all time, so far as our own' short span is concerned, by the unerring
stylus of youth: the outline of a little red schoolhouse, distinguished
from the other similar structures within Tiverton bounds by "District
No. V.," painted on a shingle, in primitive black letters, and nailed
aloft over the door. Up to the very hollow which made its playground
and weedy garden, the road was elm-bordered and lined with fair
meadows, skirted in the background by shadowy pines, so soft they did
not even wave; they only seemed to breathe. The treasures of the road!
On either side, the way was plumed and paved with beauties so rare that
now, disheartened dwellers in city streets, we covetously con over in
memory that roaming walk to school and home again. We know it now for
what it was, a daily progress of delight. We see again the old
watering-trough, decayed into the mellow loveliness of gray lichen and
greenest moss. Here beside the ditch whence the water flowed, grew the
pale forget-me-not and sticky star-blossomed cleavers. A step farther,
beyond the nook where the spring bubbled first, were the riches of the
common roadway; and over the gray, lichen-bearded fence, the growth of
stubbly upland pasture. Everywhere, in road and pasture too, thronged
milkweed, odorous haunt of the bee and those frailest butterflies of
the year, born of one family with drifting blossoms; and straightly
tall, the solitary mullein, dust-covered but crowned with a gold softer
and more to be desired than the pride of kings. Perhaps the carriage
folk from the outer world, who sometimes penetrate Tiverton's leafy
quiet, may wonder at the queer little enclosures of sticks and pebbles
on many a bare, tree-shaded slope along the road. "Left there from some
game!" they say to one another, and drive on, satisfied. But these are
no mere discarded playthings, dear ignorant travellers! They are tokens
of the mimic earnest with which child-life is ever seeking to sober
itself, and rushing unsummoned into the workaday fields of an aimlessly
frantic world. They are houses, and the stone boundaries are walls.