The twain had no children, and perhaps therefrom grew and increased in Hetty a fairly passionate love of exact order and neatness in her home--a trait which is not so common in New England housewives as many fancy, and which does not always find equal growth and encouragement in New England husbands. William chafed under the frequent and bitter reproofs for the muddy shoes, dusty garments, hanging straws and seeds which he brought into his wife's orderly paradise, and the jarring culminated one night over such a trifle, a green sprig of Lad's-love which he had dropped and trodden into the freshly washed floor of the kitchen, where it left a green stain on the spotless boards. The quarrel flamed high, and was followed by an ominous calm which was not broken at breakfast. It would be impossible to express in words Hetty's emotions when she crossed her threshold to set her shining milk tins in the morning sunlight, and saw on one side of the doorstone a yawning hole where had grown for ten years William's bunch of Lad's-love. He had driven to the next village to sell some grain, so she could search unseen for the vanished emblem of domestic felicity, and soon she found it, in the ditch by the public road, already withered in the hot sun. When her husband went at nightfall to feed and water his cattle, he found the other bush of Lad's-love, which had been planted with such affectionate sentiment, trodden in the mire of the pigpen, under the feet of the swine. They lived together for thirty years after this crowning indignity. The grass grew green over the empty holes by the doorside, but he never forgave her, and they never spoke to each other save in direst necessity, and then in fewest words. Yet they were not wicked folk. She cared for his father and mother in the last years of their life with a devotion that was fairly pathetic when it was seen that the old man was untidy to a degree, and absolutely oblivious of all her orderly ways and wishes. At their death he sent for and "homed," as the expression ran, a brother of hers who was almost blind, and paid the expenses of her nephew through college--but he died unforgiving; the sight of that beloved Southernwood--in the pigpen--forever killed his affection. CHAPTER XVII SUN-DIALS "'Tis an old dial, dark with many a stain, In summer crowned with drifting orchard bloom, Tricked in the autumn with the yellow rain, And white in winter like a marble tomb. "And round about its gray, time-eaten brow Lean letters speak--a worn and shattered row:-- 'I am a Shade; A Shadowe too arte thou; I mark the Time; saye, Gossip, dost thou soe?'" --AUSTIN DOBSON.