When Life Was Young Part 18

Nine times out of ten they will not get it. You will get there before the letter does; and the chances are that you will have to provide your own transportation for the six or ten miles from the railway station to the farm, and you will think that distance longer than all the rest of the journey.

Most likely, too, you will find the farmer gone to a Grange meeting; and by the time you have sat round the farmhouse door on your trunk till he gets back at sunset, you will be homesick, and maybe hungry.

Also--for there are two sides to the matter--your country brother and his wife will be troubled about it. So send your letter at least a week ahead.

The first we knew of the coming of Uncle Pascal and Aunt Nabbie, they drove into the yard with a livery team from the village, and an express wagon coming on behind with their trunks.

Besides Uncle and Aunt, there was a smiling, dark-haired youth with them, a grand-nephew of Uncle Mowbray, named Olin Randall, whom we had heard of often as a kind of third or fourth cousin, but had never seen.

He had never beheld Maine before, and was regarding everything with curiosity and a little grin of condescension.

That grin of his nearly upset us, particularly Ellen and "Doad," who for a hundred reasons wished to make a very favorable impression on Uncle and Aunt Mowbray and all the family. I nearly forgot to mention that Uncle Mowbray was reputed very fussy and particular about his food.

Our two-story farmhouse was comfortable and big, and we had plenty of everything; but of course it was not altogether like one of the finest houses in Philadelphia. For Uncle Mowbray was a wealthy man, one of those thrifty, prosperous Philadelphia merchants of the era ending with the Civil War. He never let a dollar escape him.

They came just at dusk. We boys were doing the ch.o.r.es. The girls were getting supper. Theodora had resolved to try her hand at a batch of "mug-bread" for the next day, and had set "Old Hannah" up for it.

The unexpected arrival upset us all a good deal, particularly Ellen and Theodora, who had to bear the brunt of grandmother's absence, get tea, see to the spare rooms and do everything else. And then there was Olin, mildly grinning. His presence disturbed the girls worse than everything else. But Aunt Nabbie smoothed away their anxieties, and helped to make all comfortable.

We got through the evening better than had at first seemed likely, and in the morning the girls rose at five and tried to hurry that "mug-bread" along, with other things, so as to have some of it for dinner, for they found that they were short of bread.

Ellen, I believe, thought that they had better not attempt the risky experiment, but should start some hop-yeast bread.

Theodora, however, peeped into the old mug, saw encouraging eyes in it, and resolved to go on. They mixed it up with the necessary warm water and flour and set it carefully back for the second rising.

Perhaps they had a little hotter fire than usual, perhaps they had hurried it a shade too much, or--well, you can "perhaps" anything you like with milk-yeast bread. At all events, it took the wrong turn and began to perfume the kitchen.

If they had not been hard pressed and a little flurried that morning, the girls would probably have thrown it out. Instead, they took it down, saw that it was rising a little and--hoping that it would yet pull through--worked in more flour and soda, and hurried four loaves of it into the oven to bake.

Then it was that the unleavened turpitude of that hostile microbe displayed the full measure of its malignity. A horrible odor presently filled the place. Stale eggs would have been Araby the Blest beside it.

The girls hastily shut the kitchen doors, but doors would not hold it in. It captured the whole house. Aunt Nabbie, in the sitting-room, perceived it and came rustling out to give motherly advice and a.s.sistance.

And it chanced that while Theodora was confidentially explaining it to her, the kitchen door leading to the front piazza opened, and in walked Uncle Pascal, with Olin behind him. They had been out in the garden looking at the fruit, and had come back to get Aunt Nabbie to see the bees.

When that awful odor smote them they stopped short. Uncle Mowbray was a fastidious man. He sniffed and turned up his nose.

"Is it sink spouts?" he gasped. "Are the traps out of order?"

"No, no, Pascal!" said Aunt Nabbie, in a low tone, trying to quiet him.

"It is only bread."

"Bread!" cried Uncle Mowbray, with a glance of rank suspicion at the two girls. "Bread smelling like that!"

Just then Ellen discovered something white, which appeared to be mysteriously increasing in size, in the shadow on the back side of the kitchen stove. After a glance she caught open the oven door.

It was that mug-bread dough! It had crawled--crawled out of the tins into the oven--crawled down under the oven door to the kitchen floor, where it made a viscous puddle, and was now trying, apparently, to crawl out of sight under the wood-box.

Aunt Nabbie burst out laughing; she could not help it. Then she tried to turn Uncle Mowbray out.

But no, he must stand there and talk about it. He was one of those men who are always peeping round the kitchen, to see if the women are doing things right. But Olin scudded out after one look, and the girls saw him under one of the Balm o' Gilead trees, shaking and laughing as if he would split.

Poor Doad and Nell! That was a dreadful forenoon for them. As youthful housekeepers they felt, themselves disgraced beyond redemption. In three years they had not recovered from it, and would cringe when any one reminded them of Uncle Mowbray and the mug-bread.

