Country Neighbors

								


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Jacqueline Jeremy, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

COUNTRY NEIGHBORS
by
ALICE BROWN

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge 1910
Copyright, 1910, by Alice Brown
All Rights Reserved
Published April 1910

CONTENTS

  THE PLAY HOUSE                     1


HIS FIRST WIFE                    20


A FLOWER OF APRIL                 42


THE AUCTION                       53


SATURDAY NIGHT                    76


A GRIEF DEFERRED                  96


THE CHALLENGE                    122


PARTNERS                         150


FLOWERS OF PARADISE              171


GARDENER JIM                     192


THE SILVER TEA-SET               215


THE OTHER MRS. DILL              237


THE ADVOCATE                     265


THE MASQUERADE                   285


A POETESS IN SPRING              314


THE MASTER MINDS OF HISTORY      341

THE PLAY HOUSE

Amelia Maxwell sat by the front-chamber window of the great house
overlooking the road, and her own "story-an'-a-half" farther toward the
west. Every day she was alone under her own roof, save at the times when
old lady Knowles of the great house summoned her for work at fine sewing
or braiding rags. All Amelia's kin were dead. Now she was used to their
solemn absence, and sufficiently at one with her own humble way of life,
letting her few acres at the halves, and earning a dollar here and there
with her clever fingers. She was but little over forty, yet she was
aware that her life, in its keener phases, was already done. She had had
her romance and striven to forget it; but out of that time pathetic
voices now and then called to her, and old longings awoke, to breathe
for a moment and then sleep again.
Amelia seemed, even to old lady Knowles, who knew her best, a cheerful,
humorous body; but only Amelia saw the road by which her serenity had
come. Chiefly it was through an inexplicable devotion to the great
house. She could not remember a time when it was not wonderful to her.
While she was a little girl, living alone with her mother, she used to
sit on the doorstone with her bread and milk at bedtime, and think of
the great house, how grand it was and large. There was a wonderful way
the sun had of falling, at twilight, across the pillars of its porch
where the elm drooped sweetly, and in the moonlight it was like a fairy
city. But the morning was perhaps the best moment of all. The great
house was painted a pale yellow, and when Amelia awoke with the sun in
her little unshaded chamber, she thought how dark the blinds were there,
with such a solemn richness in their green. The flower-beds in front
were beautiful to her; but the back garden, lying alongside the orchard,
and stretching through tangles of sweet-william and rose, was an
enchanted spot to play in. The child that was, used to wander there and