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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11532 ***
+
+This eBook produced by Jared Fuller.
+
+
+
+A KENTUCKY CARDINAL _A Story_
+
+by James Lane Allen
+
+
+
+
+Dedication
+
+This to her from one who in childhood used to stand at the windows
+of her room and watch for the Cardinal among the snow-buried cedars.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+All this New-year's Day of 1850 the sun shone cloudless but wrought
+no thaw.  Even the landscapes of frost on the window-panes did not
+melt a flower, and the little trees still keep their silvery boughs
+arched high above the jeweled 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 is bitter cold, with no sounds
+outside but the cracking of the porches as they freeze tighter.
+Even the north wind seems grown too numb to move.  I had determined
+to convert its coarse, 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 snap 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 shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light.
+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 shrubbery 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.
+
+The longer 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 magnet 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 of the highest animal and cannibal.
+That way nearly everything is prose.  I can feel the prose rising
+in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before
+any other dogs are in sights.  And, indeed, the case is much that
+of a country dog come to 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 I have rolled over in the mud and fought
+like a common cur, is Man.
+
+Among my neighbors who furnish me much of the plain prose of life,
+the nearest hitherto has been a bachelor named Jacob Mariner.  I
+called him my rain-cow, because the sound of his voice awoke
+apprehensions of falling weather.  A visit from him was an endless
+drizzle.  For Jacob came over to expound his minute symptoms; 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 neighbor
+lives across the road--a widow, Mrs. Walters.  I call Mrs. Walters
+my mocking-bird, because she reproduces 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 favor me
+with a little singing, and soon the air is vocal with every note
+of the village songsters.  After this, Mrs. Walters usually begins
+to flutter in a motherly way around the subject of _my_ symptoms.
+
+Naturally it has been my wish to bring about between this rain-cow
+and mocking-bird the desire to pair with one another.  For, if a
+man always wanted to tell his symptoms and a woman always wished
+to hear about them, surely a marriage compact on the basis of such
+a passion ought to open up for them a union of overflowing and
+indestructible felicity.  They should associate as perfectly as the
+compensating metals of a pendulum, of which the one contracts as
+the other expands.  And then I should be a little happier myself.
+But the perversity of life!  Jacob would never confide in Mrs.
+Walter.  Mrs. Walters would never inquire for Jacob.
+
+Now poor Jacob is dead, of no complaint apparently, and with so few
+symptoms 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 neighbors.  What 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 twittered kindly at each other over the fence, and ruffled our
+plumage with common disapproval.  It is marvellous how a member of
+her sex will conceive dislike of people 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.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Mrs. Walters this morning with more news touching our incoming
+neighbors.  Whenever I have faced towards this aggregation of unwelcome
+individuals, I have beheld it moving towards me as a thick gray
+mist, shutting out nature beyond.  Perhaps they are approaching
+this part of the earth like comet that carries its tail before it,
+and I am already enveloped in a disturbing, befogging nebulosity.
+
+There is still no getting the truth, but it appears that they are
+a family of consequence in their way--which, of course, may be
+a very poor way.  Mrs. Margaret Cobb, mother, lately bereaved of
+her husband, Joseph Cobb, who fell among the Kentucky boys at the
+battle of Buena Vista.  A son, Joseph Cobb, now cadet at West Point,
+with a desire to die like his father, but destined to die--who
+knows?--in a war that may break out in this country about the
+negroes.
+
+While not reconciled, I am resigned.  The young man when at home
+may wish to practise the deadly vocation of an American soldier of
+the period over the garden fence at my birds, in which case he and
+I could readily fight a duel, and help maintain an honored custom
+of the commonwealth.  The older daughter will sooner or later turn
+loose on my heels one of her pack of blue dogs.  If this should
+befall me in the spring, and I survive the dog, I could retort
+with a dish of strawberries and a copy of "Lalla Rookh"; if in the
+fall, with a basket of grapes and Thomson's "Seasons," after which
+there would be no further exchange of hostilities.  The younger
+daughter, being a school-girl, will occasionally have to be subdued
+with green apples and salt.  The mother could easily give trouble;
+or she might be one of those few women to know whom is to know the
+best that there is in all this faulty world.
+
+The middle of February.  The depths of winter reached.  Thoughtful,
+thoughtless words--the depths of winter.  Everything gone inward
+and downward from surface and summit, Nature at low tide.  In its
+time will come the height of summer, when the tides of life rise
+to the tree-tops, or be dashed as silvery insect spray all but to
+the clouds.  So bleak a season touches my concern for birds, which
+never seem quite at home in this world; and the winter has been
+most lean and hungry for them.  Many snows have fallen--snows that
+are as raw cotton spread over their breakfast-table, and cutting
+off connection between them and its bounties.  Next summer I must
+let the weeds grow up in my garden, so that they may have a better
+chance for seeds above the stingy level of the universal white.  Of
+late I have opened a pawnbroker's shop for my hard-pressed brethren
+in feathers, lending at a fearful rate of interest; for every
+borrowing Lazarus will have to pay me back in due time by monthly
+instalments of singing.  I shall have mine own again with usury.
+But were a man never so usurious, would he not lend a winter seed
+for a summer song?  Would he refuse  to invest his stale crumbs in
+an orchestra of divine instruments and a choir of heavenly voices?
+And to-day, also, I ordered from a nursery-man more trees of holly,
+juniper, and fir, since the storm-beaten cedars will have to come
+down.  For in Kentucky, when the forest is naked, and every shrub
+and hedge-row bare, what would become of our birds in the universal
+rigor and exposure of the world if there were no evergreens--nature's
+hostelries for the homeless ones?  Living in the depths of these,
+they can keep snow, ice, and wind at bay; prying eyes cannot watch
+them, nor enemies so well draw near; cones or seed or berries are
+their store; and in these untrodden chambers each can have the
+sacred company of his mate.  But wintering here has terrible risks
+which few run.  Scarcely in autumn have the leaves begun to drop
+from their high perches silently downward when the birds begin to
+drop away from the bare boughs silently southward.  Lo! some morning
+the leaves are on the ground, and the birds have vanished.  The
+species that remain, or that come to us then, wear the hues of
+the season, and melt into the tone of Nature's background--blues,
+grays, browns, with touches of white on tail and breast and wing
+for coming flecks of snow.
+
+Save only him--proud, solitary stranger in our unfriendly land--the
+fiery grosbeak.  Nature in Kentucky has no wintry harmonies for him.
+He could find these only among the tufts of the October sumac, or
+in the gum-tree when it stands a pillar of red twilight fire in
+the dark November woods, or in the far depths of the crimson sunset
+skies, where, indeed, he seems to have been nested, and whence to
+have come as a messenger of beauty, bearing on his wings the light
+of his diviner home.
+
+With almost everything earthly that he touches this high herald
+of the trees is in contrast.  Among his kind he is without a peer.
