The Roadmender

I HAVE attained my ideal: I am a roadmender, some say stonebreaker. Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other. All day I sit by the roadside on a stre...

ON Sundays my feet take ever the same way. First my temple service, and then five miles tramp over the tender, dewy fields, with their ineffable earthy smell, until I reach the...

First, early in the morning, a young girl came down the road on a bicycle. Her dressguard was loose, and she stopped to ask for a piece of string. When I had tied it for her she...

YESTERDAY a funeral passed, from the work-house at N—, a quaint sepulture without solemnities. The rough, ungarnished coffin of stained deal lay bare and unsightly on the floor...

THERE is always a little fire of wood on the open hearth in the kitchen when I get home at night; the old lady says it is “company” for her, and sits in the lonely twilight, her...

AWHILE ago I took a holiday; mouched, played truant from my road. Jem the waggoner hailed me as he passed—he was going to the mill—would I ride with him and come back atop of th...

I AM no longer a roadmender; the stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff with the crisp...

FEBRUARY is here, February fill-dyke; the month of purification, of cleansing rains and pulsing bounding streams, and white mist clinging insistent to field and hedgerow so that...

“TWO began, in a low voice, ‘Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a _red_ rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake.’”

ON Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of spring in its wake an...

THE seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady flight seeking the open sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight and the pl...

“ANYTUS and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me,” said Socrates; and Governor Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired authority, could not make the young weaver of...

A GREAT joy has come to me; one of those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place very near my road—t...

THIS garden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers, and birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony. The world holds no wish for me, now that I hav...

ONCE again I have paid a rare visit to my tree to find many things changed since my last sojourn there. The bees are silent, for the honey-laden flowers of the sycamore are gone...

RAIN, rain, rain: the little flagged path outside my window is a streaming way, where the coming raindrops meet again the grey clouds whose storehouse they have but just now lef...