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6
Worth Womans While
Some Old Neighbors.
E see in this day of fad and fashion few
figures that approach to Miss Jinnie’s.
A couple of decades behind the prevail
ing mode in dress, her mother’s silks
were of even earlier date, but Mrs. Ash,
being “an old lady,” unmistakably and
undeniably—for twenty years ago there
were old ladies, little as the spirit of
the present time may comprehend it—
W
it was not so noticeable; the more that for
a good part of the year they were pretty well
concealed by the shawl she wore folded to reach
well down behind in a point, and to lie comforta
bly in her lap in two other points, as she sat dur
ing the sermon with her little fat hands clasped,
and the strings of her bonnet pinned neatly under
her chin. Church was the only place Mrs. Ash was
ever known to go.
Mrs. Parker’s shawl was folded in a point, too,
and came almost to her heels where her little black
and-tan terrier. Jack, trotted behind, the only dif
ference being that where Mrs. Ash’s shawl was
silk, hers was wool. It was like the difference be
tween the two houses—Mrs. Barker’s was one-story
and unpainted, and opened immediately on the
street, while Miss Jinnie’s sat somewhat back in
the shade, was two-story and had once known a coat
of red and white. The house was Miss Jinnie’s
own, left her by her husband who had been dead
many years, and was always spoken of as having
been a “peculiar man”—one of the peculiarities
oftenest cited being that on arising from a night’s
rest the first article of apparel donned was his hat.
Mrs. Ash was only her mother—a short, placid lit
tle lady contented to walk demurely by the side of
the tall daughter who always reminded Clarissa of
a hollyhock, straight, unbending stem and pink
bloom at the top—Miss Jinnie’s complexion was
a marvel till Clarissa discovered the secret behind
the sunbonnet she wore when about her household
duties—namely, flour paste spread over her face.
Between her and Mrs. Barker lay that lady’s gar
den, so that any passage of words which might be
necessary became an easy matter over the fence.
On the other side of Mrs. Barker ran a lane leading
to the cemetery, across which were the syringas and
bridal wreaths of the Brewtons—Mr. Brewton, Mrs.
Brewton and Clarissa—and it was only a grass lot
that divided us from them, which is irrelevant, but
going to explain our proximity to a goodly company
of choice spirits, the like of which is not seen in
this day of sameness in patterns. We lived there,
as the nursery rhyme says, “Silver bells and cockle
shells, and little maids all in a row”—in front of
us on a little green rise the old church with its
Corinthian pillars where birds nested and made
merry, and, in what might have been to some, grue
some nearness to the cedars and gray-gleaming
stones of the cemetery visible from our back doors.
We did not so regard it. Clarissa did not. Yet a
child at sixteen, no inmate of her little world was
dull or uninteresting. Her father’s regular visits
on Sunday to Mrs. Ash and Miss Jinnie were as
vital in interest to her and in the mild gossip
passed, as any events in her never-lonely life.
“Pa and Mrs. Ash like to sit and talk—two old
folks together,” the girl would say. As to Miss
Jinnie’s age, I don’t suppose anybody ever before
thought of age in connection with her pretty, round
face and shining dark hair; she never grew older.
Mrs. Brewton had been all Clarissa’s life bedrid
den; so it was that Mr. Brewton found it incumbent
upon him to return to the two ladies the frequent
and neighborly visits to his wife made by Miss
Jinnie at any time during the week, and in his turn
always on Sunday; it was to him diversion, yet
perfectly godly; being a classleader he sought nat
urally the company of the elect. Armed in summer
with a palm-leaf fan, and in winter wrapped in the
great cloth cape which made him look in Clarissa’s
eyes like an old Boman Senator, he sallied forth
The Golden Age for September 27, 1906.
By FLORENCE TUCKER
followed by the girl’s loving gaze; though she called
him old in view of his sixty odd, to her he never
was so. It was often about the same hour that
Mrs. Barker would come in for a Sunday
chat with Mrs. Brewton, when that lady
would lay aside her glasses and listen, gen
uinely absorbed in the precision of her neighbor’s
remarks. Mrs. Barker had away when speaking
with unction of closing her lips at the corners and
articulating with her head on one side and an as
sumption of unusualness, which (it was the only
affectation ever known to her, if even it might be
called such) must have been really becoming, for
nobody ever thought of criticising it. Indeed, there
would have been little satisfaction in doing so, for
nothing so throws ridicule back upon itself as the
indifference of the object at which it is aimed, and
Mrs. Barker was above petty meannesses. The
only times she was ever known to descend to the
level of bickering humanity were when her chick
ens were found straying in Miss Jinnie’s unused
garden. Standing on her side the fence, encased in
sunbonnet and gloves, Miss Jinnie’s voice with its
unmistakable note of aggressiveness would call out:
“Mrs. Barker! Oh, Mrs. Barker!” when that
personage would bob out of her roasting-ear patch,
or rise up from the ground where she had been
weeding.
“Your chickens are in my garden!”
