About Him There Were
Some Few Chairs And Articles Of Furniture, And He Was Propped Against A
Bed.
He was being moved - literally carted - to another house, not home,
and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on it for
seventy-three years.
Last Sunday his son - himself old - was carted to the
churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the father,
still living, goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home is
broken up - he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse
hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will never
again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is
not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of
circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;
man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets
and pellucid air. This has been a land of frost and snow, and here too,
it is the same. A stranger, I see, is already digging the old man's
garden.
How happy the trees must be to hear the song of birds again in their
branches! After the silence and the leaflessness, to have the birds back
once more and to feel them busy at the nest-building; how glad to give
them the moss and fibres and the crutch of the boughs to build in!
Pleasant it is now to watch the sunlit clouds sailing onwards; it is like
sitting by the sea.
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