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Mother's head has no protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to 'reign like kings'? Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and McClintocks seem a madness?"
He knew of but one way to please her, but he made the most of that, and worked quietly but assiduously whenever he could without exciting his father's opposition. After the day's tasks were over the time was his own. He began by cutting all the weeds and grass in the door-yard and around the house. Palings that had disappeared from the fence were replaced, and all were whitewashed. Mrs.
But stern fate compelled her to turn back a second time, for the moment that Magde turned to pass into the house, old Mr. Lonner advanced to the door. "Nanna my child," said he, "bring my chair out into the door-yard.
A rude frame of home manufacture, covered with netting, kept inquisitive moths from entering, at the same time allowing a flood of light to make its way out into the door-yard, where it lay upon the grass and added glory to the marigolds which grew beside the path. "Happiest family I know on," muttered the man, drawing a rough hand across his eyes.
An overpowering sense of loneliness urged Douglas across the valley and brought him to pause beside the Rodman corral. He dismounted at the buck fence and stood for a moment in the shadow of the Moose, wondering why he had stopped here. He had stood thus but a few moments when two riders came up the trail. They trotted into the door-yard.
But a terrible foreboding as of death seized him when he stood before the house, and glanced up at its close-shuttered front, and round upon the dusty grass-plots and neglected flower-beds of the door-yard. With a cold hand he rang and rang again, and no answer came. At last a man lounged up to the fence from the next house-door. "Guess you won't make anybody hear," he said, casually.
As a boy he had not the privilege of going every day to school or of playing peacefully in the door-yard of his home. Mobs drove them out of Missouri, and then out of Nauvoo. They had little peace. Two years after his father had been killed, Joseph's mother, with her family, had to leave her home, along with the Saints, and undertake the long westward journey.
And he snapped with equal rage at an Irish terrier that had come out to add to the turmoil. By this time, a score of people were dancing up and down inside their door-yard fences, squalling "Mad dog!" and flinging at the black brute any missile they could lay hand to. A broken flower-pot cut the invalid's nose. A stone rebounded from his ribs.
We both laughed. My own heart was filled with joy, for the uncertain, lonely face of this homeless old woman had often haunted me. The rain-blackened little house did certainly look dreary, and a whole lifetime of patient toil had left few traces. The pucker-pear tree was in full bloom, however, and gave a welcome gayety to the deserted door-yard.
But conditions which exist on the big, bare public-school playgrounds, away alike from parental restraint and parental protection, are quite different from those in the home door-yard, and the code which obtains in the ward-school world is not an open book to all mothers of chubby-fisted sons who are called upon to observe it.
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