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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13554 ***
+
+AFTERMATH
+
+Part Second of _A Kentucky Cardinal_
+
+by
+
+JAMES LAKE ALLEN
+
+Author of _The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky_, _Flute and Violin_, etc.
+
+1899
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+I was happily at work this morning among my butterbeans--a vegetable of
+solid merit and of a far greater suitableness to my palate than such
+bovine watery growths as the squash and the beet.  Georgiana came to
+her garden window and stood watching me.
+
+"You work those butterbeans as though you loved _them_," she said,
+scornfully.
+
+"I do love them.  I love all vines."
+
+"Are you cultivating them as vines or as vegetables?"
+
+"It makes no difference to nature."
+
+"Do you expect me to be a vine when we are married?"
+
+"I hope you'll not turn out a mere vegetable.  How should you like to
+be my Virginia-creeper?"
+
+"And what would you be?"
+
+"Well, what would you like?  A sort of honeysuckle frame?"
+
+"Oh, anything!  Only support me and give me plenty of room to bloom."
+
+I do not always reply to Georgiana, though I always could if I chose.
+Whenever I remain silent about anything she changes the subject.
+
+"Did you know that Sylvia once wrote a poem on a vegetable?"
+
+"I did not."
+
+"You don't speak as though you cared."
+
+"You must know how deeply interested I am."
+
+"Then why don't you ask to see the poem?"
+
+"Was it on butterbeans?"
+
+"The idea!  Sylvia has better taste."
+
+"I suppose I'd better look into this poem."
+
+"You are not to laugh at it!"
+
+"I shall weep."
+
+"No; you are not to weep.  Promise."
+
+"What am I to promise?"
+
+"That you will read it unmoved."
+
+"I do promise--solemnly, cheerfully."
+
+"Then come and get it."
+
+I went over and stood under the window.  Georgiana soon returned and
+dropped down to me a piece of writing-paper.
+
+"Sylvia wrote it before she began to think about the boys."
+
+"It must be a very early poem."
+
+"It is; and this is the only copy; please don't lose it."
+
+"Then I think you ought to take it back at once.  Let me beg of you not
+to risk it--"  But she was gone; and I turned to my arbor and sat down
+to read Sylvia's poem, which I found to be inscribed to "The Potato,"
+and to run as follows:
+
+
+  "What on this wide earth
+    That is made or does by nature grow
+  Is more homely yet more beautiful
+    Than the useful Potato?
+
+  "What would this world full of people do,
+    Rich and poor, high and low,
+  Were it not for this little-thought-of
+    But very necessary Potato?
+
+  "True, 'tis homely to look on,
+    Nothing pretty even in its blow,
+  But it will bear acquaintance,
+    This useful Potato.
+
+  "For when it is cooked and opened
+    It's so white and mellow,
+  You forget it ever was homely,
+    This useful Potato.
+
+  "On the whole it is a very plain plant,
+    Makes no conspicuous show,
+  But the internal appearance is lovely
+    Of the unostentatious Potato.
+
+  "On the land or on the sea,
+    Wherever we may go,
+  We are always glad to welcome
+    The sound Potato."[*]
+
+[*]The elder Miss Cobb was wrong in thinking this poem Sylvia's.  It
+was extant at the time over the signature of another writer, whose
+authorship is not known to have been questioned.  Miss Sylvia perhaps
+copied it out of admiration, or as a model for her own use.
+
+    J.L.A.
+
+
+In the afternoon I was cutting stakes at the wood-pile for my
+butterbeans, and a bright idea struck me.  During my engagement to
+Georgiana I cannot always be darting in and out of Mrs. Cobb's front
+door like a swallow through a barn.  Neither can I talk freely to
+Georgiana--with her up at the window and me down on the ground--when I
+wish to breathe into her ear the things that I must utter or die.
+Besides, the sewing-girl whom Georgiana has engaged is nearly always
+there.  So that as I was in the act of trimming a long slender stick,
+it occurred to me that I might make use of this to elevate any little
+notes that I might wish to write over the garden fence up to
+Georgiana's window.
