Country Neighbors

								

mother to the nice spinster daughter. She looked as if there were
mother-stuff enough in her to pass around and nourish and bless the
world. Aunt Phebe was speaking.
"Now," said she, "I didn't have more'n half a glimpse at you last
night, Lyddy, such a surprise an' all, an' I had this mornin' to look
for'ard to. An' now I'm goin' to take my time an' see for myself what
kind of a wife Eben's be'n an' picked out."
She was laughing richly all through the words, and Lydia, though she was
blushing, liked the sound of it. She felt quite equal to the scrutiny.
She knew the days of driving had given her a color, and she was not
unconscious of her new blue waist. Then, too, Eben's hand was again on
hers under the friendly cloth. Aunt Phebe looked, took off her glasses,
pretended to wipe them, and looked again.
"Well, Eben," said she judicially, "I'll say this for ye, you've done
well."
"Pretty good-lookin' old lady, I think myself," said Eben, with a proud
carelessness. "Course she's nothin' to what my first wife was at her
age; but then, nobody'd expect that kind o' luck twice. Aunt Phebe,
here's my cup. You make it jest like the first, or you'll hear from me."
Lydia drooped over her plate. If Eben had sought her hand then, she
would have snatched it away from him. All the delicate instincts within
her felt suddenly outraged. At last she acknowledged to herself, in a
flash, how coarse-minded he must be to mingle the present with his
sacred past. But she started and involuntarily looked up. The spinster
cousin was giggling like a girl.
"Now you've got back," she was saying to Eben. "Now I know it's you,
sure enough. He took that up when he wa'n't hardly out o' pinafores,"
she said to Lydia.
"What?" Lydia managed, through her anger at him.
"Comparin' everything with his first wife. Where'd he get it, mother?"
"Why," said aunt Phebe, "there was that old Simeon Spence that used to
come round clock-mendin'. He was forever tellin' what his first wife
used to do, an' Eben he ketched it up, an' then, when we laughed at him,
he done it the more. Land o' love, Lyddy, you chokin'?"
Lydia was sobbing and laughing together, and Eben turned in a panic from
his talk with uncle Sim, to pound her back.
"No, no," she kept saying. "I'm all right. No! no!"
"Suthin' went the wrong way," commiserated aunt Phebe, when they were
all in their places again and Lydia had wiped her eyes.
"Yes," said Lydia joyously, as if choking were a very happy matter. "It
went the wrong way. Eben, you pass aunt Phebe my cup."
And while the coffee was coming she sought out Eben's hand again and
turned to gaze at him with such tell-tale eyes that the spinster cousin,
blushing a little, looked at once away, and wondered how it would seem
to be so foolish and so fond.

A FLOWER OF APRIL

Ellen Withington and her mother lived in a garden. There was a house
behind it, with great white pillars like a temple, but it played a