



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Tonya
Allen, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
HTML version by Al Haines.











TIVERTON TALES

BY

ALICE BROWN

1899




  CONTENTS


  DOORYARDS
  A MARCH WIND
  THE MORTUARY CHEST
  HORN-O'-THE-MOON
  A STOLEN FESTIVAL
  A LAST ASSEMBLING
  THE WAY OF PEACE
  THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
  HONEY AND MYRRH
  A SECOND MARRIAGE
  THE FLAT-IRON LOT
  THE END OF ALL LIVING





DOORYARDS


Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards,
those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them,
and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the
common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather
holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the
solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the
hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of
her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes
of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of

  "Come, butter, come!
  Peter stands a-waiting at the gate,
  Waiting for his butter-cake.
  Come, butter, come!"

chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and
then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too
hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of
salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of
householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them
away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the
syringa, leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what
complexion, our dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with
purification. Here are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues;
for, in Tiverton, there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning,
omits to set in order this outer pale of the temple. Long before the
merry months are well under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels
to pasture, or plants are taken from the south window and clapped into
chilly ground, orderly passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear
up" our yards. We gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by
the scavenger dog, who sits now with his tail tucked under him,
oblivious of such vagrom ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding
refined gold, we sweep it. There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once
went to the length of trimming her grass about the doorstone and
clothes-pole with embroidery scissors; but that was a too-hasty
encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who
qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.

After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of
ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see
whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are
brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the
horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the
delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are
Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.

But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture
of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points
where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all.
Here is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the
father who inherited it, and; the grandfather who reclaimed it from
waste; here have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living
and traced indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy,
of pathos, or of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground
between barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will,
since famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose
to read fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field
of the cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure
met and sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out
in the days when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a
woman. This was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the
wife of a farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the
ox which ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his
heavy slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a
gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown
shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die.
She had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she
walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied
delight, dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a
hand-organ and monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who
followed them; for the children were little, and all the saner
house-mothers contented themselves with leaning over the gates till the
wandering train had passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the
dregs, and then tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest
joy,--one that leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope,
where there is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but
she had something far better, an alert and undiscouraged