+Even when the whole company of summer voyagers have sailed back to
+Kentucky, singing and laughing and kissing one another under the
+enormous green umbrella of Nature's leaves, he still is beyond them
+all in loveliness.  But when they have been wafted away again to
+brighter skies and to soft islands over the sea, and he is left
+alone on the edge of that Northern world which he has dared invade
+and inhabit, it is then, amid black clouds and drifting snows,
+that the gorgeous cardinal stands forth in the ideal picture of
+his destiny.  For it is than that his beauty I most conspicuous,
+and that Death, lover of the peerless, strikes at him from afar.
+So that he retires to the twilight solitude of his wild fortress.
+Let him even show his noble head and breast at a slit in its green
+window-shades, and a ray flashes from it to the eye of a cat; let
+him, as spring comes on, burst out in desperation and mount to the
+tree-tops which he loves, and his gleaming red coat betrays him to
+the poised hawk as to a distant sharpshooter; in the barn near by
+an owl is waiting to do his night marketing at various tender-meat
+stalls; and, above all, the eye and heart of man are his diurnal and
+nocturnal foe.  What wonder if he is so shy, so rare, so secluded,
+this flame-colored prisoner in dark-green chambers, who has only
+to be seen or heard and Death adjusts an arrow.  No vast Southern
+swamps or forest of pine here into which he may plunge.  If he
+shuns man in Kentucky, he must haunt the long lonely river valleys
+where the wild cedars grow.  If  he comes into this immediate
+swarming pastoral region, where the people, with ancestral love of
+privacy, and not from any kindly thought of him, plant evergreens
+around their country homes, he must live under the very guns and
+amid the pitfalls of the enemy.  Surely, could the first male of
+the species have foreseen how, through the generations of his race
+to come, both their beauty and their song, which were meant to
+announce them to Love, would also announce them to Death, he must
+have blanched snow-white with despair and turned as mute as a stone.
+Is it this flight from the inescapable just behind that makes the
+singing of the red-bird thoughtful and plaintive, and, indeed,
+nearly all the wild sounds of nature so like the outcry of the
+doomed?  He will sit for a long time silent and motionless in the
+heart of a cedar, as if absorbed in the tragic memories of his
+race.  Then, softly, wearily, he will call out to you and to the
+whole world: _Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_.._Peace_..!--the
+most melodious sigh that ever issued from the clefts of a dungeon.
+
+For color and form, brilliant singing, his very enemies, and the
+bold nature he has never lost, I have long been most interested in
+this bird.  Every year several pairs make their appearance about
+my place.  This winter especially I have been feeding a pair; and
+there should be finer music in the spring, and a lustier brood in
+summer.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+March has gone like its winds.  The other night as I lay awake with
+that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper
+air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by
+faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn.  I rose and, throwing
+the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier
+might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown
+to him from the clouds.  What far-off lands, streaked with mortal
+dawn, does he believe in?  In what soft sylvan water will he bury
+his tired breast?  Always when I hear his voice, often when not,
+I too desire to be up and gone out of these earthly marshes where
+hunts the darker Fowler--gone to some vast, pure, open sea, where,
+one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I love and those who love
+me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.
+
+March is a month when the needle of my nature dips towards the
+country.  I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of winter
+sleep, stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet
+after goblet of young sunshine.  I must find the dark green snowdrop,
+and sometimes help to remove from her head, as she lifts it slowly
+from her couch, the frosted nightcap, which the old Nurse would still
+insist that she should wear.  The pale green tips of daffodils are
+a thing of beauty.  There is the sun-struck brook of the field,
+underneath the thin ice of which drops form and fall, form and
+fall, like big round silvery eyes that grow bigger and brighter
+with astonishment that you should laugh at them as they vanish.  But
+most I love to see Nature do her spring house-cleaning in Kentucky,
+with the rain-clouds for her water-buckets and the winds for her
+brooms.  What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a
+day!  How she dashes pailful and pailful into every corner, till
+the whole earth is as clean as a new floor!  Another day she attacks
+the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October,
+and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and
+aired.  Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go
+into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife
+would brush down cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten
+up like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you,
+joyfully, "Now, then, we are all right again!"  This done, she
+begins to hang up soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to
+spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such
+as no mortal looms could ever have woven.  And then, at last, she
+sends out invitations through the South, and even to some tropical
+lands, for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky.  The
+invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May,
+and by June her house is full of visitors.
+
+Not the eyes alone love Nature in March.  Every other sense hies
+abroad.  My tongue hunts for the last morsel of wet snow on the
+northern root of some aged oak.  As one goes early to a concert-hall
+with a passion even for the preliminary tuning of the musicians,
+so my ear sits alone in the vast amphitheatre of Nature and waits
+for the earliest warble of the blue-bird, which seems to start up
+somewhere behind the heavenly curtains.  And the scent of spring,
+is it not the first lyric of the nose--that despised poet of the
+senses?
+
+But this year I have hardly glanced at the small choice edition of
+Nature's spring verses.  This by reason of the on-coming Cobbs, at
+the mere mention of whom I feel as though I were plunged up to my
+eyes in a vat of the prosaic.  Some days ago workmen went into the
+house and all but scoured the very 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.
+
+Mrs. Cobb is charged, among other dreadful things, with having
+ordered of the town manufacturer a carriage that is to be as fine
+as President Taylor's, and with marching into church preceded by
+a servant, who bears her prayer-book on a velvet cushion.  What
+if she rode in Cinderella's coach, or had her prayer-book carried
+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 I the northwestern
+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 Cherokees, and afterwards, as president of his
+purchase, addressed the first legislative assembly ever held in the
+West, seated under a big elm-tree outside the wall of Boonsborough
+fort.  These people must be his heirs, or they would never have
+tried to purchase my few Sabine acres.  It is no surprise to discover
+that they are from the Green River country.  They must bathe often
+in that stream.  I suppose they wanted my front yard to sow it in
+penny-royal, the characteristic growth of those districts.  They
+surely distil it and use it as a perfume on their handkerchiefs.  It
+was perhaps from the founder of this family that Thomas Jefferson
+got authority for his statement that the Ohio is the most beautiful
+river in the world--unless, indeed, the President formed that notion
+of the Ohio upon lifting his eyes to it from the contemplation of
+Green River.  Henderson!  Green River region!  To this town and to
+the blue-grass country as Boeotia to Attica in the days of Pericles.
+Hereafter I shall call these people my Green River Boeotians.
+
+A few days later their agent again, a little frigid, very urgent--this
+time to buy me out on my own terms, _any_ terms.  But what was back
+of all this I inquired.  I did not know these people, had never done
+them a favor.  Why, then, such determination to have me removed?
+Why such bitterness, vindictiveness, ungovernable passion?
+
+That was the point, he replied.  This family had never wronged _me_.
