromp, tromp, in much quicker tempo than usual, of Hiram’s heavy boots. Hiram’s theory was a[pg 167]good deal like Jonathan’s, so this also gave me pleasure. Finally, there came the flash of another lantern, and I recognized the quick, short step of Mrs. Hiram. I smiled to myself, picturing the meeting between her and Jonathan, for I knew just how Jonathan was costumed. In two minutes I heard her steps repassing, and in five minutes Jonathan returned. He was chuckling quietly.

“I guess Griz got all she needed—didn’t know either of ’em had so much spunk in ’em.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know, exactly, but when I opened that door, there was Griz, just inside, no halter on, head down, meek as Moses, as far away from Kit’s heels as she could get—she’s got the mark of them on her leg and her flank.”

“Is she hurt?—or Kit?”

“No, not so far as we can see, not to amount to anything—except maybe Griz’s feelings.”

“And what about Mrs. Hiram’s feelings?”

Jonathan laughed aloud.“I was inside with Kit, and she called out to know if she could help.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said,‘Not on your life.’”

“So that was why she came back. Did you really say,‘Not on your life,’ or did you only imply it in your tone, while you actually said, ‘No, thank you very much’?”

“I really said it. At least, I don’t remember conversations the way you do, but I didn’t feel a bit like thanking anybody, and I don’t believe I did.”

“Well, I wish I’d heard you. One misses a good deal—”

“You can see the stable to-morrow. That’ll keep. They must have had a time of it! The walls are marked and splintered as high as I can reach. And I don’t believe Kit’ll cringe when Griz passes her any more.”

“Of course you remember Hiramsaidtwo mares didn’t usually get on very well, and even when they’re chosen by a good judge of horses—”

* * * * *

After that the two did get along peaceably enough, and Jonathan assured me that all horses had these little affairs. One day we drove over to the main street of the village on an errand.

“Will she stand?”I questioned.

“Better hitch her, perhaps,”said Jonathan, getting out the rope. He snapped it into her bit-ring, then threw the other end around a post and started to make a half-hitch. But as he drew up the rope it was suddenly jerked out of his hand. He looked up and saw Griselda’s patient head waving high above him on the end of an erect and rebellious neck, the hitch-rope waggling in loops and spirals in the air, and the whole outfit backing away from him with speed and decision. He was so astonished that he did nothing, and in a moment Griz had stopped backing and stood still, her head sagging gently, the rope dangling.

“Well—I’ll—be—”I didn’t try to remember just what Jonathan said he would be, because it doesn’t really matter. We both stared at Griz as if we had never seen her before. Griz looked at nothing in particular, she blinked long lashes over drowsy, dark eyes, and sagged one hip.

“She’s trying to make believe she didn’t do it—but she did,”I said.

“Something must have startled her,”said[pg 170]Jonathan, peering up and down the deserted street. Two roosters were crowing antiphonally in near-by yards, and a dog was barking somewhere far off.

“What?”I said.

“You never can tell, with a horse.”

“No, apparently not,”I said, smiling to myself; and I added hastily, as I saw Jonathan go forward to her head,“Don’ttry it again, please! I’ll stay by her while you go in.Please!”For I had detected on Jonathan’s face a look that I very well knew. It was the same expression he had worn that Sunday he led the calf to pasture. He made no answer, but stood examining the hitch-rope.

“No use,”he said, quietly releasing it and tossing its coil into the carriage,“It’s too rotten. If it snapped, she’d be ruined.”

I breathed freer. I privately hoped that all the hitch-ropes at the farm were rotten.

“Griz stands perfectly well without hitching,”I said as we drove home,“Why do you force an issue?”

“I didn’t. She did. She’s beaten me. If I don’t hitch her now, she’ll know she’s master.”

“Oh, dear!”I sighed.“Let herbemaster! Where’s the harm? It’s just your vanity.”

“Perhaps so,”said Jonathan.

When he agrees with me like that I know it’s hopeless.

The next night he wheeled in at the big gate bearing about his shoulders a coil of heavy rope.

“It looks like a ship’s cable,”I said.

“Yes,”he responded, leaning his bicycle against his side, and swinging the coil over his head.“I want it for mooring purposes. Think it’ll moor Griz?”

“Jonathan!”I exclaimed,“you won’t!”

“Watch me,”said Jonathan, and he proceeded to explain to me the working of the tackle.

One end had a ring in it, and as nearly as I remember, the plan was to put the rope around her body, under what would be her arm-pits if she had arm-pits,—horses’ joints are never called what one would expect, of course,—run the end through the ring, then forward between her legs and through the bit-ring.

“Then, when she sets back, it cuts her in two,”he concluded cheerfully.

“But you don’twanther in two,”I protested.

“She won’t set back,”he responded;“at least, not more than once. To-morrow’s Sunday; I’ll have to hitch her at church.”

I hoped it would rain, so we needn’t go, but we were having a drought and the morning dawned cloudless. We reached the church just on the last stroke of the bell. The women were all within; the men and boys lounging in the vestibule were turning reluctant feet to follow them.

“You go right in,”said Jonathan,“I’ll be in soon.”

I turned to protest, but he was already driving round to the side, and a hush had fallen over the congregation within that made it embarrassing to call. Besides, one of the deacons stood holding open the door for me.

I slipped into a pew near the back, with the apologetic feeling one often has in an old country church—a feeling that one is making the ghosts move along a little. They did move, of course,—probably ghosts are always[pg 173]polite when one really meets them,—and I sat down. Indeed, I was thinking very little of ghosts that day, or of the minister either. My ears were cocked to catch and interpret all the noises that came in through the open windows on my left. My eyes wandered in that direction, too, though the clear panes revealed nothing more exciting than flickering maple leaves and a sky filmed over by veils of cloud.

