buy fruit or cream or butter, we were never annoyed by an impertinent question or look. Once only I overheard a remark not altogether civil, and that was on the evening before my birthday. One of them, the elder, said, as he went away from my house with a basket of cherries, that he should like to get speech with that polyglot old maid, who read, and wrote, and made her own butter-pats. The other answered, that the butter was excellent at any rate, and perhaps she had a classical cow; and they went down the lane laughingly disputing about the matter, not knowing that I was behind the currant-bushes.
"Polyglot old maid!" I thought, very indignantly, as I went into the house. "I've a mind not to sell them another cake of my butter. But I wonder if people call me an old maid. I wonder if I am one."
I thought of it all the evening, and dreamt of it all night, waking the next morning with a new realization of the subject. That first sense of a lost youth! How sharp and strong it comes! That suddenly opened north door of middle life, through which the winter winds rush in, sweeping out of the southern windows all the splendors of the earlier time; it is like a sea-turn in late summer. It has seemed to be June all along, and we thought it was June, until the wind went round to the east, and the first red leaf admonished us. By-and-by we close, as well as we may, that open door, and look out again from the windows upon blooms, beautiful in their way, to which some birds yet sing; but, alas! the wind is still from the east, and blows as though, far away, it had lain among icebergs.
So I mused all the morning, watering the sentiment with a bit of a shower out of my cloud; and when the shadows turned themselves, I went out to see how old age would look to me in the fields and woods. It was a delicious afternoon, more like a warm dream of hay-making, odorous, misty, sleepily musical, than a waking reality, on which the sun shone. Tremulous blue clouds lay down all around upon the mountains, and lazy white ones lost themselves in the waters; and through the dozing air, the faint chirp of robin or cricket, and ding of bells in the woods, and mellow cut of scythe, melted into one song, as though the heart-beat of the luscious midsummer-time had set itself to tune.
I walked on to loiter through the woods. No dust-brush for brain or heart like the boughs of trees! There dwells a truth, and pure, strong health within them, an ever-returning youth, promising us a glorious leafage in some strange spring-time, and a symmetry and sweetness that possess us until our thoughts grow skyward like them, and wave and sing in some sunnier strata of soul-air. In the woods I was a girl again, and forgot the flow of the hours in their pleasant companionship. I must have grown tired and sat down by a thicket of pines to rest, though I have forgotten, and perhaps I had fallen asleep; for suddenly I became conscious of a sharp report, and a sharper pain in my shoulder, and, tearing off my cape, I found the blood was flowing from a wound just below the joint. I remember little more, for a sudden faintness came over me; but I have an indistinct remembrance of people coming up, of voices, of being carried home, and of the consternation there, and long delay in obtaining the surgeon. The pain of an operation brought me fully to my senses; and when that was over, I was left alone to sleep, or to think over my situation at leisure. I'm afraid I had but little of a Christian spirit then. All my plans of labor and pleasure spoiled by this one piece of carelessness! to call it by the mildest term. All those nice little fancies that should have grown into real flesh-and-blood articles for my publisher, hung up to dry and shrivel without shape or comeliness! The garden, the dairy, the new bit of carriage-way through the beeches,—my pet scheme,—the new music, the sewing, all laid upon the shelf for an indefinite time, and I with no better employment than to watch the wall-paper, and to wonder if it wasn't almost dinner- or supper-time, or nearly daylight! To be sure, I knew and thought of all the improving reflections of a sick-room; but it was much like a mild-spoken person making peace among twenty quarrelsome ones. You can see him making mouths, but you don't hear a word he says.