+I had never even seen _them_.  Yet they had heard of nothing but
+my intense dislike of them and opposition to their becoming my
+neighbors.  They could not forego their plans, but they were quite
+willing to give me the chance of leaving their vicinity, on whatever
+I might regard the most advantageous terms.
+
+Oh, my mocking-bird, my mocking-bird!  When you have been sitting
+on _other_ front porches, have you, by the divine law of your being,
+been reproducing _your_ notes as though they were _mine_, and even
+pouring forth the little twitter that was meant for your private
+ear?
+
+As March goes out, two things more and more I hear--the cardinal
+has begun to mount to the bare tops of the locust-trees and scatter
+his notes downward, and over the way the workmen whistle and sing.
+The bird is too shy to sit in any tree on that side of the yard.
+But his eye and ear are studying them curiously.  Sometimes I even
+fancy that he sings to them with a plaintive sort of joy, as though
+he were saying, "Welcome--go away!"
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The Cobbs will be the death of me before they get here.  The report
+spread that they and I had already had a tremendous quarrel, and
+that, rather than live beside them, I had sold them my place.  This
+set flowing towards me for days a stream of people, like a line of
+ants passing to and from the scene of a terrific false alarm.  I
+had nothing to do but sit perfectly still and let each ant, as it
+ran up, touch me with its antennae, get the counter-sign, and turn
+back to the village ant-hill.  Not all, however.  Some remained
+to hear me abuse the Cobbs; or, counting on my support, fell to
+abusing the Cobbs themselves.  When I made not a word of reply,
+except to assure them that I really had not quarrelled with the
+Cobbs, had nothing against the Cobbs, and was immensely delighted
+that the Cobbs were coming, they went away amazingly cool and
+indignant.  And for days I continued to hear such things attributed
+to me that, had that young West-Pointer been in the neighborhood,
+and known how to shoot, he must infallibly have blown my head off
+me, as any Kentucky gentleman would.  Others of my visitors, having
+heard that I was not to sell my place, were so glad of it that they
+walked around my garden and inquired for my health and the prospect
+for fruit.  For the season has come when the highest animal
+begins to pay me some attention.  During the winter, having little
+to contribute to the community, I drop from communal notice.  But
+there are certain ladies who bow sweetly to me when my roses and
+honeysuckles burst into bloom; a fat old cavalier of the South
+begins to shake hands with me when my asparagus bed begins to send
+up its tender stalks; I am in high favor with two or three young
+ladies at the season of lilies and sweet-pea; there is one old soul
+who especially loves rhubarb pies, which she makes to look like
+little latticed porches in front of little green skies, and it is
+she who remembers me and my row of pie-plant; and still another,
+who knows better than cat-birds when currants are ripe.  Above all,
+there is a preacher, who thinks my sins are as scarlet so long as
+my strawberries are, and plants himself in my bed at that time to
+reason with me of judgment to come; and a doctor, who gets despondent
+about my constitution in pear-time--after which my health seems to
+return, but never my pears.
+
+So that, on the whole, from May till October I am the bright side
+of the moon, and the telescopes of the town are busy observing
+my phenomena; after which it is as though I had rolled over on my
+dark side, there to lie forgotten till once more the sun entered
+the proper side of the zodiac.  But let me except always the few
+steadily luminous spirits I know, with whom is no variableness,
+neither shadow of turning.  If any one wishes to become famous in
+a community, let him buy a small farm on the edge of it and cultivate
+fruits, berries, and flowers, which he freely gives away or lets
+be freely taken.
+
+All this has taken freely of my swift April days.  Besides, I have
+made me a new side-porch, made it myself, for I like to hammer and
+drive things home, and because the rose on the old one had rotted
+it from post to shingle.  And then, when I had tacked the rose in
+place again, the little old window opening above it made that side
+of my house look like a boy in his Saturday hat and Sunday breeches.
+So in went a large new window; and now these changes have mysteriously
+offended Mrs. Walter, who says the town is laughing at me for
+trying to outdo the Cobbs.  The highest animal is the only one who
+is divinely gifted with such noble discernment.  But I am not sorry
+to have my place look its best.  When they see it, they will perhaps
+understand why I was not to be driven out by a golden cracker on
+their family whip.  They could not have bought my little woodland
+pasture, where for a generation has been picnic and muster and
+Fourth-of-July ground, and where the brave fellows met to volunteer
+for the Mexican war.  They could not have bought even the heap of
+brush back of my wood-pile, where the brown thrashers build.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+In May I am of the earth earthy.  The soul loses its wild white
+pinions; the heart puts forth its short, powerful wings, heavy with
+heat and color, that flutter, but do not lift it off the ground.
+The month comes and goes, and not once do I think of lifting my
+eyes to the stars.  The very sunbeams fall on the body as a warm
+golden net, and keep thought and feeling from escape.  Nature uses
+beauty now not to uplift, but to entice.  I find her intent upon
+the one general business of seeing that no type of her creatures
+gets left out of the generations.  Studied in my yard full of birds,
+as with a condensing-glass of the world, she can be seen enacting
+among them the dramas of history.  Yesterday, in the secret recess
+of a walnut, I saw the beginning of the Trojan war.  Last week
+I witnessed the battle of Actium fought out in mid-air.  And down
+among my hedges--indeed, openly in my very barn-yard--there is a
+perfectly scandalous Salt Lake City.
+
+And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me.  Not a little
+fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on
+a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his
+coattails and crying out at me, "Hello! Adam, what were you made
+for?"  "You attend to your business, and I'll attend to mine," I
+answer.  "You have one May; I have twenty-five!"  He didn't wait
+to hear.  He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping
+at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open
+arms and the sound of a kiss.
+
+But if I have twenty-five Mays remaining, are not some Mays gone?
+Ah, well!  Better a single May with the right mate than the full
+number with the wrong.  And where is she--the 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 instance, 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 neighbors 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 pennyroyal
+and dearest Green River.  They are quiet; have borrowed nothing
+from any one in the neighborhood; have well-dressed, well-trained
+servants; and one begins to be a little impressed.  The curtains
+they have put up at the windows suggest that the whole nest is being
+lined with soft, cool spotless loveliness, that is very restful
+and beguiling.
+
+No one has called yet, since they are no at home till June; but
+Mrs. Walters has done some tall wading lately, and declares that
+people do 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 the 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 window 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.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+This morning, the 3d of June, the Undine from Green River rose
+above the waves.
+
+The strawberry bed is almost under their windows.  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 strawberries.
+
+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 nothing 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 strawberries?"
+
+"The gentleman who owns this place does not sell his strawberries.
+He gives them away, 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."
+
+"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.
+
+"But 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 like 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 like?"
+
+"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 particularly of birds."
+
+"What does _he_ know about birds?  Doesn't he care for people?"
+
+"He doesn't think many worth caring for."
+
+"Indeed!  And _he_ is perfect, then, is he?"
