"
There never was a Peabody Pew in the Tory Hill Meeting-House, and Nancy's love
story and Justin's never happened within its century-old walls, but I have
imagined only one of the many romances that have had their birth under the
shadow of that steeple, did we but realize it.
As you have sat there on open-windowed Sundays, looking across purple
clover-fields to blue distant mountains, watching the palm-leaf fans swaying
to and fro in the warm stillness before sermon time, did not the place seem
full of memories, for has not the life of two villages ebbed and flowed
beneath that ancient roof? You heard the hum of droning bees and followed the
airy wings of butterflies fluttering over the grave-stones in the old
churchyard, and underneath almost every moss-grown tablet some humble romance
lies buried aud all but forgotten.
If it had not been for you, I should never have written this story, so I give
it back to you tied with a sprig from Ophelia's nosegay; a sprig of "rosemary,
that's for remembrance."
K. D. W.
August, 1907
The Old Peabody Pew
Edgewood, like all the other villages along the banks of the Saco, is full of
sunny slopes and leafy hollows.
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