Page:Brown·Bread·from·a·Colonial·Oven-Baughan-1912.pdf/95

 periwinkles, lit with purple stars, hid kindly the unwashen step, and surged against the never-opening door. Upon the little lawn, smooth once as Bossu’s hairless head, the scythe was now sadly needed, and shears should long since have been used about the shell-paved weeping-ash arbour where the two old comrades had been wont to sit together, to smoke their pipes of modern (how inferior!) tobacco, to drink the Australian vintage that compared, how unfavourably! with the old, rough red vin du pays, and to speak one with another the dear old tongue. Bossu, it is true, had been of France, not of Switzerland, and had been wont, therefore, at times, to suggest alternatives to Philippe’s phrases and pronunciation; not always without a little natural irritation on both sides; Ninon had often had to allay excitement. Still he had been, in some sort after all, a compatriot, and in all ways a comrade.

And Ninon, too. Not so pretty, not so pretty, as that earlier, fresher Ninon, laid to rest—could it be, eh, mon Dieu! forty-two years since? in the little churchyard over there by the milk-white glacier-stream. . . but named for her, and young like her, and kind—Ninon, too, was gone away; they said, to the married sister in the North Island: there was nobody left! And a shingle, see! was off the roof; the chimney needed repairing, the gate swung loose. The old place was staunch enough to last for years to come, if it were but properly looked after, but, left all to itself like this, it would soon grow damp, it would quickly rot, and young Bossu would presently have excuse enough to pull it down and build upon its site that cheese