A Spinster's Leaflets; Wherein Is Written the History of Her "Doorstep Baby," a Fancy Which in Time Became a Fact and Changed a Life

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill My well is one of my proudest possessions. To me it is like nothing in nature so much as a humming-bird's nest. In reality, it is like a deep cup, lined from top to bottom. But its lining is the softest of green, living moss, with ferns tender and fine waving out all along the sides and leaning over to see themselves in the water. Only a wide, irregular strip of trampled turf, a picket-fence falling into decay, and three sunken stone steps separate it from, K- ..:: ' m. /. .''the highway; and day after day travellers see the sign, a tin cup hanging on a stout nail at the spout, and turn in to drink. Many a moonlight night when half asleep have I heard the creak of the well-sweep, ballasted with its three great stones, and the plash of the mossy bucket in the sweet, cold water, and felt a thrill of satisfaction at the thought of the Bible blessing implied. It is the most I have to give, and no one isever turned away. It may have kept more than one disgraceful tramp from the tavern at The Corners by forestalling thirst on the way. Back of my kitchen and the wood-house, a one-story room which turns its face to the west and is blind on the street side, lies my small garden-plot. In my young days there was an outlying farm belonging to us which Squire Vann has owned for a generation. The fence has contracted like the famous walls of the prisoner in Poe's tale; but unlike those it leaves me fair breathing-space, and nobody can take from me the memory of what lias been. I can still go out under my grape-vine arbor at the garden-gate to South Pond, across the Squire's pasture, by a footpath as devious and charming as John Burroughs's. Creeping through the worm- fence that makes corner thickets for loveliest spring flowers to hide in, I follow a wavering, damp line alon..