+
+I was greatly taken with the thought, and, dropping my hand-axe,
+hurried into the house and wrote a note to her at once, which I
+thereupon tied to the end of the pole by a short string.  But as I
+started for the garden this arrangement looked too much like catching
+Georgiana with a bait.  Therefore, happening to remember, I stopped at
+my tool-house, where I keep a little of everything, and took from a peg
+a fine old specimen of a goldfinch's nest.  This I fastened to the end
+of the pole, and hiding my note in it, now felt better satisfied.  No
+one but Georgiana herself would ever be able to tell what it was that I
+might wish to lift up to her at any time; and in case of its being not
+a note, but a plum--a berry--a peach--it would be as safe as it was
+unseen.  This old house of a pair of goldfinches would thus become the
+home of our fledgling hopes: every day a new brood of vows would take
+flight across its rim into our bosoms.
+
+Watching my chance during the afternoon, when the sewing-girl was not
+there, I rushed over and pushed the stick up to the window.
+
+"Georgiana," I called out, "feel in the nest!"
+
+She hurried to the window with her sewing in her arms.  The nest swayed
+to and fro on a level with her nose.
+
+"What is it?" she cried, drawing back with extreme distaste.
+
+"You feel in it!" I repeated.
+
+"I don't wish to feel in it," she said.  "Take it away!"
+
+"There's a young dove in it," I persisted--"a young cooer."
+
+"I don't wish any young cooers," she said, with a grimace.
+
+Seeing that she was not of my mind, I added, pleadingly; "It's a note
+from me, Georgiana!  This is going to be our little private
+post-office!"  Georgiana sank back into her chair.  She reappeared with
+the flush of apple-blossoms and her lashes wet with tears of laughter.
+But I do not think that she looked at me unkindly.  "Our little private
+post-office," I persisted, confidingly.
+
+"How many more little private things are we going to have?" she
+inquired, plaintively.
+
+"I can't wait here forever," I said.  "This is growing weather; I might
+sprout."
+
+"A dry stick will not," said Georgiana, simply, and went back to her
+sewing.
+
+I took the hint, and propped the pole against the house under the
+window.  Later, when I took it down, my note was gone.
+
+I have set the pole under Georgiana's window several times within the
+last two or three days, It looks like a little dip-net, high and dry in
+the air; but so far as I can see with my unaided eye, it has caught
+nothing so large as a gnat.  It has attracted no end of attention from
+the birds of the neighborhood, however, who never saw a goldfinch's
+nest swung to the end of a leafless pole and placed where it could be
+so exactly reached by the human hand.  In particular it has fallen
+under the notice of a pair of wrens, which are like women, in that they
+usually have some secret business behind their curiosity.  The business
+in this case is the matter of their own nest, which they have located
+in a broken horse-collar in my saddle-house.  At such seasons they are
+alert for appropriating building materials that may have been fetched
+to hand by other birds; and they have already abstracted a piece of
+candle-wick from the bottom of my post-office.
+
+Georgiana has been chilly towards me for two days, and I think is doing
+her best not to freeze up altogether.  I have racked my brain to know
+why; but I fear that my brain is not of the sort to discover what is
+the matter with a woman when nothing really is the matter.  Moreover,
+as I am now engaged to Georgiana, I have thought it better that she
+should begin to bring her explanations to me--the steady sun that will
+melt all her uncertain icicles.
+
+At last this morning she remarked, but very carelessly, "You didn't
+answer my note."
+
+"What note, Georgiana?" I asked, thunderstruck.
+
+She gave me such a look.
+
+"Didn't you get the note I put into that--into that--"  Her face grew
+pink with vexation and disgust.
+
+"Did you put a note into the--into the--" I could not have spoken the
+word just then.
+
+I retired to my arbor, where I sat for half an hour with my head in my
+hands.  What could have become of Georgiana's note?  A hand might have
+filched it; unlikely.  A gust of wind have whisked it out; impossible.
