Tiverton Tales

								


Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Paul Stephen, Ted Garvin
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net

TIVERTON TALES
BY ALICE BROWN
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY ALICE BROWN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO M. H. R.
A MASTER MAGICIAN

CONTENTS

DOORYARDS
A MARCH WIND
THE MORTUARY CHEST
HORN-O'-THE-MOON
A STOLEN FESTIVAL
A LAST ASSEMBLING
THE WAY OF PEACE
THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
HONEY AND MYRRH
A SECOND MARRIAGE
THE FLAT-IRON LOT
THE END OF ALL LIVING

TIVERTON TALES

DOORYARDS

Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards, those
outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them, and, when
children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the common
occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather holds,
we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the solid
block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the hour
when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of her own
sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes of
butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of
"Come, butter, come! Peter stands a-waiting at the gate, Waiting for his
butter-cake. Come, butter, come!"
chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and
then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too
hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of
salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of
householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them
away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the syringa,
leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what complexion, our
dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with purification. Here
are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues; for, in Tiverton,
there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning, omits to set in order
this outer pale of the temple. Long before the merry months are well
under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels to pasture, or plants
are taken from the south window and clapped into chilly ground, orderly
passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear up" our yards. We
gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by the scavenger dog,
who sits now with his tail tucked under him, oblivious of such vagrom
ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding refined gold, we sweep it.
There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once went to the length of
trimming her grass about the doorstone and clothes-pole with embroidery