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Maps, plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at different reduction ratios. Those too large to be entirely included in one exposure are filmed beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to right and top to bottom, as many frames as required. The following diagrams illustrate the method; Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., pet. vent etre film4s it des taux de reduction diff^rents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour etre reproduit en un seul cliche, il est film6 d partir de Tangle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images n^cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mdthode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 A KENTUCKY CARDINAL AFTERMATH A Kentucky Cardinal AND Aftermath B\ JAMES LANE ALLEN Author of_. The Reign of Law," "The Choir Invisible" " Ihe Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," etc. TORONTO THE COPP, CL\RK COMPANY, L,.m,tkd 1 900 Thh c.nthu nn.st „o' hr i,„port.i into Great Britaiu or the UuiteJ StaUs. h3i t„te cd aooorH.nr, to A-t of t.,e Parliament of Tanadn, ,„ .ne vo- onsand „,„e hundred, by Thk CorP. C,,akk Cmp.v.v Limh^d. IWonto Ontario, n. the Ullice of th. Miuiater of Agriculture in, in the year one f ■':f K A KhNiL'CKY CARDINAL AKTKRMATH FAliE '47 m Bflitratt0n This to her from one who in chii.lhood used to stand at the windows of her among the snow-buried cedars. room and watch for the Cardinal SlrTtii^ r^'X'r/--''-;ik V /-!-r^/'\ ^^A'-'Miu /cmlir^ ?r.:^^A'o •iimSk ua':^ "S-^ri'/ V j 2'^f . Jf ^ If ^^:^ CLM of Siiihiticd>lon.b ^=' Apprehensions of Falling Weather Cuckoo anri Mocking-bird We twittered kindly at each other Many an Exquisite Strain Touches her Guitar with Maidenly Solicitude A Distant Sharpshooter .... A False Impression of Mrs. Cobb Got down my Map of Kentucky Certain Ladies who bow sweetly to ine The New Neighbours have come " Old man, are you the gardener .? " . I dressed up ... . Over to my Woodland Pasture vii PAGE 2 4 6 8 13 17 25 27 32 37 42 44 46 Little Town Boys into my Strawberry Bed Toploftical Struttin/^ I see People on account of my Grapes and Pears Welcomed her gayly Knocked reproachfully . , ^ Putting a Prop under a Too-heavily Laden Limb Thrust Mrs. Cobb out of the House Wiien she fed her Hens Tliat Whippin^r Looking down at the (iate that I made Yesterday Georgiana and her Mother coming out " But wouldn't I like to have him !" "What have you done ? " she cried A Little Saul of Tarsus . "And — i —that — all ?" Set our Candles in our Windows Sylvia and the Gosling . Dropped him out into the Street I tapped it ... _ " Sylvia, my dear child, how old are you Sylvia performing . . . He was sitting on the Front Porch Then we set off at a Brisk Pace The Three Generals " I have been married, sir ! " . viii PACB 50 67 74 80 85 S7 89 93 103 "3 121 129 132 '38 143 f44 '59 161 163 166 '78 185 187 189 191 The Carpentt-r and the Sewing-Girl She could see out of only One Eye Rosettes of Yellow Ribbon She sprang across to me . Then her Kyes caught Siglit . "What is it, Mrs. Walters ?" . Tile Sagacious Old Soul . Specimens of my Notes and Drawincrs I beheld Cieorgiana as an Old, Old Ladv Dropped into a Cough FAGK '93 '97 '99 20I 204 2o6 2o8 -'3 24 r IX :l t I 3JntroDuction ^HE first thing in life that I can remember is the hict of being ^^^ caught up into somebody's arms T^i^"^^^ and of owning a blue tumbler. Possibly when that gigantic person — who- ever it was — seized me by my tv\j handles, I seized my tumbler by its one handle ; and thus the glass and the caress stayed bound together in my memory as parts of the same commotion. But I can never evoke these ill-assorted beginnings of all conscious recol- lection without being also obliged to think of a pump on a slippery hill with a brick pavement around it: and a pump and a tumbler and being suddenly snatched off the earth suggest some true story of the times. But, then again, it is impossible xi to recall the Image of this pump without instantly dragging into view the head and shoulders of a smiling school-teacher, who held me in his arms and who had the power tc give away sweet morsels — on that occa- sion ; and why he should appear so early in the procession of small knowledge — indeed, at the azoic head of it — may be a secret not worth discovering, but it is at least quite certain that no one will ever discover it. Most likely, these several things, which are now beheld as compressed into a single scene and instant, existed far apart through time and place. A year arrived when caresses began to be conscious experience ; in another 1 entered upon the ownership of a cerulean mug ; during a third my explorations of the physical world extended to the pump in the yard — for one stood there; on some day of a fourth I may have been led across the woods to the school-house on the mud road — perhaps some Friday afternoon, when it was customary to have spelling matches, or dialogues and speeches, and when parents xii I came and refreshments — the arrival of the refreshments being much more important than that of the parents. Be the truth as it may, the matters set down above are all that 1 can remember on my own account about my birthplace and my earliest years. Thev are filaments of the obscurest alg^e, gathered around the coasts of that dim, deep sea which is a child's mind and now resembling nothing so much as a barely traceable bunch of out- lines pressed on one small card. After this everything vanishes — tumbler and teacher, pump and pudding. There is an upheaval, or a downfall ; and when Mem- ory begins again the weaving of that long seamless living tapestry wherefrom she has never rested and whereon she is busy yet, 1 was about two miles away. My father had moved with his family to a farm that had been left to him by his father and entailed for the benefit of us, his children ; and there I continued to live until I was twenty-two years of age, without ever having been out- side the state of Kentucky or having seen xiii more than once or twice any but the nearest village. The farm to which the scene now shifts was small. I was the last of seven children; and during the forerunning years of his' married life my father, who was of a most generous, unselfish, and trustful nature, had met with reverses ; both his and my mother's independent fortunes were gone. This piece of property represented a fragment of his father's estate, just as his father's estate represented but a fragment of the wilderness lands of a pioneer settler. On it stood a brick house of the Virginia pattern — a very good one for the time at which it had been built. In its original shape it consisted of that part which was two stories high; but later (I do not know when or by whom) there had been added at the southern end an ell containing, besides a pantry and a kitchen, one chamber, the largest room in the house! This was occupied by my father and mother. Thus, in accordance with the com- mon custom of the country in those days, it xiv became the general living-room of the family. Its two good-sized windows opened upon the front yard. One of these was kept closed, because the bed sat against it; the other was regularly closed at nightfall, and regularly opened the first thing in the morn- ing. In this room, then, and at this window begins the history of my outdoor life. There my impressions of the physical world took earliest shape and meaning; whatsoever un- important habits of observation I may possess were there formed, directed, and rewarded; and if I have ever written anything concern- ing Nature which shows the slightest knowl- edge or feeling — if in far later years I have ever lingered over a page, vainly trying to put upon it the reality of external things as they seem to us, and the reality of the emo- tions they arouse in us — the origin of it all goes back to that time and place. Of the other portions of the house, any account would enter but unprofitably into the purpose of these recollections. True, I XV early acquired excellent information regard- ing the pantry next door. It was full of things that once had been in Nature, but were soon to be in Man. And in Me. Substances piled up, simply waiting to be taken in: why keep them waiting? It was one of the places in which a boy sometimes lengthens his life and sometimes shortens it, but where meantime he invariably broadens his information and his body. The truth, in any case, would be of no value except as a warning, and there is never anybody to take the warning. Of the kitchen also, adjoining the pantry — those twin hostelnes of little pattering feet — I have recollections that go fairly back to Chaos ; but neither have these anything to do with that one especial end in view, which further on perhaps may kindly justify these frank and unexpected personali- ties. As for the other rooms — the dining- room, the parlour, the bedrooms upstairs, and the enormous garret above these — each in time grew discoverable and definite to my spreading intelligence until at last I could XVI (3 i I .5 grasp the entire house as a mental whole, consisting of many orderly and separately interesting parts. But their several diverse histories began later ; and none opened for me an eye through which to look out upon the physical world. So that there was but one : the window in my father's and mother's room, that single observatory for a delicate child kept much indoors and having no playmates. At this instant, as I test the matter in consciousness, I possess not a single recollection of this v/indow in summer or of anything I ever sawfiom it during that season : which means no doubt that then I was never there. But from the first chill days of autumn when the white window-sash was lowered, and doors were shut, and a fire was kindled on the hearth — from that time until late spring, when the sash was thrown up again and doors were set open and the fireplace was whitewashed for the summer, with a bag of straw rammed up the chimney to keep back soot and swallows — the memories of what I xvii looked out upon through that window are so thick that in all the years since I have never exhausted them, and I have but to develop some unused film of memory to find fresh ones at any moment. It has been .-.aid that the first thing in the morning the shutters were thrown open. How often, as soon as this was done, would my mother call to me and direct my atten- tion to something of interest. Perhaps to the window-panes themselves, silvered and sparkling with frost. What a wonder and a myster) to a child's eyes ! Those landscapes which had settled in a night across his crystal path of vision and now shut out all others ! Until they were melted away by his hot breath, or scratched through with a small curious finger-nail. Sometimes it was as though the distant woods with all its boughs and avenues had thrown its image towards the house— -not across the sunlight, but under cover of the darkness — and this image had been intercepted at the window and fastened there in ice. XVlll I About thirty yards away stood a row of b'ge cedar-trees, the well-nigh universal ever- gteen in Kentucky front yards at that period, for nurseries were scarce, and a fir, a larch, a juniper, or the like 'as difficult or impos- sible to get. How often she called to me, on going to the window herself, to look out at these cedars ! At the first snow, piled lightly on the boughs ; at a male cardinal, sitting on a pinnacle of white and green ; at some great sleet, bending them to the earth, rigid and shapeless. It was she who intro- duced me to the subject of birds. Thus, shut up in a rather lonely farm- house with my back to the fire, I learned to send my eyes abroad and to live out of doors with sun and cloud, storm and calm, through- out three quarters of the year. These window observations went on dur- ing many returning seasons. Long before they had ceased, they were overlapped by other lines of experience begun outside the house. First in the yard itself; and has the mature mind ever been able to describe how xix vast a world a large country yard is to a child ? A summer day there was longer than is the man's brief life ; one corner of it more distant from another than continent from continent to his measuring eyes. In the yard I could draw near to many things which I had been obliged to observe from a distance. I could follow them up, lay hold on them, play the mischief For one thing : I could run, at winter twilights, out to the cedar-trees and seizing a low bough, shake it and scatter the birds settled down for the night; thus driving them from tree to tree, backward and forward, their cries growing always more distressing in the darkness : a wonderfully interesting piece of business to me for some unknown devilish reason. And then there was the first trap, and the first wild, fluttering captive after breakfast some morn- ing. And when the blue grass with orchard grass mixed in it was at its highest, not yet having been mowed, and the cold showers of early June left the tops dripping and bowed down, out of the depths here and there I XX issued all day the cries of the young, fallen troni the nest or unable to rise on callow wing out of that chill forest of stems. A fine chance for adventures and a place where a boy can learn to hate cats — and never afterwards get over his aversion. Passing on. I must yet pause to say that on a Kentucky farm in those days a child vv'as surrounded by a prodigal bird life of which but traces remain. My earliest recol- lections of daybreak are now condensed iiUo one surviving impression : that of hearing all round my father's house, beating close to the walls and surging faintly and more faintly away in every direction, such a sea of song as I think can no longer visit human ears. Of mornings I was often called out of the house to look at the sky, across which wild geese were flyinff (I can still hear the cry of the leaders up there — thaC highest mel- ody of earth). Or far outnumbering these, wild ducks; or outnumbering the wild ducks a myriad to one, the wild pigeons — now entirely gone. Sometimes the flocks of XXI these dappled for hours the low gray sky over one entire quarter of the heavens : passing, passing, passing. At other times — a strangely beautiful sight — flying high on a clear frosty morning and spread far out in a thin straight line, they passed under the zenith like a moving arch. A procession of arches ! one after another, all borne in the same direction — a single instinct in ten thousand breasts. They were visiting still the vast oak forests of Kentucky. The whole land lay across the ancient paths of migration. Strange species now and then crossed also. I can remember that my father, who was a capital shot, standing one day in his stable lot, winged an immense sea fowl that fluttered far down on a neighbour's estate. He went for it and brought it home; but not he nor any one else knew the name of it. Outside the yard, on every side there lay for me as a child the wonderful universe of the farm. I early began to make the acquaintance of this by sitting on the pom- mel before my father as he rode over it on xxii i i ?l his gaitfd saddle liorse. Later I began to ride behind him, thank heavens I where there was no upward horn-like projection to be perched on, but where I could straddle a real soft, tat, living back. There was such a difference between riding on a pommel and riding off of it. My father knew the names of all trees of the land and their varieties ; and of weed and grass and shrub. He had his wonderful practical knowledge direct from his father, as his father had drawn his from the foregoing pioneer settler ; and thus in the person of my father I touched in some small way that marvellous utilitarian wood- craft possessed by the western frontiersman. Through my father also came the earliest knowledge of the fields. I possess no men- tal picture of him older than that of the sow- ing of hempseed. He sat on his saddle horse, whose ears he had tied over with his hand- kerchief to keep the seed from falling into them. Backward and forward, backward and forward, across the soft brown earth he rode, sowing the hemp. And through him xxiii M there was brought into my life perhaps the most wholesome idea and lesson that has ever entered it, — that of getting down to hard work ; and that whatsoever work my hand undertook, to rest not until it was done and done with thoroughness. Both he and my mother were of inexorable thoroughness and particularity in all their lives. I have never followed their example but with outward profit and inward peace, nor neglected it withou*: loss of both of these. What I have now com.e to and am trying to say is that everything I was set to do, from the beginning to the end of all my small labours on the farm, brought indispensable knowledge; kept me close to the earth; caused me to know more of the infinite life of out-of-doors. I dropped corn, covered it, thinned it (an abominable business, I thought, working a boy's body as though he were a pair of sugar tongs). Sometimes I shucked it in autumn, threw the fodder over to the stock in winter, took the corn to the mill in the spring and took my share of the bread at all seasons. XX iv t m ■'4 I followed the cradles, and shocked oats and wheat, and helped haul the oats to the barn, and the wheat to the stack. And who can do these things without learning a little about the natural history of fields ? I cut weeds in the woodland pasture (what Kentucky boy of those times but looked bitterly forward from year to year to the weed-cutting season, and connected weeds with the original curse of the earth — regularly adding an original one unknown to iMoses). I cut weeds along fences and in stable lots : on the whole I think 1 knew weeds pretty well. For several springs I helped to cut the willows for tying the vines in my father's large vineyard. I charred the ends of the stakes over which these vines were to grow, hoed the vines, thmned out superfluous leaves, gathered the grapes for the press, racked the wine in the cellar — and sometimes the wine racked me. I prepared the ground for the sowing of veg- etable seeds and cultivated the plants after they came up : surely I was made to master the business of gardening. Sometimes when x.w a tree was felled in the woods, I collected the brush into a pile and afterwards burnt the brush and my breeches. 1 cut wood for the house at the wood-pile. At the stable I fed the stock: what is there did I not learn about a barn and its kind faithful souls ? On the whole, though I was never a hard- worked, hard-pressed boy, there dwelt in the minds of parents of those days the stalwart, sturdy idea that when business stops the devil begins ; and my parents evidently did not wish him to begin. It appeared to me that when they did not keep me busy, they kept me moving: they sent me on errands to the neighbours — presumably an amuse- ment for the young. In this way, as I now know, I began to extend my knowledge of woods and fields and pathways beyond the farm. Furthermore, one of my regular occu- pations (another amusement) was to hunt the turkeys. But long before I started out with the idea of finding the turkeys, the turkeys had started out with the idea of not xxvi I being found by anybody. Apparently they refused grasshoppers until they had reached a place where they had no right to eat them. What wanderings and searchings they origi- nated ! And no sooner did they perceive that they were discovered than thev benan to run cheerfully home — zealously pushing each other out of the way — as though they had never intended to leave it and were onlv too glad to return. But they did this every day, and I was not inclined to believe them. It IS more to the purpose to record how during these hours of roaming over the summer and autumn land, 1 received uncon- scious lessons regarding it through every busy sense. And then there were the child's pleasures of wood and stream and field, during which more knowledge was gotten through sheer joy alone — the best way : for as you can- not buy joy, neither can you buy the truth that always attends it. Wring out of the heart of a man the last essence of his knowledge of a country, and it will be the xxvii scenes of boyhood pleasures. Call on hin.i for his best remembrance of an orchard ; and it will be something like tliis : an afternoon in hire autumn when he had climbed the fence of one, during a long hunt, his tongue parched and his stomach empty. But not an apple was to be found : it was too late : they had all been knocked or gathered. Ah! there was a splendid one, caught in the fork of a limb; or kickinir about amongr the leaves, he found two, one on top of the other, beside a sprout of blackberry in deep grass near the edge of the limbs; or, in a little hollow of the ground, he spied a third with a bee hole on one side of it ; a wet leaf stuck to the other and a little white mould under it. Through work and errand and pleasure, then, I was ever learning. As I grew older other things helped to furrow habits more deeply. The school to which J was sent lay across the country ; and morninc; and after- noon that country must be traversed. The neighbourhood church lay several miles off in xwiii another. When I entered college, through part of each year I walked back and forth — several miles, across the country still. So that by the end of that time and as the end of it all, 1 had learned some little about Nature in a neighbourhood. One fact is not to be overlooked : that 1 should probably have learned less, had the neighbourhood contained more children. Of course this neighbourhood contained its ch.il- dren, otherwise it would not have been one. But there were some tamilies with whom we did not exchange visits. I had whole groups and flocks ot cousii^is, awav off below the horizon, in t'vo or three directions ; but I saw them too seldom — to mv sorrow, Th en there were much older bovs far ahead of me and babies everywhere behind me — no trouble about babies. But at a certain period there seemed to have been a lull, and during that lull I was born. So that strictly I had no adjacent contemporaries. Undoubtedly this had its effect — this absence of compan- ionship : it often led me to follow the negroes xxix into the fields, where as one result I watched the hemp through all its changes. Another result, more important by far for me, was the dependence