ROMANCE OF A BARN-YARD.

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 34, 25 May 1878, Page 4

ROMANCE OF A BARN-YARD.

(From Harper's Monthly Magazine.) We were all sitting on the piazza, except those of us that were swinging in the hammocks among the trees; the sea wind was blowing over us, the birds were daitiag low here and there, and the bantams and the spring chickens and the big black Cochins were clucking and picking in the grass, watched over by the old King Charles, who redeemed us from vulgarity, and it was a scene of domestic comfort, as Aunt Helen said. Aunt Helen, by-the-way, became a very pleasant addition to the comfortable appearance of the scene as she said it Sho was just as plump as a woman ought to be when her next birthday is maybe her fortieth. She had a soft flush on her cheek, where the dimple was yet as fresh as when she was a girl, and the flush deepened sometimes into a real damask; her teeth were like rows of seed-corn for whiteness, and her eyes were just as brown as brook water; only her hair—that was quite white. Lovely hair, though, for all that; she parted it evenly over her low level forehead and above the yet black eyebrows; and we all deolared, every day of our lives, that, Aunt Helen was a beauty. " I used to be," she had replied; " but that's all gone now. I have put my youth behiud me." Perhaps she had. But we young people used to think differently when we saw Mr. Thornton coming up the road, and Aunt Helen's eyes resolutely bent on her work, but her colo ir mounting and mounting, till the redd st ruse that evoi burned in the sunshine was not so ri li Mr. Thornton saw it too, no doubt f r he always looked and looked intently all the way by. But the truth was—l shall have to tell you all about it if I tell you any—that when Aunt Helen was twenty years younger, she and Mr. Thornton were lovers, as they had been lovers ever since they could remomber. They had built their house at last, and her wedding dross was made. If she was a beauty he was every inch her mate—l know he was because he is to-day—one of the men it does you good to see, who look as if thov could hold up the world if need be, and inspire you with confidence in th'ir power. Now what in the world do you suppose that, with their house furnished, and the cake baked, and a dozen years of intimate affection to bind them, Aunt Helen and Mr. Thornton found to quarrel about ? She declared she wouldn't keep hens! And he declared that then he wouldn't keep house! That was the whole of it, to condense the statement; one word led to another, and another ltd to more, and finally, in a towering passion himself, he told Aunt Helen that she had better learn to control her temper if she didn't want to be a vixen entirely, and Aunt Helen took the ring off her finger and laid it on the table without a word and sailed out of the room, and refused to see bim when he called in the morning, and sent back hie letter unopened, and cut the wedding cake and put some of it on the tea table and sent the rest to the fair. Perhaps, on the whole, Mr. Thornton might have been right. Exactly one week from that night Mr. Thornton was married to Mary Mayhew, an inoffensive little body who would have married any body that asked her, and she went into the house that had been furnished according to Aunt Helen's taste; and immediately afterward a henhouse of the most fanciful description of architecture, with gilded vanes and scarlet ohanticleors bristling all over it, rose on the hill behind his house, full of fancy fowl,, and the little lawn was all alive ■with its overflow, and you couldn't go by the place without meeting a flock of cropple crown, or partridge Cochin, or white Leghorn, or black Spanish, flying up on each separate piece of fence to crow ont Mr. Thornton's triumph—reversing the old tradition of the crower, and crying, " No women rule here!" They say Mr. Thornton grew very old in a few years. His inoffensive little thing of a wife turned out to be a smart termagant, who led him a pretty dance. Perhaps she was dissatisfied with her piece of a heart; but then she knew that was all when she took it. He treated hor always gently—perhaps feeling he had done her some wrong in marrying her and gratified her overy wish, although, having cared nothing for her in the beginning, it is doubtful if he cared any more for her in the end. The end came after oighteen years, when Mrs. Thornton was killed in a railroad collision, and her husband waß left with four children on his hands, rude, noisy, ill-faringcubs, as all the neighbours said. If Mr. Thornton had ever impatiently chanced to think that his punishment had lasted long enough, he thought now that it was just beginning, when he found himself alone with those children. He wondered that his wife had any temper left at all. He grew more bent, more vexed and worried, •every day, and one would hardly have recognised, people said, the dark and splendid Stephen Thornton of his youth in this middle-aged, gray-haired man; and yet, to our eyes, he was still quite a remarkable looking person—perhaps more so from our associating him with the poetry in Aunt Helen's life, and making him an object ef wonder as to whotlicr or not now they would ever come together again. But there was little chance of that We had met Mr. Thornton elsewhere, but ho had never como across our threshold since the day he went out with his brido's I ring. 'And Aunt Helen's peculiarity was that she never forgot. "Could she, then, [ forget the words he spoke to her in his ' anger ? Could she ever forget his marrying another woman within a week ? It iaj boon in that week and a few follow-

ing that her hair had turned white. She had suffered inexpressibly; she had never slept a night; but she kept up a ear fact. Perhaps she would have suffered longer if it bad not been for our growing up j about her. Her life was thus filled, every moment of it; she had but very little time to be lonely, to brood, or mourn. ' She forgot herself in us. It gave her a r'et happiness, and kept her comely, d then she was too proud : whenever the thought thrust up its head, she shut the lid down, as you may say, and sat on it.

