another more problematic still. But in the yard are the undisputable
evidences of his wild unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with
torn and flapping canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are
here: poor relations in a broken-down family. But children love this
yard. They come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right,
and ask at the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take
long, entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure
Siberian nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the
pursuing wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a
three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the
road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be
despised.

Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate
communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.
This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright
days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads
together over some amiable yarn; But now one house is closed, its
windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has
grown over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed.
It is easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the
heart; and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in
us the pangs of loss and grief.

But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not
remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or
disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon
an historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts
had the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and
the mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him news