If time ever stood still, if we were condemned to the blank solitude of
hospital nights or becalmed, mid-ocean days, and had hours for
fruitless dreaming, I wonder what viands we should choose, in setting
forth a banquet from that ambrosial past! Foods unknown to poetry and
song: "cold b'iled dish," pan-dowdy, or rye drop-cakes dripping with
butter! For these do we taste, in moments of retrospect; and perhaps we
dwell the more on their homely savor because we dare not think what
hands prepared them for our use, or, when the board was set, what faces
smiled. We are too wise, with the cunning prudence of the years, to
penetrate over-far beyond the rosy boundary of youth, lest we find also
that bitter pool which is not Lethe, but the waters of a vain regret.




FARMER ELI'S VACATION


"It don't seem as if we'd really got round to it, does it, father?"
asked Mrs. Pike.

The west was paling, and the August insects stirred the air with their
crooning chirp. Eli and his wife sat together on the washing-bench
outside the back door, waiting for the milk to cool before it should be
strained. She was a large, comfortable woman, with an unlined face, and
smooth, fine auburn hair; he was spare and somewhat bent, with curly
iron-gray locks, growing thin, and crow's-feet about his deep-set gray
eyes. He had been smoking the pipe of twilight contentment, but now he
took it out and laid it on the bench beside him, uncrossing his legs
and straightening himself, with the air of a man to whom it falls,