Excerpt from Mis Melissa’s Baby
Many long lonesome years she had spent in the little old house, gray and weather beaten, with its garden of tangled rose bushes and straggling rows of hollyhocks and dahlias that in late summer Haunted their gay colors inside the picket fence be side the grassy road.
Secluded, did I say - but in winter only, when the snow lay deep and white, like a carpet of cotton, and the trees spar kled with their icy coating. Then, indeed, it was a rare sight to see a stranger pass, but in summer, when everything was green and beautiful as a garden of Paradise, the city folks came in throngs. They swarmed over the hills then, and walked and sangalong the winding country roads or sat at ease upon the scarred and initialed seats beneath the maple trees.
Happy and jolly folks they were, too, for the most part, seemingly carefree and well satisfied with the world in general. They called themselves New Though ters and in the Hall which they had built upon the hill they gathered every day to dance and sing, to listen to good music and talks on various things.
Some of them, indeed, not knowing that Mis’ Melissa had a deep-seated antipathy towards them, had even wanted to come and board with her in the quaint little house, or be permitted to pitch their tents in the old orchard or beside the Tumbling Brook that wound its rippling, rushing way through her meadow, but to all these Mis’ Melissa gave the same emphatic answer, No.
Often these folks, as Mis’ Melissa called them, came in groups at eventide to watch the glorious colors of the sunset glow and fade in the Western sky, and itwas this particular thing that at last aroused Mis’ Melissa s ire to the highest pitch and brought about my story.
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