Meadow Grass: Tales of New England Life

								

chiefly in their longing to be free! We had a theory that Jonathan and
David would go into business together. Perhaps we thought of them in
the same country store, their chairs tilted on either side of the
air-tight stove, telling stories, in the intervals of custom, as they
apparently did in their earlier estate. For, shy as they were in
general company, they chatted together with an intense earnestness all
day long; and it was one of the stock questions in our neighborhood,
when the social light burned low,--
"What under the sun do you s'pose Dave and Jont find to talk about?"
Alas! again the world had builded foolishly; for with early manhood,
they fell in love with the same round-cheeked school-teacher. Jonathan
married her, after what wrench of feeling I know not; and the other
fled to the town, whence he never returned save for the briefest visit
at Thanksgiving or Christmas time. The stay-at-home lad is a warm
farmer, and the little school-teacher a mother whose unlined face shows
the record of a placid life; but David cannot know even this, save by
hearsay, for he never sees them. He is a moneyed man, and not a year
ago, gave the town a new library. But is he happy? Or does the old
wound still show a ragged edge? For that may be, they tell us, even
"when you come to forty year."
Then, clad in brighter vestments of memory, there was the lad who
earned unto himself much renown, even among his disapproving relatives,
by running away from home, in quest of gold and glory. True, he was
brought back at the end of three days, footsore and muddy, and with
noble appetite for the griddle-cakes his mother cooked him in lieu of
the traditional veal,--but all undaunted. He never tried it again, yet
people say he has thrown away all his chances of a thrifty living by
perpetual wandering in the woods with gun and fishing-rod, and that he
is cursed with a deplorable indifference to the state of his fences and
potato-patch. No one could call him an admirable citizen, but I am not
sure that he has chosen the worser part; for who is so jovial and
sympathetic on a winter evening, when the apples are passed, and even
the shining cat purrs content before the blaze, or in the wood
solitudes, familiar to him as his own house door?
"Pa'tridges' nests?" he said, one spring, with a cock of his eye
calculated to show at once a humorous recognition of his genius and his
delinquencies. "Sartain! I wish I was as sure where I keep my scythe
sned!"
He has learned all the lore of the woods, the ways of "wild critters,"
and the most efficacious means both to woo and kill them. Prim
spinsters eye him acridly, as a man given over to "shif'less" ways, and
wives set him up, like a lurid guidepost, before husbands prone to
lapse from domestic thrift; but the dogs smile at him, and children,
for whom he is ever ready to make kite or dory, though all his hay
should mildew, or to string thimbleberries on a grass spear while