Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/348

 in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginning to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity of their summer retreat.

Miss Abigail overheard a conversation to this effect one day between some self-invited visitors to her wonderful garden. Her heart burned and her face blackened. "You might as well," she told them, "laugh at the funny faces of a person who's choking to death!"

The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her. "How so?"

"Roads aren't for grass to grow in!" she fulminated. "They're for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go over to and from their homes."

"Ah, economic conditions," they began to murmur. "The inevitable laws of supply and" "Get out of my garden!" Miss Abigail raged at them. "Get out!"

They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint ferocity, and she had sworn wrathfully never to let another city dweller inside her gate—a resolution which she was forced to forego as time passed on and she became more and more hard pressed for ammunition.

Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundred dollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened. She no longer dared afford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden. She spaded the beds herself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child's express wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands. When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation from lack