it created upon other things for play, study, interest, activity, curiosity, affec- tion. So that the other inhabitants of my world — domestic fowls, dumb brutes, birds, creatures of the woods — took measurably from the first the place of the human species. There has never been reason to regret these universal childhood friendships : none of them, has ever been broken : they mean more the longer they last. In so far as literature is concerned these same experiences taught me, and have always compelled me, to see human life as set in Nature : finding its explanation in soil and sky and season : merely one of the wild growths that spring up on the surface of the earth amid ten thousand others. ! hold this to be the only true way in which to write of Man in fiction, as it is in science. I further hold it to be true that if a writer is ever to have that knowledge of a country which xxx p j i. reappears in his work as local colour, he must have gotten it in his childhood ; that no one ever knows Nature anywhere unless he has known Nature somewhere in his youth ; and that he who has thus known her in one place can, at any time, easily know her in any other. There maybe new terms, phrases, groupings, and arrangements ; but it is the same Mother- Speech learned at the knee. Behind all that I have written lie the land- scapes of a single neighbourhood. They are in T/je B/ue Grass Region of Kentucky, in Flute and Violin ; still more in A Summer in yl ready, in A Kentucky Cardinal and After- math ; and in 'The Reign of Law. The question is often asked, how can a man in a city write of a country far away that he has not seen for years. But that country is never far away and the man looks over into it un- ceasingly. He has but to lift his eyes to see it — as clearly as he sees the people in the street. Such pictures of outdoor life are for any one a great possession, a divine indestructible wealth; and it is for the simple sake of try- XXXI 1 ing to spread the love of Nature — of scattering broadcast such wealth — that he has written down these words with a certain childish figure so much in evidence: but this boy was the only one that he had the right to use as an illustration. J. L. A. New York City, 10 October, 1900. xxxn ! A n LL this Xew-ycar's Day of 1850 the sun shone cloudless but wrought no thaw, lOven the landscapes of frost on the win- dow-panes did not melt a flower, and the little trees still keep their silvery boughs arched high above the jewelled avenues. During the afternoon a lean hare limped twice across the lawn, and there was not a creature stirring to chase it. Now the night B I is bitter cold, with no sounds outside but the cracking of the porches as they freeze tighter. fc-W ^> /^ '"V>a '- ^^ APPREHENSIONS OF FALLING WEATHER. Even the north wind seems grown too numb to move. I had determined to convert its coarse, 2 1 big noise into something sweet— as may often be done by a little art with the things of this life — and so stretched a horse-hair above the opening between the window sashes; but the soul of my harp has departed. I hear but the comfortable roar and snaj) of hickory logs, at long intervals a deeper breath from the dog stretched on his side at my feet, and the crickets under the hearth-stones. They have to thank me for that nook. One chill afternoon I came upon a whole company of them on the western slope of a woodland mound, so lethargic that I thumped them repeatedly before they could so much as get their senses. There was a branch near by, and the smell of mint in the air, so that had they been young Kentuckians one might have had a clew to the situation. With an ear for winter minstrelsy, I brought two home in a handkerchief, and assigned them an elegant suite of apartments under a loose brick. But the finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower ^•** CUCKOU ANU MOCKING-BIRU. i shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its li<;ht. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear. Towards dark, having seen to the comfort of a household of kind, faithful fellow-beings, whom man in his vanity calls the lower animals, I went last to walk under the cedars in the front yard, listening to that music which is at once so cheery and so sad — the low chirping of birds at dark winter twilights as they gather in from the frozen fields, from snow-buried shrub- bery and hedge-rows, and settle down for the night in the depths of the evergreens, the only refuge from their enemies and shelter from the blast. But this evening they made no ado about their home-coming. To-day perhaps none had ventured forth. I am most uneasy when the red-bird is forced by hunger to leave the covert of his cedars, since he, on the naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the most far-shining and beautiful mark for Death. I stepped across to the tree in which a pair of these birds roost, and shook it, to make sure they were at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the next with the quick startled notes they utter when aroused. I w ^.O- I ^ ! ■1 I WE TWirrEKEJ; KINDLY AT KACH OTHER. The lonf(er I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a mag- net to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town — to the massed haunts o*^ the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. 1 can feel the prose rising in nie as I step along, like hair on tlie back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sight. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come Lo town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which T have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man. Among my neighbours who furnish me much of the plam prose of life, the nearest hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner. I called liim my raincrow, because the sound of his voice awoke apprehensions of failing weather. m MANY AN KXQflSITF, STRAIN. 8 A visit from him was an endless drizzle. For Jacob came over to expound his minute symp- toms ; and had everything that he gave out on the subject of human ailments been written down, it must have made a volume as large, as solemn, and as inconvenient as a family Bible. My other nearest neighbour lives across the road — a widow, Mrs. Walters. I call Mrs. Walters my P^ocking-bird, because she r -produces by what is truly a divine arrangement of the throat the voices of the town. When she flutters across to the yellow settee under the grape-vine and balances herself lightly with expectation, I have but to request that she favour me with a little singing, and as soon the air is vocal with every note of the village songsters. After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins to flutter in a moth- erly way around the subject of wj' s\mptoms. Naturally, it has been my wish to bring about between this raincrow and mocking-bird the desire to pair with one another. For, if a man always wanted t. tell his symptoms, and a woman always wished to hear about them, surely a mar- riage compact on the basis of such a passion ought to open up for them a union of ever- flowing and indestructible felicity. They should associate as perfectly as the compensating metals of a pendulum, of which the one con- tracts as the other expands. And then I should be a little happier myself. lUit the perversity of life! Jacob would never confide in Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Walters would never inquire for Jacob. Now poor Jacob is dead, of no complaint apparently, and with so few sym])toms that even the doctors did not know what was the matter, and the upshot of this talk is that his place has been sold, and I am to have new neighbours Whcit a disturbance to a man living on the edge of a quiet town ! Tidings of the calamity came to-day from Mrs. Walters, who flew over and sang — sang even on a January afternoon — in a manner to rival her most vociferous vernal execution. But the poor creature was so truly distressed that I followed her to the front gate, and we tw'ttered kindly at each other over the fence, and ruffled our plumage with common disapproval. It is marvellous how a member of her sex will con- ceive dislike of peo])le that she has never seen ; but birds are sensible of heat or cold long before either arrives, and it may be that this mocking- bird feels something wrong at the quill end of her feathers. 10 '^^e^/^ A PACF^ CT ilLUr^ DOGS LET LC^E™:-^ ^-^^..r)-^- J 4 ':^^k ry memory of Jacob off the face of the earth. Then there has been need to quiet Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Walters does not get into our best society ; so that the town is to her like a pond to a crane : she wades round it, going in as far as she can, and snatches up such small fry as come shoreward from the middle. In this way lately I have gotten hints of what is stirring in the vasty deeps of village opinion. 24 1%-?.^ ^^■^■^y^-'^- A. FALSK IMI'RKSSION oK MRS. CoBB. 25 Mrs. Cobb is charged, among other dreadful things, with having ordered of the town manu- facturer a carriage that is to be as fine as Presi- dent Taylor's and with marching into church preceded by a servant, who bears hei prayer- book on a velvet cushion. What if she rode in Cinderella's coach, or had her prayer-book car- ried before her on the back of a Green River turtle.' But to her sex she promises to be an invidious Christian. I am rather disturbed by the gossip regarding the elder daughter. But this is so conflicting that one impression is made only to be effaced by another. A week ago their agent wanted to buy my place. I was so outraged that I got down my map of Kentucky to see where these peculiar beings originate. They come from a little town in the southwestern corner of the State, on the Ohio River, named Henderson — named from that Richard Henderson who in the year 1775 bought about half of Kentucky from the Chero- kees, and afterwards, as president of his pur- chase, addressed the first legislative assembly ever held in the West, seated under a big elm tree outside the walls of Boonsborough fort. These people must be his heirs, or they would never have tried to purchase my few Sabine 26 ^'"^^^^ GOT Ul)\VN MV MAI' Ul' KENTl'CKY. 27 acres. It is no surprise to discover that they arc from the (irccn River country. They must bathe often in that stream. I sujipose they wanted my front yard to sow it in jjcnny- royal, the characteristic growth of those dis- tricts. They surely distil it and use it as a l)erfume on their handkerchiefs. It was per- haps from the founder of this family that Thomas Jefferson . jrgi^j - THK NKW NKIf:HBnrRS WAVK COME. 37 right one? If she ever comes near my yard and answers my whistle, I'll know it; and then I'll teach these popinjays in blue coats and white pantaloons what Adam was made for. But the wrong one — there's the terror ! Only think of so composite a phenomenon as Mrs. Walters, for in.stance, adorned with limp nightcap and stiff curl-papers, like garnishes around a leg of roast mutton, waking up beside me at four o'clock in the morning as some gray- headed love-bird of Madagascar, and beginning to chirp and trill in an ecstasy ! The new neighbours have come — mother, younger daughter, and servants. The son is at West Point ; and the other daughter lingers a few days, unable, no doubt, to tear herself away from her beloved penny-royal and dearest Green River. They are cjuiet ; have borrowed nothing from any one in the neighbourhood; have well- dressed, well-traineii servants , and one begins to be a little impressed. The curtains they have |)ut up at the windows suggest that the whole nest is being lined with S( it, cool, spotless love- liness, which is very restful and beguiling. No one has called yet, >ince they are not at home till June , but Mrs. Walters has done some tall wading lately, and declares that people do 3» not know what to think. They will know when the elder daughter arrives ; for it is the worst member of the family that settles what the world shall think of ':he others. If only she were not the worst ! If only as I sat here beside my large new window, around which the old rose-bush has been trained and now is blooming, I could look across to her win- dow where the white curtains hang, and feel that behind them sat, shy and gentle, the wood-pigeon for whom through Mays gone by I have been vaguely waiting ! And yet I do not believe that I could live a single year with only the sound of cooing in the house. A wood-pigeon would be the death of me. 39 VI IHIS mornin<;, the 3d of June, the llndine from Green River rose above the waves. The strawberry bed is almost under their win- dows. I had gone out to pick the first dish of the season for breakfast; for while I do not care to eat except to live, I never miss an opportunity of living upon straw- berries. 40 I was stooping down and bending the wet leaves over, so as not to miss any, when a voice at the window above said, timidly and playfully, •' Are you the gardener ? " I picked on, turning as red as the berries. Then the voice said again, " Old man, are you the gardener ? " Of course a person looking down carelessly on the stooping figure of any man, and seeing noth- ing but a faded straw hat, and arms and feet and ankles bent together, might easily think him decrepit with age. Some things touch off my temper. But I answered, humbly, " I am the gardener, madam." "How much do you ask for your straw- berries.?" "The gentleman who owns this place does not sell his strawberries. He gives them aw^y. if he likes people. How much do you ask for your strawberries } " " What a nice old gentleman ! Is he having those picked to give away } " " He is having these picked for his breakfast." "Don't you think he'd like you to give me those, and pick him some more ? " "I fear not, madam." " Nevertheless, you might. He'd never know." 41 "OLU MAN, ARE YOU THK GARDENER?" 42 "I think he'd find it out." " You are not afraid of him, are you ? " " I am when he gets mad." " Does he treat you badly ? " " If he does, I always forgive him." " He doesn't seem to provide you with very many clothes." I picked on. " Rut you seem nicely fed." I picked on. " What is his name, old man ? Don't you like to talk.?" "Adam Moss." " Such a green, cool, soft name ! It is hke his house and yard and garden. What does he do ? " "Whatever he pleases." " You must not be impertinent to me, or I'll tell him. What does he Hke ? " " Birds— red-birds. What do you like } " "Red-birds! How does he catch them.? Throw salt on their tails.?" " He is a lover of Nature, madam, and partic- ularly of birds." "What does /le know about birds.? Doesn't he care for people .? " " He doesn't think many worth caring for." " Indeed ! Ana /le is perfect, then, is he .? " 43 1 DRESSED UP. 44 " He thinks he is nearly as bad as any ; but that doesn't make the rest any better." "Poor old gentleman! He must have the bhies dreadfully. What docs he do with his birds? Eat his robins, and stuff his cats, and sell his red-birds in cages? " "He considers it part of his mission in life to keep them from being eaten or stuffed or caged." " And you say he is nearly a hundred ? " " He is something over thirty years of age, madam." " Thirty ? Surely we heard he was very old. And does he live in that beautiful little old house all by himself ? " " / live with him ! " " r.;/. ! Ha ! ha ! ha ! And what is your name, you dear good old man ? " "Adam." " Two Adams living in the same house ! A- /ou the old Adam ' I have heard so much '♦ him." At this I rose, pushed back my hat, and looked up at her. " / am Adam Moss," I said, with distant politeness. " Vou can have these strawberries for your breakfast if you want them." 45 OVER TO MY Wi)ont,ANU I'ASTl RE. 46 There was a low quick "Oh ! " and she was gone, and the curtains closed over her face. It was rude; but neither ou<(ht she to have called me the old Adam. I have been thinkinjr of one thins: why should she speak sliKhtin-;ly of my knowledp^e of birds .' What does she know about them ? I should like to inquire. Late this afternoon, I dressed up in my hi<;h gray wool hat. my fine lons-tailod blue' cl.^h coat with brass buttons, my pink waist-coat, frilled shirt, white cravat, and yellow nankeen trou.sers, and walked slowly several times around my strawberry bed. Did not see any more ripe strawberries. Within the last ten days I have called twice upon the Cobbs, urged no doubt by an extrava- gant readiness to find them all that I feared they were not. How exquisite in life is the art of not seeing many things, and of forgetting many that have been seen ! They received me as though nothing unpleasant had happened. Nor did the elder daughter betray that we had met. She has not forgotten, for more than once I surprised a light in her eyes as though she were laughing. She has not, it is certain, told even her mother and sister. Somehow this 4; fact invests her character with i charm as of subterranean roominess and secrecy. Women who tell everything are like finger-bowls of clear water. But it is Sylvia that pleases me. She must be about seventeen ; and so demure and confid- ing that I was ready to take her by the hand, lead her to the garden-gate, and say : Dear child, everything in here — butterflies, flowers, fruit, honey, everything — is yours; come and go and gather as you like. Yesterday morning I sent them a large dish of strawberries, with a note asking whether they would walk during the day over to my woodland pasture, where the soldiers had a barbecue before setting out for the Mexican war. The nn)ther and Sylvia accepted Our walk was a little overshadowed by their Ic ss ; and as I thoughtlessly described the gayety of that scene — t!.e splendid young fellows danc- ing in their bright uniforms, and now and then pausing to wipe their foreheads, the speeches, the cheering, the dinner under the trees, and, a few days later, the tear-dimmed eyes, the hand-wringing ?nd embracing, and at last the marching proudly away, each with a Bible in his pocket, ai.d many never, never to return — 48 I I was sorry that I had not foreseen the sacred chord I was touching. But it made good friends of us more quickly, and they were well-bred, so that we returned to all appearance in giy spirits. The elder daughter came to meet us. and went at once silently to her mother's side, as though she had felt the sepr.ration. I wondered whether she had declined to go because of the memory of her father. As we passed my front gate, I asked them to look at my flowers. The mother praised also the cabbages, thus showing an admirably balanced mind; the little Sylvia fell in love with a vine-covered arbour; the elder daughter appeared to be secretly watching the many birds about the grounds, but when I pointed out several less-known species, she lost interest. What surprises most is that they are so re- fined and intelligent. It is greatly to be feared that we Kentuckians in this part of the State are profoundly ignorant as to the people in other parts. I told Mrs. Walters this, and she, seeing that I am beginning to like them, is beginning to like them herself. Dear Mrs.' Walters ! Her few ideas are like three or four marbles on a level floor : they have no power to move themselves, but roll equally well in any direction you push them. E 49 This afternoon I turned a lot of little town boys into my strawberry bed, and now it looks like a field that had been harrowed and rolled. UlTLi; R)\VN )!UYS INTO MY hlRAWBKRRV BED. I think they would <;ladly have pulled up some of the plants to see whether there might not be berries growing on tlie roots. It is unwise to do everything that you can for people at once ; for when you can do noth- 50 ing more, they will say you are no longer like yourself, and turn against you. So I have meant to go slowly with the Cobbs in my wish to be neighbourly, and do not think that they could reasonably be spoiled on one dish of strawberries in three weeks. liul the other evening Mrs. Cobb sent over a plate of golden sally-lunn on a silver waiter, covered with a snow-white napkin ; and acting on this provo- cation. I thought they could be trusted with a basket of cherries. So next morning, in order tr save the ripen- ing fruit on a rather small tree of choice variety. I thought I should put up a scarecrow, and to this end rummaged a closet for some last win- ter's old clothes. These I crammed with straw, and I fastened the resulting figure in the crotch of the tree, tying the arms to the adjoining limbs, and giving it the dreadful appearance of shout- ing, " Keep out of here, you rascals, or you'll get hurt!" And. in truth, it did look so like me that I felt a little uncanny about it myself. Returning home late, I went at once to the tree, where I found not a quart of cherries, and the servants told of an astonishing thing : that no sooner had the birds discovered who was standing in the tree, wearing the clothes in SI which he usccj to feed them during the winter, than the news spread Hke wildfire to the effect that he had climbed up there and was calling out : " Here is the best tree, fellows ! Pitch in and help yourselves ! " So that the like of the chattering and fetching away was never seen before. This was the story ; but little negroes love cherries, and it is not incredible that the American birds were assisted in this instance by a large family of fat young African spoon bills. Anxious to save another tree, and afraid to use more of my own clothes, I went over to Mrs. Walters, and got from her an old bonnet and veil, a dress and cape, and a pair of her cast-off yellow gaiters. These garments I strung together and prepared to look lifelike as nearly as a stuffing of hay would meet the inner re- quirements of the case. T ni seated the dread apparition in the fork of a limb, and awaited results. The first thief was an old jay, who flew towards the tree with his head turned to one side to see whether any one was overtaking him. But scarcely had he alighted when he uttered a scream of horror that was sickening to hear, and dropped on the grass beneath, after which he took himself off with a silence and speed that would have done credit to a passen- 52 ger-pigeon. That tree was rather avoided for some days, or it may have been let alone merely because others were ripening; so that IMrs. Cobb got her cherries, and I sent Mrs. Walters some also for the excellent loan of her veil and gaiters. As the days pass I fall in love with Sylvia, who has been persuaded to turn mv arbour into areading-roop.andisoften to be' found there of mornin-s with one of Sir Walter's novels. Sometimes I leave her alone, sometimes lie on the bciich facing her, while she reads aloud, or, tiring, prattles. Little half-Hedged spirit,' to whom the yard is the earth and June eternity, but who peeps over the edge of the nest at the chivalry of the ages, and fancies iiu-t she knows the world. The other day, as we were talking, she tapped the edge of her hanhoc with a slate- pencil -for she is also studying the Greatest Common Divisor — and said, warningly, " Vou must not make epigrams ; for if you succeeded you would be brilliant, and everything brilliant is tiresome." " Who is your authority for that epigram, Miss Sylvia } " I said, laughing. " Don't you suppose that I have any ideas but what I get from books ? " 53 " You may have all wisdom, but those sayings proceed only from experience." " I have my intuitions ; they are better than experience." " If you keep on, you will be making epigrams presently, and then I shall find you tiresome, and go away." " You couldn't. I am your guest. Mow un- conventional I am to come over and sit in your arbour? But it is Georgiana's fault." " Did she tell you to con.e ? " "No; but she didn't keep me from coming. Whenever any one of us does anything improper we always say to each other, ' It's Georgiana's fault. She ought not to have taught us to be so simple and unconventional. ' " " And is she the family governess } " " She governs the family. There doesn't seem to be any real government, but we all do as she says. You might think at first that Georgiana was the most light-headed member of the family, but she isn't. She's deep. I'm shallow in comparison with her. She calls me sophisticated, and introduces me as the elder Miss Cobb, and says that if I don't stop reading Scott's novels and learn more arithmetic she will put white caps on me, and make me walk 54 to church in carpet slippers and with grand- mother's stick." " But you don't seem to have stopped, Miss Sylvia." "No; but I'm stopping. Georgiana always gives us time, but we get right at last. It was two years before she could make my brother go to West Point. He was wild and rough, and wanted to raise tobacco, and float with it down to New Orleans, and have a good time. Then when she had gotten him to go she was afraid he'd come back, and .so she persuaded my mother to live here, where there isn't any to- bacco, and where I could be .sent to school. That took her a year, and now she is breakin'^ up my habit of reading nothing but novels. She gets us all down in the end. One day when she and Joe were little children they were out at the wood-pile, and Georgiana was sitting on a log eating a jam biscuit, with her feet on the log in front of her. Joe had a hand-a.xe, and was chopping at anything till he caught sight of her feet. Then he went to the end of the log, and whistled like a steamboat, and began to hack down in that direction, calling out to her : ' Take your toes out of the way, Georgiana. I am coming down the river. The current is up and 55 I can't stop.' 