+
+"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 blues dreadfully.  What does
+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.  Thirty!  And does he
+live in that beautiful little old house all by himself?"
+
+"_I_ live with him!"
+
+"_You_!  Ha! ha! ha!  And what is _your_ name, you dear good old
+man?"
+
+"Adam."
+
+"_Two_ Adams living in the same house!  Are you the _old_ Adam?  I
+have heard so much of him."
+
+At this I rose, pushed back my hat, and looked up at her.
+
+"_I_ am Adam Moss," I said, with distant politeness.  "You can have
+these strawberries for your breakfast if you want them."
+
+There was a low quick "Oh!" and she was gone, and the curtains
+closed over her face.  It was rude; but neither ought she to have
+called me the old Adam.  I have been thinking of one thing:  why
+should she speak slightingly of _my_ knowledge of birds?  What does
+_she_ know about them?  I should like to inquire.
+
+Late this afternoon I dressed up in my high gray wool hat, my fine
+long-tailed blue cloth coat with brass buttons, by pink waistcoat,
+frilled shirt, white cravat, and yellow nankeen trousers, and
+walked slowly several times around my strawberry bed.  Did no see
+any more ripe strawberries.
+
+
+Within the last ten days I have called twice upon the Cobbs, urged
+no doubt by an extravagant 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 fact invest her character with a 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 confiding 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 mother and Sylvia accepted.  Our walk
+was a little overshadowed by their loss; and as I thoughtlessly
+described the gayety of that scene--the splendid young fellows
+dancing 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
+and embracing, and at last the marching proudly away, each with a
+Bible in his pocket, and many never, never to return--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 gay spirits.  The elder
+daughter came to meet us, and went at once silently to her mother's
+side, as though she had felt the separation.  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 arbor;
+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 refined 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.
+
+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.
+I think they would gladly have pulled up some of the plants to see
+whether there might not be berries growing on the roots.
+
+
+It is unwise to do everything that you can for people at once; for
+when you can do nothing 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 neighborly, and do not think that they
+could reasonably be spoiled on one dish of strawberries in three
+weeks.  But 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 provocation, I thought they could be trusted
+with a basket of cherries.
+
+So next morning, in order to save the ripening 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 winter'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 shouting, "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 which he used to feed them during the
+winter, than the news spread like 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
+life-like, as nearly as a stuffing of hay would meet the inner
+requirements of the case.  I them 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
+passenger-pigeon.  That tree was rather avoided for some days, or
+it may have been let alone merely because others were ripening; so
+that Mrs. Cobb got her cherries, and I sent Mrs. Walter 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 my arbor into a reading-room, and is often to be found
+there of mornings with one of Sir Walter's novels.  Sometimes I
+leave her alone, sometimes lie on the bench facing her, while she
+reads aloud, or, tiring, prattles.  Little half-fledged 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 that
+she knows the world.  The other day, as we were talking, she tapped
+the edge of her _Ivanhoe_ with a slate-pencil--for she is also
+studying the Greatest Common Divisor--and said, warningly, "You
+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?"
+
+"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.  How unconventional I am to come
+over and sit in your arbor!  But it is Georgiana's fault."
+
+"Did _she_ tell you to come?"
+
+"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 to
+church in carpet slippers and with grandmother'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 tobacco, and where I could be sent to school.  That took
+her a year, and now she is breaking 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-axe, 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 I can't stop.'  'My toes were there first,' said Georgiana,
+and went on eating her biscuit.  'Take them out of the way, I tell
+you,' he shouted as he came nearer, 'or they'll get cut off.'  'They
+were there first,' repeated Georgiana, and took another delicious
+nibble.  Joe cut straight along, and went whack right into her five
+toes.  Georgiana 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. 'Georgiana, 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 arbor, and shortly afterwards I
+followed with a book.
+
+"When you stop reading novels and begin to read history, Miss
+Sylvia, here is the most remarkable 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 country."
+
+"I know all about it," replied Sylvia, resenting this slight
+upon her erudition.  "Georgiana has my father's copy, and his was
+presented to 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; the _great_, the very
+_great_ Audubon."
+
+"Well, this was the _great_, the very _great_ 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 drawings 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 _great_, the very
+_great_ Audubon."
+
+"Would Miss Cobb let me see these drawings?" I asked, eagerly.
+
+"She might; but she prizes them as much as if they were stray leaves
+out of the only Bible in the world."
+
+As Sylvia turned inside out this pocket of her mind, there had
+dropped out a key to her sister's conduct.  Now I understood her
+slighting attitude towards my knowledge of birds.  But I shall
+feel some interest in Miss Cobb from this time on.  I never dreamed
+that she 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 Henderson 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 Georgiana.  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 perhaps.
+If then you keep still and look perfectly safe, she will return,
+but remain at a fixed distance, 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 wild nature in her that refuses
+to be domesticated.  One's faith is strained to accept Sylvia's
+estimate that Georgiana is deep--she is so light, so airy, so
+playful.  Sylvia is a demure little dove that has pulled over itself
+an owl's skin, and is much prouder of its wicked old feathers than
+of its innocent heart; but Georgiana--what is she?  Secretly an
+owl with the buoyancy of a humming-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 birds, 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?"
+
+"Too much arbor, too many flowers, too much fine treatment."
+
+"Does fine treatment ever harm anybody?  Is it not bad treatment
+that spoils people?"
+
+"Good treatment may 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?  Children 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."
+
+"Is she being educated for a teacher?"
+
+"You know that Southern ladies never teach."
+
+"Then she will never need the Greatest Common Divisor.  I have
+known many thousands of human beings, and none but teachers ever
+have 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 arbor does not further interfere with
+Miss Sylvia's progress towards perfection."
+
+"Why didn't you wish us to be your neighbors?"
+
+"I didn't know 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 you 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 neighbor?"
+
+"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
+themselves compared with the rest of the world?"
+
+"Perhaps it's because they are Virginians.  There may be various
+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 very closely,
+do you suppose we would get to feel the same way?"
+
+"I am sure of it."
+
+"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_ approve 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, immeasurable 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 renewed desire to see those
+Audubon drawings.  So yesterday morning I sent over to her some
+things written by a Northern man, whom I call 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, standing 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
+eagerness.
+
+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
+impressive 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 spirit in its wanderings through
+the Kentucky forests, I almost forgot her to whom I was listening.
+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 Georgiana
+doesn't think me worth talking to seriously.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+July 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 bunting.  The girls were to be dressed
+in white, carry flowers and flags, and sing "The Star-spangled
+Banner" in the procession, just before the fire-engine.  I wrote a
+note to Georgiana, asking whether it would interfere with Sylvia's
+Greatest Common Divisor if I presented her with a profusion of
+elegant flowers on that occasion.  Georgiana herself had equipped
+Sylvia 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 mediaeval
+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 a 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 around town, and a pussillanimous
+crack or two over the back-garden fence at my birds, they went away
+again, to the home of this New York cousin, carrying Georgiana 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 armor
+consists of a slate-pencil for a spear, a slate for a shield, and
+a volume of Sir Walter for a battle-axe.  Now and then I have found
+her sitting alone in the arbor 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 Ravenswood.
