The birds hopped on the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously
a strange object underneath.
There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke!
The monarch of the meadow would never again feel the magic
thrill of the sap in its veins, nor the bursting of brown bud
into green leaf.
The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs.
The "time of pleasure and love" was over with the nooning tree; over too,
with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the light
of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.
---------------------------------------------------------------
THE FORE-ROOM RUG.
Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window
of the village watch-tower, so called because it commanded
a view of nearly everything that happened in Pleasant River;
those details escaping the physical eye being supplied by faith
and imagination working in the light of past experience.
She sat in the chair of honor, the chair of choice, the high-backed
rocker by the southern window, in which her husband's mother,
old Mrs.
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