+I debated and rejected every hypothesis to the last one.  Acting upon
+this, I walked straight to the saddle-house, and in a dark corner
+peered at the nest of the wrens.  A speck of white paper was visible
+among the sticks and shavings.  I tore the nest out and shook it to
+pieces.  How those wrens did rage!  The note was so torn and mudded
+that I could not read it.  But suppose a jay had carried it to the high
+crotch of some locust!  I ran joyfully back to the window.
+
+"I've found it, Georgiana!" I called out.
+
+She appeared, looking relieved, but not exactly forgiving.
+
+"Where!"
+
+My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth.
+
+"Where did you find it?" she repeated, imperiously.
+
+"What do you want to know for?" I said, savagely.
+
+"Let me see it!" she demanded.
+
+My clasp on it suddenly tightened.
+
+"Let me see it!" she repeated, with genuine fire.
+
+"What do you want to see it for?" I said.
+
+She turned away.
+
+"Here it is," I said, and held it up.
+
+She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched.
+
+"Did the pigs get it?"
+
+"The wrens.  It was merely a change of post-office."
+
+"I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the
+letters."
+
+Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when
+they were looking and I was not; but women--_all_ women--now and then
+hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves.  Sylvia, for
+instance.  She grew peevish with me the other day because my garden
+failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her
+whim.  And yet for days Sylvia has been helping herself with such lack
+of stint that the poor clipped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass
+sympathetically by them, and say, "If you don't keep her away, we'd as
+well be weeds!"
+
+The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the
+passage of the Greatest Common Divisor--far more dreadful than the
+passage of the Beresina--her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement,
+and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany
+appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her
+sentimental being up to the highest pitch.  Feeling herself to be
+naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires
+that she shall be continually played upon--if not by one person, then
+by another.  Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry
+straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies;
+and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at
+the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end.
+The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to
+supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the
+teeth of all known estimates of mortality.  How unlike Georgiana!
+
+I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when
+they are rarest.  Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a
+blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing
+high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its
+shining leaves.  But what beauty, purity, freshness!  You must hunt to
+find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it
+all--there is not a trace left for another.  But Sylvia!  I am afraid
+Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public
+pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape.
+
+I caught some one taking a grape the other evening--a sort of green
+grape.  Sylvia has been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her
+escort on the evening of her Commencement--him of the duck trousers and
+webbed feet.  On one occasion I have observed her walking along the
+borders of my garden in his company and have overheard her telling him
+that _he_ could come in and get flowers whenever he wished.  I wish I
+might catch him once.
+
+To cap the climax, after twilight on the evening in question, I
+strolled out to my arbor for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana.
+Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling! deep in the
+shadow of the vines.  He had his arm around her and was kissing her.
+
+"Upon my honor!" I said; and striding over to him I thrust my hand
+under his coattails, gripped him by the seat of his ducks, dragged him
+head downward to the front fence and dropped him out into the street.
+
+"Let me catch _you_ in here kissing anybody again!" I said.
+
+He had bit me viciously on one of my calves--which are sizable--as I
+had dragged him along; so that, I had been forced to stoop down and
+twist him loose by screwing the end of his spongy nose.  I met him on
+the street early the next morning, and it wore the hue of a wild plum
+in its ripeness.  I tapped it.
+
+"Only three persons know of your misbehavior last night," I said.  "If
+you ever breathe it to a soul that you soiled that child by your touch,
+the next time I get hold of you it will not be your nose: it will be
+your neck!"
+
+My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen that I should have
+forborne returning to the arbor had I not felt assured that she must
+have escaped to the house through modesty and sheer shame.  But she had
+not budged.
+
+"I blush for you, Sylvia!" I exclaimed.  "I know all about that fellow!
+He shouldn't kiss--my old cat!"
+
+"I don't see what _you_ have to do with it!" said Sylvia, placidly.
+"And I have waited to tell you that I hope you will never interrupt me
+again when I am engaged in entertaining a young gentleman."
+
+"Sylvia, my dear child!" I said, gravely, sitting down beside her.
+"How old are you?"
+
+"I am of the proper age to manage my own affairs," said Sylvia, "with
+the assistance of my immediate family."
