Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1884 — Once Upon a Time. [ARTICLE]

Once Upon a Time.

How quiet was the farm that afternoon! Everything nodded and dozed in the sun or rested in the shade. How i the sun streamed down on meadow and j field! The corn-blades drooped and wilted. Iu the old hill field I could see j Uie men in the wheat, their arms swayI ing in perfect rhythm with the swinging cradles. And how like silver the bright blades flashed as they turned! The bees droned and. drummed lazily about the old-fashioned “cypress” under the sitting-room windows. We always called it “cyprus,” you know, because that wasn’t the name of it; and they buzzed in vagrant fashion up and down the long rows of flowers that lined the path to the front gate. The morn-ing-glories had closed their bright eyes of blue and pink, but a forest of 4 o’clocks were getting ready to wake up; the boll \ hocks stood up like blossoming beanpoles. I always used to think that Aaron’s rod, when it “brought forth buds and bloomed blossoms,” looked like a hollyhock; it yielded al- . monds, but it looked like a hollyhock, I know. The breath of the old-fash-ioned pinks—no, dear, they were not carnations; he had no carnations then; they were just pinks—came sweetly on the air; and the fro w.-y bush of “old man” at the corner looked old and wilted indeed; in the bla ing heat a tall group of sunflowers stood up like a cluster of hospitable umbrellas; the big bunch of “ribbon-grass” looked as seasonable ps a striped summer silk, with the larkspurs drooping over it on one side, and on the other a group of “rugged robins” standing up, cherry and blue as the skies. As though it was not sensibly warm enough to sight as well as feeling. a colony of poppies stood blazing away above their pale leaves, while the coxcomb and Prince of Wales feather added an unnecessary touch of warmth to the paterre. And here, there, everywhere and trying to get somewhere else the “Bouncing Bets” swarmed all over the garden, crept through the garden fence, and ran right along iu the corners and right by the dusty roadside, among the disreputable dog-fennel and plebeian rag-weed, clear down to where the big slough c osses the road. I laid under the big Morello che.rv tree by the new well- the one near the house, you remember, seventy-eight feet deep, aud yielded the coldest, clearest water iu America —aud lazily watehed a few straogling, fleecy clouds sailing aimlessly across the blue skies, as though they had lost their reckoning, and were only waiting to be picked up and set right. I could hear thi old clock tick solemnly away in the sitting room. It limped a little on its way around the dial, and always ticked loudest on the left hand swing of the pendulum; and it had a startl ng way of going off at unexpected times in a funny sort of noise that sounded like a conga or a chuckle, whichever would scare you most. The girls had gone to town. Grandma sat in the open sitting-room door sewing. Grandfather stood in the cool shade at tlie long work-bench at the end of the kitchen, making a new singletree for the light wagon. They could not see each other. I doubt if they heard, or at any rate observed, each other’s voices; but I could very plainly see and bear each one, and I forgot my book listening to them, and Irving to guess their thoughts from their disjointed, changing, abrupt fragments of song. And the occasional flutter of leaves stirred by a wandering breath of wind, the shadows dimpling the second growth of red clover, the stray ng note of a restless bird, the long, dusty road, stretching far away past the woods to the “high prairie,” the flash of a buttertlv’s wings—how it all harmonized with the broken songs that fell almost unconsciously at times from the old lips, while “the singers were over with the business of tlie house;” while the whole earth is at rest, and is quiet, they break forth into s uging. Robert J. Burdette, in Brooklyn Eagle.