DOORYARDS


Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards,
those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them,
and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the
common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather
holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the
solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the
hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of
her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes
of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of

"Come, butter, come!
Peter stands a-waiting at the gate,
Waiting for his butter-cake.
Come, butter, come!"

chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and
then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too
hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of
salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of
householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them
away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the
syringa, leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what
complexion, our dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with