The moralists tell us that what we get out of any experience depends upon what we bring to it. What I brought to it that morning was a mind agog, attuned to receive these expected outside sounds. To all such sounds the service within was merely a background—a background which didn’t know its place, since it kept pushing itself more or less importunately into the foreground. I sat there, of course, with perfect propriety of demeanor, but my reactions were something like this:—

Hymn 912… seven stanzas! horrors! oh!omit the 3d, 5th, and 6th—well, I should hope so!… I can’t hear a thing while this is going on!… He hasn’t come in yet![pg 174]Scripture reading for to-day—why can’t he give us the passage and let us read it for ourselves?—well, his voice is rather high and uneven, I think I could make out Jonathan’s through the loopholes in it.… There! What was that, I wonder! Sounded like shouting,—oh, why can’t he talk softly!Let us unite in prayer.Ah! now we’ll have a long, quiet time, anyway!… if only he wouldn’t pray quite so loud! Why pray aloud at all, anyway? I like the Quaker way best: a good long strip of silence, where your thoughts can wash around in any fashion that—There! No—yes—no—it’s just people going by on the road.… Maybe he’s in the back of the church now, waiting for the close of the prayer. Seems as if I had to look.… Well, he isn’t.…For thy name’s sake, amen.

And then the collection, with an organ voluntary the while—now why an organ voluntary? Why not leave people to their thoughts some of the time?

And at last, the sermon:—The text to which I wish to call your attention this morning—my attention, forsooth! My attention was otherwise occupied. Ah! A puff of[pg 175]warm, sweet air from behind me, and the soft, padding noise of the swinging doors, apprised me of an incomer. A cautious tread in the aisle—I moved along a little to make room.

In a city church probably I should have thrown propriety to the winds and had the gist of the story out of him at once, but in a country church there are always such listening spaces,—the very pew-backs and cushions seem attentive, the hymnals creak in their racks, and the little stools cry out nervously when one barely touches them. It was too much for me. I was coerced into an outer semblance of decorum. However, I snatched a hasty glance at Jonathan’s face. It was quite red and hot-looking, but calm, very calm, and I judged it to be the calm, not of defeat nor yet of settled militancy, but of triumph. I even thought I detected the flicker of a grin,—the mere atmospheric suggestion of a grin,—as if he felt the urgent if furtive appeal in my glance. At any rate, Jonathan was all right, that was clear. And as to Griz—whether she was still one mare or two half-mares—it didn’t so much matter.[pg 176]And now for the sermon! I gathered myself to attend.

As we stood up for the last hymn, I whispered,“How did it go?”

“All right. She’s hitched,”was the answer.

After church there was the usual stir of sociability, and when I emerged into the glare of the church steps, I saw Jonathan driving slowly around from the rear. Griz walked meekly, her head sagged, her eyes blinked.

“Good quiet little horse you’ve got there,”said a deacon over my shoulder;“don’t get restless standing, the way some horses do.”

“Yes, she’s very quiet,”I said.

I got in, and at last, as we drove off, the flood-gates of my impatience broke:—

“Well?”I said,—“well?”

“Well—”said Jonathan.

“Well? Tellme about it!”

“I’ve told you. I hitched her.”

“How did you hitch her?”

“Just the way I said I would.”

“Didn’t she mind?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did she make a fuss?”

“Not much.”

“What do you mean by much?”

“Oh, she set back a little.”

“Do any harm?”

“No.”

“Hurt herself?”

“Guess not.”

“Jonathan, you drive me distracted—you have no more sense for a story—”

“But there was nothing in particular—”

“Now, Jonathan, if there was nothing in particular,whydidn’t you get into church till the sermon was begun, and why were you so red and hot?”

Jonathan smiled indulgently.“Why, of course, she didn’t care about being hitched. I thought you knew that. But it was perfectly easy.”

And that was about all I could extract by the most artful questions. I took my revenge by telling Jonathan the deacon’s compliment to Griz.“He said she didn’t get restless standing, the way so many horses did. I thought of mentioning that you were a rather good judge of horses, in an amateur way, but then I thought it might seem like boasting, so I didn’t.”

After that, of course, I didn’t really deserve to hear the whole story, but the next night I happened to be in the hammock while Jonathan was talking to a neighbor at the front gate, and he was relating the incident with detail enough to have satisfied the most hungry gossip. Only thus did I learn that Bill Howard, who had wound the rope twice round the post to give himself a little leeway, was drawn right up to the post when she set back; that they had been afraid the headstall would tear off; that they had been rather nervous about the post, and other such little points, which I had not been clever enough to elicit by my questions.

Now, why? Probably a man likes to tell a story when he likes to tell it. I find myself wondering how much Odysseus told Penelope about his adventures when she got him to herself for a good talk. Is it significant that his really long story was told to the King of the Phæacians?

As to Griz:—it would perhaps not be worth while to recount her subsequent history. It was a curious one, consisting of long stretches of continuous and ostentatious[pg 179]meekness, broken by sudden flare-ups which, after their occurrence, always seemed incredible. She never again“set back”when Jonathan was the one to hitch her, but this was a concession made to him personally, and had no effect on her general habits. We talked of changing her name, but could never manage it. We thought of selling her, but she was too valuable—most of the time. And when we finally parted from her our relief was deeply tinged with regret.

I have sometimes wondered whether such flare-ups were not the natural and necessary means of recuperation from such depths of meekness. I have even wondered whether the original Griselda may not have—but this is not a dissertation on early Italian poetry, nor on the nature of women.

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