

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Jacqueline Jeremy, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



COUNTRY NEIGHBORS

by

ALICE BROWN







Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge 1910

Copyright, 1910, by Alice Brown
All Rights Reserved
Published April 1910




CONTENTS


  THE PLAY HOUSE                     1

  HIS FIRST WIFE                    20

  A FLOWER OF APRIL                 42

  THE AUCTION                       53

  SATURDAY NIGHT                    76

  A GRIEF DEFERRED                  96

  THE CHALLENGE                    122

  PARTNERS                         150

  FLOWERS OF PARADISE              171

  GARDENER JIM                     192

  THE SILVER TEA-SET               215

  THE OTHER MRS. DILL              237

  THE ADVOCATE                     265

  THE MASQUERADE                   285

  A POETESS IN SPRING              314

  THE MASTER MINDS OF HISTORY      341




THE PLAY HOUSE


Amelia Maxwell sat by the front-chamber window of the great house
overlooking the road, and her own "story-an'-a-half" farther toward the
west. Every day she was alone under her own roof, save at the times when
old lady Knowles of the great house summoned her for work at fine sewing
or braiding rags. All Amelia's kin were dead. Now she was used to their
solemn absence, and sufficiently at one with her own humble way of life,
letting her few acres at the halves, and earning a dollar here and there
with her clever fingers. She was but little over forty, yet she was
aware that her life, in its keener phases, was already done. She had had
her romance and striven to forget it; but out of that time pathetic
voices now and then called to her, and old longings awoke, to breathe
for a moment and then sleep again.

Amelia seemed, even to old lady Knowles, who knew her best, a cheerful,
humorous body; but only Amelia saw the road by which her serenity had
come. Chiefly it was through an inexplicable devotion to the great
house. She could not remember a time when it was not wonderful to her.
While she was a little girl, living alone with her mother, she used to
sit on the doorstone with her bread and milk at bedtime, and think of
the great house, how grand it was and large. There was a wonderful way
the sun had of falling, at twilight, across the pillars of its porch
where the elm drooped sweetly, and in the moonlight it was like a fairy
city. But the morning was perhaps the best moment of all. The great
house was painted a pale yellow, and when Amelia awoke with the sun in
her little unshaded chamber, she thought how dark the blinds were there,
with such a solemn richness in their green. The flower-beds in front
were beautiful to her; but the back garden, lying alongside the orchard,
and stretching through tangles of sweet-william and rose, was an
enchanted spot to play in. The child that was, used to wander there and
feel very rich. Now, a woman, she sat in the great house sewing, and
felt rich again. As it happened, for one of the many times it came to
her, she was thinking what the great house had done for her. Old lady
Knowles had, in her stately way, been a kind of patron saint, and in
that summer, years ago, when Amelia's romance died and she had drooped
like a starving plant, Rufus, the old lady's son, had seemed to see her
trouble and stood by her. He did not speak of it. He only took her for
long drives, and made his cheerful presence evident in many ways, and
when he died, with a tragic suddenness, Amelia used selfishly to feel
that he had lived at least long enough to keep her from failing of that
inner blight.

On this day when old lady Knowles had gone with Ann, her faithful help,
