Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/293

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A MORE PARTICULAR DESCRIPTION. By Wendell P. Stafford. HP HE lawyer, intent at his table, held Chitty apart by a leaf, While his quill ran creaking and straining down the driest page of his brief. A footfall — the rickety stairway groaning each step like sin — A silence of hesitation — and his visitor ventured in.

"I've bargained my woodland, lawyer, and want the deed made out; I fetched the old one with me; it tells ye all 't 's about." The squire took up the paper and read, in hurried tones, "Beginning, for a corner, at a stake in a pile of stones, Thence northward (rods so many), thence east (so many more), Thence south to a brook called Miller's, and back along the shore" — Then he rose and went to the window, rubbing his glasses hard, And stared at the mating robins in the elms across the yard. "Ahem! I know this woodland, — it's many and many a year, — Perambulated it, in fact (this old deed isn't clear). I saw it last the summer before I was twenty-one; But I can tell to-day, sir, how those boundaries ought to run : Beginning in the shadow of a low-boughed maple-tree, Thence winding up a thicket as far as you can see; Turn at the leaning bar-way, follow a lane of flowers To a corner kept by squirrels, where the sun sleeps hours and hours; Then take the mossy foot-path adown the alder dale, Hung over by the birches, crossed by the rabbits' trail, — Beside the brook that lingers along a dusky glen With here and there a whisper, and a trout-leap now and then, — As far as two may wander in the twilight, heart in heart, — And back to the bound begun at for a place to kiss and part."

He stood and watched the robins, and one particular pair That seemed to be having a quarrel in the elm-trees over there. But the farmer had gone; and his neighbors that took the farmer's say Debated the squire's insanity for a twelvemonth and a day.