CHAPTER XI

THE BIRDS AND BIRD-SONGS AT THE OLD FARM

"Sing away, ye joyous birds, While the sun is o'er us."

Looking back to that first fortnight after my arrival at the Old Squire's, I think what most impressed my youthful mind was the country verdure and the bird-songs. Everything looked so very green, accustomed as my eyes were to the red city bricks, white doorsteps and dusty streets. The universal green of those June days at times well nigh bewildered me.

Astronomers tell us that there are systems of worlds in outer s.p.a.ce, presided over by green suns; it was as if I had been transported to such a world. Moreover, the effect was cool and calm and healthful; cities are abnormal places of abode; man originated and during all the early ages of his development, lived in the green, arboreal country, surrounded by rustic scenery and sylvan quiet. The clangor and roar of a great city, particularly the noise by night, is unnatural; nor are the reflected colors from urban structures normal to the eye. Add to these the undue tension to which city life, as a whole, braces the living substance of brain and nerve, and the reason why city populations have to be so constantly recruited from the country is in some degree explained. Children even more than older persons need country surroundings.

Next to the deep novelty of the wide green landscape, came the bird-songs. It was June. The air seemed to me all a-quiver with bird-notes, and I was listening to each and every one. Ah, to my untried, youthful eyes those fresh great hay-fields, whitening with ox-eyed daisies, reddening with sweet-scented clover and streaked golden with vivid yellow b.u.t.ter-cups, over which the song-convulsed bobolinks hovered on arcuate wings!

I had never heard the nesting song of a bobolink before. What a song it is!--the eager zeal, the exultation in it. The overflowing, rollicking joy with which it is poured forth, filled me with such gleeful astonishment, the first time I heard one, and struck such a chord of sympathetic feeling in my heart and so powerfully, that I recollect shouting, "ye-ho!" and racing tumultuously after the rapturous singer.

"What does that bird say?" I cried.

Laughing quietly at my fresh curiosity, the Old Squire told me that the bird was supposed to say,--

"Bob o' Lincoln, take-a-stick-and-give-a-lick, Bob-olink, Kitty-link, Withy-link, Billy-seeble, see, see, see!"

Addison gave a somewhat different interpretation which has now slipped my memory; I deemed the Old Squire's version the more reliable one.

While strawberrying in the fields, that summer, I searched three or four times for the nests which I felt sure were close by, in the gra.s.s, for the little plain gray wife of the noisy singer sat on the weed-tops, crying,--"Skack! skack!" but I could not find them.

Once, I remember, the following year Theodora and I resolved that we would find the nest of one bold fellow that kept singing close over our heads, as we were gathering strawberries in a gra.s.sy swale, in the west field. We set down our dishes and crept over every foot of a tract at least a quarter of an acre in extent, and went over a part of it two or three times. At last, we found it, but not till we had crushed both nest and eggs beneath our crawling knees--a denouement which distressed Theodora so much that she declared she would never search for a bobolink's nest again. "Clumsy monsters that we are," said she; "the poor thing's nest is crushed into the dirt!"

When we came to mow that swale a few days after, Gramp first marvelled, then grumbled repeatedly; for the gra.s.s was in a mat. He spoke of it at the dinner table that day, making a covert accusation against Gram, whereupon Theodora and I owned up in the matter, Doad naively adding that we had done it "on the strength of Gram's original permit," but that we had agreed never to do so again. The Old Squire laughed a little grimly and said he wanted it understood, that the permit, alluded to, was not transferable. But the old lady now interposed her opinion, that the permit could be made a moderate use of by others, if she saw fit--and needed strawberries.

A pair of blue-birds built their nest in a box which Addison had nailed to a short pole and set up in the barnyard wall; and every morning, as we milked the cows, we would hear their plaintive notes, repeated over and over to each other as they flew about;--"Deary, cheer up, Deary, cheer up!" as if life needed constant mutual consolation, to be supported. "Old Ummy," the house cat, was much inclined to watch their box and once attempted to climb up to them.

Two pairs of peewees built about the premises, one just inside the south barn cellar, the other under a projecting window-sill at the end of the wagon-house. These two pairs, or younger birds reared there, had built in these same places for seven or eight years. Night and morning as we milked, and at noon also, as we sat grinding scythes at the well, those old peewees would alight on posts, or gables, rub their beaks twice on the dry wood and cry, "Peewee, peewee, peewitic; pewee, peer-a-zitic!"

For some not very good reason, I took a boyish dislike to peewees. They are very useful birds, great destroyers of worms, moths and flies, and so far as I know, never do the slightest harm, which can hardly be said of all our feathered favorites.

As we hoed potatoes and corn on those green June days, the song of the little gray ground sparrows was constantly in my ears, although the others seemed not to notice it.

"And what does that one say?" I asked Gramp.

"What one?" the old gentleman asked.

"Why, that bird! It sings all the time," I rejoined. "Don't you hear it?"

He stopped and appeared to listen, at a loss, for a minute, as to what I heard.