City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's
cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her
crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,
her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has
brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not
throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs
childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying
a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some
children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less
like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of
the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often
be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a
phalanx?
We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a
steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little
shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge
I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden
profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the
weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky
and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the
village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white
pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And
there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in
snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a
parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug
stores, too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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