But one day—after the time when the doctor had said Harry was a hopeless oripple, and must lie on his back the rest of his life—Aunt Helen brought home a little basket from the county fair, and took from the wool within it two of the cunningest mites of chickens you ever laid your eyes on. " I hate them," said she, " they make me craw); but they will amuse the dear child. They're African bantams." And so they did amuse him and delight him, as he lay on his lounge in the bay window and watched them growing up full of business. And that was the way, by-the-way, that we came to have ohickens round the front piazzas. One night, a year afterward, when the bantams were quite grown people, somebody dropped over the fence a pair of big black Cochins, that staulked about as if the earth was too good to tread on, or as if they were afraid of crushing a bantam with the next step. Of course we knew where the Cochins came from—for nobody else in town had any—but no one said a word. Only it was sport on the next day to peer round the corner and see Aunt Helen, with a piece of bread in her hand, in doubt whether to have anything to do with those fowls or not, twice extending her hnnd with t;,e crumbs and snatching it back again, and at lost making one bold effort, and throwing the whole thing at thom, and hurrying into the house. But from that moment the ever-hungry Cochins 6eeiued to regard her as their patron saint. She never appeared but they came stalking gingerly along to meet her, and at last one even made so bold as to tty up and porch on the back of her chair on the piazza. Of course he was shooed off with vigour—with a little move vigour, perhaps, because Mr. Thornton had al that moment been passing, and had seen !i w man who would never keep hen- pre.- anting that tableau. It was two or three days after that

that Aunt Helen, coming home at ;«■; light from one of her rambles by the river-bank, was observed to be very nervous and Hushed, an i to look much js it sho hud been crying. " It's all right," said our Ned, coming I in jhortly after her. ' I know all about it. I've been setting my eel traps , and what do you think—she met old Thornton —" " Ned !" " She did indeed. And what'll you say to that man's cheek ' tie up and spoke to her'" " Oh, now, Ned ! Before you ?" "Fact Before >i,e ( No, indeed . i lay low," s::id Ned, with achuckle. " But. bless yon, they wouldn't have seen mu if I had stood high." " For shame, Ned ! Oh, how c >ul sou —and Aunt Helen !" " Guess you'll have been no bptter in my place," said the unscrupulous boy. " But there, that's all. If I couldn't listen, of you can't." " Oh, now, Ned, please !" we all chorused together. " Well, then. He stood straight before her. ' Helen,' said he,' have you forgotten me t and she began to turn white. ' I have had time enough, sir,' she said." "Oh, you ought not to have staid, Ned?" " You may find out the rest by your learning," said the offended narrator. "I should like to know how I was goiiiir to leave. Only I'll say this, that if Aunt Helen would marry old Thornton to-day She wouldn't touch him with a walk-ing-stick I" To our amazement, on the very next afternoon who should appear at our gate, whith his phaeton ani pair, but Mr. Thornton; and who, bonneted and gloved and veiled, Bhould issue from the door, to be placed in that phaeton and drive off with him, but Aunt Helon. Ned chuckled; but the rest of us could do nothing but wonder. " Has she gone to be married?" we gisped. Aud Lill and Harry began to ory. " Well, I'll tell you," said Ned, in mexoy. " Ho said there'd never been a day since he loft her that he hadn't longed for what he throw away." " Oh, how wicked !" " She told him so, very quietly and severely—l tell you, Aunt Helen can be severe—and to bo silent on that point. ' For ever ?' said he. ' And ever,' said she. 'lt is impossible,' said he. And then he went over, ono by one, a dozen different days and scenes when they were young; and if ever a fellow felt mean, I was the one."

" I should think you would," we cried with one accord.

