Chickens -- Fiction; Farms -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States -- Fiction
As I ran rapidly through the old pasture, which was overgrown with
buckbushes and sassafras sprouts, which were turning into great pink and
green fern clumps in the warm April sunshine, I gave the two or three
Saint-Saens Delilah notes which had been robbed of any of their wicked
Delilah flavor for me by having heard Mr. G. Bird sing them so beautifully
on the stage of the Metropolitan in that first dream night in Elmnest. But
I called and then called in vain until at last I came out to the huge old
rock that juts out from the edge of the rugged little knoll at the far end
of the pasture. Here I paused and looked down on Elmnest in the afternoon
sunshine with what seemed to be suddenly newly opened eyes. I had been in
and out of Elmnest to such an extent for the last six weeks that I hadn't
had a chance to get off and look at it from an outsider's standpoint, and
now suddenly I was taking that view of it. The old rose and green brick
house, covered in by its wide, gray shingle roof, the gables and windows
of which were beginning to be wreathed in feathery and pink young vines,
which were given darker notes here and there in their masses by the sturdy
green of the honey-suckles, hovered down on a small plateau rear-guarded by
the barn and sheds, flanked by the garden and the gnarled old orchard, and
from its front door the long avenue of elms led far down to the group of
Riverfield houses that huddled at the other end. All villages in the State
of Harpeth have been so built around the old "great houses" of the colonial
landowners, and between their generations has been developed a communistic
life that I somehow feel is to bridge from the pioneer life of this country
to the great new life of the greater commune that is coming to us. Down
there in Riverfield I knew that there was sin and sorrow and birth and
death, but there was no starvation, and for every tragedy there was a
neighbor to reach out a helping hand, and for every joy there were hearty
and friendly rejoicings.
"Oh, and I'm one of them--I belong," I said to myself as I noted each
cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor.
Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella
Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something
that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish. "And I'm making Elmnest
fulfil its destiny into the future--into the future that the great Evan
Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the
fields. I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming."
"He does," came an answer from right at my shoulder in Pan's flutiest
voice, and I turned to find him standing just behind me on the very edge of
the old tilting rock.
"How do you know?" I demanded of him as I took the clean white cloth tied
up at four corners, gypsy-fashion, which he offered me and which, I could
see, was fairly bursting with green leaves of a kind I had never seen
before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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