City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
She was not an instant in deciding.
"Why, sunset," she said.
"Promise me," said I--said we!--"that you will remember _Now_. And that
after to-night, when you see a sunset--always, always, till she
comes--you will think about her. About Margaret."
Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we
lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a
fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always
selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will
remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand
in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance
which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset
should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,
wandering spirit....
Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the
bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing
precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the
winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand
bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the
village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of
all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some
mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil
voice.
V
DIFFERENT
Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the
canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks
from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the
gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground
being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond
the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between
trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.
Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day
of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end
of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed
into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known
the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in
spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from
Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump
pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland
dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and
night-in-a-trundle-bed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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