Out under the Atlantic the twin antennaed armored knights of the shellfish kingdom are creeping up from the indigo deep waters to the wanning emerald, shallower ones, with greed for high-smelling dead fish in their stickpin eyes, Lobster stew is in the offing, and new greenbacks for the family roll, for lobsters are going to fetch a good price this year, thanks to the summer colonists who are running up shingled bungalows on this farm's shores and on most of the others along the twenty-five hundred miles of this continuous Rio de Janeiro of a coastline.
Aunt Ella's rheumatism goes, with the first robin redbreast. Her spry old lingers shake the winter from their joints, and she finishes the hooked rug for the front staircase. A hen stiff as a cigar-store Indian is on ever)' tread, leading a happy family up to bed and dreams of traps chock-full of lobsters. Love lights Aunt Ella's eyes as she thinks how Timothy's big feet will travel over her art. But nothing lights up Timothy's eyes but the pink light of a kettle of steamed lobsters.
And Aunt Emmaows in from upcountry. Aunt Emma alway sows in at the crucial turning points of the year—the autumnal and vernal equinoxes. For she is the master of medicine and morals for her brother William's family, which, because of its preponderance of he-ones, needs, she believes, stern herbal and moral mini-station twice a year.
So pennyroyal and yarrow, sage and sulphur and tansy scent up the house like a drugstore now. Peter gets painted with goose grease and camphor and gets taught such lessons of boys being seen but not heard at the te that he creaks with politeness. And Uncle Cephus is completely chapfallen when a strangely decorous crew comes out in a skiff to call on him and eat the Dundee pudding he has made in his ship's big kettle. He has to smack Peter a. dozen times on the fullness of his breeches aft before he can undo the work of his moral half-sister and get the sparkle and dueness back in his nephew's eyes. He has to reteach Peter all the colorful sea oaths he has schooled him in all winter long. It takes his vast Dundee pudding of corn meal cooked in molasses and numerous thick slabs of salted cod and a half night's length of his saltiest tales to get the stout little crew back in shape again. But he sends the boy back rejuvenated and full of strong and colorful speech again to the farmhouse in the morning, to the scandalization of his Aunt Emma.
Uncle Timothy goes into hiding in his open-chamber fortress most of the time Aunt Emma is here. He creeps down only for meals. And even then he sits in his kitchen chair as though he didn't wear pants but a skirt.
Whether it is the result of Aunt Emma's goose grease and spring tonics of bitter herbs, or Cop'n Cephus' jovial hand that warmed Peter out of the dol-drums of dosages of spring morals and snuffles, Peter takes a sudden spurt in his love affairs, and he ups and wins back Lucy from that purveyor of beef hearts,black-haired Ben.
And to cap the climax of this spring, coming in like a flock of bluebirds in the bare hackmatacks and Mayflowers all over the ledges like snowdrifts. Uncle Timothy, who has never done such a thing since he joined the Masons thirty years ago, goes to town and buys himself a light-colored suit of clothes with checks! Aunt Ella grows all aflutter with hope, and she goes to town and buys herself a spring bonnet with fifteen kinds of (lowers on it and two white dove's wings just about to take off and bear the whole artificial flower garden off to heaven.
But not a thing cornea of the hat with the dove's wings and the rich flowers on it. The checked suit was a false hope after all. And Aunt Ella, the same day that the moral Aunt Emma announces that she thinks it her bounden duty to stay on into April, packs up her belongings and departs from the farm.
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