第18章 THE REVOLVING YEAR(4)

Sh! Keep still, can't you? There is a more canorous and horn-like quality to the crowing of Gildersleeve's rooster, and his hens chant cheerily as they kick the litter about. But it wasn't these cheerful sounds that wakened us with a start. There! Hear that? Hear it?

Two or three long-drawn, reedy notes, and an awkward boggle at a trill, but oh, how sweet! How sweet! It is the song-sparrow, blessed bird! It won't be long now; it won't be long.

The snow fort in the back-yard still sulks there black and dirty.

"I'll go when I get good and ready, and not before," it seems to say. Other places the thinner snow has departed and left behind it mud that seizes upon your overshoe with an "Oh, what's your rush?"In the middle of the road it lies as smooth as pancake-batter. Aload of building stone stalls, and people gather on the sidewalk to tell the teamster quietly and unostentatiously that he ought to have had more sense than to pile it on like that with the roads the way they are. Every time the cruel whip comes down and the horses dance under it, the women peering out of the front windows wince, and cluck "Tchk! Ain't it terrible? He ought to be arrested." This way and that the team turns and tugs, but all in vain. Somebody puts on his rubber boots and wades out to help, fearing not the muddy spokes. Yo hee! Yo hee! No use. He talks it over with the teamster. You can hear him say: "Well, suit yourself. If you want to stay here all night."And then the women exult: "Goody! Goody! Serves him right. Now he has to take off some of the stone. Lazy man's load!"The mother of children flies to the back-door when school lets out.

"Don't you come in here with all that mud!" she squalls excitedly.

"Look at you! A peck o' dirt on each foot. Right in my nice clean kitchen that I just scrubbed. Go 'long now and clean your shoes.

Go 'long, I tell you. Slave and slave for you and that's all the thanks I get. You'd keep the place looking like a hogpen, if Iwasn't at you all the time. I never saw such young ones since the day I was made. Never. Whoopin' and hollerin' and trackin' in and out. It's enough to drive a body crazy."(Don't you care. It's just her talk. If it isn't one thing it's another, cleaning your shoes, or combing your hair, or brushing your clothes, or using your handkerchief, or shutting the door softly, or holding your spoon with your fingers and not in your fist, or keeping your finger out of your glass when you drink - something the whole blessed time. Forever and eternally picking at a fellow about something. And saying the same thing over and over so many times.

That's the worst of it!)

Pap and mother read over the seed catalogues, all about "warm, light soils," and "hardy annuals," and "sow in drills four inches apart."It kind of hurries things along when you do that. In the south window of the kitchen is a box full of black dirt in which will you look out what you're doing? Little more and you'd have upset it.

There are tomato seeds in that, I'll have you know. Oh, yes, government seeds. Somebody sends 'em, I don't know who. Congressman, I guess, whoever he is. I don't pretend to keep track of 'em. And say. When was this watered last? There it is. Unless I stand over you every minute - My land! If there's anything done about this house I've got to do it.

Between the days when it can't make up its mind whether to snow or to rain, and tries to do both at once, comes a day when it is warm enough (almost) to go without an overcoat. The Sunday following you can hardly hear what the preacher has to say for the whooping and barking. The choir members have cough drops in their cheeks when they stand up to sing, and everybody stops in at the drug store with: "Say, Doc, what's good for a cold?"Eggs have come down. Yesterday they were nine for a quarter; to-day they're ten. Gildersleeve wants a dollar for a setting of eggs, but he'll let you have the same number of eggs for thirty cents if you'll wait till he can run a needle into each one. So afraid you'll raise chickens of your own.

Excited groups gather about rude circles scratched in the mud, and there is talk of "pureys," and "reals," and "aggies," and "commies,"and "fen dubs!" There is a rich click about the bulging pockets of the boys, and every so often in school time something drops on the floor and rolls noisily across the room. When Miss Daniels asks:

"Who did that?" the boys all look so astonished. Who did what, pray tell? And when she picks up a marble and inquires: "Whose is this?"nobody can possibly imagine whose it might be, least of all the boy whose most highly-prized shooter it is. At this season of the year, too, there is much serious talk as to the exceeding sinfulness of "playing for keeps." The little boys, in whose thumbs lingers the weakness of the arboreal ape, their ancestor, and who "poke" their marbles, drink in eagerly the doctrine that when you win a marble you ought to give it back, but the hard-eyed fellows, who can plunk it every time, sit there and let it go in one ear and out the other, there being a hole drilled through expressly for the purpose. What?

Give up the rewards of skill? Ah, g'wan!

The girls, even to those who have begun to turn their hair up under, are turning the rope and dismally chanting: "All in together, pigs in the meadow, nineteen twenty, leave the rope empty," or whatever the rune is.

It won't be long now. It won't be long.

"For lo; the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines, with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise my love, my fair one and come away."THE SONG OF SOLOMON.