Years before, the romance of the old couple had been the idyl of the country-side. They had indeed been lovers as children. They had made pilgrimages to their trysting-place when the breadth of the dooryard was a long journey. They had plighted their vows as they sat in juvenile content, plump, tow-headed, bare-footed among the chips of the wood pile. As they grew older it was the object of their lives to save their treasures to bestow on each other. A big apple, a chunk of maple-sugar, a buckeye of abnormal proportions, attained a certain dignity regarded as _gages d’amour_. They were never parted for a day till Editha was seventeen years old, when she was summoned to the care of a paralytic aunt who dwelt in Shaftesville, twelve miles distant, and who, in the death of her husband, had been left peculiarly helpless and alone.
The separation was a dreary affliction to the lovers, but it proved the busiest year of Benjamin Casey’s life, signalized by his preparations for the home-coming of the bride to be. All the country-side took a share in the “house-raising,” and the stanch log cabin went up like magic on the rocky bit of land on the bluff, thus utilized to reserve for the plow the arable spaces of the little farm. Every article of the rude furniture common to the region was in its appropriate place when Editha first stood on her own threshold and gazed into the glowing fire aflare upon her own hearth; and humble though it was, she confronted the very genius of home.
The guests who danced at the wedding and afterward at the infare felt that the lifelong romance was a sort of community interest, and for many a year its details were familiarized by repetition about the fire-side or to the casual stranger. But Time is ever the mocker. The generation which had known the pair in the bloom and freshness of their beauty had in great part passed away. Their idyl of devotion and constancy gradually became farcical as the years imposed their blight. “Them old moth-eaten lovyers” was a phrase so apt in derisive description that it commended itself for general use to a community of later date and newer ideals. What a zest of jovial ridicule would the iconoclasts have enjoyed had it been known that it was only when one was sixty-five years of age and the other sixty-three that there had occurred their first experience of a lovers’ quarrel! For Benjie and Editha now were seriously regarded only by themselves.