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.