+
+The other day I caught her toiling at something, 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 opening lines, after
+that bland habit of young writer; and as nearly as I recollect,
+they began as follows:
+
+"I love to have gardens, I love to have plants,    I love to have
+air, and I love to have ants."
+
+When not under the spell of mediaeval chivalry she prattles needlessly
+of Georgiana, early life, and their old home in Henderson.  Although
+I have pointed out to her the gross impropriety of her conduct, she
+has persisted in reading me some of Georgiana's letters, written
+from the home of that New York cousin, whose mother they are now
+visiting.  I didn't like _him_ particularly.  Sylvia relates that
+he was a favorite of her father's.
+
+The dull month passes to-day.  One thing I have secretly wished to
+learn; did her brother cut Georgiana's toes entirely off?
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+In August the pale and delicate poetry of the Kentucky land makes
+itself felt as silence and repose.  Still skies, still woods, still
+sheets of forest water, still flocks and herds, long lanes winding
+without the sound of a traveller through fields of the universal
+brooding stillness.  The sun no longer blazing, but muffled in a
+veil of palest blue.  No more black clouds rumbling and rushing up
+from the horizon, but a single white one brushing slowly against
+the zenith like the lost wing of a swan.  Far beneath it the
+silver-breasted hawk, using the cloud as his lordly parasol.  The
+eagerness of spring gone, now all but incredible as having ever
+existed; the birds hushed and hiding; the bee, so nimble once,
+fallen asleep over his own cider-press in the shadow of the golden
+apple.  From the depths of the woods may come the notes of the
+cuckoo; but they strike the air more and more slowly, like the
+clack, clack of a distant wheel that is being stopped at the close
+of harvest.  The whirring wings of the locust let themselves go
+in one long wave of sound, passing into silence.  All nature is a
+vast sacred goblet, filling drop by drop to the brim, and not to
+be shaken.  But the stalks of the later flowers begin to be stuffed
+with hurrying bloom lest they be too late; and the nighthawk rapidly
+mounts his stairway of flight higher and higher, higher and higher,
+as though he would rise above the warm white sea of atmosphere and
+breathe in cold ether.
+
+Always in August my nature will go its own way and seek its own
+peace.  I roam solitary, but never alone, over this rich pastoral
+land, crossing farm after farm, and keeping as best I can out of
+sight of the laboring or loitering negroes.  For the sight of them
+ruins every landscape, and I shall never feel myself free till
+they are gone.  What if they sing?  The more is the pity that any
+human being could be happy enough to sing so long as he was a slave
+in any thought or fibre of his nature.
+
+Sometimes it is through the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where
+float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the
+crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit
+from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds.  They are all mine--these
+Kentucky wheat-fields.  After the owner has taken from them his
+last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also--one that he did
+not see, and doubtless would not begrudge me--the harvest of beauty.
+Or I walk beside tufted aromatic hemp-fields, as along the shores
+of softly foaming emerald seas; or past the rank and file of fields
+of Indian-corn, which stand like armies  that had gotten ready
+to march, but been kept waiting for further orders, until at last
+the soldiers had gotten tired, as the gayest will, of their yellow
+plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down
+at their sides.  There the white and the purple morning-glories
+hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their
+elfin trumpets.
+
+This year as never before I have felt the beauty of the world.
+And with the new brightness in which every common scene has been
+apparelled there has stirred within me a need of human companionship
+unknown in the past.  It is as if Nature had spread out her last
+loveliness and said:  "See!  You have before you now all that you
+can ever get from me!  It is not enough.  Realize this in time.  I
+am your Mother.  Love me as a child.  But remember! such love can
+be only a little part of your life."
+
+Therefore I have spent the month restless, on the eve of change,
+drawn to Nature, driven from her.  In September it will be different,
+for then there are more things to do on my small farm, and I see
+people on account of my grapes and pears.  My malady this August
+has been an idle mind--so idle that a letter from Georgiana seems
+its main event.  This was written from the old home of Audubon on
+the Hudson, whither they had gone sight-seeing.  It must have been
+to her much like a pilgrimage to a shrine.  She wrote informally,
+telling me about the place and enclosing a sprig of cedar from one
+of the trees in the yard.  Her mind was evidently overflowing on
+the subject.  It was rather pleasant to have the overflow turned
+my way.  I shall plant the cedar where it will say always green.
+
+I saw Georgiana once more before he leaving.  The sudden appearance
+of her brother and cousin, and the new that she would return with
+them for the summer, spurred me up to make another attempt at those
+Audubon drawings.
+
+How easy it was to get them!  It is what a man thinks a woman will
+be willing to do that she seldom does.  But she made a confession.
+When she first found that I was a smallish student of birds, she
+feared I would not like Audubon, since men so often sneer at those
+who do in a grand way what they can do only in a poor one.  I had
+another revelation of Georgiana's more serious nature, which is
+always aroused by the memory of her father.  There is something
+beautiful and steadfast in this girl's soul.  In our hemisphere vines
+climb round from left to right; if Georgiana loved you she would,
+if bidden, reverse every law of her nature for you as completely
+as a vine that you had caused to twine from right to left.
+
+Sylvia enters school the 1st of September, and Georgiana is to be
+at home then to see to that.  How surely she drives this family
+before her--and with as gentle a touch as that of a slow south wind
+upon the clouds.
+
+Those poor fist drawings of Audubon!  He succeeded; we study his
+early failures.  The world never studies the failures of those who
+do not succeed in the end.
+
+The birds are moulting.  If man could only moult also--his mind
+once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions!
+How fine we should all look if every August the old plumage of our
+natures would drop out and be blown away, and fresh quills take the
+vacant places!  But we have one set of feathers to last us through
+our threescore years and ten--one set of spotless feathers, which
+we are told to keep spotless through all our lives in a dirty world.
+If one gets broken it stays; if one gets blackened, nothing will
+cleanse it.  No doubt we shall all fly home at last, like a flock
+of pigeons that were once turned loose snow-white from the sky, and
+made to descend and fight one another and fight everything else for
+a poor living amid soot and mire.  If then the hand of the unseen
+Fancier is stretched forth to draw us in, how can he possibly
+smite any one of us, or cast us away, because we came back to him
+black and blue with bruises and besmudged and bedraggled past all
+recognition?
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+To-day, the 7th of September, I made a discovery.  The pair of
+red-birds that built in my cedar-trees last winter got duly away
+with the brood.  Several times during summer rambles I cast my eye
+about, but they were not to be seen.  Early this afternoon I struck
+out across the country towards a sinkhole in a field two miles away,
+some fifty yards in diameter, very deep, and enclosed by a fence.