'My toes were there first,' said Gcorgiana, and wont on eating her biscuit. 'Take thcrn out of the way, I tell you,' he shouted as he came nearer, ' or they'll get cut off.' 'They were there first,' repeated Geor- giana, and took another delicious nibble. Joe cut straight along, and went whack ! right into her five toes. Gcorgiana screamed with all her might, but she held her foot on the log, till Joe dropped the hatchet with horror, and caught her in his arms. 'Gcorgiana, I told you to take your toes away,' he cried ; 'you are such a little fool,' and ran with her to the house. But she always had control over him after that." To-day I saw Sylvia enter the arbour, and shortly afterwards I followed with a book. "When you stop reading novels and begin to read history, Miss Sylvia, here is the most re- markable history of Kentucky that was ever written or ever will be. It is by my father's old teacher of natural history in Transylvania University, Professor Rafinesque, who also had a wonderful botanical garden on this side of the town ; perhaps the first ever seen in this coun- try." "I know all about it," replied Sylvia, resent- 56 ing this slight upon her erudition. •• Georgiana has my father's ccpy. and his was presented tu him by Mr. Audubon." "Audubon!" I said, with a doubt. "Never heard of Audubon.?" cried Sylvia, delighted to show up my ignorance. "Only of the great Audubon. Miss Sylvia; thc^jrar, the very ^r^^ff Audubon." "Well, this was the ^^m//, the very ^m?/ Audubon. He lived in Henderson, and kept a corn-mill. He and my father were friends, and he gave my father .some of his early drawin-s of Kentucky birds. Georgiana has them now, and that is where she gets her love of birds — from my father, who got his from the ^reaf, the very ^r;.^r// Audubon." " Would Miss Cobb let me see these draw- ings ? " I asked, eagerly. " She might; but she prizes them as much as If they were stray leaves out of the only liible in the world." As Sylvia turned inside out this pocket of her mmd, there had dropped out a key to her sister's conduct. Now I understood her slight- ing attitude towards my knowledge of birds But I shall feel some interest in Miss Cobb from this time on. I never dreamed that she 5/ could bring me fresh news of that rare spirit whom I have so wished to see, and for one week in the woods with whom I would give any year of my life. Are they possibly the Hen- derson family to whom Audubon intrusted the box of his original drawings during his absence in Philadelphia, and who let a pair of Norway rats rear a family in it, and cut to pieces nearly a thousand inhabitants of the air ? There are two more days of June. Since the talk with Sylvia I have called twice more upon the elder Miss Cobb. Upon reflection, it is misleading to refer to this young lady in terms so dry, stiff, and denuded ; and I shall drop into Sylvia's form, and call her simply Geor- giana. That looks better — Georgiana ! It sounds well, too — Georgiana ! Georgiana, then, is a rather elusive character, The more I see of her the less I understand her. If your nature draws near hers, it retreats. If you pursue, it flies — a little frightened per- haps. If then you keep still and look perfectly safe, she will return, but remain at a fixed dis- tance, like a bird that will stay in your yard, but not enter your house. It is hardly shyness, for she is not shy, but more like some strain of 58 wild nature in her that refuses to be donicsti- cated. One's faith is strained to accept Sylvia's estimate that Ge()r<;iana is deep — she is so light, so airy, so playful. Sylvia is a de./iure little dove that has pulled x - itself an owl's skin, and is much prouder >f its wicked old feathers than of its innocent heart; but Geor- giana— what is she? Secretly an owl with the buoyancy of a hummin^^-bird ? However, it's nothing to me. She hovers around her mother and Sylvia with a fondness that is rather beautiful. I did not mention the subject of Audubon and her father, for it is never well to let an elder sister know that a younger one has been talking about her. I merely gave her several chances to speak of birds, but she ignored them. As for me and my love of bird.s, such trifles are beneath her notice. I don't like her, and it will not be worth while to call again soon, though it would be pleasant to see those drawings. This morning as I was accidentally passing under her window I saw her at it and lifted my hat. She leaned over with her cheek in her palm, and said, smiling, " You mustn't spoil Sylvia ! " " What is my definite offence in that regard ? " 59 IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) V W, / C/j % 1.0 I.I IIM ill 2.5 §45 S IM iim M i.8 1.25 1.4 16 ■• 6" ► i p^ <^ /}. M "el ■^1 4" 0/5 >^ Photographic Sciences Corporation '^" ^#. <^ 4 <> ^%^ 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716) 872-4503 f^ L-S- W, " Too much arbour, too many flowers, too much fine treatment." "Docs fine treatment ever harm anybody? Is it not bad treatment that spoils people ? " " Good treatment m.ay never spoil people who are old enough to know its rarity and value. But you say you are a student of nature; have you not observed that nature never lets the sugar get to things until they are ripe ,'' Chil- dren must be kept tart." " The next time that Miss Sylvia comes over, then, I am to give her a tremendous scolding and a big basket of green apples." " Or, what is worse, suppose you encourage her to study the Greatest Common Divisor ? I am trying to get her ready for school in the fall." " Ts she being educated for a teacher ? " "You know that Southern ladies never teach." "Then she will never need the Greatest Com- mon Divisor. I have known many thousands of human beings, and none but teachers ever has the least use for the Greatest Common Divisor." " But she needs to do things that she dislikes. We all do." I smiled at the memory of a self-willed little bare foot on a log years ago. " I shall see that my grape arbour does not 60 further interfere with Miss Sylvia's progress towards perfection." " Why didn't you wish us to be your neigh- bours ? " " I didn't icnow that you were the right sort of people." " Are we the right sort !> " "The value of my land has almost been doubled." " It is a pleasure to know that ^■Qu approve of us on those grounds. Will the value of our land rise also, do you think } And why do you suppose we objected to you as a neighbour.? " " I cannot imagine." "The imagination can be cultivated, you know. Then tell me this : why do Kentuckians in this part of Kentucky think .so much of them- selves compared with the rest of the world ? " " Perhaps it's because they are Virgmians. There may be vaH is reasons." "Do the people ever tell what the reasons are.?" " I have never heard one." "And if we stayed here long enough, and imitated them closely, do you suppose we would get to feel the same way ? " " I am sure of it." 6i " It must be so pleasant to consider Kentucky the best part of the world, and your part of Kentucky the best of the State, and your family the best of all the best families in that best part, and yourself the best member of your family. Ought not that to make one perfectly happy ? " " I have often observed that it seems to do so." " It is delightful to remember that you ap- prove of us. And we should feel so glad to be able to return the compliment. Good-bye! " Any one would have to admit, however, that there is no sharpness in Georgiana's pleasantry. The child-nature in her is so sunny, sportive, so bent on harmless mischief. She still plays with life as a kitten with a ball of yarn. Some day Kitty will fall asleep with the Ball poised in the cup of one foot. Then, waking, when her dream is over, she will find that her plaything has become a rocky, thorny, storm-swept, im- measurable world, and that she, a woman, stands holding out towards it her imploring arms, and asking only for some littlest part in its infinite destinies. After the last talk with Georgiana I felt re- newed desire to see those Audubon drawings. 62 So yesterday morning I sent over to her some thmgs written by a Northern man, whom I eall the young Audubon of the Maine woods His name is Henry D. Thoreau. and it is, I believe known only to me down here. Everything that I can find of his is as pure and cold and lonely as a wild cedar of the mountain rocks, standin' far above its smokeless valley and hushed white river. She returned them to-day, with word that she would thank me in person, and to-night I went over in a state of rather senseless eager- ness. Her mother and sister had gone out, and she sat on the dark porch alone. The things of Thoreau's have interested her, and she asked me to tell her all I knew of him, which was little enough. Then of her own accord she began to speak of her father and Audubon - of the one with the worship of love, of the other with the worship of greatness. I felt as though I were in a moonlit cathedral ; for her voice, the whole revelation of her nature, made the spot so im- pressive and so sacred. She scarcely addressed me; she was communing with them. Nothing that her father told her regarding Audubon appears to have been forgotten ; and. brought nearer than ever before to that lofty, tireless 63 spirit in its wanderings through the Kentucky forests, I almost forgot her to whom I was lis- tening. But in the midst of it she stopped, and it was again kitten and yarn. I left quite as abruptly. Upon my soul I believe that Georgi- ana doesn't think me worth talking to seriously. 64 = ■» -frm-iK-i^di K^^^ has dragged like a log ^' across a wet field. There was the Fourth, which is always the grandest occasion of the year with us. Society has taken up Sylvia and rejected Georgiana ; and so with its great gallantry, and to her boundless delight, Sylvia was invited to sit with a bevy of girls in a large furniture wagon covered with flags and F 65 buntinj^. The girls were to be dressed in white, carry flowers and flags, and sing "The Star- Spangled Banner' in the procession, just be- fce the fire-engine. I wrote a note to Geor- giana, asking whether it would interfere with Sylvia's Greatest Common Divisor if I presented her with a profusion of elej^. nt flowers on that occasion. Georgiana herself had equipped Syl- via with a truly exquisite silken flag on a silver staff; and as Sylvia both sang and waved with all her might, not only to keep up the Green River reputation in such matters, but with a medireval determination to attract a young man on the fire-engine behind, she quite eclipsed every other miss in the wagon, and was not even hoarse when persuaded at last to stop. So that several of the representatives of the other States voted afterwards in a special congress that she was loud, and in no way as nice as they had fancied, and that they ought never to recognize her again except in church and at funerals. And then the month brought down from West Point the son of the family, who cut off— or cut at — Georgiana 's toes, I remember. With him a sort of cousin, who lives in New York State ; and after a few days of toploftical strutting 66 1 iVi 1'^ n'i\l "^^^TX.-. TOPLOFTICAL STRUTTING. 67 around town, and a pusillanimous crack or two over the back-garden fence at my birds, they went away again, to the home of this New York cousin, carrying Gcorgiana with them to spend the summer. Nothing has happened since. Only Sylvia and I have been making hay while the sun shines — or does not shine, if one chooses to regard Georgiana's absence in that cloudy fashion. Sylvia's ordinary armour consists of a slate-pencil for a spear, a slate for a shield, and a volume of Sir Walter for a bludgeon. Now and then I have found her sitting alone in the arbour with the drooping air of Lucy Ashton beside the fountain ; and she would be better pleased if I met her clandestinely there in cloak and plume with the deadly complexion of Ravensv/ood. The other day I caught her toiling at some- thing, and she admitted being at work on a poem which would be about half as long as the " Lay of the Last Minstrel." She read me the open- ing Unes, after that bland habit of young writ- ers ; and as nearly as I recollect, they began as follows : " I love to see gardens and arbours and plants ; I love the fine air, but not my fine aunts." 68 When not under the spell of media-val chiv- airy she prattles needlessly of Geor«,nana. early life, and their old home in Henderson. Al- thou^jh I have pointed out to her the gross impropriety of her conduct, she has persisted in readin<< me some of Georr^iana's letters written from the home of that New York cousin, whose mother they are now visitint;. I didn't like ///;;/ particulaiV. Sylvia relates that he was a favourite of ner father's. The dull month passes to-day. One thin----.^-«f- a window, looking out at S^'y^" 033 the aged row of cedars, ro-.v/l^. lv.t. now laden with snow, and thinking of Horace and Soracte. Suddenly, beneath a jutting pinnacle 91 of white boughs which left under themselves one little spot of green, I s?.w a cardinal hop out and sit full-breasted towards me. The idea flashed through my mind that this might be that shyest, most beautiful fellow whom I had found in September, and whom I tried to make out as the son of my last wmter's pensioner. At least he has never lived in my yard be- fore ; for when, to test his shyness, I started to raise the window-sash, at the first noise of it he was gone. My birds are not so afraid of me. I must get on better terms with this stranger. Mrs. Walters over for a v/hile afterwards. I told her of my fancy that this bird was one of last summer's brood, and that he appeared a trifle larger than any male I had ever seen. She said of course. Had I not fed the parents all last winter.? When she fed her hens, did they not lay bigger eggs ? Did not bigger eggs contain bigger chicks .? Did not bigger chicks become bigger hens, again .-• According to Mrs. Walters, a single winter's feeding of hot corn, meal, scraps of bacon, and pods of red peppei will all but bring about a variation of species; and so if the assumed rate at which I am now going were kept up a hundred years, my cedar- ^ 93 trees might be full of a race of red-birds as large and as fat as geese. Standing towards sundown at another win- dow, I saw Gcorgiana sewing at hers, as I have seen her every day since I got out of bed. Why should she sew so much ? There is a servant also ; and they sew, sew, sew, as if eternal sew- ing were eternal happiness, eternal salvation. The first day she sprang up, letting her work roll off her lap, and waved her handkerchief inside the panes, and smiled with what looked to me like radiant pleasure that I was well again. I was weak and began to tremble, and, going back to the fireside, lay back in my chair with a beating of the heart that was a warning. Since then she has recognized me only by a quiet, kindly smile. Why has no one ever called her name ? I believe Mrs. Walters knows. She comes nowadays as if to tell me something, and goes away with a struggle that she has not told it. But a secret can no more stay in the depths of Mrs. Walters's mind than cork at the bottom of water ; some day I shall see this mystery riding on the surface. 94 ■jy-f^ XII *KS, she knew; while unco n s c i o u s I talked of Georgi- ana, of being in love with her. Mrs. Walters added, sadly, that Georgi- ana came home in the fall engaged to that New York cousin. Hence the sewing -he was to marry her in June. I am not in love with her. It is now four weeks since hearing this conventional fiction and every day I have been perfectly able to repeat: "I am not in love with Georgiana!" 95 There was one question which I put severely to Mrs. Walters: Had she told Georgiana of my foolish talk ? She shook her head violently, and pressed her lips closely together, suggest- ing how impossible it would be for the smallest monosyllable in the language to escape by that channel; but she kept her eyes wide open, and the truth issued from them, as smoke in a hol- low tree, if stopped in at a lower hole, simply rises and comes out at a higher one. " You should have shut your eyes also," I said. " You have told her every word of it, and the Lord only knows how much more." This February has let loose its whole pack of grizzly sky-hounds. Unbroken severe weather. Health has not returned as rapidly as was promised, and I have not ventured outside the yard. But it is a pleasure to chronicle the beginning of an acquaintanceship between his proud eminence the young cardinal and myself. For a long time he would have naught to do with me, fled as I approached, abandoned the evergreens altogether and sat on the naked tree-tops, as much as threatening to quit the place altogether if I did not leave him in peace. Surely he is the shyest of his kind, and to my fancy, the most beautiful ; and therefore Na- 96 turc seems to have stored him with extra cau- tion towards his arch-enemy. But in the old human way I have taken advantage of his necessities. The north wind has been my friend against him. I have called in the aid of sleets and sno.vs, have besieged him in his white castle behind the iriittcrino- array of his icicles with threats of starvation. So one day, dropping like a glowing coal down among the other birds, he snatched a desperate hasty meal from the public poor-house table that I had spread under the trees. It is the first surrender that decides. Since then some progress has been made in winning his confidence, but the struggle going on in his nature is plain enough still. At times he will rush away from me in utter terror; at others he lets me draw a little nearer, without movin^^ from a limb ; and now, after a month of persua- sion, he begins to discredit the experience which he has inherited from centuries upon centuries of ancestors. In all that I have done I have tried to say to him : " Don't judge me by man- kind in general. With me you are safe. I pledge myself to defend you from enemies, high and low." This has not escaped the notice of Georgi- H 97 ^i ana at the window, and more than once she has Vtt her work drop to watch my patient pro<;ress and to bestow upon me a rewarding smile. Is there nearly always sadness in it, or is the sadness in my eyes ? If Georgiana's brother is giving her trouble, I'd like to take a hand-axe to /lis feet. I suppose I shall never know whether he cut her foot in two. She carries the left one a little peculiarly ; but so many women do that. Sometimes, when the day's work is over and the servant is gone, Georgiana comes to the window and looks away towards the sunsets of winter, her hands clasped behind her back, her motionless figure in relief against the dark- ness within, her face white and still. Being in the shadow of my own room, so that she could not see me, and knowing that I ought not to do it, but unable to resist, I have softly taken up the spy-glass which I use in the study of birds, and have drawn Georgiana's face nearer to me, holding it there till she turns away. I have noted the traces of pain, and once the tears which she could not keep back and was too proud to shed. Then I have sat before my flickering embers, with I know not what all but ungovernable yearning to be over there in 98 the shadowy room with her, and, whether she would or not, to fold my arms around her, and, drawing her face against mine, whisper : " What is it, Georgiana ? And why must it be ? " 99 HE fountains of the great deep opened. A new heaven, a new earth. Georgi- ana has broken her engagement with her cousin. Mrs. Cobb let it lOO out in the strictest confidence to Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Walters, with stricter confidence still, has told me only. The West-Pointer had been writing for some months in regard to the wild behaviour of his cousin. This grew worse, and the crisis came. Georgiana snapped her thread and put up her needle. He travelled all the way down here to implore. I met him at the gate as he left the house — a fine, straight, manly, handsome young fellow, his face pale with pain, and his eyes flashing with anger -and bade him a long, affec- tionate, inward God-speed as he hurned away. It was her father's influence. He had always wished for this union. Ah, the evils that come to the living from the wrongful wishes of the dead ! Georgiana is so happy now, since she has been forced to free herself, that spring in this part of the United States seems to have advanced about half a month. " What on earth will she do with all those clothes.?" inquired Mns. Waitci., the other night, eyeing me with curious imprcssiveness. •' Let them be hanged," I said, promptly. There is a young .scapegrace who passes my house morning and evening with his cows. He has the predatory instincts of that being who lOI loves to call himself the image of his Maker, and more than once has given annoyance, espe- cially last year, when he robbed a damson-tree of a brood of Baltimore orioles. This winter and spring his friendly interest in my birds has increased, and several times I have caught him skulking among the pines. Last night what should I stumble on but a trap, baited and sprung, under the cedar-tree in which the car- dinal roosts. I was up before daybreak this mornmg. Awhile after the waking of the birds here comes my young bird-thief, creeping rap- idly to his trap. As he stooped I had him by the collar, and within the next five minutes I must have set up in his nervous system a nega- tive disposition to the caging of red-birds that will descend as a positive tendency to all the generations of his offspring. All day this meditated outrage has kept my blood up. Think of this beautiful cardinal beat- ing his hea;t out against maddening bars, or caged for lif,* 'a some dark city street, lonely, sick, and silent, ndden to sing joyously of that high world of light and liberty where once he sported ! Think of the exquisite refinement of cruelty in wishing to take him on the eve of May! 102 7'HV' '' '• .