The evening Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1918-1920, 1919-04-09

She went up the two brown flag steps
and knocked on the panels.
The raps of her knuckles sounded
Y like thumps on a coffin. She trieH.
I the split and shrivcn door. 1t was
locked.
81 guess there's no one home"
she faltered.
No one home indeed. Poor Mibb!
Il could O. told you that in the
first place." replied the driver. Il
didn't know but what you'd bought
the place, OF somethin'; that's why
III didn't say nuthin'."
doesn't Mrs. Purse live here any
longer? She isn't dead?"
"Naw; she held an auction last
week and went to live with Aunt Julia
harrington down in the village"
Mibb swayed YEARLY on the door
step.
, "Take my bag and leave it at the
Whitney House. How much do owe
you? I'll walk back"
backed out and headed for the village.
When the soft chuf- chuf-c huf of its
engine had grown fainter and fainter
until it died away to nothing, she
was alone out there in front of the
abandoned house in the long slanting
hours of closing day. Somehow she
felt as if she had been abandoned
too, like the old place brooding
now in the sinking sun.
After a while she walked slowly.
from the yard Her loneliness now
seemed greater than it had ever
seemed before not to find Mary
Purse inFthe old Purse place.
She started slowly down the hill
Bakers meadow over the way that
used to be the finest moving any.
where around Paris, was not coming
up virile and green. The grass was
red and thin and sickly and filled with
devils paintbrush. The old Squires
place was gone; two hoary elm trees
green with scale, stood sentinel now
over cellar hole and heaps of senile
yellow brick and stumps of fire
place; the Squires house burned down
in the winter of '97. The grove of
chestnut trees in Cogswell's pasture
had been cut down these many years
and likewise had the big beechnut
tree gone from the eastern end of the
bridge. And the bridge itself was
no longer the, picturesque covered
affair of thirty-odd years before. 1t
was a trim business-like affair of
white iron thrown across the stream
in nineteen hundred after the freshet
of the previous winter had made the
old one dangerous.
ooh it's all changed so; it's-all
--changed-so! If it wasn't for the
i old Purse place and the hills. I'd
hardly know it was the same" she
said.
She crossed the bridge with a
heavy heart. The location at the
eastern end of Main Street where
once her fathers house had stood had
been absorbed for ten years by the
increasing areas of the Process
works.
"Thank God that's gone!" she wills
pered. 81 could have stood most
anything but to see the old place
again as it used to be when | was
happy at home with Ma and
the boardersw
She finally reached the point where
Pine street bisects Main. At the
southern end of Pine street there is
little slope that comes out over
looking the river. On this stretch
between road and river on the south
cast corner of the village, there is
little plot of grass-choked land
we've come to call "the cemetery on
the HILL"
Something turned Mibb'S steps that
way. She had no where else to go.
Why not up into the graveyard where
lay sleeping the loved ones of other
years?
A beautiful afterglow was over the
world as she entered the cemetery
and moved down among the graves.
Half-fearfully she searched the tomb
stones yet morbidly hungry for what
they might disclose.