fruit or cream or butter, we were
never annoyed by an impertinent question or look. Once only I overheard
a remark not altogether civil, and that was on the evening before my
birthday. One of them, the elder, said, as he went away from my house
with a basket of cherries, that he should like to get speech with that
polyglot old maid, who read, and wrote, and made her own butter-pats.
The other answered, that the butter was excellent at any rate, and
perhaps she had a classical cow; and they went down the lane laughingly
disputing about the matter, not knowing that I was behind the
currant-bushes.

"Polyglot old maid!" I thought, very indignantly, as I went into the
house. "I've a mind not to sell them another cake of my butter. But I
wonder if people call me an old maid. I wonder if I am one."

I thought of it all the evening, and dreamt of it all night, waking the
next morning with a new realization of the subject. That first sense of
a lost youth! How sharp and strong it comes! That suddenly opened north
door of middle life, through which the winter winds rush in, sweeping
out of the southern windows all the splendors of the earlier time; it is
like a sea-turn in late summer. It has seemed to be June all along, and
we thought it was June, until the wind went round to the east, and the
first red leaf admonished us. By-and-by we close, as well as we may,
that open door, and look out again from the windows upon blooms,
beautiful in their way, to which some birds yet sing; but, alas! the
wind is still from the east, and blows as though, far away, it had lain
among icebergs.

So I mused all the morning, watering the sentiment with a bit of a
shower out of my cloud; and when the shadows turned themselves, I went
out to see how old age would look to me in the fields and woods. It was
a delicious afternoon, more like a warm dream of hay-making, odorous,
misty, sleepily musical, than a waking reality, on which the sun shone.
Tremulous blue clouds lay down all around upon the mountains, and lazy
white ones lost themselves in the waters; and through the dozing air,
the faint chirp of robin or cricket, and ding of bells in the woods, and
mellow cut of scythe, melted into one song, as though the heart-beat of
the luscious midsummer-time had set itself to tune.

I walked on to loiter through the woods. No dust-brush for brain or
heart like the boughs of trees! There dwells a truth, and pure, strong
health within them, an ever-r