The Portland daily press., 1883-08-08
Ashes of Roses.
BY MRS. GEO. A. cAswELL.

midst lay battered tin pan and a spoon.
Her words We're echoed an hour later by
woman with tired heart and brain, looking
away from the "Oxford House" over the
cool green fields of the Saco valley, with
their great villages of white-capped haycocks.
The fields are many-tinted in their greens,
patched here and there with brown, relieved
by beautiful elms and willows, cut into a
crazed sort of geometrical problem by fences
and the crooked, shining Saco, faunt
ing great yellow daisies and lilies and fringed
white with meadow-rue. Men are hurrying
to toss the uncovered hay to the top of
rounded loads that seem all ready to topple
over. Every white cap and every uncon-
carned OK looks as though it were there sole
ly for ornament, so perfectly does anything
that happens to appear in these broad inter-
wales fit into its place. Haycocks, oxen and
loads are so extremely picturesque and SO
far away against their green background
that one thinks nothing of the worry and
furry of the men, and till he looks at the
mountains with thin veil of shadow and
scurrying clouds, the sunlight kissing only
the uplifted face of Kearsarge. it seems no
more real than any stage effect. One almost
listens to hear the orchestra sound the mu-
sic that he is himself fitting to the scene and
the thunder that rumbles and tumbles
among the mountains is far better than the
zinc thunder of Rip Van Wrinkle. The next
act comes soon enough. The men scramble
to the top of the loads without tumbling the
hay down-nobody knows how; quite at
their leisure the oxen move aud the great
loads sway and creak and climb the hill and
labor into barns. The oxen, once there and
knowing they are to stay, switch their tails
and toss their horns as though nobody had
been half so much in hurry as they. The
clouds, though growing blacker and blacker,
have waited till this minute and now drop
the gentlest of warm summer showers in
great drops like beads, while the mountains
-one might as well look for mountains in
Holland, so completely are they hit den be-
hind the cloud-curtains.
1t is lovely So is the sand-bank, if
looked at from the right standpoint, and if
Four-years prefers the sand-bank with its
simp lie diversifying features, Fifty-years will
turn to the mountains, and so maintain the
equilibrium of things.
Wide apart as are mountains and sand
bank in their points of interest, Fryeburg
offers much that is desirable in the way of
the two extremes. The sand-bank stretches
away on two sides of the village and breaks
up into countless sandy roads that cross
one another at every conceivable angle and
are little connecting roads" that serve to
disconnect everything that would otherwise
hold together, and so complicate matters that
you know that the engineer who evolved
them had delirium tremens. So far as
knowing where you are is concerned, you
might as well be in Boston. However, if
you start to drive to one point and find in
the end that you have reached quite anoth-
er, it doesn't matter much. All ways lead
out among the pines, and you will drive for
miles over grass-grown roads where the dew
lies on low leaves till long after noon,
fecked with shadows, strewn with pine
needles, fragrant with ferns, and given over
to mosquitoes. You may come back laden
with scarlet and white and gold-bunchber-
ries, clematis and golden-rod, and if you
wish for brown there are CATO -nine-tails.
Or if it be mountains and fields that you
wish to see, all the green miles of intervales
reach away to mountains that rise white and
cold to-day, warm and hazy tomorrow; now
desolate, chill and forbidding, then glad and
bright, and bathed in light from summit to
foot.
1t Is lovely if one wants rest. OF Frye
burg herself, that is, the yillage-but this is
almost personal. 1t becomes necessary to
move carefully. One doesn't wish to speak
of his elderly aunt or his grandmother as
"kittenish." And ] remember Fryeburg
more years ago than 1 should think of men
tioning-a village whose main street was
all elms and lilacs and white houses with
green blinds; where there were tin peddler's
carts, "shook teams" creeping slowly about
in clouds of white dust, horse and wagon
jogging along under the elms now and then,
and great yellow stage Gathering up from
Portland with the mail once day; where
the meat-man and the fisb-man drove from
door to door, and everybody did marketing
from the back of the wagons; where if one
didn't fancy the calico or black alpaca that
the one or two stores offered, she had the
privilege of going without, and where, more
over, the last years dress would do very
well; where the academy and the meeting
house were the beginning and the end of ev-
erything; where there were picnics and SUI
garing-of parties, and lyceums to improve
the mind, and "circles' to improve the man
ners, suppose, and school exhibitions with
white dresses and pink ribbons and essays.
sob, the glorious vanished hence!
oh, the sad imperfect tense"
have vivid memories of the day when,
my dolls and myself newly dressed for the
occasion, ] was set down here TO 60 to school.
1t didn't console me that "Daniel Webster
once taught here" l had left behind me a
little white-haired girl beside whom Daniel
Webster was pigmy to me. rent to bed,
refused Cruel and determined to pine away.
That plan being frustrated, however, real
ly did go to school and then and there, for
woman question" In front of the academy
was fence tastefully and simply built of
ong granite blocks arranged like bars of
soap in grocer's window, and "the boys
had declared that little girls should not walk
this fence. But the little girls maintained
their rights, and the discussion waxed warm.
Finally, at their wits end, as men usually
are in handling this question, the boys re-
sorted to strategem, and tilted one end of
the fence. Next morning all the feminine
disputants lay scattered far and wide on the
grounds with their fists in their eyes. A
lew of the stronger-minded ones still main