The Feast’s End
The feast was a noble feast, as has already been said.
There was an elegant ingenuity displayed in the form
of pies which delighted my heart. Once acknowledge that
an American pie is far to be preferred to its humble
ancestor, the English tart, and it is joyful to be reassured
at a Bowden reunion that invention has not yet failed.
Beside a delightful variety of material, the decorations
went beyond all my former experience; dates and names
were wrought in lines of pastry and frosting on the
tops. There was even more elaborate reading matter on
an excellent early-apple pie which we began to share
and eat, precept upon precept. Mrs. Todd helped me generously
to the whole word BOWDEN, and consumed REUNION herself,
save an undecipherable fragment; but the most renowned
essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old
Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the
windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of
genuine lilac set at the front. It must have been baked
in sections, in one of the last of the great brick ovens,
and fastened together on the morning of the day. There
was a general sigh when this fell into ruin at the feast’s
end, and it was shared by a great part of the assembly,
not without seriousness, and as if it were a pledge
and token of loyalty. I met the maker of the gingerbread
house, which had called up lively remembrances of a
childish story. She had the gleaming eye of an enthusiast
and a look of high ideals.
“I could just as well have made it all of frosted
cake,” she said, “but ’twouldn’t
have been the right shade; the old house, as you observe,
was never painted, and I concluded that plain gingerbread
would represent it best. It wasn’t all I expected
it would be,” she said sadly, as many an artist
had said before her of his work.
There were speeches by the ministers; and there proved
to be a historian among the Bowdens, who gave some fine
anecdotes of the family history; and then appeared a
poetess, whom Mrs. Todd regarded with wistful compassion
and indulgence, and when the long faded garland of verses
came to an appealing end, she turned to me with words
of praise.
“Sounded pretty,” said the generous listener.
“Yes, I thought she did very well. We went to
school together, an’ Mary Anna had a very hard
time; trouble was, her mother thought she’d given
birth to a genius, an’ Mary Anna’s come
to believe it herself. There, I don’t know what
we should have done without her; there ain’t nobody
else that can write poetry between here and ‘way
up towards Rockland; it adds a great deal at such a
time. When she speaks o’ those that are gone,
she feels it all, and so does everybody else,
but she harps too much. I’d laid half of that
away for next time, if I was Mary Anna. There comes
mother to speak to her, an’ old Mr. Gilbreath’s
sister; now she’ll be heartened right up. Mother’ll
say just the right thing.”
The leave-takings were as affecting as the meetings
of these old friends had been. There were enough young
persons at the reunion, but it is the old who really
value such opportunities; as for the young, it is the
habit of every day to meet their comrades,—the
time of separation has not come. To see the joy with
which these elder kinsfolk and acquaintances had looked
in one another’s faces, and the lingering touch
of their friendly hands; to see these affectionate meetings
and then the reluctant partings, gave one a new idea
of the isolation in which it was possible to live in
that after all thinly settled region. They did not expect
to see one another again very soon; the steady, hard
work on the farms, the difficulty of getting from place
to place, especially in winter when boats were laid
up, gave double value to any occasion which could bring
a large number of families together. Even funerals in
this country of the pointed firs were not without their
social advantages and satisfactions.
I heard the words “next thanksgivingr” repeated
many times, though this one was still ours and all the
leaves were still gone.
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