+A series of these circular basins, at regular distances apart, runs
+across the country over there, suggesting the remains of ancient
+earth-works.  The bottom had dropped out of this one, probably
+communicating with the many caves that are characteristic of this
+blue limestone.
+
+Within the fence everything is an impenetrable thicket of weeds and
+vines--blackberry, thistle, ironweed, pokeweed, elder, golden-rod.
+As I drew near, I saw two or three birds dive down, with the shy way
+they have at this season; and when I came to the edge, everything
+was quiet.  But I threw a stone at a point where the tangle was deep,
+and there was a great fluttering and scattering of the pretenders.
+And then occurred more than I had looked for.  The stone had
+hardly struck the brush when what looked like a tongue of vermilion
+flame leaped forth near by, and, darting across, stuck itself out
+of sight in the green vines on the opposite slope.  A male and
+a female cardinal flew up also, balancing themselves on sprays of
+the blackberry, and uttering excitedly their quick call-notes.  I
+whistled to the male as I had been used, and he recognized me
+by shooting up his crest and hopping to nearer twigs with louder
+inquiry.  All at once, as if an idea had struck him, he sprang
+across to the spot where the first frightened male had disappeared.
+I could still hear him under the vines, and presently he reappeared
+and flew up into a locust-tree on the farther edge of the basin,
+followed by the other.  What had taken place or took place then I
+do not know; but I wished he might be saying:  "My son, that man
+over there is the one who was very good to your mother and me last
+winter, and who owns the tree you were born in.  I have warned
+you, of course, never to trust Man; but I would advise you, when
+you have found your sweetheart, to give he a trial, and take her
+to his cedar-trees."
+
+If he said anything like this, it certainly had a terrible effect
+of the son; for, having mounted rapidly to the tree-top, he clove
+the blue with his scarlet wings as though he were flying from death.
+I lost sight of him over a corn-field.  One fact pleased me:  the
+father retuned to his partner under the briers, for he is not of
+the lower sort who forget the mother when the children are reared.
+They hold faithfully together during the ever more silent, ever more
+shadowy autumn days; his warming breast is close to hers through
+frozen winter nights; and if they both live to see another May she
+is still all the world to him, and woe to any brilliant vagabond
+who should warble a wanton love-song under her holy windows.
+
+Georgiana returned the last of August.  The nest morning she was
+at her window, looking across into my yard.  I was obliged to pass
+that way, and welcomed her gayly, expressing my thanks for the
+letter.
+
+"I had to come back, you see," she said, with calm simplicity.  I
+lingered awkwardly, stripping upward the stalks of some weeds.
+
+"Very few Kentucky birds are migratory," I replied at length, with
+desperate brilliancy and an overwhelming grimace.
+
+"I shall go back some time--to say," she said, and turned away with
+a parting faintest smile.
+
+I that West Point brother giving trouble?  If so, the sooner a war
+breaks out and he gets killed, the better.  One thing is certain:
+if, for the next month, fruit and flowers will give Georgiana any
+pleasure, she shall have a good deal of pleasure.  She is so changed!
+But why need I take on about it?
+
+They have been cleaning out a drain under the streets along the
+Town Fork of Elkhorn, and several people are down with fever.
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+New-Year's night again, and bitter cold.
+
+When I forced myself away from my fire before dark, and ran down to
+the stable to see about feeding and bedding the horses and cows,
+every beast had its head drawn in towards its shoulders, and
+looked at me with the dismal air of saying, "Who is tempering the
+wind now?"  The dogs in the kennel, with their noses between their
+hind-legs, were shivering under their blankets and straw like
+a nest of chilled young birds.  The fowls on the roost were mere
+white and blue puffs of feathers.  Nature alone has the making of
+her creatures; why doesn't she make them comfortable?
+
+After supper old Jack and Dilsy came in, and standing against the
+wall with their arms folded, told me more of what happened after I
+got sick.  That was about the middle of September, and it is only
+two weeks since I became well enough to go in and out through all
+sorts of weather.
+
+It was the middle of September then, my servants said, and as within
+a week after taking the fever I was very ill, a great many people
+came out to inquire for me.  Some of these, walking around the
+garden, declared it was a pity for such fruit and flowers to be
+wasted, and so helped themselves freely every time.  The old doctor,
+who always fears for my health at this season, stopped by nearly
+every day to repeat how he had warned me, and always walked back to
+his gig in a round-about way, which required him to pass a favorite
+tree; and once he was so indignant to find several other persons
+gathered there, and mournfully enjoying the last of the fruit as
+they predicted I would never get well, that he came back to the
+house--with two pears in each duster pocket and one in his mouth--and
+told Jack it was an outrage.  The preacher, likewise, who appears
+in the spring-time, one afternoon knocked reproachfully at the
+front door and inquired whether I was in a condition to be reasoned
+with.  In his hand he carried a nice little work-basket, which may
+have been brought along to catch his prayers; but he took it home
+piled with grapes.
+
+And then they told me, also, how many a good and kind soul came
+with hushed footsteps and low inquires, turning away sometimes
+with brightened faces, sometimes with rising tears--often people
+to whom I had done no kindness or did not even know; how others,
+whom I had quarrelled with or did not like, forgot the poor puny
+quarrels and the dislike, and begged to do for me whatever they
+could; how friends went softly around the garden, caring for a
+flower, putting a prop under a too heavily-laden limb, or climbing
+on step-ladders to tie sacks around the finest bunches of grapes,
+with the hope that I might be well in time to eat them--touching
+nothing themselves, having no heart to eat; how dear, dear ones
+would never leave me day or night; how a good doctor wore himself
+out with watching, and a good pastor sent up for me his spotless
+prayers; and at last, when I began to mend, how from far and near
+there poured in flowers and jellies and wines, until, had I been
+the multitude by the Sea of Galilee, there must have been baskets
+to spare.  God bless them!  God bless them all!  And God forgive
+us all the blindness, the weakness, and the cruelty with which we
+judge each other when we are in health.
+
+This and more my beloved old negroes told me a few hours ago, as
+I sat in deep comfort and bright health again before my blazing
+hickories; and one moment we were in laughter and the next in
+tears--as is the strange life we live.  This is a gay household now,
+and Dilsy cannot face me without a fleshly earthquake of laughter
+that I have become such a high-tempered tiger about punctual meals.
+
+In particular, my two nearest neighbors were much at odds as to
+which had better claim to nurse me; so that one day Mrs. Walters,
+able to endure it no longer, thrust Mrs. Cobb out of the house by
+the shoulder-blades, locked the door on her, and them opened the
+shutters and scolded her out of the window.
+
+One thing I miss.  My servants have never called the name of
+Georgiana.  The omission is unnatural, and must be intentional.
