"We'd ruther have it nice," said the builders, "even if there ain't
much of it."
These were Eliza Marden and Peleg her husband, who worked from sun to
sun, with scant reward save that of pride in their own fore-handedness.
I can imagine them as they drove to church in the open wagon, a couple
portentously large and prosperous: their one child, Hannah, sitting
between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent
way, at the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a
long afternoon in the sun, her thin little hands busied about nothing
weightier than crochet; and her mother regarded her with a horrified
patience, as one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild
oats of idleness. The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it
was Hannah who composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, but a
defective sense of rhyme:--
"Here lies Eliza
She was a striver
Here lies Peleg
He was a select Man"
We townsfolk found something haunting and bewildering in the lines;
they drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring
only to betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always
cherished the belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and
their possibilities.
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