+
+"Well, I don't think you are," I replied.  "And since your brother is
+at West Point, there is one thing that I am going to take the liberty
+of telling you, which the other members of your family may not fully
+understand.  If you were younger, Sylvia, you might do a good deal of
+this and not be hurt by it; or you might not be hurt by it if you were
+a good deal older; but at your age it is terrible; in time it will
+affect your character."
+
+"How old must I be?" said Sylvia, wickedly.
+
+"Well, in your case," I replied, warmly, a little nettled by her tone,
+"you'd better abstain altogether."
+
+"And in your case?" said Sylvia.
+
+"You never mind my case!" I retorted.
+
+"But I do mind it when I suffer by it," said Sylvia.  "I do mind it if
+it's going to affect my character!"
+
+"You know very well, Sylvia," I replied, "that I never kissed you but
+three times, and then as a brother."
+
+"I do not wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way," said
+Sylvia, with a pout of contempt.
+
+It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia's powers
+of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent
+men--and as to the way that different men would try to act with her.
+
+I had been talking to her in a low tone I do not know how long.  Her
+ill-nature had quickly vanished; she was, in her way, provoking,
+charming.  I was sitting close to her.  The moonlight played upon her
+daring, wilful face through the leaves of the grape-vines.  It was
+unpremeditated; my nature was, most probably, unstrung at the instant
+by ungratified longings for Georgiana; but suddenly I bent down and
+kissed her.
+
+Instantly both Sylvia and I started from the seat.  How long Georgiana
+had been standing in the entrance to the arbor I do not know.  She may
+that instant have come.  But there she was, dressed in white--pure,
+majestic, with the moon shining behind her, and shedding about her the
+radiance of a heavenly veil.
+
+"Come, Sylvia," she said, with perfect sweetness; and, bidding me
+good-night with the same gentlewoman's calm, she placed her arm about
+the child's waist, and the two sisters passed slowly and silently out
+of my garden.
+
+At that moment, if I could have squeezed myself into the little
+screech-owl perched in a corner of the arbor, I would gladly have crept
+into the hollow of an oak and closed my eyes.  Still, how was I to
+foresee what I should do?  A man's conversation may be his own; his
+conduct may vibrate with the extinct movements of his ancestors.
+
+Georgiana's behavior then was merely the forerunner of larger marvels.
+For next morning I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman's inability
+to understand Man and Man's inability to understand Himself, and set it
+under her window.  It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch's
+nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich
+egg.  All day I waited with a heart as silent as a great clock run
+down; my system of philosophy swung dead in the air.  To my tortured
+vision as I eyed it secretly from my porch, it took on the semblance of
+one of Sylvia's poetical potatoes, and I found myself urging in its
+behalf Sylvia's fondest epithets: "how homely, yet how beautiful,"
+"little thought of, but very necessary," "unostentatious, but of lovely
+internal appearance."
+
+Towards sunset I took it sadly down.  On top of the nest lay
+Georgiana's old scarlet emery-bag stuck full of her needles!  She had
+divined what all the writing meant and would not have it.  Instead she
+sent me this emblem not only of her forgiveness but of her surrender.
+When a man expects a woman to scold him and she does not, he either
+gets to be a little afraid of her morally or he wants to take her in
+his arms.  Henceforth, if Georgiana were removed to another planet, I
+would rather worship her there simply as my evening or morning star
+than coexist with any earthly woman.  One thought besets me: did she
+realize that perhaps she herself was the cause of my misdemeanors with
+Sylvia?  Has she the penetration to discover that when a woman is
+engaged to a man she cannot deny him all things except at her own peril?
+
+This proof of her high-mindedness and the enchanting glimpses of her
+face that she has vouchsafed me since, goaded me yesterday morning to
+despatch a reckless note: "Will you come to the arbor for a little
+while tonight?  I have never dared ask this before, but you know how I
+have desired it.  It is so much more private there.  Write on the back
+of this paper one word, 'Yes.'  There is a pencil in the nest."
+
+The shutters were nearly closed, but I caught sight of the curve of a
+shoulder and the movement of a busy hand.  As I pushed the note up I
+said:
+
+"Read it at once.  I am waiting."
