North of Boston | Page 9

earth from your own baby's grave
And talk about your
everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall

Outside there in the entry, for I saw it."
"I shall laugh the worst laugh
I ever laughed.
I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed."
"I
can repeat the very words you were saying.
'Three foggy mornings
and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.'

Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a
birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlour.
You

couldn't care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death,
comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from
the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more
alone.
Friends make pretence of following to the grave,
But before
one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way
back to life
And living people, and things they understand.
But the
world's evil. I won't have grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won't, I
won't!"
"There, you have said it all and you feel better.
You won't
go now. You're crying. Close the door.
The heart's gone out of it: why
keep it up.
Amy! There's someone coming down the road!"

"You--oh, you think the talk is all. I must go--
Somewhere out of this
house. How can I make you----"
"If--you--do!" She was opening the
door wider.
Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.
I'll follow
and bring you back by force. I will!--"
The Black Cottage
WE chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of
special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well
back from the road in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were
speaking of,
A front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh
painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and I,
to look.
He made as if to hold it at arm's length
Or put the leaves
aside that framed it in.
"Pretty," he said. "Come in. No one will care."

The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a
weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. "You see,"
he said,
"Everything's as she left it when she died.
Her sons won't
sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and
summer here
Where they were boys. They haven't come this year.

They live so far away--one is out west--
It will be hard for them to
keep their word.
Anyway they won't have the place disturbed."
A
buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon
portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
"That

was the father as he went to war.
She always, when she talked about
war,
Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the lounge
beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir

Anything in her after all the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or
Fredericksburg,
I ought to know--it makes a difference which:

Fredericksburg wasn't Gettysburg, of course.
But what I'm getting to
is how forsaken
A little cottage this has always seemed;
Since she
went more than ever, but before--
I don't mean altogether by the lives

That had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two sons, till she
was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after those two sons.
She
valued the considerate neglect
She had at some cost taught them after
years.)
I mean by the world's having passed it by--
As we almost
got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort of mark
To
measure how far fifty years have brought us.
Why not sit down if you
are in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The
warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and
put them in their place.
She had her own idea of things, the old lady.

And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had
her story of them.
One wasn't long in learning that she thought

Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn't just to keep the States
together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She
wouldn't have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for
them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That
all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases--so
removed
From the world's view to-day of all those things.
That's a
hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course the easy
way
Is to decide it simply isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow
say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will
trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.

You couldn't tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South
to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not

Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she
ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how

could they be made so very unlike
By