only the bleaker and barer.

That forlorn unpainted little house, with its sagging blinds! It
squatted there through the year like a one-eyed beggar without a
friend--lost in its venerable white-beard winters, or contemplating an
untidy welter of rusty farm machinery through the summers.

When Luke brought his one scraggy little cow up the lane he always
turned away his head. The place made him think of the old man who let
the birds build nests in his whiskers. He preferred, instead, to look at
the glories of Bald Mountain or one of the other hills. There was
nothing wrong with the back drop in the home stage-set; it was only home
itself that hurt one's feelings.

There was no cheer inside, either. The sagging old floors, though
scrubbed and spotless, were uncarpeted; the furniture meager. A pine
table, a few old chairs, a shabby scratched settle covered by a thin
horse blanket as innocent of nap as a Mexican hairless--these for
essentials; and for embellishment a shadeless glass lamp on the table,
about six-candle power, where you might make shift to read the
_Biweekly_--times when there was enough money to have a Biweekly--if you
were so minded; and window shelves full of corn and tomato cans, still
wearing their horticultural labels, where scrawny one-legged geraniums
and yellowing coleus and begonia contrived an existence of sorts.

And then, of course, the mantelpiece with the black-edged funeral notice
and shiny coffin plate, relics of Grampaw Peel's taking-off; and the
pink mug with the purple pansy and "Woodstock, N.Y.," on it; the
photograph of a forgotten cousin in Iowa, with long antennae-shaped
mustaches; the Bible with the little china knobs on the corners; and the
pile of medicine testimonials and seed catalogues--all these contributed
something.

If it was not a beautiful place within, it was, also, not even a
pleasant place spiritually. What with the open door into his father's
room, whence you could hear the thin frettings made by the man who had
lain these ten years with chronic rheumatism, and the untuneful
whistlings of whittling Tom, the big brother, the shapely supple giant
whose mind had never grown since the fall from the barn room when he was
eight years old, and the acrid complaints of the tall gaunt mother,
stepping about getting their inadequate supper, in her gray wrapper,
with the ugly little blue shawl pinned round her shoulders, it was as
bad a place as you might find in a year's jo