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Updated: May 5, 2025
He wondered why he had been such a fool as to leave it in a dark street of flat-faced wooden houses with dooryards of trampled earth and a general air of poverty, goats, and lunch-pails. He tramped on, a sullen and youthless man. Presently he was in shaggy, open country. He was frightened by his desertion of Ruth, but he did not want to go back, nor even telephone to her.
She sat up straight and turned her head away from the houses with their trim orderly dooryards and well-kept hedges, and, for a moment, fixed her mind with passionate loyalty on the lonely wind-swept stretches of her native state; the battered and weatherbeaten ranch-house, Benita But only for a moment.
She had once been stung by bees, on just such a morning as this, and she had a set theory that they infested all strange dooryards. Dilly felt as if even the Joyces could not save her day in its solemn significance unless, indeed, they should appear in their proper persons.
Through the window in the pearl light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills, the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to the earth, with children playing in the dooryards.
But the bulk of them had been strolling peacefully along the highways or crossing to or from their own dooryards, when the juggernauts smashed them into torture or into instant death.
Looking upon the settlement where he lived, set as it was like a white-and-green jewel in a ring of lush barbaric beauty, his fancy showed him the vista of a spinsterish-looking Main Street lined by dooryards having fences of pointed painted pickets, and behind the pickets, peonies and hollyhocks encroaching upon prim flagged walks which led back to the white-panelled doors of small houses buried almost to their eaves in lilac bushes and golden glow.
He must know the eight hundred miles of coast as we know the nooks and corners of our dooryards. Doctor Grenfell wished also to make the acquaintance of the people. He wished to visit them in their homes that he might learn their needs and troubles and so know better how to help them. He was not alone to be their doctor.
Momentarily more miserable as the time of parting drew nearer, dumb with unhappiness, they turned aside from the main thoroughfares of the city, leaving the business section, and gained the sleepier side streets, bordered by the residences of the proletariat, where for blocks none but children were to be seen, and of them but few quaint, sober little bodies playing almost noiselessly in their dooryards.
It was late spring now, lilacs in all the dooryards, all the houses being cleaned inside out, and they were to be married in the fall. They had picked the little house on the outskirts of Skinnertown not far from the Tory oak, in which they were to live. And often we made it the end of an excursion, and played at games devised by Mary to improve the appearance of the little yard.
Terence dashed at them now and then, and they fled screaming into dooryards to come out again and mimic him when he had passed, while mothers and fathers and grandfathers smiled at the good nature in his Irish face. Presently he looked down at me comically. "Why wuddent ye be doin' the like, Davy?" he asked. "Amusha! 'tis mesilf that wants to run and hop and skip wid the childher.
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