Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/32

22 Jes' scare 'em with the coals; thet 's my idee.'

Then, turning suddenly about on me,

'Wal, Square, I guess so. Callilate to stay?

I 'll ask Miss Weeks; 'bout thet it 's hern to say.'

"Well, there I lingered all October through,

In that sweet atmosphere of hazy blue,

So leisurely, so soothing, so forgiving,

That sometimes makes New England fit for living;

I watched the landscape, erst so granite glum,

Bloom like the south side of a ripening plum,

And each rock-maple on the hillside make

His ten days' sunset doubled in the lake;

The very stone walls draggling up the hills

Seemed touched, and wavered in their roundhead wills.

All! there 's a deal of sugar in the sun!

Tap me in Indian-summer, I should run

A juice to make rock-candy of,—but then

We get such weather scarce one year in ten.

"There was a parlor in the house, a room

To make you shudder with its prudish gloom.

The furniture stood round with such an air,

There seemed an old maid's ghost in every chair;

Each looked as it had scuttled to its place

And pulled extempore a Sunday face,

Too smugly proper for a world of sin,

Like boys on whom the minister comes in.

The table, fronting you with icy stare,

Strove to look witless that its legs were bare.

While the black sofa with its horse-hair pall

Gloomed like the bier for Comfort's funeral.

Two portraits graced the wall in grimmest truth,

Mister and Mistress W. in their youth,—

New England youth, that seems a sort of pill,

Half wish-I-dared, half Edwards on the Will,

Bitter to swallow, and which leaves a trace

Of Calvinistic cholic on the face.

Between them, o'er the mantel, hung in state

Solomon's temple, done in copperplate;

Invention pure, but meant, we may presume,

To give some Scripture sanction to the room.

Facing this last, two samplers you might see,

Each, with its urn and stiffly-weeping tree,

Devoted to some memory long ago

More faded than their lines of worsted woe;

Cut paper decked the frames against the flies,

Though none e'er dared an entrance who were wise,

And bushed asparagus in fading green

Added its shiver to the franklin clean.

"When first arrived, I chilled a half-hour there,

Nor dared deflower with use a single chair;