\it ^ THAT VlIU'l'lNi;, Jvfi*'>«-*'*^ 103 It is hardly a fancy that something as loyal as friendship has sprung up between this bird and me. I accept his original shyness as a mark of his finer instincts ; but, like the nobler natures, when once he found it possible to give his confi- dence, how frankly and fearlessly has it been given. The other day, brilliant, warm, windless, I was tramping across the fields a mile from home, when I heard him on the summit of a dead sycamore, cleaving the air with stroke after stroke of his long melodious whistle, as with the swing of a silken lash. When I drew near he dropped down from bough to bough till he reached the lowest, a few feet from where I stood, and showed by every movenient how glad he was to see me. We really have reached the under- standing that the immemorial persecution of his race by mine is ended ; and now more than ever my fondness settles about him, since I have found his happiness plotted against, and have perhaps saved his very life. It would be easy to trap him. His eye should be made to distrust every well-arranged pile of sticks under which lurks a morsel. To-night I called upon Georgiana and sketched the arrested tragedy of the morning. She watched me curiously, and then dashed into a 104 little treatise on the celebrated friendships of man for the lower creatures, in fact and fiction, from camels down to white mice. Her father must have been a remarkably learned man. I didn't like this. It made me somehow feel as though I were one of yEsop's Fables, or were being translated into English as that old school-room horror of Androclus and the Lion. In the bot- tom of my soul I don't believe that Georgiana cares for birds, or knows the difference between a blackbird and a crow. I am going to ■ -nd her a little story, "The Passion of the Desert." Mrs. Walters is now confident that Georgiana regrets having broken off her engagement. But then Mrs. Walters can be a great fool when she puts her whole mind to it. 105 XIV '^I (^N APRIL I commence to ' scratch and dig in my gar- den. To-day as I was raking off my strawberry bed, Georgi- ana, whom I have not seen since the night when she satirized me, called from the window : " What are you going to plant this year ? " " Oh, a little of everything," I answered, under my hat. " What are j'ou going to plant this year ? " " Are you going to have many strawber- ries .? " " It's too soon to tell : they haven't bloomed io6 yet. It's too soon to tell when they do bloom. Sometimes strawberries are like women : Whole beds full of showy blossoms; but when the time comes to be ripe and luscious, you can't find them." " Indeed." " Tis true, 'tis pity." " I ^ad always supposed that to a Southern gentleman woman was not a berry, but a rose. What does he hunt for in woman as much as bloom and fragrance ? But I do not belong to the rose-order of Southern women myself. Syl- via does. Why did you send mc that story } " "Didn't you like it.?" "No. A woman couldn't care for a story about a man and a tigress. Either she would feel that she was too much left out, or suspect that she was too much put in. The same sort of story about a lion and a woman — that would be better." I raked in silence for a minute, and when I looked up Georgiana was gone. I remember her saying once that children should be kept tart ; but now and then I fan^y that she would like to keep even a middle-aged man in brine. Who knows but that in the end I shall sell my place to the Cobbs and move away. 107 Five more days of April, and then May! For the last half of this light-and-shadow month, when the clouds, like schools of changeable lovely creatures, seem to be playing and rush- ing away through the waters of the sun, life to me has narrowed more and more to the red-bird, who gets tamer and tamer with habit, and to Georgiana, who gets wilder and wilder with happiness. The bird fills the yard with brilliant singing ; she fills her room with her low, clear songs, hidden behind the window-curtains, which are now so much oftener and so needlessly closed. I work myself nearly to death in my garden, but she does not open them. The other day the red-bird sat in a tree near by, and his notes floated out on the air like scarlet streamers. Georgiana was singing, so low that I was mak- ing no noise with my rake in order to hear ; and when he began, before I realized what I was doing, I had seized a brickbat and hurled it, barely missing him, and driving him away. He did not know what to make of it ; neither did I ; but as I raised my eyes I saw that Georgiana had opened the curtains to listen to him, and was closing them with her eyes on my face, and a look on hers that has haunted me ever since. io8 April the 26th. It's of no use. To-morrow night I will go to sec Gcorgiana, and ask her to marry me. April 28th. Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. I am not the least sick, but I am not feeling at all well. So have made a will, and left everything to Mrs. Walters. She has been over five times to-day, and this evening sat by me a long time, holding my hand and smoothing my forehead, and urging me to try a cream poultice — a mustard-plaster — a bowl of gruel — a broiled chicken. I believe Gcorgiana thinks I'll ask her again. Not if I lived by her through eternity ! Thy r( " " My garden is too public. I wish to be pro- tected from outsiders." "Would it be the same thing if I were to nail up this window.!* That would be so much quicker. It will be ten years before your hedge is high enough to keep me from seeing you. And even then, you know, I could move up- stairs. But I am so sorry to be an outsider." "I merely remarked that I was planting a hedge." When Georgiana spoke again her voice was lowered : " Would you open a gateway for me into your garden, to be always mine, so that I III might go out and come in, and never another human soul enter it ? " Now Jacob had often begged me to cut him a private gateway on that side of the garden, so that only he might come in and go out; and I had refused, since I did not wish him to get to me so easily with his complaints. Besides, a gate once opened, who may not use it ? and I was indignant that Georgiana should lightly ask anything at my hands; therefore I looked quickly and sternly up at her and said, " I will not." Af'^'^rwards the thought rushed over mc that she ' not spoken of any gatewa)' through my garden fence, but of another one, mystical, hidden, infinitely more sacred. For her voice descended almost in a whisper, and her face, as she bent down towards me, had on it I know not what angelic expression. She seemed float- ing to me from heaven. May 17. To-day I put a little private gate through my fence under Georgiana's window, as a sign to her. Balaam's beast that I am ! Yes, seven times more than the inspired ass. As I passed to-day, I noticed Georgiana look- ing down at the gate that I made yesterday. She 112 <^^'^ § LOOKING DOWN AT THE GATE THAT I MADE YESTERDAY. 113 mmm^ held a flower to her nose and eyes, but behind the leaves I detected that she was laughing. " Good-morning ! " she called to me. " What did you cut that ugly hole in your fence for .'' " " That's not an ugly hole. That's a little private gateway." " But what's the little private gateway /t>r.?" " Oh, well ! You don't understand these mat- ters. I 11 tell your mother." " My mother is too old. She no longer stoops to such things. Tell mc ! " " Impossible ! " " I'm dying to know." " What will you give me ? " " Anything — this flower ! " " But what would the flower stand for in that case } A little pri — " '• Nothing. Take it ! " and she dropped it lightly on my face and disappeared. As I stood twirling it ecstatically under my nose, and won- dering how I could get her to come back to the window, the edge of a curtain was lifted, and a white hand stole out and softly closed the shuttr-rs. In the evening Sylvia went in to a concert of the school, which was to be held at the Court- house, a chorus of girls being impanelled in the 114 ." jury-box, and the principal, who wears a little wig, taking her seat on the woolsack. I prom- ised to have the very pick of the garden ready, and told Sylvia to come to the arbour the last thing before starting. She wore big blue ro- settes in her hair, and at that twilight hour looked as lovely, soft, and pure as moonshine ; so that I lost control of myself and kis.sed her twice — once for Georgiana and once for myself. Surely it must have been Sylvia's first experience. I hope so. Yet she passed througn it with the composure of a graduate of several years' stand- ing. But, then, women inherit a great stock of fortitude from their mothers in this regard, and perpetually add to it by their own dispositions. Ought I to warn Georgiana — good heavens! in a general way, of course — that Sylvia should be kept away from sugar, and well under the influ- ence of vulgar fractions ? It made me feel uncomfortable to sec her go tripping out of her front gate on the arm of a youth. Can it be possible that /w would try to do what / did ? Men differ so in their virtues, and are so alike in their transgressions. Tl is forward gosling displayed white duck pantaloons brandished pumps on his feet, which looked flat enough to have been webbed, and was scented 115 as to his marital locks with a far-reaching pesti- lence of bergamot and cinnamon. After they were gone I strolled back to my arbour and sat down amid the ruins of Sylvia's flowers. The night was mystically beautiful. The moon seemed to me to be softly stealing down the sky to kiss Endymion. I looked across towards Georgiana's window. She was there, and I slipped over and stood under it. "Georgiana," I whispered, "were you, too, looking at the moon ? " " Part of the time," she said, sourly. "Isn't it permitted ? " " Sylvia left her scissors in the arbour, and I can't find them." "She'll find them to-morrow." " If they get wet, you know, they'll rust." "I keep something to take rust off." "Georgiana, I've got something to tell you about Sylvia." " What ? That you kissed her ? " " N — o ! Not //lat, exactly ! " " Good-night ! " May 2 1 St. Again I asked Georgiana to be mine. J am a perfect fool about her. But she's coming my way at last — God bless her ! ii6 May 24th. I renewed my suit to Georgiana. May 27th. I besought Georgiana to hear me. May 28th. For the last time I offered my hand in marriage to the elder Miss Cobb. Now I am done with her forever. I am no fool. May 29th. Oh. damn Mrs. Walters. 117 «p XVI HIS morning, the 3d of June, I went out to pick the first dish of straw- berries for my break- fast. As I was stooping down I heard a timid, playful voice at the window like the echo of a year ago : " Are you the gardener ? " Since Georgiana will not marry me, if she v/ould only let me alone ! " Old man, are you the gardener ? " 118 "Yes, I'm the gardener. I know what you are." "How much do you ask for your straw- berries ? " " They come high. Nothing of mine is to be as cheap hereafter as it has been." " I am so glad — for your sake. I should like to possess something of yours but I suppose everything is too high now." " Entirely too high ! " "If I only could have foreseen that there would be an increase of value ! As for me, I have felt that I am getting cheaper lately. I may have to ^n'e myself away soon. If I only knew of some one who loved the lower ani- mals." " The fox, for instance .■' " " Yes ; do you know of any one who would accept the present of a fo.x ? " " Ahem ! I wouldn't mind having a tatne iox. I don't care much for wild foxes." "Oh, this one would get tame — in time." " I don't believe I know of any one just at present." "Very well. Sylvia will get the highest mark in arithmetic. And Joe is distinguishing him- self at West Point. That's what I wanted to 119 tell you. I'll send over the cream and sugar, and hope you will enjoy all your berries. We shall buy some in the market-house next week." Later in the forenoon I sent the strawberries over to Georgiana. I have a variety that is the shape of the human heart, and when ripe it matches in colour that brighter current of the heart through which runs the hidden history of our passions. All over the top of the dish I carefully laid these heart-shaped berries, and under the biggest one, at the very top, I slipped this little note : " Look at the shape of them, Georgiana ! I send them all to you. They are perishable." This afternoon Georgiana sent back the empty dish, and inside the napkin was this note : " They are exactly the shape and colour of my emery needle-bag. I have been polish- ing my needles in it for many years." Later, as I was walking co town, I met Georgiana and her mother coming out. No explanation had ever been made to the mother of that goose of a gate in our division fence ; and as Georgiana had declined to accept the sign, I determined to show her that the gate could now stand for something else. So I said : 120 J' ■^'"^' '■•mid GEORGIANA AND HER MOTHER COMING Ol^r. 121 w " Mrs. Cobb, when you send your servants over for green corn, you can let them come through that little gate. It will be more con- venient." Only, I was so angry and confused that I called her Mrs. Corn, and said that when she sent her little Cobbs over . . . etc., etc. After Georgiana's last treatment of me I resolved not to let her talk to me out of her window. So about nine o'clock this morning I took a negro boy and set him to picking the berries, while I stood by, directing him in a deep, manly voice as to the best way of man- aging that intricate business. Presently I heard Georgiana begin to sing to herself behind the curtains. " Hurry up and fill that cup," I said to him, savagely. " And that will do this morning. You can go to the mill. The meal's nearly out." When he was gone I called, in an undertone : "Georgiana! Come to the window! Please! Oh, Georgiana ! " But the song went on. What was the matter.? I could not endure it. There was one way by which perhaps she could be brought. I whis- 122 tied long and loud again and again. The cur- tains parted a little space. " I was merely whistling to the bird," I said. " I knew it," she answered, looking as I had never seen her. " Whenever you speak to him your voice is full of confidence and of love. I believe in it and like to hear it." "What do you mean, Georgiana .' " I cried, imploringly. "Ah, Adam!" she said, with a rush of feel- ing. It was the first time she had ever called me by name. She bent her face down. Over it there pas.sed a look of sweetness and sadness indescribably blended. " Ah, Adam ! you have asked me many times to ma)'}y you ! Make me believe once that you love me ! Make me feel that I could trust myself to you for life ! " "What else can I do.'" I answered, stirred to the deepest that was in me, throwing my arms backward, and standing with an open breast into which she might gaze. And she did search my eyes and face in silence. "What more.?" I cried again, "in God's name ? " She rested her face on her palm, looking thoughtfully across the yard. Over there the 123 red-bird was singing. Suddenly she leaned down towards me. Love was on her face now. Hut her eyes held mine with determi- nation to wrest from them the last truth they might contain, and her voice trembled with doubt : " Would you put the red-bird in a cage for me } Would you be willing to do that for me, Adam .? " At those whimsical, cruel words I shall never be able to reveal all that I felt — the surprise, the sorrow, the pain. Scenes of boyhood flashed through my memory. A conscience built up through years of experience stood close by me with admonition. I saw the love on her face, the hope with which she hung upon my reply, as though it would decide everything between us. I did not hesitate ; my hands dropped to my side, the warmth died out of my heart as out of spent ashes, and I answered her, with cold reproach : " I— will— not!" The colour died out of her face also. Her eyes still rested on mine, but now with pitying sadness " I feared it," she murmured, audibly, but to herself, and the curtains fell together. 124 Four days have passed. Gcorgiana has cast me off. Mcr curtains arc closed except when she is not there. I have tried to see her ; she excuses herself. I have written ; my letters come back unread. I have lain in wait for her on the streets ; she will not talk with me. The tic between us has been severed. With her it could never have been affection. And for what > I ask myself over and over and over and over — for what ? Was she jeal- ous of the bird, and did she require that I should put it out of the way.? Sometimes women do that. Did she take that means of forcing me to a test.' Women do that. Did she wish to show her power over me, demanding the one thing she knew would be the hardest for mc to grant ? Women do that. Did she crave the pleasure of seeing me do wrong to humour her caprice.? Women do that. Hut not one of these things can I even associate with the thought of Georgiana. I have sought in every way to have her explain, to explain myself. She will neither give nor receive an explanation. I had supposed that her unnatural request would have been the end of my love, but it has not; that her treatment since would have fatally stung my pride, but it has not. I understand 125 neither ; forgive both ; love her now with that added pain which comes from a man's discover- ing that the woman dearest to him must be par- doned — pardoned as long as he shall live. Never since have I been able to look at the red-bird with the old gladness. He is the re- minder of my loss. Reminder.^ Do I ever for- get.' Am I not thinking of that before his notes lash my memory at dawn } All day can they do more than furrow deeper the channel of un- forgctfulness ? Little does he dream what my friendship for him has cost me. But this solace I have at heart — that I was not even tempted to betray him. Three days more have passed. No sign yet that Georgiana will relent soon or ever. Each day the strain becomes harder to bear. My mind has dwelt upon my last meeting with her, until the truth about it wavers upon my memory like vague, uncertain shadows. She doubted my love for her. What proof was it she de- manded .