+Of course I have not asked whether she showed any care; but that
+little spot of silence affects me as the sight of a tree remaining
+leafless in the woods where everything else is turning green.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+To-day I was standing at a window, looking out at the aged row of
+cedars, now laden with snow, and thinking of Horace and Soracte.
+Suddenly, beneath a jutting pinnacle of white boughs which left
+under themselves one little spot of green, I saw 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 winter's pensioner.  At least he has never lived in my
+yard before; 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 while 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 pepper 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-trees might be
+full of a race of red-birds as large and as fat as geese.
+
+Standing towards sundown at another window, I saw Georgiana 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 sewing 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 by only a quiet kindly smile.  Why
+has no one ever called her name?  I believe Mrs. Walters knows.
+She comes nowadays as if to tell 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. Walter's mind than cork at the bottom of
+water; some day I shall see this mystery riding on the surface.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Yes, she knew; while unconscious I talked of Georgiana, of being
+in love with her.  Mrs.  Walters added, sadly, that Georgiana
+came home in the fall engaged to that New York cousin.  Hence the
+sewing--he is 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!" 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, suggesting 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 hollow 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 Nature seems to have stored him
+with extra caution towards archenemy.
+
+But in the old human way I have taken advantage of his necessities.
+The north wind has been by friend against him.  I have called
+in the aid of sleets and snows, have besieged him in his white
+castle behind the glittering 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,
+a little nearer, without moving form a limb; and now, after a month
+of persuasion, 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 mankind
+in general.  With me you are safe.  I pledge myself to defend you
+from enemies, high and low."
+
+This had not escaped the notice of Georgiana at the window, and more
+than once she had let her work drop to watch my patient progress
+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 _his_ 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 darkness 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 heed.
+Then I have sat before my flickering embers, with I know not what
+all but ungovernable yearning to be over there in 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?"
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+The fountains of the great deep opened.  A new heaven, a new earth.
+Georgiana has broken her engagement with her cousin.  Mrs. Cobb let
+it 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 behavior 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 her to implore.  I met him at the gate
+as he left the house--a fine, straight, manly, handsome young
+fellow, with his face pale with pain, and his eyes flashing with
+anger--and bade him a long, affectionate, inward God-speed as he
+hurried 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 Mrs.
+Walters the other night, eying me with curious impressiveness.
+
+"They ought to 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 loves to call himself the image of his Maker, and more than
+once has given annoyance, especially 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 cardinal roosts.  I was up before daybreak this morning.
+Awhile after the waking of the birds here comes my young bird-thief,
+creeping rapidly 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 negative 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 beating his heart out against maddening bars, or
+caged for life in some dark city street, lonely, sick, and silent,
+bidden 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!
+
+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 confidence, 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 movement how glad he was to see me.  We really
+have reached the understanding 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
+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 Asp's
+Fables, or were being translated into English as that old school-room
+horror of Androclus and the Lion.  In the bottom 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 send 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.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+In April I commence to scratch and dig in my garden.
+
+To-day, as I was raking off my strawberry bed, Georgiana, 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
+_you_ going to plant this year?"
+
+"Are you going to have many strawberries?"
+
+"It's too soon to tell:  they haven't bloomed 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 had 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 don't belong to the rose-order of Southern
+women myself.  Sylvia does.  Why did you send me 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 fancy 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?
+
+
+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 rushing 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 making
+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.
+
+
+April the 26th.  It's of no use.  To-morrow night I will go to see
+Georgiana, 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 Georgiana thinks I'll ask her again.  Not if I lived by
+her through eternity!  Thy rod and Thy staff--_they_ comfort me.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+A Poor devil will ask a woman to marry him.  She will refuse him.
+The day after she will meet him as serenely as if he had asked her
+for a pin.
+
+It is now May 15th, and I have not spoken to Georgians when I've
+had a chance.  She has been entirely too happy, to judge from her
+singing, for me to get along with under the circumstances.  But
+this morning, as I was planting a hedge inside my fence under her
+window, she leaned over and said, as though nothing were wrong
+between us, "What are you planting?"
+
+I have sometimes thought that Georgiana can ask more questions than
+Socrates.
+
+"A hedge."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To grow."
+
+"What do you want it to grow for?"
+
+"My garden is too public.  I wish to be protected 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
+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."
+
+Afterwards the thought rushed over me that she had not spoken of
+any gateway 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 floating to me from
+heaven.
+
+
+May 17th.  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 looking down at the gate
+that I made yesterday.  She 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 _for_?"
+
+"Oh, well!  You don't understand these matters. I'll tell your
+mother."
+
+"My mother is too old.  She no longer stoops to such things.  Tell
+_me_!
+
+"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 wondering 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 shutters.
+
+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 impaneled
+in the jury-box, and the principal, who wears a little wig, taking
+her seat on the woolsack.  I promised to have the very pick of the
+garden ready, and told Sylvia to come to the arbor the last thing
+before starting.  She wore big blue rosettes in her hair, and at
+that twilight hour looked as lovely, soft, and pure as moonshine;
+so that I lost control of myself and kissed her twice--once for
+Georgiana and once for myself.  Surely it must have been Sylvia's
+first experience.  I hope so.  Yet she passed through it with the
+composure of a graduate of several year's standing.  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 influence of vulgar fractions?
+
+It made me feel uncomfortable to see her go tripping out of her
+front gate on the arm of a youth.  Can it be possible the _he_ would
+try to do what _I_ did?  Men differ so in their virtues, and are
+so alike in their transgressions.  This forward gosling displayed
+white duck pantaloons, brandished pumps on his feet, which looked
+flat enough to have been webbed, and was scented as to his marital
+locks with a far-reaching pestilence of bergamot and cinnamon.
+
+After they were gone I strolled back to my arbor and sat down amid
+the ruins of Sylvia's flowers.  The nigh 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 arbor, 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 _that_, exactly!"
+
+"Good-night!"
+
+
+May 21st.  Again I asked Georgiana to be mine.  I am a perfect fool
+about her.  But she's coming my way at last--God bless her!
+
+
+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!
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+This morning, the 3d of June, I went out to pick the first dish
+of strawberries for my breakfast.  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 would only let me alone!
+
+"Old man, are you the gardener?"
+
+"Yes, I'm the gardener.  I _know_ what _you_ are."
+
+"How much do you ask for your strawberries?"
+
+"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 _give_ myself away soon.  If I only knew of some one
+who loved the lower animals."
+
+"The fox, for instance?"
+
+"Yes; do you know of any one who would accept the present of a
+fox?"
+
+"Ahem!  I wouldn't mind having a _tame_ fox.  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 himself at West Point.  That's what I wanted
+to tell you.  I'll send you 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 color 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 color of my
+emery needle-bag.  I have been polishing my needles in it for many
+years."