“Well, I don’t guess they have hurt anything—
there’s nothing there,” would come with some as
perity. Whereupon Miss Jinnie would respond:
“If I wanted chickens on my place I’d have some
of my own,” and words would ensue; Miss Jinnie
thereafter marching with sunbonnet erect into the
house fb go over the rencontre with “Ma,” and
Mrs. Barker going back to her work with a renewed
energy which bespoke determination; or, if it chanc
ed to occur on a Saturday morning any time before
ten o’clock, arming herself with rake and an old
straw broom she would take her way out the lane
to the cemetery. On one of these occasions Claris
sa sat, as she had often done before, on the back
porch,
“Mother.” she called to the invalid lying within,
“has Mrs. Barker been going to the cemetery every
Saturday morning since the flood?”
“Oh, no!” came the reply, “only since the
war. ’ ’
“Was Mr. Barker killed in the war?”
“No, he was marshal of the town just after the
war, and was shot in a negro riot while attempting
to maintain the peace.”
“Well, that picture she has on his tombstone is
of a man in a soldier’s uniform, and a very good
looking man, too.”
“Yes, that was taken during the war; it’s curious
how it has stayed there so many years with only
that glass to protect it.”
“Well, mother, let me tell you!” cried Clarissa,
rising and going in. “You know the Naylor baby’s
grave? The last time I was over there somebody
had broken the glass that holds all those little
things, and taken the jet-and-gold necklace and
cross! The little shoes and broken toys the child
had were all there, and looking as if about to crum
ble away, but the necklace was gone.”
“Well, they’ve been there a long time—as long
almost as Mr. Barker’s picture.”
“How did he ever come to marry her anyway,
mother?” laughed Clarissa. “It is so funny to
think of Mrs. Barker having a lover and being mar
ried.”
“Why, you know in the war times the women
made up clothing and knitted socks, and fixed boxes
of all the comforts that could be procured, to send
to the soldiers. They all got together and packed
them, and some of the girls put their names on the
articles they had made. Merlin Stone was one who
did; and when the things with her name, all neatly
made and suggestive of womanly kindness, fell to
Mr. Barker, I suppose he thought a good deal about
it, Certainly after the close of the war he sought
her out, and they were married, but soon afterward
he was killed and she has lived there alone ever
since except for her roomers, and a good deal of
the time the rooms have not been taken. They must
have been lonely years.”
“Just with Jack and Becky,” said Clarissa.
1 ‘ Yes, her dog and her cow have been a great deal
to her—and to us—for where would my little girl
have gotten the milk for her coffee but for old
Becky?” said Mrs. Brewton, settling her glasses
and resuming her paper.
Clarissa picked one leaf after another from the
pomegranite bush which spread up over the window
sill. She was thinking of Mrs. Barker’s faithful
and loving care of Becky. No stall was more
comfortable; dry and warm in winter, it was in
roughest weather the creature was most in the
thought of her mistress; and in summer the sweet
est of pasturage was hers, the garden contributing
forage and at certain seasons grazing, at which
times she deported herself with the dignity of one
coming into her own. Becky was always a mild
mannered cow, and accepted with the appreciation
of understanding the kindness of her lot. If her
affection was not expressed as demonstratively as
was Jack’s, she had not the same privilege of near
ness, and then, it was not her way; Jack was of a
vivacious temperament, and he was constantly with
his mistress, even trotting cheerfully behind as she
reached her seat in the amen corner on Sundays,
and conducting his nap throughout the sermon with
the utmost decorum.
“Jack’s got enough better church manners than
Miss Jinnie Stamp or old Mrs. Ash, either,” said
Vinnie, the sexton’s little daughter, to Clarissa one
day. “She needn’t to think I’d go to that little
old school she’s er teachin’ in that house in her
yard! Pa isays he’d be afraid some judgment
would come on us, like ’twill on her some day.
Why, what do you think?’ she shook her finger in
Clarissa’s face with the very look of an embryo
prohpet'ess—(“When me and Lida sweeps the
church out after ev’ry Sacrament Sunday, there’s
the Sacrament bread where Miss Jinnie and Mrs.
Ash throwed it down when they went back to their
seats! You know that tombstone what won’t set
up straight, and the top of it’s done fell off and
nobody can’t make it stay on?”—she continued,
growing pale and rigid with superstition. “The
young man that’s buried there walked straight from
the Sacrament table and fed the bread to a dog,
and that young man fell dead at the church door!
You know it! There, Miss Jinnie and Mrs. Ash
throwed that bread down—Jack could have eat it,
but he had too much manners to do it!”
If Mrs. Barker shared in Vinnie’s sentiments as
to the respective respectability of her neighbors and
her dog, she was less open in their expression,
though, as she walked the earthly way, she had to
confess to herself Miss Jinnie was the thorn in her
flesh. She was sitting one afternoon smarting un
der a recent conflict when Clarissa came in to bring
the last week’s Advocate and get an extra pound of
butter. Going out into the kitchen so absorbed she
was in weighing out the butter her ear failed to note
the approach or entrance of a man at the open door
way. Clarissa did not at first notice him, either;
she was thinking of the young soldier whose grate
ful heart had led him to find love and home with the
matter-of-fact, kindly little woman whose prosaic
life was so little suggestive of sentiment. But then
she had been young, and, no doubt, softer; she fell
to conjuring up the sort of girl Mrs. Barker must
have been, as her eyes went over with renewed in
terest each old-fashioned article about the room,
the tester bed with its curious little railing around
the top that must have been so nice with the cur
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her own hands had woven in those early days; and
there on the mantel shelf the tall, queer clock like
none Clarissa had ever seen, and hanging above it
the picture of a man in a little round frame,
(Concluded next week.)