Tiverton Tales

								


Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Tonya
Allen, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
HTML version by Al Haines.

TIVERTON TALES
BY
ALICE BROWN
1899

  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

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 scissors; but that was a too-hasty
encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who
qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.