The Old Gray Homestead by Frances Parkinson Keyes
page 124 of 237 (52%)
page 124 of 237 (52%)
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to be done there while you're gone."
"I'd love to go to the cemetery--or anywhere else, for that matter--with you," said Sylvia, "and afterwards--to _our_ house. Perhaps you'll want to give some directions yourself!" The tiny graveyard lay in the hollow of one of the wooded slopes which broke the great, undulating meadow which stretched from the Homestead to the river, a wall made of the stones picked up on the place around it, a plain granite shaft erected by the first Gray in the centre, and grouped about the shaft the quaint tablets of the century before, with old-fashioned names spelled in an old-fashioned manner, and with homely rhymes and trite sayings underneath; farther off, the newer gravestones, more ornate and less appealing. The elms were just beginning to bud, and the cold April wind whistled through them, but the pines were as green and sheltering as always, and Sylvia spread her blanket under one of them, and worked away at the sewing she had brought instead of a book, while Austin burned the grass and dug and pruned, whistling under his breath all the time. He stopped once to call her attention to a robin, the first they had seen that spring, and finally, when the sacred little place was in perfect order, came with a handful of trailing arbutus for her, and sat down beside her. "I thought I remembered seeing some of this on the bank," he said; "it's always grown there--will you take it for your 'bouquet des fiancailles,' Sylvia? I remember how surprised we all were last year because you liked the little wild flowers best, and went around searching for them, when your rooms were full of carnations and hothouse roses. And because you used to go out to walk, just to see the sunsets. Do you still love sunsets, too?" |
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