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On the last "First-day" before their departure, she walked down the meadows to the lonely brake between the hills. It was the early spring, and the black buds of the ash had just begun to swell. The maples were dusted with crimson bloom, and the downy catkins of the swamp-willow dropped upon the stream and floated past her, as once the autumn leaves.
She came to the gate to meet him, and gave him her hand in greeting, without a word or the need of one from either. Then together they set forth over the sun-flecked pavement, the maples swishing above them, heavier branches crooning in the strong breeze, under a sky like a Della Robbia background.
At the play and the opera he sat thinking of the silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its leafless maples, and the life that was no more in it than if they had all died out of it; and he could not keep down a certain resentment, senseless and cruel, as if the poor girl were somehow to blame for their exile.
''Twas a great stroke of business to give us all the trouble, and take all the advantage to himself our trees, our fires, nothing but the use of his oxen as a set-off. The advantage was less than Arthur supposed; for maples are not impoverished by drainage of sap, and firewood is so abundant as to be a nuisance.
But the space was mainly green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.
When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width, under and amid the Alders, Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river.
A wood thrush began a nest in one of my maples, as usual making the foundation of dry leaves, bits of paper, and dry grass. After the third day the site on the branch was bare, the wind having swept away every vestige of the nest. As I passed beneath the tree I saw the thrush standing where the nest had been, apparently in deep thought.
For the moon was not shining, neither did the stars give their light. The tall, black trunks of the maples swayed and shook in the wind, which moaned through their leafless boughs. Novelists always make lovers walk in the moonlight. But if love is not, as the cynics believe, all moonshine, it can at least make its own light.
"I'm afraid I shouldn't be of much use," Austen answered. "They'd have given me a back seat, too." The Widow Peasley's was a frame and gabled house of Revolutionary days with a little terrace in front of it and a retaining wall built up from the sidewalk. Austen, on the steps, stood gazing across at a square mansion with a wide cornice, half hidden by elms and maples and pines.
Not until the sap began to flow from the maples was winter counted broken. Robbie Baker rode over about the middle of March and begged so hard that Mrs. Harding allowed Enoch to return with him to help at the Baker's "sugaring." There were plenty of fine maples near the Baker house and Nuck was promised a share of the refined sugar.
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