A SKETCH IN UMBER.
EVERY life has its history: this is the story of Ruth Welch, the placid-faced, silver-haired woman who sat in the September twilight looking out over the moorlands one Saturday evening, and considering many things.
The house faced toward the south. It looked across a little creek that made in from the sea, and it had in its prospect only level heaths to the horizon's edge. On the west stretched the waters of an arm of the Atlantic, and the tides came twice a day around the low cape into the inlet, and the wind blew over the moors; but in all directions one looked upon level wastes. "The Plains," the country-people called them, speaking of them sometimes as "Welch's bogs," or in sections as the "blueb'ry plains" or the "cramb'ry mashes;" and people who lived outside of them regarded the moors as painfully dull.
They were not, too, without some excuse for such an opinion. The rhodora and the "lamb-kill" in spring spread over sections of the waste transient sheets of glowing color, but for the most part the country was either white or brown, and to one not fond of it the effect of the monotone of hue was depressing. The shade of brown varied, changing from a grayish or even greenish brown in midsummer to a sombre, almost uniform umber in autumn, which latter tint now and then during the winter appeared in desolate patches through the flats of snow, until in March the whole plain came to light darker and more forbidding than ever.
All these long months the only break in the dull monochrome of the landscape was the red cottage which still was called "Grandsir' Welch's," although the old man had been dead many a year, and the little garden before it that kept up with old-fashioned flowers a show of bravery until the frosts came. The tint of the old house was dull and dingy, but in so colorless a setting the hue seemed brighter, as a single event might assume undue importance in a monotonous life. If one could have supposed the builder an imaginative man or one given to refinements of sentiment, it might be easy to imagine that when he built his house thus alone in the plains, with not another dwelling in sight and without a break in the level landscape, he felt the need of giving it some color that should protest against the deadly grayness of all around and hearten its owner by its warmth of tone.
So overwhelming were the solitude and the unbroken sameness of the place, however, that an imaginative man would scarcely have chosen it as an abiding-place, although once involved in its powerful fascination he would have been held to his life's end. By what accident Grandsir' Welch's grandfather had chosen to build here half a score of miles from the little fishing village which stood to the people of that region for the world, no one knew, and very likely no one cared. People thereabout concerned themselves little with reasons for anything, facts being all they found mental grasp sufficient to hold. Once