" Now look horo," rcturnod Ned. " If ynu want to hear the rest, you keop that ! sort of remark to yourself. It was too j lato for uio to show myself, anyway. (And I'll bo blamed if I'll say mint her •word if you don't everyone acknowledge, you'd have done just a* 1 did." " Oh, Ned, do toll the whole, at's a good boy I" " Well, she iust began to ery—l never saw Aunt Helen cry before. And then It seemed M if he wotdd go distracted . and he bagged her not to cry, and ehe '< cried the more; and ho begged her to main- hitn out rf hand I kumv ju»( how to do it uow ; only it doesn't seem a

very successful way — and she shook her head ; aod he implored her by their old lore, he said, and she wiped her eyes, anil looked at him, and gave a laugh—a hateful sort of laugh. ' Our old love !' said she. ' Then,' said he,' if you will not for j my sake, nor for your own sake, por for | the sake of that old love, marry me for I the sake of the motherless children who need you more than children ever needed a mother yet, and who—who are driving me crazy ! And then Aunt Helen laughed in earnest, a good, sweet, ringing peal; and the long and the short of it is that she has driven up to the Thornton house to-day, to look at the cubs and see what she thinks about them. Maybe she'll bring them down here—she's great od missionary work, you know." " Well, I declare !" was tho final chorus And we sat in silence a good half hour; and by the time our tongues were running again, Aunt Helen had returned, and Mr. Thornton had come in with her and sat down upon the piazza step at her feet, but not at all with the air of an accepted lover—much more like a tenant of Mohammed's coffin, we thought. And, as I began to tell you, we were all sitting and swinging there when Aunt Helen exclaimed about it being a scene of domestic comfort. As she sat down, the big black Cochin hen came to meet her, and Aunt Helen threw her a bit of water cracker, a supply of which she always carried about her nowadays. " Why, where's your husband ?" said she to the hen.

" There he is," said Ned. " He's been up alone in that corner of the grass the whole day, calling and clucking and inviting company; but the rest haven't paid the slightest attention to him, and are picking and scratching down among the carinas." " Oh, but he's been down there twice, Ned," cried Harry, " and tried to whip the little bantam, but it was a drawn battle." " Well, he ought to have a little vacation, and scratch for himself a while." said Aunt Helen. "He has picked and scratched for his hen and family in the most faithful way all summer." " And so's the bantv," said Ned. " The bantam's the best; ho's taken as much care of tho chickens as the nen has, anvway; and he never went to roost once all the time his hen was setting, Mr. Thornton, hut sat right down in the straw beside tier every night." A model spouse," said Aunt Helen. "They are almost human," said Mr I'll irnton. And so we sat talking tin the tea hell rang, for Mr. Thornton was going to stay to tea, he boldly told ua : and we saw that he meant to get all the young people on his side by trie way ho ■'.•-'.,'.".ii to talk to -Nci about trout arm pi. keivl, and about deepsea fishing ; bit: when ho go* lo eel traps, Ned's lace n, purple, and he blessed that tea bell, 1 fancy However, Mr Thornton might have found that it wasn't so easy to range tbu young people on bis side if he had m. ;■ ,1 ioug continued effort. We enjoyed ii romance tinder our oyes, but we ii'id no s-irt of notion of bis taking otu Aunt ill-lon away. We were just coming toil, from tea, and were patronising the sun'sel a little, which wa-s uucomouly tine, and I thought I bad never soon Aunt Helen looking like such a beauty, with that rich light overlaying her like a rosy bloom, when J.'hn came hastening up. " I just want you all t . -ton inside the barn door with me, if you please ma'am," said he. And we went alter him to bo greeted In tho sweet smell of the newmown hay, and to lie gilded by the an' great broad sunbeam swimming full of a glory of motes from door to door: "Do you see that," said John. It was a flock of the hens and chicKens on their customary roosts. " Atol now do von c that ?" said he ; and he turned about and showed us, on the top rail of t,h- pony's manger, the big black Cochin also gone to roost, but separately—and his wife beside him ? No, but little Mrs. Bantam I "That's who he has been .clucking and calling-to this whole afternoon, the wrotcfi!" cried Ned. "Andnowlook here," said lihutani followed him into theharness-room: where the chickens had chanced to be hatched, and there, in the straw on the floor, sat the disconsolate little bantam rooster, all alone, with his wings spread and his feathers puffed out, brooding his lour little chickens under his wings—the four little chickens deserted by their mother. " I declare ! I declare 1" cried Aun\ Helen, as wo came out into the great moty aunbeam again ; " tho times are so depraved that it has really reached the barn-yard. The poor little banty and his brood I Why, it's as bad as the forsaken merman.'

" Only not so poetical," said we. " Helen," said Mr. Thornton, " it is exactly my condition. Are you going to have pity for that bird, and none for me ? Are you going to leave mc to my fate ?" And in a moment, right before us all, as she stood in the great red sunbeam, Mr. Thornton put his arms round Aunt Helen, who, growing rosier and rosier, either from the sunbeam or something else, could do nothing at last but hido her face " Helen," ho said, " you are certain ry coming homo with mc r And Aunt Helen <li . not sa. no.