The Harvest Moon
J. S. Fletcher
eBook
(, Nov. 24, 2011)
That Sunday eyening^ according to well-established custom, Cornelius Van de linde had the old farmstead all to himself, save that his favourite sheep-dog shared the hearth with him. His only child linda, then a great girl of eighteen* had gone across the meadows to the church at Fishlake; the two old pensioners who lived under his roof, Matthew and Sarah Jennett* one of whom spent his day in admiring the pigs while the other busied herself in sitting by the kitchen fire, had taken a leisurely progress towards the little chapel in the neighbouring village; the two maid-servants were out with their respective swains. The house was still as the_Jand outside—^the land from which the wheat and barley had just been safely garnered. Over land and house the soft September twilight, still golden with the glory of the scarce-disappeared sun, fell like a benediction.Cornelius always spent his Sunday evenings ioa methodical way. He was one of those elderly men who, by recollection of early training and from the inclination which comes with advancing age to stand by the things first thought, are lovers of system and order, liking to do to-day what they did yesterday and will do to-morrow, When the house was quiet, Linda having departed to church and the old folks to chapel, it was his custom to take the old family Bible from the great oak desk in which it was religiously enshrined and to read a chapter aloud to himself, the old dog standing by with alert eyes and cocked ears. This sacred duty over, he replaced the Bible in the desk, and from a secret drawer in that ancient receptacle drew forth certain bundles of letters tied up with strips of faded ribbon. These bundles were all superscribed in Cornelius's crabbed handwriting—^some, " My . Father's Letters"; some, " My Mother's Letters " ; some, " My Good Wife's Letters." He used to untie the ribbons with his gnaried fingers, and spread the letters out with reverent care, as if he had been a devotee handling the relics of a saint, and he would read a sentence or two here, or a page or two there, and sometimes a letter right through, and now and then he would come across a dried geranium leaf orthe petal of a rose, and these he would lightly touch with the tip of his little finger as if he feared they might crumble. Then he would make the letters into bundles again, and retie the faded ribbon, and put the bundles back into the secret drawer and relock the desk, and that done would fill and light hi§ pipe, and, with the sheep-dog at his heels, would go out into the flower-garden in front of the house to look around him at his well-filled stack-yard and at the broad acres from which he had once again reaped a good harvest.ComeUus Van de linde's farmstead stood in the midst of as level a tract of land as can be foimd in England outside the Fens. In all directions the country stretched away in an unbroken levelfor mile upon mile. The towers and spires of churches, the tall poplars which rose here and there, the gables and chimneys of an occasional manor-house—^these objects were discernible at long distances, so uniformly level was the land. But though it had once been nothing but bog and morass and fen, with great stretches of mere in which more than one royal sportsman had fished to- his heart's content, there was nothing cheerless or monotonous in its aspect. Unhke much reclaimed fen-landIt was well wooded, well supplied with thick hedgerows and prolific orchards and gardens, and it produced com crops at which no farmer could grumble. But, as its own folk were fond of saying, it was as flat as a pancake.