-• I must stop looking at the red-bird, lying here and there under the trees, and listen- ing to him as he sings above me. My eyes devour him whenever he crosses my path with an uncomprehended fascination that is pain. 126 How gentle he has become, and how, without intending it, I have deepened the perils of his life by the very gentleness that I have brough: upon him. Twice already the fate of his species has struck at him, but I have pledged myself to be his friend. This is his happiest season ; a few days now, and he will hear the call of his young in the nest. I shut myself in my workshop in the yard this morning. I did not wish my servants to know. In there I made a bird-trap such as I had often used when a boy. And late this after- noon I went to tovv-n and bought a bird-cage. I was afraid the merchant would misjudge me, and explained. He scanned my face silently. To-morrow I will snare the red-bird down behind the pines long enough to impress on his mem- ory a life-long susj)icion of every such artifice, and then I will set him free again in his wide world of light. Above all things, I must see to it that he does not wound himself or have the least feather broken. It is far past midnight now, and I have not slept or wished for slumber. Constantly since darkness came on I have been watching Georgiana's window for the light ^^7 of her candle, but there has been no kindly f^limmer yet. The only radiance shed upon the gloom outside comes from the heavens. Great cage-shaped white clouds are swung up to the firmament, and within these pale, gentle, im- prisoned iightniui^s flutter feebly to escape, fall back, rise, and try aj.',ain and again, and fail. ... A little after dark this evening I carried the red-bird over to Georgiana. . . . I have seen her so little of late that I did not know she had been away from home for days. But she was expected to-night, or, at furthest, to-morrow mornip.g. I loft the bird with the ser- vant at the door, who (ould hardly believe what he saw. As I j)asscd out of niy front gate on my way there, the boy who returns about that time from the pasture for his cows joined me as I hurried along, attracted by the fluttering of the bird in the cage. " Is it the red-biid .'' / tried to catch him once," he said, with entire forgiveness of me, as having served him right, "but I caught some- thing else. I'll never forget that whipping. Oh, but wouldn't I like to have him! Mr. Moss, you wouldn't mind my trying to catch one of those little bits o' brown fellows, would you, that 128 J y 'BUT wouldn't 1 i.lKt lO HAVE HIM!" 129 hop around under the pine-trees ? They aren't any account to anybody. Oh my ! but wouldn't I like to have him ! May I bring my trap some time, and will you help me to catch one o' those little bits o' brown ones ? You can't beat vie catching them ' " Several times to-night I have gor^ -oss and listened under Gcorgiana's window. The ser- vant must have set the cage in her room, for, as I listened, I am sure I heard the red-bird beating his head and breast against the wires. A while ago I went again, and did not hoar him. I waited a long time. . . . lie may be quieted. . . . Ah, if any one had said to me that I would ever do what I have done, with what full, deep joy could I have throttled the lie in his throat ! I put the trap under one of the trees where I have been used to feed him. When it fell he was not greatly frightened. He clutched the side of it, and looked out at me. IVIy own mind supplied his words : "Help! rmciuight! Take me out ! You promised I " When I transferred him to the cage, for a moment his confidence lasted still. He mounted the perch, shook his plumage, and spoke out bravely and cheerily. Then all at once came on the terror. 130 The dawn came on this morning with its old splendour. The birds in my yard, as of old, poured forth their songs. But those loud, long,' clear, melodious, deep-hearted, passionate, best- loved notes ! As the chorus swelled from shad- owy shrubs rnd vines to the sparkling tree-tops I listened for some sound from Georgiana's room, but over there I saw only the soft, slow flapping of the white curtains like signals of distress. Towards ten o'clock, wandering restless, I snatched up a book which I had no wish to read, and went to the arbour where I had so often discoursed to Sylvia about children's cruelty to birds. Through the fluttering leaves the sun- light dripped as a weightless shower of gold, and the long pendants of young fruit swayed gently in their cool wa.xen greenness. Where some rotting planks crossed the top of the arbour a blue-jay sat on her coarse nest ; and presently the mate flew to her with a worm, and then talked to her in a low voice, as much as saying that they must now leave the place for- ever. I was thinking how love softens even the voice of this file-throated screamer, when along the garden walk came the rustle of a woman's clothes, and, springing up, I stood face to face with Georgian a. f3i w '§^^^p / ■ "WHAT IIAVK YOU DONE?" bllK CRIED. 132 " What have you done ? " she implored. "What have you done?" I answered as quickly. " Oh, Adam, Atiani ! You have killed it ! How could you } How could you } " "... Is he dead, Georgiana > Is he dead ? . . ." I forgot everything else, and pulling my hat down over my eyes, turned from her in the helpless shock of silence that came with those irreparable words. Then, in ungovernable anger, suffering, re- morse, I turned ui)on her where she sat : " It is you who killed him ! Why do you come here to blame me ? And now you pretend to be sorry. You felt no pity when pity would have done some good. Tritler ! Hypocrite ! " " It is false ! " she cried, her words flashing from her whole countenance, her form drawn up to repel the shock of the blow. " Did you not ask for him ? " "No!" "Oh, deny it all! It is a falsehood — in- vented by me on the spot. You know nothing of it! You did not ask me to do this! And when I have yielded, you have not run to re- proach me here and to cry, ' How could you .? How could you ? ' " 133 " No ! No ! Every word of it — " " Untruth added to it all ! Oh, that I should have been so deceived, blinded, taken in ! " ''Adam!" '* Lovely innocence ! It is too much ! Go away ! " " I will not stand this any longer ! " she cried. " I will go away ; but not till I have told you why I have acted as I have." " It is too late for that ! I do not care to hear ! " " Then you i'/A?// hear ! " she replied. "You shall know that it is because I have believed you capable of speaking to me as you have just spoken : believed you at heart unsparing and unjust. You think I asked you to do what you have done .-' No ! I asked you whether you would be willing to do it ; and when you said you would not, I saw then — by your voice, your eyes, your whole face and manner — that you would. Saw it as plainly at that moment, in spite of your denial, as I see it now — the cruelty in you, the unfaithfulness, the willing- ness to betray. It v-^s for this reason — not because I heard you refuse, but because I saw you consent — that I could not forgive you." She paused abruptly and looked across into 134 my face. What she may now have read in it I do not know. Then anger swept her on : " How often had I not heard you bitter and contemptuous towards people because they are treacherous, cruel! How often have you talked of your love of nature, of our inhumanity towards lower creatures ! But what have you done ? " You set your fancy upon one of these crea- tures, lie in wait for it, beset it with kindness, persevere in overcoming its wildness. You are amused, delighted, proud of your success. One day — you remember.? — it sang as you had always wished to hear it. It annoyed you, and you threw a stone at it. With a little less angry aim you would have killed it. I have never seen anything more inhuman. How do I know that some day you would not be tired of rr;.', and throw a stone at me f When a woman sub- mits to this once, she will have them thrown at her whenever she sings at the wrong time, and she will never know when the right time is. " Then you thought you were asked to sacri- fice it, and now you have done that. How do I know that some day you might not be tempted to sacrifice me ? " She paused, her voice break- ing, and remained silent, as if unable to get beyond that thought, 135 •' If you have finished," I said, very quietly, " I have something to say to you, and we need not meet after this. " I trapped the bird ; you trapped me. I understood you to ask something of me, t^o cast me off when I refused it. Such was my faith in you that beneath your words I did not look for a snare. How hard it was for me to forgive you what you asked is my own affair now ; but forgive you I did. How hard it was to grant it that also is now, and will always be, my own secret. I beg you merely to believe this : know- ing it to be all that you have described — and far more than you can ever understand — still, I did it. Had you demanded of me something worse, I should have granted that. If you think a man will not do wrong for a woman, you are mistaken. If you think men always love the wrong that they do for the women whom they love, you are mistaken again. " You have held up my faults to me. I knew them before. I have not loved them. Do not think that I am trying to make a virtue out of anything I say ; but in all my thoughts of you there has been no fault of yours that I have not hidden from my sight, and have not resolved as 136 best I could never to see. Yet do not dream that I have found you faultless. " You fear I mi^^ht sacrifice you to something else. It is possible. Every man resists temp- tation only to a certain point; every man has his price. It is a risk you will run with any. "If you doubt that a n.:.n is capable of sacri- ficing one thing that he loves to another that he loves more, tomjit him, lie in wait for his weak- ness, ensnare him in the toils of his greater passion, and learn the truth. " I make no defence — believe all that you say. But had you loved me, I might have been all this, and it would have been nothinir " With this I walked slowly out of the arbour, but Georgiana stood beside me. Her light touch was on my arm. " Let me see things clearly! " "You have a lifetime in which to sec things clearly," I answered. " How can that concern me now ? " And I passed on into the house. During the morning I wandered restless. For a while I lay on the grass down behind the pines. How deep and clear are the covered springs of memory ! All at once it was a morning in my boyhood on my father's farm. I, a little Saul '37 f A I.llTLE SAUL OF TARJ^US. 138 of Tarsus among the birds, was on my way to the hcdge-rowis and woods, as to Damascus, breathing out threatcnings and slaughter. Then suddenly the childish miracle, which no doubt had been preparing silently within my nature, wrought itself out ; for from the distant forest trees, from the old orchard, from thicket and fence, from the wide green meadows, and down out of the depths of the blue sky itself, a vast chorus of innocent creatures sang to my newly opened ears the same words: "Why perse- cutest thou me ? " One sang it with indigna- tion ; another with remonstrance; still another with resignation ; others yet with ethereal sad- ness or wild elusive pain. Once more the house-wren met me at the rotting gate-post, and cried aloud, "■ pty-se-cu-ttst — pcr-sc-cu-tcst — pfy-sc-cn-test — per-sc-cu-test ! " And as I peeped into the brush-pile, again the brown thrush, building within, said, " t/wu — t/u>u — //u^n ! " Through all the years since I had thought my.self changed, and craved no greater glory than to be accounted the chief of their apostles. But now I was stained once more with the old guilt, and once more I could hear the birds in my yard singing that old, old chorus against man's inhumanity. 139 Towards the middle ot the afternoon I went away across the country — by any direction ; I cared not what. On my way back I passed through a large rear lot belonging to my neigh- bour, and adjoining my own, in which is my stable. There has lately l)een inijiorted into this j)art of Kentucky from luigland the much- prized breed of the beautiful white Berkshire. As I crossed the lot, near the milk-trough, ash- heap, and parings of fruit and vegetables thrown from my neighbour's kitchen, I saw a litter of these pigs having their awkward sjiort over some strange red plaything, which one after another of them would shake with all its might, root and tear at, or tread into greater shapeless- ness. It was all there was left of him. If I could have been spared the sight of that ! I entered my long yard. The sun was set- ting. Around me was the last peace and beauty of the world. Through a narrow ave- nue of trees I could see my house, and on its clustering vines fell the angry red of the sun darting across the cool green fields. The last hour of light touches the birds as it touches us When they sing in the morning, it is with the happiness of the earth ; but as the shadows fall strangely about them, end the 140 helplessness of the nipjht comes on, their voices seem to be lifted vip like the loftiest jioetry of the human spirit, with sympathy for reaUties and mysteries past all understanding;. A great choir was hymning now. On the tops of the sweet old honeysuckles the cat-birds ; robins in the low boughs of maples ; on the high limb of the elm the silvery-throated lark, who had stopped as he jxissed from meadow to meadow ; on a fence rail of the distant wheat- field the quail — and many another. I walked to and fro, receiving the voice of each as a spear hurled at my body. The sun sank. The shadows rushed on and deepened. Suddenly, as I turned once more in my path, I caught sight of the figure of Georgiana moving straight towards me from the direction of the garden. She was bare-headed, dressed in white ; and she advanced over the smooth lawn, through ever- greens and shrubs, with a gentle grace and dig- nity of movement such as I had never beheld. I kept my weary pace, and when she came up I did not lift my eyes. "Adam ! " she said, with gentle reproach. I stood still then, but with my face turned away, " F'orgivc me ! " All girlishness was gone out of her voice. It was the woman at last. 141 I turned my face t"'\rthcr from her, and we stood in silence. " I have suffered enou<:;h, Adam," she pleaded. I answered quietly, d()j;i;edly, for there was nothinj; le;> in me to ajipeal to : " I am <;lad we can ;)art kindly. . . . Neither of us may care much for the kindness now, hut we will not he sorry hereafter. . . . The cjuar- rels, the mistakes, the rif^jht and the wrong of our lives, the misunderstandincjs — they are so stran.i;e, so pitiful, so full of pain, and come so soon to nothin.t;." And I lifted my hat, and took tiie path towards my house. There was a point ahead where it divided, the other branch leadinj; towards the little pri- vate j;ate through which Georgiana had come. Just before reaching the porch I looked that way, with the idea that I should see Georgiana's white figure moving across the lawn ; but I discovered that she was following me. Mount- in*^ my door-steps, I turned. She had paused on the threshold. I waited. At length she said, in a voice low and sorrowful : " Arc you not going to forgive me, Adam .' " " I do forgive you ! " The silence fell and lasted. I no longer saw her face. At last her despairing voice barely reached me again: 142 'ANU — IS— IHAI —ALL ?' M3 « And — is — ///«/ — all ? " I had no answer to make, and sternly waited for her to go. SKT OIR CANDLES IN OUR WINDOWS. A moment longer she lingered, then turned slowly away ; and I watched her figure growing fainter and fainter till it was lost. I sprang after her, my voice rang out hollow, and broke with terror and pain and longing : 144 " Georgiana ! Georgiana ! " "Oh, Adam, Adam!'' I heard her cry, with low, piercing tenderness, as she ran back to me through the darkness. When we separated we lighted fresh candles and set them in our windows, to burn a pure pathway of flame across the intervening void. Henceforth we are like poor little foolish chil- dren, sick and lonesome in the night without one another. Happy, happy night to come when one short candle will do for us both ! Ah, but the long, long silence of the trees ! . 145 AFTERMATH T" ■::siMfe dfiermMi^fi^ -'13,)' w-^ I , WAS happily at work this morning among my butterbcans — a vegetable of solid merit and of far greater suitableness to my palate than such bovine watery growths as the squash and the beet. Georgiana came to her garden window and stood watching me. " You work those butterbeans as though you loved //itffi," she said, scornfully. " I do love them. I love all vines." " Are you cultivating them as vines or as vegetables ? " " It makes no difference to Nature." " Do you expect me to be a vine when we are married ?" " I hope you'll not turn out a mere vegeta- 149 blc. Mow should you like to be a Virf;inia- creeper ? " " And what would you be ? " " What would you like ? A sort of honey- suckle frame ? " " Anything ! Only support nic and give me room to bloom." I do not always reply to Georgiana, 'though I always could if I chose. Whenever I re- main silent about anything she changes the subject. " Did you know that Sylvia once wrote a poem on a vegetable .'' " " I did not." "You don't speak as though you cared." " You must know how deeply interested I am. " Then why don't you ask to see the poem ^ " " What was it on ? — butterbeans ? " " Sylvia has better taste." " I suppose I'd better look into this poem." " You are not to laugh at it." " I shall weep." " Promise." " What am I to promise ? " "That you will read it without laughing." "I do promise — solemnly, cheerfully." »S0 " Come and ^et it." I went over and stood under the window. Georgiana soon returned and drojipcd down to me a piece of writing-paper. " Sylvia wrote it before she began to think about boys." " It must be a very early poem of hers ! " " It is; and this is the only copy ; don't lose it." " Then I think you ought to take it back at once. Let me beg of you not to risk it — " Hut she was gone ; and I turned t(; my arbour and sat down to read Sylvia's j)oem, whii h I found to be inscribed to " The Potato," and to run as follows : " What on thi.s wide earth That is made or does by nature grow Is more homely yet more beautiful Than the useful Potato .-' " What would this world full of people do, Kich and poor, hijjh and low, Were it not for thi.s little-thought-of But very neces.sury Potato ? " True, 'tis homely to look on, Nothing pretty even in its blow, But it will i)ear acquaintance, This useful Potato. " For when it is cooked and oijened It's so white and mellow, You forget it ever was homely, This useful Potato. " On the whole it is a very plain plant, Makes no conspicuous show, But tlie internal appearance i-' lovely Of the unostentatious Potato. " On the land or on the sea, Wherever we may go. We are always glad to welcome The sound Potato." » In the afternoon I was cutting stakes at the wood-pile for my buttcrbeans, and a bright idea struck me. During my engagement to Georgi- ana I cannot always be darting in and out of Mrs. Cobb's front door like a swallow through a barn. Neither can I talk freely to Georgiana — with her up at the window and me down on the ground — when I wish to breathe into her ear the things that I mu.st utter or die. Besides, the sewing-girl whom Georgiana has engaged is nearly always there. So that as I was in the ^ The elder Miss Cobb was wrong in thinking this poem Sylvia's. It was extant at the time over the signature of another writer, whose authorship is not known to have been questioned. Miss Sylvia perhaps adopted and adapted it out of admiration, or as a model for her own use. J. L. A. act of trimming? . lonj? slender stick, it occurred to me that I mij;ht make use ot this to elevate any little notes that I might wish to write. I was greatly taken with the thought, and, dropping my hand-axe, hurried into the house and wrote a note to her at once, which I there- upon tied to the end of the pole by a short string. Hut as I started for the garden this r»rangement looked t(0 much like catching Georgiana with a bait. Therefore, happening to remember, I stopped at my tool-house, where I keep a little of everything, and took from a peg a fine old specimen of a goldfinch's nest. This I fastened to the end of the pole, and hid- ing my note in it, now felt better satisfied. No one but Georgiana herself would ever be able to tell what it was that 1 might wish to lift up to her at any time ; and in case of its beiiig not a note, but a plum — a berry — a peach — it would be as safe as it was unseen. This old house of a pair of goldfinches would thus be- come the home of our fledgling hopes : every day a new brood of vows would take flight across its rim into our bosoms. Watching my chance during the afternoon, when the sewing-girl was not there. I rushed over and pushed the stick up to the window. 153 '//, ^. it 'e2 cT: cy .y i r> ^> # % IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 125 ^ IIIIM «^ IIIIM 110 1.4 111^ III 2.2 II 2.0 1.6 - 6' Photographic Sciences Corporation & ^ ^■ ^. 4^ iV ^ <\^ \ \ % V ^^ ^ ^ *' ^ A. <"^ '-% V <^^ "% n? 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (7J6) 872-4503 w ^ 4. o \ " Georgiana," I called out, "feel in the nest ! " She hurried to the window with her sewing in her arms. The nest swayed to and fro on a level with her nose. " What is it.' " she cried, drawing back with extreme distaste. " Feel in it ! " I repeated. " I don't wish to feel in it," she said. " Take it away ! " "There's a young dove in it," I persisted — •' a young cooer." " I don't wish any young cooers," she said, with a grimace. Seeing that she was not of my mind, I added, pleadingly : " It's a note from me, Georgiana. This is going to be our Httle private post- ofifice ! " Georgiana sank back into her choir. She reappeared with the flush of apple-blossoms and her lashes wet with tears of laughter. But I do not think that she looked at me unkindly. "Our little private post-office," I persisted, confidingly. " How many mere little private things are we going to have .-' " she inquired, plaintively. "I can't wait here forever," I said. "This is growing weather; I might sprout." 154 " A dry stick will not," said Georgiana, simply, and went back to her sewing. I took the hint, and propped the pole against the house under the window. Later, when I took it down, my note was gone. I have set the pole under Georgiana's window several times within the last two or three days. It looks like a little dip-net, high and dry in the air ; but so far as I can see with my unaided eye, it has caught nothing so large as a gnat. It has attracted no end of attention from the birds of the neighbourhood, however, who never saw a goldfinch's nest swung to the end of a leafless pole and placed where it could be so exactly reached by the human hand. In par- ticular, it has fallen under the notice of a pair of wrens, which are like women, in that they usually have some secret business behind their curiosity. The business in this case is the matter of their own ne t, which they have located in a broken horse-collar in my saddle- house. At such seasons they are alert for appropriating building materials that may have been fetched to hand by other birds ; arid they have already abstracted a piece of candle-wick from the bottom of my post-office. Georgiana has been chilly towards me for 155 two days, and I think is doing her best not to freeze up altogether. I have racked my brain to know why ; but I fear that my brain is not of the sort to discover what is the matter with a woman when nothing really is the matter. Moreover, as I am now engaged to Gcorgiana, I have thought it better that she should begin to bring her explanations to me — the steady sun that will melt all her uncertain icicles. At last this morning she remarked, but very carelessly, " You didn't answer my note." "What note, Georgiana .