Hillsboro People | Page 7

at which to arrive, but we know better. There is
no feeling in the world like that with which one starts up the white road,
stars below him in the quiet pool, stars above him in the quiet sky,
friendly lights showing the end of his journey is at hand, and the soft
twilight full of voices all familiar, all welcoming.
Poor old Uncle Abner Rhodes, returning from an attempt to do business
in the city, where he had lost his money, his health, and his hopes, said
he didn't see how going up to Heaven could be so very different from
walking up the hill from the station with Hemlock Mountain in front of
you. He said it didn't seem to him as though even in heaven you could
feel more than then that you had got back where there are some folks,
that you had got back home.
Sometimes when the stars hang very bright over Hemlock Mountain
and the Necronsett River sings loud in the dusk, we remember the old
man's speech, and, though we smile at his simplicity, we think, too, that
the best which awaits us can only be very much better but not so very
different from what we have known here.
PETUNIAS--THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCE
It was a place to which, as a dreamy, fanciful child escaping from
nursemaid and governess, Virginia had liked to climb on hot summer
afternoons. She had spent many hours, lying on the grass in the shade
of the dismantled house, looking through the gaunt, uncovered rafters
of the barn at the white clouds, like stepping-stones in the broad blue
river of sky flowing between the mountain walls.

Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate--the
deserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain--but to the
child there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over
the little clearing. The sun shone down warmly on the house's battered
shell and through the stark skeleton of the barn. The white birches,
strange sylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their
delicate leaves as if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would
cover all the wounds of human neglect, and soon everything would be
as though man had not lived. And everywhere grew the thick, strong,
glistening grass, covering even the threshold with a cushion on which
the child's foot fell as noiselessly as a shadow. It used to seem to her
that nothing could ever have happened in this breathless spot.
Now she was a grown woman, she told herself, twenty-three years old
and had had, she often thought, as full a life as any one of her age could
have. Her college course had been varied with vacations in Europe; she
had had one season in society; she was just back from a trip around the
world. Her busy, absorbing life had given her no time to revisit the
narrow green Valley where she had spent so many of her childhood's
holidays But now a whim for self-analysis, a desire to learn if the old
glamour about the lovely enchanted region still existed for her weary,
sophisticated maturity, had made her break exacting social
engagements and sent her back alone, from the city, to see how the old
valley looked in the spring.
Her disappointment was acute. The first impression and the one which
remained with her, coloring painfully all the vistas of dim woodland
aisles and sunlit brooks, was of the meagerness and meanness of the
desolate lives lived in this paradise. This was a fact she had not noticed
as a child, accepting the country people as she did all other
incomprehensible elders. They had not seemed to her to differ
noticeably from her delicate, esthetic mother, lying in lavender silk
negligées on wicker couches, reading the latest book of Mallarmé, or
from her competent, rustling aunt, guiding the course of the summer
colony's social life with firm hands. There was as yet no summer
colony, this week in May. Even the big hotel was not open. Virginia
was lodged in the house of one of the farmers. There was no element to

distract her mind from the narrow, unlovely lives of the owners of that
valley of beauty.
They were grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as
though the miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes.
They were absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad
cooking and worse dressmaking. The very children, grimy little
utilitarians like their parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden
sunshine, in order to rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries.
Virginia was no longer a child to ignore all this. It was an embittering,
imprisoning thought from which she could not escape even in the most