II

AND SO THEY LIVED----

And so it turned out quite as if it were in the old ballad, that "all in
the merry month of May," and also "all in the merry green wood," there
were great doings about the bold little promontory where once stood the
cabin on the old wood-lot where the Simms family had dwelt. The brook ran
about the promontory, and laid at its feet on three sides a carpet of
blue-grass, amid clumps of trees and wild bushes. Not far afield on either
hand came the black corn-land, but up and down the bluffy sides of the
brook for some distance on both sides of the King-dragged highway, ran the
old wood-lot, now regaining much of the unkempt appearance which
characterized it when Jim Irwin had drawn upon himself the gentle rebuke
of Old Man Simms for not giving a whoop from the big road before coming
into the yard.

But Old Man Simms was gone, with all the Simmses, now thoroughly
established on the Blanchard farm, and quite happy in their new success.
The cabin was gone, and in its place stood a pretty little bungalow, about
which blossomed the lilacs and peonies and roses and other old-fashioned
flowers, planted there long ago by some pioneer woman, nourished back to
thriftiness by old Mrs. Simms, and carefully preserved during the
struggles with the builders of the bungalow by Mrs. Irwin. For this was
Mrs. Irwin's new home. It was, in point of fact, the teacher's house or
schoolmanse for the new consolidated Woodruff District, and the old Simms
wood-lot was the glebe-land of the schoolmanse.

Jim turned over and over in his mind these new applications of old,
historic, significant words, dear to every reader of
history--"glebe-land," "schoolmanse"--and it seemed to him that they
signified the return of many old things lost in Merrie England, lost in
New England, lost all over the English-speaking world, when the old
publicly-paid clergyman ceased to be so far the servant of all the people
that they refused to be taxed for his support. Was not the new kind of
rural teacher to be a publicly-paid leader of thought, of culture, of
progress, and was he not to have his manse, his glebe-land, and his
"living"? And all because, like the old clergymen, he was doing a work in
which everybody was interested and for which they were willing to be
taxed. Perhaps it was not so high a status as the old; but who was to say
that? Certainly not Jim Irwin, the possessor of the new kind of "living,"
with its "glebe-land" and i