-" " I asked, thunder- struck. She gave me such a look. " Didn't you get the note I put into that — into that — " Her face grew pink with vexa- tion. " Did you put a note into the — into the — " I could not have spoken the word just then. I retired to my arbour, where I sat for half an hour with my head in my hands. What could have become of Gcorgiana's note ? A hand might have filched it ; unUkely. A gust of wind might have whisked it out ; impossible. I de- bated and rejected every hypothesis to the last one. Acting upon this, I walked straight to the saddle-house, and in a dark corner peered at the 156 nest of the wrens. A speck of white paper was visible among the sticks and shavings. I tore the nest out and shook it to pieces. How those wrens did rage ! The note was so torn and mudded that I could not read it. But sup- pose a jay had carried it to the high crotch of some locust ! I ran joyfully back to the window. " I've found it, Georgiana ! " T called out. She appeared, looking relieved, but not ex- actly forgiving. "Where.?" My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth. "Where did you find it .-' " she repeated, im- periously. "What do you want to know f or .•' " I said, savagely. " Let me see it ! " she demanded. My clasp on it suddenly tightened. " Let me see it ! " she repeated, with genuine fire. " What do you want to see it for .'' " I said. She turned away. " Here it is," I said, and held it up. She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched. " Did the mud-daubers have it } " 157 -^ '"The wrens. Tt was merely a change of post-office." " I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the letters." Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when they were looking and I was not; but women — a// women — now and then hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves. Sylvia, for instance. She grew peevish with me the other day be- cause my garden failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her whim. And yet for days Sylvia has been helping her- self with such lack of stint that the poor cHpped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass sym- pathetically by them, and say, " If you don't keep her away, we'd as well be weeds ! " The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the passage of the Greatest Common Divisor — far more dreadful than the passage of the Beresina — her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement, and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her sentimental being up to the highest pitch. Feeling herself to be naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, 158 *^^)t"'^>5i^ 3^. 1- SYLVIA AND THE GOSLING. 159 Sylvia requires that she shall be continually played upon — if not by one person, then by another. Nature overloads a tender :y in order to make it carry straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies ; and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men, at the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end. The pre- cautionary swarm in Sylvia's case .seems multi- tudinous enough to supply her with siKcessive husbands to the end of her days and in the teeth of all known esti nates of masculine mor- tality. How unlike Georgiana ! I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when they are rarest. Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane ; growing high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its shin- ing leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness ! You must hunt to find it and climb to reach it ; but when you get it, you get it all — there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia ! I am afraid Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public pathway: each passerby reaches up and takes a grape. I caught some one taking a grape the other i6o < 'M ,,."- /■■ >^ ,«^ "■■„ .4^SS^x V,' "5?-. ^^ ^ V ( I nKol'l'KIi HIM OlT INTO TliK SlKKKl. M l6l evcnincj — a sort of green grape. Sylvia had been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her escort on the evening of her Commencement — him of the duck trousers and webbed feet. On one occasion I have observed her walking along the borders of my garden in his com- pany and have overheard her telling him that he could come in and get flowers whenever he wished. To cap the climax, after twilight on the even- ing in question, I strolled out to my arbour for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana. Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling ! deep in the shadow of the vines. He had his arm around her and was kissing her. " Upon my honour ! " I said ; and striding over to him I thrust my hand under his coat-tails, gripped him by the seat of his ducks, dragged him head downward to the front fence and dropped him out into the street. " Let me catch you in here kissing anybody again ! " I said. He had bit me viciously on one of my calves — which are sizable — as I had dragged him along ; so that I had been forced to stoop down and twist him loose by screwing the end of his spongy nose. I met him on the street early the 162 next morning, and it wore the hue of a wild plu in its riponcss. I tapped it. in v,ri> c/ ^ A ' ^--'^- ''->^. .^^. -^ 1 lAPPED IT. •t^T^. "Only three persons know of your misbe- haviour last night," I said. " If you ever breathe it to a soul that you soiled that child by your touch, the next time I get hold of you it will not be your nose : it will be your neck ! " My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen that I should have forborne returninj; to the arbour had I not felt assured that she must have escaped to the house throu^^h modesty and sheer shame. But she had not budcjed. " I blush for you, Sylvia ! " I exclaimed. " I know all about that fellow ! He shouldn't kiss — my old cat! " " I don't see what yoti have to do with it ! " said Sylvia, placidly. " .And I have waited to tell you that I hope you will never interrujit me ,;ain when I am engas^ed in entertaining a young gentleman." " Sylvia, my dear child ! " I said, gravely, sit- ting down beside her. " How old are you .' " " I am of the proper age to manage my own affairs," said Sylvia, " with the assistance of my immediate family." " Well, I don't think you are," I replied. " And since your brother is at West Point, there is one thing that I am going to take the liberty of telling you, which the other members of your family may not fully understand. If you were younger, Sylvia, you might do a good deal of 164 WVP this :iiul not be hurt by it ; or you mii^ht not be hurt by it if you were a ^^ood deal older; l)ut at your aj^^e it is terrible; in time it will affect your character." " How old must I be ? " said Sylvia, wickedly. "Well, in your case," I replied warmly, a little nettled by her tone, "you'd better abstain alto[;ethcr." " And in your case .' " said Sylvia. " Never mind my case ! " T retorted. " Ikit I do mind it when I suffer by it," said Sylvia. " I do mind it if it's going to affect my character ! " "You know very well, Sylvia," I rei)licd, "that I never kissed you but three times, and then as a brother." " I do rot wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way," said Sylvia, with a pout of disappointment. It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia's powers of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent men — and as to the way that different men would try to act with her. I had been talking to her in a low tone I do not know how long. Her ill-nature had quickly vanished ; she was, in her svay, provoking, 165 ^ 'SYLVIA, MY 1)E.\K CIIII.I), HOW ULlJ ARli VOU ? " 1 66 charming. I was sitting close to her. The moonlight played upon her daring, wilful face through the leaves of the grape-vines. It was unpremeditated ; my nature was, most probably, unstrung at the instant by ungratified longings for Georgiana ; but suddenly I bent down and kissed her. Instantly both Sylvia and I started from the seat. How long Georgiana had been standing in the entrance to the arbour I do not know. She may that instant have come. Jkit there she was, dressed in white — pure, majestic, with the moon shining behind her, shedding about her the radi- ance of a heavenly veil. " Come, Sylvia," she said, with perfect sweet- ness ; and, bidding me good-night with the same gentlewoman's calm, she placed her arm about the child's waist, and the two sisters passed slowly and silently out of my garden At that moment, if I could have squeezed myself into the little screech-owl perched in a corner of the arbour, I would gladly have crept into the hollow of an oak and closed my eyes. Still, how was I to foresee what I should do ? A man's conversation may be his own ; his conduct may vibrate with the e.xtinct movements of his ancestors. 167 Georgiana's behaviour then was merely the forerunner of larj^er marvels. For next morn- ing I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman's inability to understand Man and Man's inability to understand Himself, and set it under her window. It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch's nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich egg. All day I waited with a heart as silent as a great clock run down ; my system of philosophy swung dead in the air. To my tortured vision as I eyed it secretly from my porch, it took on the semblance of one of Sylvia's poetical potatoes, and I found myself urging in its behalf Sylvia's fondest epithets : " how homely, yet how beau- tiful," " little thought of, but very necessary," "un- ostentatious, but lovely internal appearance." Towards sunset I took it sadly down. On top of the nest lay Georgiana's old scarlet emery-bag stuck full of her needles ! She had divined what all the writing meant and v/ould not have it. Instead she sent me this emblem not only of her forgiveness, but of her surrender. When a man expects a woman to scold him and she does not, he either gets to be a little afraid of her morally or he wants to take her in his arms. Henceforth, if Georgi- i68 m0mf ana were removed to another planet, I would rather worship her there simply as my evening or morning star than coexist with any earthly woman. One thought besccs me : did she realize that perhaps she herself was the cause of my misdemeanor.rs with Sylvia? Has she the penetration to discover that when a woman is engaged to a man she cannot deny him all things except at her own peril ? This proof of her high-mindedness and the enchanting glimpr.es of her face that she has vouchsafed me since, goaded me yesterday morning to despatch a reckless note: "Will you come to the arbour for a little while to- night? I have never dared ask this before, but you know how I have desired it. It is so much more private there. Write on the back of this paper one word, 'Yes.' There is a pencil in the nest." The shutters were nearly closed, but I caught sight of the curve of a shoulder and the move- ment of a busy hand. As I pushed the note up I said : " Read it at once. I am waiting;.' A hand came out and took in the note, then the pencil ; then note and pencil were put back. On the former was written, "Yes." 1 69 I think I must hava done a dozen things in five minutes, and then I started aimlessly off to town. On the way I met Georgiana. " Good God, Georgiana! " I exclaimed. " You here .? " " Where else } " said she. " And why not } " "I thought I just saw you at the window — " And then my awful soul within me said: " H-sh-sh-sh ! Not a word of this to a human being ! " After supper last night I called old Jack and Dilsy hito the garden, and led them around it, giving orders; thence to the arbour, where I bade them sit down. In the year of 1805 Mr. Jefferson, as presi- dent of the Philosophical Society, ordered exca- vations to be made at Big Bone Lick in Ken- tucky for the skeletons of extinct animals. My father, who was interested in antiquities, had had much correspondence with Mr. Jefferson in regard to earlier discoveries at that spot ; and when this expedition was undertaken he formed one of the explorers. Jack, his servant, at that time a strapping young fellow, had been taken along as one of the negroes who were to do the digging. The wonders then unearthed have always 170 been the greenest spot in old Jack's memory ; so that they have been growing larger ever since. Whenever I wish to hear him discourse with the dogmatic bluster of a sage who had original information as to geological times, I set Jack to talking about the bones of the Mastodon-Maximus, the name of which he gets from me, with a puzzled shake of his head, about regularly once a year. It is my private opinion that old Jack believes Big Bone Lick to have been the place where the Ark settled, and these to have been the bones of animals that had been swept out by Noah on landincr T • Last night I had merely to ask him whether he credited the story of an old traveller that he had once used some ribs found there for his tent-poles and a too^n for his hominy beater; whereupon DiLsy, foreseeing what was coming, excused herself on the plea of sudden rheuma- tism and went to bed, as I wished she should. The hinges on the little private gate under Georgiana's window I keep rusty ; this enables me to note when Lny one enters my garden. Bv- and-by I heard the hinges softly creak, where- upon I feigned not to believe what Jack was telling me ; whereupon he fell into an harangue of such affectionate and sustained vehemence 'Wm that when the hinges creaked again I was never able to determine. Was ever such usage made before of an antediluvian monster? To-day the sewing-girl thrust out spiteful faces at me several times. She is the one that helped Gcorgiana last year when she was making her wedding-clothes to marry the West Point cousin. God keej) him safely in the distance, or guide him firmly to the van of war ! How docs a woman feel when she is making her wedding-clothes for the second time and for another man .-' I know very well how the other man feels. Upon mv urging Georgiana to marry me at once — nature does not recognize engagements ; they ire a device of civilization— -she protested : " But I must get ready ! Think of the sew- ing!" " Oh, bother ! " I grumbled. " Where are all those clothes that you made last year .'' " How was I to suppose that Georgiana must have everything made over as part of her feel- ing for me .-' I would not decree it otherwise ; yet I question whether this delicacy may not impose reciprocal obligations, and remove from my life certain elements of abiding comfort. What if it should engendc; a prejudice against 172 my own time-worn acc|uaintanccs — the famil- iars of my fireside ? It m\ Mrs. Walters. To tell her and not expect her to tell would be like giving a thump to the dry head of a thistle on a breezy day and not ex- pecting the seed to go flying off in a hundred directions. 174 ,-«'-«^"'U' Vfcil^'"^ -■-■^,!iii^ JSL..■ S?f>^i. ;ri^a^,; ?^^: V'^; '/iff ;'v .\\ r .^-f^'.r < ^'■y rim ■ \^mJ^ :K'c ^^^r '> "I HAVK REKN MARRIED, SIR!" '91 >}^jk-iA^-^'n', sojourn. They were passing almost beneath me on the other side ; he had been talking ; i heard her brief reply, in a voice low and full of dignity, " I have been married, sir ! " " Mother of Gcorgiana ! " I cried, within my- self. Hut had she ever thought of taking a second husband she must have seen through " Old Drumbeater," as Sylvia called him. There were times when their breakfast would be late — for the sake of letting his chicken be broiled in slow perfection or his rolls or waflles come to a faultless brown ; and I, being at work near the garden fence, would hear him tramping up and down the walk on the other side and swearing at a family that had such irregular meals. The camel, a lean beast, requires an extraordinary supply of food, which it proceeds to store away in its hump as nourishment to be drawn upon while it is crossing the desert. There may be no long campaigning before the general ; but if there were and ratioi,^ were short, why could he not live upon h's own back .^ It is of a thick- ness, a roundness, and an impenetrability that would have justified Jackson in using him as a cotton-bale at the battle of New Orleans. Thus in my little corner of the world wc have all been at the same business of love, and I 192 ■C.'r THE CARrENTER AVD THE SKWINC-rjRr,. O 193 ■ wonder whether the corner be not the world itself : Mrs. Cobb and the general, Georgiana and I, the sewing-girl and the carpenter; for I had forgotten to note how quickly these two have found out that they want each other. My arbour is at his service, if he wishes it ; and Jack shall keep silent about the mastodon. It is true that from this sentimental enumera- tion I have omitted the name of Mrs. Walters ; but there is a secret here which not even Georgi- ana herself will ever get from mc. Mrs. Walters came to this town twenty years ago from the region of Bowling Green. Some years after- wards I made a trip into that part of the State to hear the mocking-bird — for it fills those more southern groves, but never visits ours ; and while there I stepped by accident on this discovery : TJicre never ivas aiif Mr. Wii Iters. It is her maiden name. But as I see the free- dom of her life and reflect upon the things that a widow can do and an old maid cannot — with her own sex and with mine — I commend her wisdom and leave her at peace. Indeed I have gone so far, when she has asked for my sym- pathy, as to lament with her Mr. Walters' s death. After all, what great difference is there between her weeping for him because he is 194 no more, and her weeping for him because he never was ? After which she freshens herself up with another handkerchief, a little Florida water, and a pigment of May roses from the apothecary's. And I have omitted the name of Sylvia ; but then Sylvia's name, like that of Lot's wife, can never be used as one of a class, and she herself must always be spoken of alone. (If Sylvia had been Lot's wife, she would not hc^.-e turned to a pillar of salt, she would most probably have become a geyser.) T don't know why, but she went on a visit to Henderson after that evening in the arbour. I suspect the governing power of Georgiana's wisdom to have been put forth here, for within a few days I received from Sylvia a letter which she asked me not to show to Gcorgiana, and in which she invited me to correspond with her secretly. The letter was of a singularly glucose quality as to the emotions. Throughout she referred to herself as "the c.\ile," although it was plain that she wrote in the highest spirits ; and in concluding she openly charged Gcorgiana with having given her a black eye — a most unspeakable phrase, surely picked up in the school-room. As a return for the black eye, 195 Sylvia said that she had composed a poem to herself, a copy of which she enclosed. I quote Sylvia's commemorative verses upon her wrongs and her banishment. They show features of metrical excess, and can scarcely claim to reflect the polish of her calmer art ; but they are of value to me as proving that whatever the rebuke Georgiana may have given, it had rebounded from that elastic spirit. LINES TO MYSELF Oh ! she was a hn-cly girl. So pretty and so fair. With gentle, love-lit t'yt's. And wavy, dark brown hair. I loved the gentle girl, P)Ut. f)Ii ! I heaved a sigh When first she told me she could see Out of only aiw eye. But soon I thought within myself I'd better save my tear and sigh To bestow upon an older person I know Who has more ihan one eye. She is brave and intelligent Too. She is witty and wise. She'll accomplish more now than another person I know Who has two eyes. 196 ^2r - -Ttt-^ ' mj v siiK cufi.i) SEK orr uk om.v cink i.vk. 197 Ah, ) oil need not pity her ! S?it- needs not your tear and sigh. She'll make good use, I tell you, Of her o/w remaining eye. In the home where we are hastening. In our eternal Home on High, See Xhatj'ou be not rivalled By the girl with only one eye.^ Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in the spirit of revenge upon her mother ; and when she came horr.e some days ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age — a boy, enor- mously fat — whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her mother had been decoyed by the general. Further to satirize the similarity of loverr., she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of yellow ribbon. Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore ; and several times lately she has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling elegies under the 1 Miss .Sylvia could not have l)een speaking seriously when she wrote that she had " composed " this poem. It is known to be the work of another hand, though Sylvia certainly tam- pered with the original and pr(/duced a version of her own. J. L. A. 198 ■W' .'<'-<\C ROSEVrtS UK Ytl.I.oW KUiiiuN. 199 green sea in regard to Araby's daughter. There is real aptness in the latter reference ; for this boy's true place in nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated with thick tissues of blubber. If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in deep. Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open letter in her hand. "Oh, read it! " she cried, her face kindling. It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the \^o\.\\'s,\\\\c.Joiiynal, accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and assigning her a fi.xed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of Kentucky poetesses. The title of the poem was, " My Lover Kneels to None but God." " I infer from this," I said gravely, " that your lover is a Kentuckian." •' He is," cried Sylvia. " Oh, his peerless haughty look ! " "Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I con- tinued mildly, " upon having such an editor and such a lover ; but I really think that your lover ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion." 200 " Never ! " cried Sylvia. " He kneels only to God and me ! " -+tfA. SHE SI'KANG ACROSS TO ME. " Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued further, "you will want 201 to be very nice to him, and you might give him something new to parse." Sylvia studied me dubiously : the subject is not one that reassures her. " Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in Virgil and Homer. And if he could do that then, think what he must be able to do now, and what pleasure his parsing passion must afford him ! " I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimat- ing that perhaps Mr. Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was based upon the fact that only he could parse it. There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon. This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time during the fore- noon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the collar over his head and was gone. Whither and how long no one knew ; but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs, Walters's house — poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held 202 him in such deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head. Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney. Glancing down this, he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and friendly a passage. His prog- ress was stopped by a bundle of straw at the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and hav- ing emerged from a grove of asparagus in the fireplace, he found him.self not on the earth, but in Mrs. VValters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humour' is not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white a.'- no fuller , could white it, and he dripping with soot. Here the ground beneath him was of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter. In the course of his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only. It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having left every window 203 closed and every door locked, as is her custom. She threw open her door and started in, but THEN HER EYES CAUGHT SIC.H r. paused, being greeted by a snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted out- ward. 204 "Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank with bewilderment. Then her eyes .ught sight of what had once been her bed. Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded with down, ^is head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes blazing green with defiance. She slammed and locked the door. " Run for the sheriff ! " she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought her market basket ; and she followed him as he fled. "What is it, Mrs. Walters.?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and bringing the handcuffs. " There's somebody in my bed ! " she cried, wringing her hands. " I believe it's a ." " It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing ; for by this time we were all gathered together. " What a foolish 'coon ! " said the sewing-girl. " Oh, I\Ir,s. Walters ! You are like Little Rod Riding-hood!" said Sylvia. " I can't arrest a "coon, madam ! " exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck at being made ridiculous. " Then arrest the carpenter ! " cried poor, un- happy, excited Mrs. Walters, bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder. 205 And among us all Gcorgiana was the only comforter. She laid aside her own work for < GSfSk^ '^ C |'',MfTO;:f< .. .^' 1 , \i\ f\^^ "WHAT IS IT, MRS. WALTERS?" that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her desperately wounded neighbour, and at nightfall, over the bed, now peaceful and snowy once more, 206 she spread a marvellous priceless quilt that she had long been making to exhibit at the ap- proaching World's Fair at New York. "Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtmie, '< it seems to me that things hap- pen in order to show you off." " Only think ! " Georgiana replied ; " she will never get into bed again without a shiver and a glance at the chimney. I begrudge her the quilt for one reason ; it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in it." " Did she tell you that she had had those bed- clothes ever since her marriage ? " "Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very long." " How long should you think ? " "Oh, well — " "And yet she certainly has the clearest pos- sible idea of Mr. Walters. I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers." "Or perhaps wish to." 207 THE SAGACIOUS UI.U SOUL. 208 Ill KVERAL c.irthquakes have lately been felt in this part of the f,^lol)e. Coming events cast their shocks before. The end of August — the ni^'-ht before my marriage. The news cf it certainly came like the shock of an earthquake to many people of the town, who know perfectly w '1 that no woman will allow the fruit and flowers to be carried off a place as a man will, "'he sagacious old soul who visits me yearly for young pie-plant actu- ally hurried out and begged for a basketful of the roots at once, thus taking time — and the rhubarb — by the forelock. And the old epicu- rean harpy whose passion is asparagus, having accosted me gruffly on the street with an inquiry P 209 as to the truth of my engagement and been quietly assured how true it was, informed nie to my face that any man situated as happily as I am was an infernal fool to entangle himself with a wife, and bade me a curt and everlasting good-morning on the spot. Yet every day the theme of this old troubadour's talk around the hotels is female entanglements — mendacious, unwifely, and for him unavailing. Through divers channels some of my fellow- creatures — specimens of the most dreadful prose — have let me know that upon marrying I shall forfeit their usurious regard. As to them, I shall relapse into the privacy of an orchard that has been plucked of its fruit. But my wonder- ment has grown on the other hand at the nian- ber of those to whom, as the significant unit of a family instead of a bachelor zero, I have now acquired a sterling mercantile valuation. Upon the whole, I may fairly compute that my rela- tion to the human race has been totally changed by the little I may cease to give away and by the less that I shall need to buy. And Mrs. Walters ! Although I prefer to think of Mrs. Walters as a singer, owing to her unaccountable powers of reminiscential vocali- zation, I have upon occasion classified her 210 among the waders; and certainly, upon the day when my engagement to Georgiana trans- pired, she waded not only around the town but all over it, sustained by a buoyancy of spirit that enabled her to keep her head above water in depths where her feet no longer touched the bottom. It was the crowning triumph of this vacant soul's life to boast that she had made this match ; and for the sake of giving her so much happiness, I think I should have been willing to marry Georgiana whether I loved her or not. So we are all happy : Sylvia, who thus enters upon a family right to my flowers and to the distinction of being the only Miss Cobb; Dilsy, who, while gathering vegetables about the gar- den, long ago began to receive little bundles of quilt pieces thrown down to her with a smile and the right word from the window above; and Jack, who is to drive us on our bridal-trip to the Blue Lick Springs, where he hopes to renew his scientific studies upon the ma.xillary bones. I have hesitated between Blue Lick and Mud Lick, though to a man in my condi- tion there can be no great difference between blue and mud. And I had thought of the 211 Harrodsburg Springs, but the negro musicians there were lately hurried off to Canada by the underground railway, out of which fact has grown a lawsuit for damages between the proprietor and his abolitionist guest. A few weeks ago I entrusted a secret to Georgiana. I told her that before she conde- scended to shine upon this part of the world — now the heavenlier part — I had been engaged upon certain researches and discoveries relating to Kentucky birds, especially to the Kentucky warbler. I admitted that these studies had been wretchedly put aside under the more pressing necessity of fixing the attention of all my powers, ornithological and other, upon her garden window. But as I placed specimens of my notes and drawings in her hand, I remarked gravely that after our marriage I should be ready to push my work forward without delay. All this was meant to give her a delightful surprise ; and indeed she examined the evi- dences of my undertaking with devouring and triumphant eagerness. But what was my amaze- ment when she handed them back in silence, and with a face as white, though as fragrant, as a rose. 212 o,tt*-^'. -^ > .Sl'KCl.MKNS OK MV NOTKS AND nRA\VIN(;s. " I have distressed you, Georgiana ! " I cried, "and my only thought had been to give you pleasure. I am always doing something wrong!" She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow, as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares. Then she sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap. "You have shared your secret with me," she said solemnly, at length. " I'll share mine with you. It is the only fear that I have ever felt regarding our future. It has never left me ; and what you have just shown me fills me with terror." I sat aghast. " I am not deceived," she continued ; " you have not forgotten nature. It draws you more powerfully than anything else in the world. Whenever you speak of it, you say the right thing, you find the right word, you get the right meaning. With nature alone you are perfectly natural. Towards society you show your shabby, awkward, trivial, uncomfortable side. But these drawings, these notes — there lies your power, your gift, your home. You truly belong to the woodsmen." 214 I listened to this as to fresh talk about a stranger. " Do you not foresee what will happen ? " she went on, with emotion. " After we have been married a whiie you will begin to wander off — at first for part of a day, then for a day, then for a day and a night, then for days and nights together. That was the way with Audu- bon, that was the way with Wilson, that is the way with Thoreau, that will be the way with all whom nature draws as it draws vou. And me — think of me — at home! A woman not able to go with you ! Not able to wade the creeks and swim the rivers ! Not able to sleep out in the brown leaves, to endure the rain, the cold, the travel ! And so I shall never be able to fill your life with mine as you fill mine with yours. As time passes, I shall fill it less and less. Every spring nature will bo just as young to you ; I shall be always older. The water you love ripples, never wrinKles. I shall cease rippling and begin wrinkling. No matter what happens, each summer the birds get fresh feath- ers ; only think how my old ones will never drop o'.t. I shall want you to go on with your work. If I am to be your wife, I must be wings to you. But think of compelling me to furnish 215 you the wings with which to leave me ! What is a little book on Kentucky birds in comparison with my happiness ! " She was so deeply moved that my one desire was to uproot her fears on the spot. "Then there shall be no little book on Ken- tucky birds ! " I cried. " I'll throw those things into the fire as soon as I go home. Only say what you wish me to be, Georgiana," I con- tinued, laughing, "and I'll be it — if it's the town pump." " Then if I could only be the town well," she said, with a poor little effort to make a heavy heart all at once go merrily again. Bent on making it go merrily as long as I shall live, the following day I called out to her at the window : "Georgiana, I'm improving. I'm get*:ing along." " What do you mean .'' " she asked. " Well, in town this morning they chose me as one of the judges of vegetables at the fair next month. I said, ' Gentlemen, I expect to be married before that time, and I do not intend to be separated from my wife. Will she have the privilege of accompanying mc among these competing vegetables .'' ' And last month they 216 5^' made me director of a turnpike company — I suppose because it runs through my farm. To- day at a meeting of the directors I said, ' Gen- tlemen, how far is this turnpike to run ? I will direct it to the end of my farm and not a step farther. I do not wish to be separated from my wife.'" Georgiana has teased me a good deal in my life. It is well to let a woman taste of the tree of knowledge whose fruit she is fond of dispensing. "You'd better be careful!" she said archly. " Remember, I haven't married you yet." " I am careful," I replied. " I haven't married yoH yet, either! My idea, Georgiana," I con- tinued, " is to plant a grove and raise cocoons. That would gratify my love of nature and your fancy for silk dresses. I could have my silk woven and spun in our manufactory at Newport, Kentucky; and you know that we couldn't possibly lose each other among the mulberry- trees." "You'd better take care!" she repeated. "Do you expect to talk to me in this style after we are married } " "That will all depcnr' upon how ynu talk to me," I answered. " But 1 have always under- 217 stood married life to be the season when the worm begins to turn." Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the monstrous selfish- ness that lay coiled like a canker in my words. I was really no better than those husbands who virtually say to their wives : " While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary — you were everything. Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and you must not stand in the way." But the thought is insupportable that Geor- giana should not be happy with me at any cost. I divine now the reason of the effort she has long been making to win me from nature; there- fore of my own free will I have privately set about changing the character of my life with the idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content. And thus it has come about that during the August now ended — always the month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek its wood- land peace — I have hung about the town as one who is offered for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he hates to do. Many of the affairs that engage t'.j passions of my fellow-beings are to me as the 218 gray stubble through which I walk in the Sep- tember fields — the rotting wastage of harvests long since gathered in. At other times I drive myself upon their sharp and piercing conflicts as a bird is blown uselessly again and again by some too strong a wind upon the spikes of the thorn. I hear the angry talk of our farmers and merchants, I listen to the fiery orations of our statesmen and the warning sermons of our divines. (Think of a human creature calling himself a divine.) The troubled ebb and flow of events in Kentucky, the larger movements of unrest throughout the great republic— these have replaced for me the old communings with nature that were full of music and of peace. Evening after evening now I turn my con- versations with Georgia na as gayly as I can upon some topic of the time. She is not always pleased with what I style my researches into civilized society. One evening in particular our talk was long and seriou.s, beginning in shal- lows and then steering for deep waters. "Well, Georgiana," I had .said, " Mi.ss Delia Webster has suddenly returned to her home in Vermont." "And who is Mi.ss Delia Webster'" she had inquired, with unmistakable acidity. 219 " Miss Delia Webster is the lady who was sentenced to the State penitentiary tor abduct- ing our silly old servants into Ohio. Hut the jury of Kentucky noblemen who returned the verdict — being married men, and long used to forgiving a woman anything — petitioned the governor to pardon Miss Delia on the ground that she belongs to the sex that can do no wrong -and be punished for it. Whereupon the governor, seasoned to the like large experi- ence, pardoned the lady. Whereupon Miss Webster, having passed a few weeks in the pen- itentiary, left, as I stated, for her home in Ver- mont, followed by her father, who does not, how- ever, seem to have been able to overtake her." " If she'd been a man, now," suggested Georgiana. "If she'd been a man she would have shared the fortunes of h> i principal, &" Heverend Mr. Fairbanks, who has ho/ returned to his home in Ohio, and will not — for fifteen years." " Do you think it an agreeable subject of con- versation .-" " inquired Georgiana. "Then I will change it," I said. "The other day the editor of the Smithland Bi'c was walk- ing along the street with his little daughter and was shot down by a doctor." 220 "Horrible!" exclaimed (;cor^nana. "Why?" " Self-defence," I answered. " And last week in the court-room in .Mduiu Sterling a man was shot by his brother-in-law during the sitting of court." "And why did he kill him?'' "Self-defence!" I answered. " And in Ver- sailles a man down in the street was assassinated with a rifle fired from the garret of a tavern. Self-defence. And in Le.xinj^ton a young man shot and killed another for drawing his handker- chief from his pocket. Self-defence! — the sense of thf^ court being that whatever such an action might mean in other civilized countries, in Ken- tucky and under the circumstances — the young fellows were quarrelling — it naturally betokened the reaching for a revolver. Thus in Kentucky, Georgiana, and during a heated discussion, a man cannot blow his nose but at the risk of his life." " I'll see that you never carry a handkerchief," said Georgiana. "So remember — don't you ever reach for one!" "And the other day in Kddysville," I went on, " two men fought a duel by going to a doc- tor's shop and having him open a vein in the arm of each. Just before they fainted from 221 exhaustion they made signs that their honour was satisfied, so the doctor tied up the veins. I see that you don't believe it, but it's true." " And why did they fight a duel in that way .-' " "I give it up," I said, "unless it was in self- defence. We are a most remarkable society of self-defenders. liut if every man who fights in Kentucky is merely engaged in warding off a murderous attack upon his life, who docs all the murderous attacking ? You know the seal of our commonwealth : two gentlemen in evening dress shaking hands and with one voice declar- ing, ' United we stand, divided we fall.' So far as the temper of our time goes, these two gen- tlemen might w^ell be represented as twenty paces apart, and as calling out, ' United, we stood ; divided, j'ou fall ! ' Killings and duels ! Killings and duels ! Do you think we need these as proofs of courage .-' Do you suppose that the Kentuckians of our day are braver than the pioneers .-' Do you suppose that any people ever elevated its ideal of courage in the eyes of the world by all the homicides and ad the duels that it could count ? There is only one way in which any civilized peopl ^ has ever :!one that, only one way in which any civili/ed people has ever been able to impress the world very '>:>■> deeply with a belief in the reality and the nobil- ity of its ideal of courage : it is by the warlike spirit of its men in times of war, and by the peaceful spirit of its men in times of peace. Only, you must add this : that when these times of peace have come on, and it is no longer pos- sible for such a people to realize its ideal of courage in arms, it is nevertheless driven to express the ideal in other ways — by monu- ments, arches, inscriptions, statues, hterature, pictures, all in honour of those of their country- men who lived the ideal before the world and left it more lustrous in their dying. That is the full reason why we know how brave a people the Greeks were — by their peaceful ways of honouring valour in times of peace. And that in part is why no nation in the world doubts the courage of the English, because when the Eng- lish are not fighting they are forever doing some- thing to honour those who have fought well. So that they never have a peace but they turn it into preparation for the next war. " And that is why, as the outside world looks in upon us u---lay and sifts the evidence of whether I ask myself the question, what if all the men who have killed their personal enemies or been killed by them in Kentucky, and if all the men who have killed their per- sonal friends or been killed by them in Ken- tucky, had spent their love of fighting and their love of courage upon a monument to the Pio- neers—such a monument as stands nowhere else in the world, and might f^tly st;.nd in this State to commemorate the winning of the West ? Would the world think the better or the worse of the Kentucky ideal of bravery ? " I had not meant to talk to you so long on this subject," I added, in apology, "but I have been thinking of these things lately since I have been so much in town." " I am interested," said Georgiana ; " and as I agree with you. we need not both .^^peak." But she looked pained, and I sought to give a happier turn to the conversation. "There is only one duel I ever heard of that Q 22 S gave mc any pleasure, and that one never came off. A few years ago a Kentuckian wrote a political satire on an Irishman in Illinois — wrote it as a widow. The Irishman wished to fight. The widow offered to marry the Irish- man, if such a sacrifice would be accepted as satisfactory damages. The Irishman sent a challenge, and the Kentuckian chose cavalry broadswords of the largest size. lie was a giant ; he had the longest arms of any man in Illinois: he could have mowed Erin down at a stroke like a green milk-weed ; he had been trained in duelling with oak-trees. You never heard of him : his name is Abraham Lincoln." " I have heard of him, and I have seen him — in Lnion County before I came here," said Georgiana, w-ith enthusiasm. " He came here once to hear Mr. Clay speak," I resumeu ; " and I saw them walking together one day under the trees at Ashland — the two mf)st remarkable-looking men that I ever beheld together." My few acres touch the many of the great statesman. Get rgian.i and I often hear of the movements of his life, as two little boats in a quiet bay are tossed by the storms of the ocean. 