The Face of the Fields. Sharp Dallas Lore

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “I flattened for a moment, when some one in the yard yelled at me. I preferred the policeman, and grabbing my pail I slid over to the street. The policeman moved on past the corner of the station out of sight. The square was free, and yonder stood a cab!

      “Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. The cabman saw me coming, and squared away. I waved a paper dollar at him, but he only stared the more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too much for one dollar. I pulled out another, thrust them both at him, and dodged into the cab, calling, ‘Cambridge!’

      “He would have taken me straight to the police station, had I not said, ‘Harvard College. Professor Agassiz’s house! I’ve got eggs for Agassiz’; and pushed another dollar up at him through the hole.

      “It was nearly half-past six.

      “‘Let him go!’ I ordered. ‘Here’s another dollar if you make Agassiz’s house in twenty minutes. Let him out. Never mind the police!’

      “He evidently knew the police, or there were few around at that time on a Sunday morning. We went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone down the wood-roads from the pond two hours before, but with the rattle and crash now of a fire brigade. Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street, we took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting out something in Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a belt and brass buttons.

      “Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put the eggs in jeopardy, and on over the cobble-stones, we went. Half-standing, to lessen the jar, I held the pail in one hand and held myself in the other, not daring to let go even to look at my watch.

      “But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was afraid to see how near to seven o’clock it might be. The sweat was dropping from my nose, so close was I running to the limit of my time.

      “Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dove forward, ramming my head into the front of the cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me across the small of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of eggs helter-skelter over the floor.

      “We had stopped. Here was Agassiz’s house; and not taking time to pick up the scattered eggs, I tumbled out, and pounded at the door.

      “No one was astir in the house. But I would stir them. And I did. Right in the midst of the racket the door opened. It was the maid.

      “‘Agassiz,’ I gasped, ‘I want Professor Agassiz, quick!’ And I pushed by her into the hall.

      “‘Go ’way, sir. I’ll call the police. Professor Agassiz is in bed. Go ’way, sir.’

      “‘Call him – Agassiz – instantly, or I’ll call him myself!’

      “But I didn’t; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick loud voice called excitedly, —

      “‘Let him in! Let him in! I know him. He has my turtle eggs!’

      “And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic gown, came sailing down the stairs.

      “The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with both hands, and dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with a swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my trembling hands ticked its way to seven – as if nothing unusual were happening to the history of the world.”

      “You were in time then?” I said.

      “To the tick. There stands my copy of the great book. I am proud of the humble part I had in it.”

      III

      THE EDGE OF NIGHT

      BEYOND the meadow, nearly half a mile away, yet in sight from my window, stands an apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary between the upper and lower pastures. For an apple tree it is unspeakably woeful, and bent, and hoary, and grizzled, with suckers from feet to crown. Unkempt and unesteemed, it attracts only the cattle for its shade, and gives to them alone its gnarly, bitter fruit.

      But that old tree is hollow, trunk and limb; and if its apples are of Sodom, there is still no tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, none even in my own private Eden, carefully kept as they are, that is half as interesting – I had almost said, as useful. Among the trees of the Lord, an apple tree that bears good Baldwins or greenings or rambos comes first for usefulness; but when one has thirty-five of such trees, which the town has compelled one to trim and scrape and plaster-up and petticoat against the grewsome gypsy moth, then those thirty-five are dull indeed, compared with the untrimmed, unscraped, unplastered, undressed old tramp yonder on the knoll, whose heart is still wide open to the birds and beasts – to every small traveler passing by who needs, perforce, a home, a hiding, or a harbor.

      When I was a small boy everybody used to put up overnight at grandfather’s – for grandmother’s wit and buckwheat cakes, I think, which were known away down into Cape May County. It was so, too, with grandfather’s wisdom and brooms. The old house sat in behind a grove of pin-oak and pine, a sheltered, sheltering spot, with a peddler’s stall in the barn, a peddler’s place at the table, a peddler’s bed in the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless feather-bed, of a piece with the house and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in the neighborhood; but no other house in all the region, not even the tavern, two miles farther down the Pike, was half as central, or as homelike, or as full of sweet and juicy gossip.

      The old apple tree yonder between the woods and the meadow is as central, as hospitable, and, if animals communicate with one another, just as full of neighborhood news as was grandfather’s roof-tree.

      Did I say none but the cattle seek its shade? Go over and watch. That old tree is no decrepit, deserted shack of a house. There is no door-plate, there is no christened letter-box outside the front fence, because the birds and beasts do not advertise their houses that way. But go over, say, toward evening, and sit quietly down outside. You will not wait long, for the doors will open that you may enter – enter into a home of the fields, and, a little way at least, into a life of the fields, for this old tree has a small dweller of some sort the year round.

      If it is February or March you will be admitted by my owls. They take possession late in winter and occupy the tree, with some curious fellow tenants, until early summer. I can count upon these small screech-owls by February, – the forlorn month, the seasonless, hopeless, lifeless stretch of the year, but for its owls, its thaws, its lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possibility of swallows, and its being the year’s end. At least the ancients called February the year’s end, maintaining, with fine poetic sense, that the world was begun in March; and they were nearer the beginnings of things than we are.

      But the owls come in February, and if they are not swallows with the spring, they, nevertheless, help winter with most seemly haste into an early grave. Yet across the faded February meadow the old apple tree stands empty and drear enough – until the shadows of the night begin to fall.

      As the dusk comes down, I go to my window and watch. I cannot see him, the grim-beaked baron with his hooked talons, his ghostly wings, his night-seeing eyes; but I know that he has come to his window in the turret yonder on the darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the meadow, beating, dangling, dropping between the flattened tussocks; nor hear him, back on the silent shadows, slant upward again to his turret. Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even the quick-eared meadow-mouse did not hear.

      But I have been belated and forced to cross this wild night-land of his; СКАЧАТЬ