A sick mind breeds fever fast in a sick body, and by night I was in a high fever, and for a day or two knew but little of what went on about me. One of the first things I heard, when I grew easier, was, that my neighbor, the sportsman, was waiting below to hear how I was. It was the younger one whose gun had wounded me; and he had shown great solicitude, they said, coming several times each day to inquire for me. He brought some birds to be cooked for me, too,—and came again to bring some lilies he had gone a mile to fetch, he told the girl. Every day he came to inquire, or to bring some delicacy, or a few flowers, or a new magazine for me, until the report of his visit came to be an expected excitement, and varied the dull days wonderfully. Sickness and seclusion are a new birth to our senses, oftentimes. Not only do we get a real glimpse of ourselves, undecked and unclothed, but the commonest habits of life, and the things that have helped to shape them day by day, put on a sort of strangeness, and come to shake hands with us again, and make us wonder that they should be just exactly what they are. We get at the primitive meaning of them, as if we rubbed off the nap of life, and looked to see how the threads were woven; and they come and go before us with a sort of old newness that affects us much as if we should meet our own ghost some time, and wonder if we are really our own or some other person's housekeeper.
I went through all this, and came out with a stock of small facts beside,—as, that the paper-hanger had patched the hangings in my chamber very badly in certain dark spots, (I had got several headaches, making it out,)—that the chimney was a little too much on one side,—that certain boards in the entry-floor creaked of their own accord in the night,—that Neighbor Brown had tucked a few new shingles into the roof of his barn, so that it seemed to have broken out with them,—and any number of other things equally important. At length I got down-stairs, and was allowed to see a few friends. Of course there was an inundation of them; and each one expected to hear my story, and to tell a companion one, something like mine, only a little more so. It was astonishing, the immense number of people that had been hurt with guns. No wonder I was sick for a day or two afterward. I was more prudent next time, however, and, as the gossips had got all they wanted, I saw only my particular friends. Among these my neighbor, the sportsman, insisted on being reckoned, and after a little hesitation we were obliged to admit him. I say we,—for, on hearing of my injury, my good cousin, Mary Mead, had come to nurse and amuse me. She was one of those safe, serviceable, amiable people, made of just the stuff for a satellite, and she proved invaluable to me. She was immensely taken with Mr. Ames, too, (I speak of the younger, for, after the first call of condolence, the elder sportsman never came,) and to her I left the task of entertaining him, or rather of doing the honors of the house,—for the gentleman contrived to entertain himself and us.
Now don't imagine the man a hero, for he was no such thing. He was very good-looking,—some might say handsome,—well-bred, well educated, with plenty of common information picked up in a promiscuous intercourse with town and country people, rather fine tastes, and a great, strong, magnanimous, physical nature, modest, but perfectly self-conscious. That was his only charm for me. I despise a mere animal; but, other things being equal, I admire a man who is big and strong, and aware of his advantages; and I think most women, and very refined ones, too, love physical beauty and strength much more than they are willing to acknowledge. So I had the same admiration for Mr. Ames that I should have had for any other finely proportioned thing, and enjoyed him very much, sitting quietly in my corner while he chatted with Mary, or told me stories of travel or hunting, or read aloud, which he soon fell into the way of doing.
We did try, as much as hospitality permitted, to confine his visits to a few ceremonious calls; but he persisted in coming almost every day, and walked in past the girl with that quiet sort of authority which it is so difficult to resist. In the same way he took possession of Mary and me. He was sure it must be very dull for both of us; therefore he was going, if we would pardon the liberty, to offer his services as reader, while my nurse went out for a ride or a walk. Couldn't I sit out under the shadow of the beech-trees, as well as in that hot room? He could lift the chair and me perfectly well, and arrange all so that I should be comfortable. He would like to superintend the cooking of some birds he brought one day. He noticed that the girl didn't do them quite as nicely as he had learned to do them in the woods. And so in a thousand things he quietly made us do as he chose, without seeming to outrage any rule of propriety. When I was able to sit in a carriage, he persuaded me to drive with him; and I had to lean on his arm, when I first went round the place to see how matters went on.
Once I protested against his making himself so necessary to us, and told him that I didn't care to furnish the gossips so much food