+
+Later, as I was walking to 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:  "Mrs. Cobb, when
+you send your servants over for green corn, you can let them come
+through that little gate.  It will be more convenient."
+
+Only, I was so angry and confused that I called her Mrs. Corn,
+and said that when she sent her little Cobbs over . . . my green
+servants, 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 managing 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
+whistled long and loud again and again.  The curtains 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 feeling.  It was the first time
+she had ever called me by name.  She bent her face down.  Over it
+there passed a look of sweetness and sadness indescribably blended.
+"Ah, Adam! you have asked me many times to _marry_ 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 red-bird was singing.  Suddenly she leaned
+down towards me.  Love was on her face now.  But her eyes held
+mine with the determination 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 color 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.
+
+
+Four days have passed.  Georgiana has cast me off.  Her curtains
+are 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 tie between us has been severed.  With her it could never
+have been affection.
+
+And for what?  I ask myself over and over and over--for what?  Was
+she jealous 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 me to grant?  Women do that.  Did she crave the pleasure
+of seeing me do wrong to humor her caprice?  Women do that.  But
+not one these things can I even associate with the thought of
+Georgiana.  I have 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 neither; forgive
+both; love her now with that added pain which comes from a man's
+discovering that the woman dearest to him must be pardoned--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 reminder of my loss.  Reminder?  Do I ever
+forget?  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 unforgetfulness?  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 weavers upon my memory like vague, uncertain shadows.
+She doubted my love for her.  What proof was it she demanded?  I
+must stop looking at the red-bird, lying here and there under the
+trees, and listening to him as he sings above me.  My eyes devour
+him whenever he crosses my path with an uncomprehended fascination
+that is pain.  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 brought 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 afternoon I went to town
+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 memory a life-long suspicion 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 of her candle, but there has been no kindly
+glimmer 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, imprisoned lightnings
+flutter feebly to escape, fall back, rise, and try again 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 expected to-night, or, at
+furthest, to-morrow morning.  I left the bird with the servant at
+the door, who could hardly believe what he saw.  As I passed out
+of my 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-bird?  _I_ tried to ketch him once," he said,
+with entire forgiveness of me, as having served him right, "but
+I caught something 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 ketch one of them little bits o' brown fellows, would
+you, that hops around under them pine-trees?  They ain't no account
+to nobody.  Oh my! but _wouldn't_ I like to have him!  May I bring
+_my_ trap some time, and will you help me to ketch one o' them
+little bits o' brown ones?  You can beat _me_ ketchin' 'em!"
+
+Several times to-night I have gone across and listened under
+Georgiana's window.  The servant 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.  Awhile ago I went again,
+and did not hear him.  I waited a long time. . . . _He  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.  My own mind supplied
+his words:  "Help!  I'm caught!  Take me out!  You promised!"  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.
+
+
+The dawn came on this morning with its old splendor.  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 shadowy shrubs and vines to the sparking
+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 arbor where I had so often
+discoursed to Sylvia about children's cruelty to birds.  Through
+the fluttering leaves the sunlight dripped as a weightless shower
+of gold, and the long pendants of young fruit swayed gently in
+their cool waxen greenness.  Where some rotting planks crossed the
+top of the arbor 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 forever.
+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 Georgiana.
+
+"What have you done?" she implored.
+
+"What have _you_ done? I answered as quickly.
+
+"Oh, Adam, _Adam_!  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, remorse, I turned upon 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.  Trifler!  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 me for him?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Oh, deny it all!  It is a falsehood--invented 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 reproach me here and to cry,
+'How could you?  How could you?'"
+
+"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 _shall_ 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 willingness to betray.  It was 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 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 creatures, 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 me, and throw
+a stone at _me_?  When a woman submits 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 sacrifice 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 breaking, and remained
+silent, as if unable to get beyond that thought.
+
+"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, to 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: knowing 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 best I could never to see.  Yet do not dream that I
+have found you faultless.
+
+"You fear I might sacrifice you to something else.  It is possible.
+Every man resists temptation only to a certain point; every man
+has his price.  It is a risk you will run with any.
+
+"If you doubt that a man is capable of sacrificing one thing that
+he loves to another that he loves more, tempt him, lie in wait for
+his weakness, 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 nothing."
+
+With this I walked slowly out of the arbor, but Georgiana stood
+beside me.  Her light touch was on my arm.
+
+"Let me see things clearly!"
+
+"You have a lifetime in which to see 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 of Tarsus among the birds, was
+on my way to the hedge-rows and woods, as to Damascus, breathing
+out threatenings 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
+persecutest thou me?"  One sang it with indignation; another with
+remonstrance; still another with resignation; others yet with
+ethereal sadness or wild elusive pain.  Once more the house-wren
+aloud, "_per-se-cu-test--per-se-cu-test--per-se-cu-test--per-se-cu-test_!"
+And as I peeped into the brush-pile, again the brown thrush, building
+within, said, "_thou--thou--thou_!"
+
+Through all the years since I had thought myself 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.
+
+Towards the middle of 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 neighbors, and adjoining my own,
+in which is my stable.  There has lately been imported into this
+part of Kentucky from England the much-prized breed of the beautiful
+white Berkshire.  As I crossed the lot, near the milk-trough,
+ash-heap, and paring of fruit and vegetables thrown from my neighbor's
+kitchen, I saw a litter of these pigs having their awkward sport
+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 shapelessness.  It was all there was left of him.
+
+I entered my long yard.  If I could have been spared the sight
+of that!  The sun was setting.  Around me was the last peace and
+beauty of the world.  Through a narrow avenue 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, and the helplessness
+of the night comes on, their voices seem to be lifted up like the
+loftiest poetry of the human spirit, with sympathy for realities
+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 passed 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 bareheaded, dressed in white; and she advanced over the smooth
+lawn, through evergreens and shrubs, with a gentle grace and dignity
+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.
+
+"Forgive me!"  All girlishness was gone out of her voice.  It was
+the woman at last.
+
+I turned my face farther from her, and we stood in silence.
+
+"I have suffered enough, Adam," she pleaded.
+
+I answered quietly, doggedly, for there was nothing left in me to
+appeal to:
+
+"I am glad we can part kindly. . . . Neither of us may care much
+for the kindness now, but we will not be sorry hereafter. . . .
+The quarrels, the mistakes, the right and the wrong of our lives,
+the misunderstandings--they are so strange, so pitiful, so full of
+pain, and come so soon to nothing."  And I lifted my hat, and took
+the path towards my house.
+
+There was a point ahead where it divided, the other branch leading
+towards the little private gate 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.  Mounting my door-steps,
+I turned.  She had paused on the threshold.  I waited.  At length
+she said, in a voice low and sorrowful:
+
+"And you are 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:
+
+"And--is--_that_--all?"
+
+I had no answer to make, and sternly waited for her to go.
+
+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:
+
+"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 children, so
+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! . . .
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11532 ***