226 Any reference to him always makes us thought- ful, and wo fell silent now. "Georgiana," I said at length, softly, "it's all in self-defence. I believe you promised to marry me in self-defence." " I did," she said promptly. " Well, I certainly asked you in self-defence, Mi.ss Cobb," I replied. "And now in a few days, according to rhe usage of my time, I am going to take your life — even at the peril of my own. If you desire, it is your privilege to examine the deadly weapons before the hour of actual combat." and I held out my arms to her appealingly. She bent her body delicately aside, as always. " I am upset," she said di.scouragingly. "You have been abusing Kentucky." '^Ah, that is the trouble!" I answered. "Von wish me to become more interested in my fellow-creatures. And then you will not let me speak of what they do. And the other day you told me that I am not per- fectly natural with anything but nature. Nature is the only thing that is perfectly natural with me. When I study nature there are no delicate or dangerous or forbidden subjects. The trees have no evasions. The weeds are honest. Run- 227 ning water is not trying to escape. The sun- sets are not coloured with hypocrisy. The Hghtning is not revenge. Everything stands forth in the sincerity of its being, and nature invites me to exercise the absolute liberty of my mind upon all life. I am bidden to master and proclaim whatsoever truth she has fitted me to grasp. If I am worthy to investigate, none is offended ; if I should be wise enough to discover any law of nature, the entire world would ex- press its thanks. Imagine my being assassi- nated because I had published a complete report upon the life and habits of the field-mouse ! " " If one mouse published a report on the life and habits of another, there'd be a fight all over the field," said Georgiana. " A ridiculous extreme," I replied. " lUit after you have grown used to study nature with absolute freedom and absolute peace, think how human life repels you. You may not investi- gate, you may not speak out, you may not even think, you may not even feel. You are not allowed to reveal what is concealed, and you are required to conceal what is revealed. Nat- ural ! Have you ever known any two men to be perfectly natural with each other except when they were fighting ? As for the men that I as- 228 "m' sociate with every day, they weigh their words out to one another as the apothecary weighs his poisons, or the grocer his gunpowder." "You forget," said Georgiana, "that we are living in a very extraordinary time, when every- body is sensitive and excited." " It is so always and everywhere," I replied. " You may never study life as you study nature. With men you must take your cuoice : liberty for your mind and a prison for your body; liberty for your body and a prison for your mind. Nearly all people choose the latter ; we know what becomes of the few who do not." But this reference to the times led us to speak slowly and solemnly of what all men now are speaking : war that must come between the North and the South. We agreed that it would come from each side as a blazing torch to Ken- tucky, which lies between the two, and is divided between the two in love and hate — to Kentucky, where a soldier's life is always the ideal of a man's duty and glory. At last I felt that my time had come. "Georgiana," I said, "there is one secret I have never shared with you. It is the only fear I have ever felt regarding our future. But, if there should be a war — you'd better know it 229 now — leave you or not leave you, I am going to join the army." She grew white and faint with the thought of a day to come. Bi-' at last she said : " Yes; you must go." " I know one thing," I added, after a Ions silence ; " if I could do my whole duty as a Ken- tuckian — as an American citizen — as a human being— I should have to fight on both sides." I have thus set down in a poor way a j)art of the only talk I ever had with Georgiana on these subjects during the year 1851. Yesterday, about sunset, the earth and sky were beautiful with that fulness of peace which things often attain at the moment before thev alter and end. The hour seemed to me the last serene loveliness of summer, soon to be ruffled by gales and blackened by frosts. Gf.orgiana stood at her window looking into the west. The shadows of the trees in my yard fell longer and longer across the garden towards her. Darkest among these lay the shapes of the cedars and the pines in which the red-bird had lived. Her whole attitude bespoke a mood surrendered to memory ; and I felt sure that we two were thinking of the same thing, 230 "N*] As she approached that mystical revelation of life which must come with our marriage, Georgiana's gayety has grown subtly overcast. It is as if the wild strain in her were a little sad at having to be captured at last ; and I too ex- periencc an indefinable pain that it has become my lot to subdue her in this way. The thought possesses me that she submits to marriage be- cause she cannot live intimately with me and lavish her love upon me in any other relation ; and therefore I draw back with awe from the idea of taking such possession of her as I will and must. As she stood at her window yesterday evening she caught sight of me across the yard and silently beckoned. I went over and looked up at her, waiting and smiling. "Well, what is it.?" I asked at length, as her eyes rested on me with the fulness of affection. " Nothing. I wanted to see you standing down there once more. Haven't you thought of it ? This is the last time — the last of the window, the last of the garden, the end of the past. Everything after this will be so different. Aren't you a little sorry that you are going to marry me ,'' " 231 "Will you allow me to fetch the minister this instant?" In the evening they put on her bridal dress and sent over for mc, and, drawing the parlour doors aside, blinded me with the sight of her standing in there, as if waiting in duty for love to claim its own. As I saw her then I have but to close my eyes to sec her now. I scarce know why, but that vision of her haunts my mind mysteriously. I see a fresh snow-drift in a secret green valley between dark mountains. The sun must travel far and high to ich it ; but when it does, its rays pour down nom near the zenith and are most powerful and warm ; then in a little while the whole valley is green again and a white mist, rising from it, muffles the face of the sun. Oh, Georgiana ! Georgiana ! Do not fade away from me as I draw you to me. My last solitary candle flickers in the socket : it is in truth the end of the past. 232 IV .^3^^-' ' AST summer I foiled a dead oak in the woods and had the heart of him stored away for my winter fuel: a series of burnt -offer- ings to the worshipful spirit of my hearth- stone. There should 233 have been several of these offerings already, for October is almost ended now, and it is the month during which the fir^>t cool nights come on in Kentucky and the first fires are lighted. A few twilights ago T stood at my yard gate watching the red domes of the forest fade into shadow and listening to the cawing of crows under the low gray of the sky as they hurried home. A chill crept over the earth. It was a fitting hour ; I turned in-doors and summoned Georgiana. "We will light our first fire together," I said, straining her to my heart. Kneeling gayly down, we piled the wood in the deep, wide chimney. Each of us then brought a live coal, and together we started the blaze. I had drawn Georgiana's chair to one side of the fireplace, mine opposite ; and with the candle still unlit we now sat silently watch- ing the flame spread. What need was there of speech .'' We understood. By-and-by some broken wreaths of smoke floated outward into the room. My sense caught the fragrance. I sniffed it with a rush of memories. Always that smell of smoke, with other wild, clean, pungent odours of the woods, 234 Vf* had been strangely pleasant to nie. I remem- ber thinking of thcni when a boy as incense perpetually and reverently set free by nature towards the temple of the skies. I'hey aroused in me even then the spirit of meditation on the mystery of the world ; and later they became inwrought with the pursuit and enjoyment of things that had been the delight of my life for many years. So that coming now, at the very moment when I was dedicating niy.self to my hearth-stone and to domestic life, this smell of wood smoke reached me like a message from my past. For an instant ungovernable longing surged over me to return to il. For an instant I did return ; and once more I lay drowsing before my old camp-fires in th: autumn woods, with the frosted trees draping their crimson cur- tains around me on the walls of space and the .stars flashing thick in the ceiling of my bed- chamber. My dog, who had stretched himself at my feet before the young blaze, inhaled the smoke also with a full breath of reminiscence, and lay watching me out of the corner of his eye — I fancied with reproachful constancy. I caught his look with a sense of guilt, and glanced across at Georgiana. 235 Her gaze was buried deep in the flames. And iiow sweet iier fact was, how inexpressibly at peace. She had folded lie wings of her whole life, and sat by the hearth as still as a brooding dove. No past laid its disturbing touch upon her shoulder. Instead. I could see that if there were any flight of her mind away from the present it was into the future — a slow, tranquil flight across the years, with all the hap- piness that they nuist bring. As I set my own thoughts to journey after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld (ieor- giana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temi)les, spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with uncon- querable gaycty and youth. " How sweet that smoke is, Gcorgiana," I said, rousing us both, and feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may speak. " And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back into his elements — smoke and light, heat and ashes. What a magnificent work he was on natural history, re- quiring hundreds of years for his preparation and completion, written in a language so learned that not the wisest can read him wisely, and 236 -»>l"»' -ir— 1» L*- — -Hi: ♦—• ' ■ I BEHELD UEORGIANA A> AN OLD, OLD L/U)V. 237 enduringly bound in the finest of tree calf! It is a dishonour to speak of him as a work, lie was a doctor of philosophy! lie should have been a college jirofessor ! Think how he could Vave used his own feet for a series of lectures on the laws of equilibrium, capillary attraction, or soils and moisture ! Was there ever a head that knew as much as his about the action of light ? Did any human being ever more grandly bear the burdens of life or better face the tem- pests of the world ? What did he not know about birds? He had carried them in his arms and nurtured them in his bosom for a thousand years. Even his old coat, with all its rents and patches — what roll of pajiyrus was ever so crowded with the secrets of knowledge .-' The august antiquarian! The old king! Can you imagine a funeral urn too n(iblc for his ashes .^ But to what base uses, Georgiana ! lie will not keep the wind away any longer; we shall change him into a kettle of lye with which to whiten our floors." What Gcorgiana's reply could have been I do not know, for at that moment Mrs. Walters flitted in. " I saw through the windows that you had a fire," she said volubly, " and ran over to get 238 warm. And, oh ! yes, T wanted to tell you — " " Stop, />/t'asc, Mrs. Walters!" I cried, start- ing towards her with an outstretched hand and a warning laugh. "Von have not yet been formally introduced to this room, and a formal introduction is necessary. Vou must be made acquainted with a primary law of its being;" and as Mrs. Walters paused, dropping her hands into her lap and regarding me with an air of mystification, I went on : " When I had repairs made in my house last summer, I had this fireplace rebuilt, and I ordered an inscription to be burnt into the bricks. We e.vpect to ask that all our guests will kindly notice this inscription in order to avoid accidents or misunderstandings. So I beg of )()u not to speak until you ha\-e read the words over the fireplace." Mrs. Walters wonderingly read the follow- ing legend, running in an arch across the chimney : ©oatj frirnti, arounti tbrsc !}fart{)=stonr3 gprah no rfail tnorlJ of nnu creature. She wheeled towards me with instantaneous triumph. 239 " I'm glad you put it there!" she cried. "I'm glad you put it there ! It will teach them a les- son about their talking. If there is one thing I cannot stand it is a gossip." I have observed that a fowl before a looking- glass will fight its own image. "Take care, Mrs. Walters!" I said gently. "You came very near to violating the law just then." " He meant it for mc, Mrs. Walters," said Gcorgiana, fondling our neighbour's hand, and looking at me with an awful rebuke. "I meant it for myself," I said. "And now it is doing its best to make me feel like a Phari- see. So I hasten to add that there are other rooms in the house in which it will be allowed human nature to assert itself in this long-estab- lishea, hereditary, and '^eradicable right. Our guests have only to .. .imate that they can no longer restrain their |)ropensities and we will conduct them to another chamber. Mrs. Moss and I will occasionally make use of these cham- bers ourselves, to relieve the tension of too much virtue. But it is seriously our idea to have one room in the house where we shall feel safe, both as respects ourselves and as respects others, from the discomfort of evil speaking. 240 ■V* Ah long as these walls stand or wc dwell in them, this is to be the room of charity and kindness to all creatures." ^•irRiWfc; DROPPED INTO A roiflU. Although wc exerted ourselves, conversation flagged during the visit of Mrs. Walters. Sev- eral times she began to speak, but, with a R 241 frightened look at the fireplace, dropped into a cough, or cleared her throat in a way that called to mind the pleasing habit of Sir Roger de Coverley in the Gardens of Gray's Inn. Later in the evening other guests came. Upon each the law of that fireside was lightly yet gravely impressed. They were in the main the few friends I know in whom such an out- ward check would call for the least inner re- straint ; nevertheless, on what a footing of con- fidence it placed our conversation! To what a commanding level we were safely lifted ! For nothing so releases the best powers of the mind as the understanding that the entire com- pany are under bond to keep the peace of the finest manners and of perfect breeding. And Georgiana — how she shone ! I knew that she could perfectly fill a window ; I now see that she can as easily fill a room. Our bodies were grouped about the fireplace ; our minds centred around her, and she flashed like the evening star along our intellectual pathway. The next day Mrs. Walters talked a long time to Georgiana on the edge of the porch. Thus my wife and I have begun life together. I think that most of our evenings will be spent 242 in the room dedicated to a kind word for uni- versal life. No matter how closely the warring forces of existence, within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there we enter peace. We shall be walled in from all darkness of whatsoever meanings our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous hours. And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household than to escape an ignoble evening. 7'o attain a noble one is like lying calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have struggled upward amid enemies all day long. Although we have now been two months married, 1 have not yet captured the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and still leads me on in the person of Georgiana. I know but too well now that I never shall. The charm in her which I pursue, yet never overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit — of that elusive, infinite splen- dour of God which flows from afar into all ter- restrial things, filling them as colour fills the rose. Even while I live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains for 243 me the uncomprehcndcd brightness and fresh- ness of a dream that does not end and has no waking. This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold her entire self into mine. We have been a revelation to each other, but the revelation is not complete ; there are cur- tains behind curtains, which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the discoveries of our union. Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at what it means for a man and woman to live together as we live. Yet, folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment. Often she appears to be vainly hovering on the other side of a too solid sphere, seeking an entrance to where I really am. I'Aen during the intimate silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing walls of fk\sh — we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs of individual being. During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the earth been flooded with beauty. 244 "^"^ Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky its rays stream through the open shutter and fall i pon Gcor- giana in her sleep. Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily downward along her figure. How august she is in her purity ! the whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the .silvering orb is as pitch to the whiteness of her nature. The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin cover- ing had slipped aside, leaving Georgiana's feet exposed. With a start of pain I recollected an old story about her childhood : that one day for the sake of her rights she had received a wound in one of her feet --how serious I had never known, but perhaps deforming, irremediable. My head was raised on the pillow; the moonlight was moving down that way ; it would cross her feet ; it would reveal the truth. I turned my face away and closed my eyes. 245 nearly chirk when I reiich home roni town these Janiuiry evcn- n<^s. However the cold may stinij the face and dart inward to the marrow, Geor<;iana is waitin<^ at le yard gate to meet me, so ooded and shawled and ringed about with petticoats — like a tree within its layers of bark — that she looks like the most thick- set of ordinary-sized women ; for there is a heavenly but 246 very human secret hidin- in this household now, and she is thouwe evening >he feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside the gate, ag.iuist which rested an enormous icicle. When I started to enter s',.. seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the countersign. "Love, captain," I said. " If it be not that, slay me at your feet ! " She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck. "It is ' Peace,'" she said. " lUit I desert to the enemy." Without going to my fireside that evening I hurr'ed on to the stable; for I do not relin- quish to my servants the office of feeding my stock. Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the divine right to be kingly men, which all men share ; but truly a divine right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in winter. It is the feudal 247 «a b.. sfVJ % ^% ^V^>. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) // ;v #', (? #, &^-r f/j l^' C^< #, C-c' f^*, ^^ (/. V 1.0 I.! 1.25 'r Ilia SIS .^" IIIIM '^ 116 M 12.0 t- 1- I'l !ijil5^ 1.8 1.4 1.6 y^ <^i A ^^i m ^ o^ M Photographic Sciences Corporation iV S ■^^ "% V %^ :\ "^ \ % n? "^ % "^^ 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 L>-ous. And as I spend much time in it for the fine, fresh work it brings to hand and thought, I feel that in my way I am part of it. that I can match the aftermath of nature with the aftermath of my life The Harvest passed over my fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the Amter's edge. The thought has now come into my mind that I shall lay aside these pages for my son to ponder if he should ever grow old enough to value what he reads. They will give him some account of how his father and mother met m the old time, of their courting days, of their happy life together. And since it becomes more probable that there will be a war, and that I might not be living to speak to him of his mother in ways not written here, I shall set down one thing about her which I pray he may take well to heart. He ought to know and to remember this ; that his life was the price of hers ; she was extinguished that he might shine and he owes it to her that the flame of his torch be as white as the altar's from which it was Kmdied. Perhaps the most remarkable thing, then, in the character of his mother- which, please God T 273 he will have, or, getting all things else, he can never be a gentleman —was honour. It shone from her countenance, it ran like melody in her voice, it made her eyes the most beautiful in expression that I have ever seen, it enveloped her person and demeanour with spiritual grace. Honour in what are called the little things of life, honour not as women commonly understand it, but as the best of men understand it — that his mother had. It was the crystalline, unshak- able rock upon which the somewhat fragile and never to be completed structure oi her life was reared. If he be anything of a philosopher, he may reason that this trait must have made his mother too serious and too hard. Let him think again. It was the very core of soundness in her that kept her gay and sweet. I have often likened her mind to the sky in its power of changeable- ness from radiant joyousness to sober calm ; but oftenest it was like the vault of April, whose drops quicken what they fall upon ; and she was of a soft-heartedness that ruled her absolutely — but only to the unyielding edge of honour. Yet she did not escape this charge of being both hard and serious upon the part of men and women who were used to the laxness of small 274 misdemeanours, and felt ill at ease before the terrifying truth that she was a lady. Beyond this single trait of hers — which, if it please God that he inherit it, may he keep though he lose everything else — I set nothing further down for his remembrance, since naught could come of my writing. By words I could no more give him an idea of what his mother was than I could point him to a few measures of wheat and bid him behold a living harvest. Upon these fields of cool October greenness there rises out of the earth a low, sturdy weed. Upon the top of this weed small white blossoms open as still as stars of frost. Upon these blos- soms Hes a fragrance so pure and wholesome that the searching sense is never cloyed, never satisfied. Years after the blossoms are dried and yellow and the leaves withered and gone, this wholesome fragrance lasts. The common people, who often put their hopes into their names, call it life-everlasting. Sometimes they make themselves pillows of it for its virtue of bringing a quiet sleep. This plant is blooming out now, and nightly as I wend homeward I pluck a handful of it, gathering along with its life the tranquil sun- 275 shine, the autumnal notes of the cardinal passing to better lands, and all the healthful influences of the fields. I shall make me a tribute of it to the memory of her undying sweetness. If God wills, when I fall asleep for good I shall lay my head beside hers on the bosom of the Life Everlasting. THE END 276