+
+A hand came out and took in the note, then the pencil; then note and
+pencil were put back.  On the former was written, "Yes."
+
+I think I must have done a dozen things in five minutes, and then I
+started aimlessly off to town.  On the way I met Georgiana.
+
+"Good God, Georgiana!" I exclaimed.  "You _here_!"
+
+"Where else?" said she.  "And why not?"
+
+"I thought I just saw you at the window--"  And then my awful soul
+within me said: "H-sh-sh-sh!  Not a word of this to a human being!"
+
+After supper last night I called old Jack and Dilsy into the garden,
+and led them around it, giving orders; thence to the arbor, where I
+bade them sit down.
+
+In the year of 1805 Mr. Jefferson, as president of the Philosophical
+Society, ordered excavations to be made at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky
+for the skeletons of extinct animals.  My father, who was interested in
+antiquities, had had much correspondence with Mr. Jefferson in regard
+to earlier discoveries at that spot; and when this expedition was
+undertaken he formed one of the explorers.  Jack, his servant, at that
+time a strapping young fellow, had been taken along as one of the
+negroes who were to do the digging.
+
+The wonders then unearthed have always been the greenest spot in old
+Jack's memory; so that they have been growing larger ever since.
+Whenever I wish to hear him discourse with the dogmatic bluster of a
+sage who had original information as to geological times, I set Jack to
+talking about the bones of the Mastodon-Maximus, the name of which he
+gets from me, with a puzzled shake of his head, about regularly once a
+year.  It is my private opinion that old Jack believes Big Bone Lick to
+have been the place where the Ark settled, and these to have been the
+bones of animals that had been swept out by Noah on landing.
+
+Last night I had merely to ask him whether he credited the story of an
+old traveller that he had once used some ribs found there for his
+tent-poles and a tooth for his hominy beater; whereupon Dilsy,
+foreseeing what was coming, excused herself on the plea of sudden
+rheumatism and went to bed, as I wished she should.
+
+The hinges on the little private gate under Georgiana's window I keep
+rusty; this enables me to note when any one enters my garden.
+By-and-by I heard the hinges softly creak, whereupon I feigned not to
+believe what Jack was telling me; whereupon he fell into an harangue of
+such affectionate and sustained vehemence that when the hinges creaked
+again I was never able to determine.  Was ever such usage made before
+of an antediluvian monster?
+
+To-day the sewing-girl thrust out spiteful faces at me several times.
+
+She is the one that helped Georgiana last year when she was making her
+wedding-clothes to marry the West Point cousin.  God keep him safely in
+the distance, or guide him firmly to the van of war!  How does a woman
+feel when she is making her wedding-clothes for the second time and for
+another man?  I know very well how the other man feels.  Upon my urging
+Georgiana to marry me at once--nature does not recognize engagements;
+they are a device of civilization--she protested:
+
+"But I must get ready!  Think of the sewing!"
+
+"Oh, bother!" I grumbled.  "Where are all those clothes that you made
+last year?"
+
+How was I to suppose that Georgiana must have everything made over as
+part of her feeling for me?  I would not decree it otherwise; yet I
+question whether this delicacy may not impose reciprocal obligations,
+and remove from my life certain elements of abiding comfort.  What if
+it should engender a prejudice against my own time-worn
+acquaintances--the familiars of my fireside?  It might be justifiable
+sagacity in me to keep them locked up for the first year or so after
+Georgiana and I become a diune being; and, upon the whole, she should
+never know what may have been the premarital shortcomings of my
+wardrobe as respects things unseen.  No matter how well a bachelor may
+appear dressed, there is no telling what he conceals upon his person.
+I feel sure that the retrospective discovery of a ravelling would
+somehow displease Georgiana as a feature of our courtship.  Nature is
+very stringent here, very guarded, truly universal.  Invariably the
+young men of my day grow lavish in the use of unguents when they are
+preparing for natural selection; and I flatter myself that even my own
+garments--in their superficial aspects at least, and during my long
+pursuit of Georgiana--have not been very far from somewhat slightly
+ingratiating.
