Page:The Poor Rich Man, and the Rich Poor Man.djvu/18

10 with its burden of willows, elders, and clematis; of a summer evening, their every leaf lit with the firefly's lamp;—nor why their eye glances from the white houses of the village street, glimmering through the trees, and far away over the orchards and waving grain of the uplands, and past the wavy line of hills that bound the horizon on one side, to fix on the bald gray peaks of that mountain wall whose Indian story the poet has consecrated. Time will solve to them this why.

Under those sycamores, on a certain afternoon many years past, sat Charlotte May, a pale, sickly-looking girl, talking with Harry Aikin; and beside them Susan May, whose ruddy cheek, laughing eye, and stocky little person presented an almost painful contrast to her stricken sister. Charlotte was examining with a very pleased countenance a new little Bible, bound in red morocco. "Did Mr. Reed give you your choice of the prizes, Harry?" she asked.

"Oh, no; Mr. Reed is too much afraid of exciting our emulation, or rivalry, as he calls it, for that. He would not even call the books he gave us prizes; but he just told us what virtue, or rather quality, we had been most distinguished for."

"I guess I know what yours was, Harry," said Susan May, looking up from weaving a wreath of nightshade that grew about them.

"What do you guess, Susy?"

"Why, kindness to everybody!"

"No, not that."

"Well, then, loving everybody."

Harry laughed and shook his head. "No, nor that, Susy;" and, opening to the first unprinted page