Tiverton Tales

								

Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish through long
patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has roused in her a
fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and that she hurries
her plants into motion because she herself must halt? Her father does
not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no luck with plants."
And that, indeed, is true.
There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to
tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles of
all sorts congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the hands
of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and though,
for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet inwardly
constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no purpose. He is
everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a faculty which
might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the definite and
tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on under vain
conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless articles, presently
to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in the farmer's pocket
ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with another more problematic
still. But in the yard are the undisputable evidences of his wild
unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with torn and flapping
canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are here: poor
relations in a broken-down family. But children love this yard. They
come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right, and ask at
the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take long,
entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure Siberian
nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the pursuing
wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a
three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the
road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be despised.
Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate
communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.
This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright
days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads
together over some amiable yarn. But now one house is closed, its
windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has grown
over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed. It is
easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the heart;
and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in us the
pangs of loss and grief.
But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not
remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or
disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon an
historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts had
the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and the