Under The Old Elms - Paperback

Under the Ol d Elms BY MARY B. CLAFLIN MTTHOROF BRAMPTON SKETCHES, PERSOKAL OI. IJBCTZOKS OF JOHN G. WHITTIBR, REAL HAPPHNTXGS n NEW YORK 46 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET THOMAS Y. CRO YELL, 5 COMPANY BOSTON 100 PURCHASE STREET TO HIM WHOSE OPEN-HEARTED HOSPITALITY AND UNSWERVING LOYALTY TO HOME AND FRIENDS AND COUNTRY MADE THE OLD ELMS A DELIGHT TO ITS INMATES t THESE MEMORIES OF HAPPY DAYS SPENT THERE ARE DEDICATED. UNDER THE OLD ELMS. I. UNDER THE OLD ELMS. As if to music they had grown, Stately and fair the elms uprise, Their swaying shadows earthward thrown, Their tops rejoicing in the skies. What life and death, what love and pain, What nights of gloom and days of gold, Have passed beneath their leafy reign Yet still their ancient pride they hold, Still tower oer roof and slope and plain, And link the new years to the old. FOR two hundred years the have been growing on a grassy bank in Newton, Massachusetts. Harps for the winds, they have thrilled to the breath of June, or bent in the blasts Under tbe Old Elms. of December. Homes for the birds, they have rocked the nests of the robin and the oriole, whose songs echo through their sylvan paradise. The lawn they shadow is broad and green, and at its farther side a low wall separates it from the village street. Through it there runs a brook with pleasant ripple and flow, crossing the field beyond to be lost in the Charles River two miles away. There grow the earliest flowers of spring, violets, anemones, hepaticas, to be followed by buttercups and daisies, and, in their season, by clusters of golden-rod and purple asters. The place is said to have been a part of the Newton estate of Governor Si mon Bradstreet, from whom it passed eventuallyto the Fuller family. That the region has been long settled is Under tbe Old Elms. shown by the fact that the homestead near it has been in the possession of one family for two hundred years. Judge Fuller, whose farm a century ago comprised nearly the whole of what is now the village of Newtonville, cul tivated the fruitful acres and on Thanksgiving Day, when his children and grandchildren were gathered about the ancestral board, beneath the old elms, he was wont to say with satis faction, My dear children, I hope you realize that every article of food before you was raised on this farm. And there was no lack of variety, with the plump turkey, the geese, ducks, and chickens, the cranberry tart let, the popcorn, the sweet cider, the hickory nuts that grew by the brook, and the chestnuts that ripened on the hillside. Under the Old Elms. There stood on a ridge near the house a group of great chestnut-trees, so ancient and storm-beaten that prob ably they were bearing fruit when the Mayflower sailed into Plymouth har bor in 1620. Of the magnificent elm whose branches overspread the house, and whose trunk, because of its un usual size and fine proportions, has been reverenced by his successors for generations, he used to tell this little story to his grandchildren Before the time of carriages, I was riding to church, two miles distant, one pleasant Sunday morning and my horse, beginning like his master to feel the encroachments of age, was not disposed to trot. Fearing the parson would have finished his opening exer cises before I should reach the corner of the great square pew where he Under the Old Elms. always looked to see me, and from which I was seldom absent, I alighted and broke froma tree by the roadside a small elm sapling, which would serve as an incentive to old Dobbin to hasten his steps. The sapling I stuck in the saddle as I hitched the horse under the meeting house shed and I brought it home with me. When I rode up to the door, your grandmother, my good wife, as was her custom, stood waiting for me and I said, Wife, I am going to put this little sapling in the ground it may shade our grandchildren The sapling, nine feet above the grassy knoll on which it stands, now measures eighteen feet in circumfer ence...