Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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Thus it followed that Miss Keith and the farm had lived together for twenty years a life of almost wedded devotion. The sheep had disappeared from the hills, it is true, and four cows, a fat horse, and countless chickens and ducks represented the live stock. The cultivated ground had been reduced to a great corn-field, a potato patch, and vegetable garden, on whose borders grew fruits of all seasons, the rest of the land being sown down to rye or hay, while the woodland that protected the house on the north and east, being only required to yield kindlings, had returned to the beauty of a forest primeval, with a dense growth of oak, white pine, and hemlock, underspread with untrodden ferns, amid which, following the seasons’ call, blossomed arbutus, anemones, moccasin flowers, snow crystal Indian pipe, and partridge vine.

Now, for the first time in all these years, Miss Keith was faltering in her single-hearted allegiance, and this upheaval coming on her fiftieth birthday, too, gave it a double significance. At fifty one’s ideas and person are supposed to be settled for life, but with Miss Keith her semi-centennial was the first occasion upon which she ever remembered to have felt thoroughly unsettled, and as she stood in front of the parlour mantel-shelf, arms akimbo, gazing at the First Cause, that rested against the wall between the fat clock and a blue china vase filled with quaking grass, she alternately frowned and smiled.