double-starched portraits of defunct Hydes, Puritanic to the very ends
of toupet and periwig,--little Mrs. Hyde was deep enough in love with
her tall and handsome husband to overlook the upholstery of a home he
glorified, and to care little for comfort elsewhere, so long as she
could nestle on his knee and rest her curly head against his shoulder.
Besides, flowers grew, even in Greenfield; there were damask roses and
old-fashioned lilies enough in the square garden to have furnished a
whole century of poets with similes; and in the posy-bed under the front
windows were tulips of Chinese awkwardness and splendor, beds of pinks
spicy as all Arabia, blue hyacinths heavy with sweetness as well as
bells, "pi'nies" rubicund and rank, hearts-ease clustered against the
house, and sticky rose-acacias, pretty and impracticable, not to mention
the grenadier files of hollyhocks that contended with fennel-bushes and
scarlet-flowered beans for the precedence, and the hosts of wild flowers
that bloomed by wood-edges and pond-shores wherever corn or potatoes
spared a foot of soil for the lovely weeds. So in Judge Hyde's frequent
absences, at court or conclave, hither and yon, (for the Judge was a
political man,) it was his pretty wife's chief amusement, when her
delicate fingers ached with embroidery, or her head spun with efforts to
learn housekeeping from old Keery, the time-out-of-mind authority in the
Hyde family, a bad-humored, good-tempered old maid,--it was, indeed, the
little Southerner's only amusement,--to make the polish and mustiness of
those dreary front-parlors gay and fragrant with flowers; and though
Judge Hyde's sense of the ridiculous was not remarkably keen, it was too
much to expect of him that he should do otherwise than laugh long and
loud, when, suddenly returning from Taunton one summer day, he tracked
his wife by snatches of song into the "company rooms," and found her on
the floor, her hair about her ears, tying a thick garland of red
peonies, intended to decorate the picture of the original Hyde, a dreary
old fellow, in bands, and grasping a Bible in one wooden hand, while a