Country Neighbors

								

air and see the world. Lydia felt that he had deserved his vacation. All
the weary steps to it, she knew, could scarcely have been climbed so
robustly save by a hero.
Eben had stayed a week, and on the morning set for his leaving, Mrs.
Gale and the three trainers harnessed in haste to drive over to Fairfax
to see the circus come in. Lydia had refused to go, because, for some
reason, she felt a little dull that morning, and Eben had soberly
declared his peddling would take him another way. He meant to be off
before the middle of the forenoon; and while he was in the barn,
foddering his horse and greasing the wheels, Lydia bethought her how he
had praised the doughnuts several nights before, and, with an aching
impulse to do something for him before he should go, hastily made up a
batch, judging that a dozen or so would please him upon the road. But
she was left-handed that morning, and as she began to fry, the fat
caught fire. Then Eben, seeing the blaze and smoke, dashed in, set the
kettle safely in the sink, and took Lydia into his arms.
"Say," he whispered to her hidden face, "what if you an' me should get
married an' go round some peddlin', an' make our way home towards fall?"
Lydia felt that this was the most beautiful invitation that could
possibly have been given her, and she answered accordingly:--
"I'd like it ever so much."
Within the next week they were married, and set out on their enchanted
progress, stopping at doors when they liked, and offering bottles
whereof the labels sounded delicious and sweet; or if a house looked
poor or stingy, passing it by. Sometimes, when Lydia felt very daring,
she went to the door herself to show her wares, and Eben stayed in the
carriage and laughed. He said she offered a bottle of vanilla as if it
were poison and she wanted to get rid of it, or as if it were water, and
of no use to anybody. Once, when she had been denied by a sour-faced
woman, he stopped under the shade of a tree farther on, and left Lydia
there while he went back and, by force of his smile and persuasive
tongue, sold the same bottle to the same woman, and came back chuckling
in a merry triumph.
This was the day that Lydia's summer happiness felt the touch of blight.
She remembered always just the moment when the wind of trouble touched
her. They were driving through a long stretch of maple woods with a
ravine below, where ferns grew darkly and water hurried over rocks.
Lydia was lying back in the carriage, swaying with its motion, and
jubilant to her finger-tips. It was young summer now, and she answered
back every pulse of the stirring earth with heart-beats of her own. Eben
was laughing.
"That's the way to do it," he was saying, in an exaggerated triumph.
"Why, you've got to talk to 'em till they think that bottle o' vanilla's
the water o' life, an' they'll have to knife ye if they can't git it no
other way."
"You're a born peddler," smiled Lydia. Then she asked, "How'd you happen