+
+This pursuit is now drawing to a close.  It is nearly the last of June.
+She has given me her word that she will marry me early in September.
+Two months for her to get the bridal feathers ready; two for me to
+prepare the nest.
+
+II
+
+I have forgotten nature.  I barely know that July, now nearly gone, has
+passed, sifted with sweetness and ablaze with light.  Time has swept
+on, the world run round; but I have stood motionless, abiding the hour
+of my marriage as a tree the season of its leaves.  For all that it
+looks so calm, within goes on a tremendous surging of sap against its
+moments of efflorescence.
+
+After which I pray that, not as a tree, but as a man, I may have a
+little peace.  When Georgiana confessed her love, I had supposed this
+confession to mark the end of her elusiveness.  When later on she
+presented to me the symbol of a heart pierced with needles, I had taken
+it for granted that thenceforth she would settle down into something
+like a state of prenuptial domestication, growing less like a swift and
+more like a hen.  But there is nothing gallinaceous about my Georgiana.
+I took possession of her vow and the emery-ball, not of her; the
+privilege was merely given to plant my flag-staff on the uncertain edge
+of an unknown land.  In war it sometimes becomes necessary to devastate
+a whole country in order to control a single point: I should be pleased
+to learn what portion of the earth's surface I am required to subdue
+ere I shall hold one little citadel.
+
+As for me, Georgiana requires that I shall be a good deal like an old
+rock jutting out of the quiet earth: never ruffled, never changing
+either on the surface or at heart, bearing whatever falls upon me, be
+it frost or sun, and warranted to waste away only by a sort of
+impersonal disintegration at the rate of half an inch to the thousand
+years.  Meantime she exacts for herself the privilege of dwelling near
+as the delighted cave of the winds.  The part of wisdom in me then is
+not to heed each sallying gust, but to capture the cave and drive the
+winds away.
+
+For I know in whom I have believed; I know that this myriad caprice is
+but the deepening of excitement on the verge of captivity; I know that
+on ahead lie the regions of perpetual calm--my Islands of the Blest.
+
+Georgiana does not play upon the pianoforte; or, as Mrs. Walters would
+declare, she does not perform upon the instrument.  Sylvia does; she
+performs, she executes.  There are times when she will execute a piece
+called "The Last Hope" until the neighbors are filled with despair and
+ready to stretch their heads on the block to any more merciful
+executioner.  Nor does Georgiana sing to company in the parlor.  That
+is Sylvia's gift; and upon the whole it was this unmitigated practice
+in the bosom--and in the ears--of her family that enabled Sylvia to
+shine with such vocal effulgence in the procession on the last Fourth
+of July and devote a pair of unflagging lungs to the service of her
+country.
+
+But Georgiana I have never known to sing except at her sewing and
+alone, as the way of women often is.  During a walk across the summer
+fields my foot has sometimes paused at the brink of a silvery runlet,
+and I have followed it backward in search of the spring.  It may lead
+to the edge of a dark wood; thence inward deeper and deeper;
+disappearing at last in a nook of coolness and shadow, green leaves and
+mystery.  The overheard rill of Georgiana's voice issues from inner
+depths of being that no human soul has ever visited, or perhaps will
+ever visit.  What would I not give to thread my way, bidden and alone,
+to that far region of uncaptured loveliness?
+
+Of late some of the overhead lullabies have touched me inexpressibly.
+They beat upon my ear like the musical reveries of future mother
+hood--they betoken in Georgiana's maidenhood the dreaming unrest of the
+maternal.
+
+One morning not long ago, with a sort of pitiful gayety, her song ran
+in the wise of saying how we should gather our rose-buds while we may.
+The warning could not have been addressed to me; I shall gather mine
+while I may--the unrifled rose of Georgiana's life, body and spirit.
+
+Naturally she and I have avoided the subject of the Cardinal.  But to
+the tragedy of his death was joined one circumstance of such coarse and
+brutal unconcern that it had left me not only remorseful but resentful.
+As we sat together the other evening, after one of those silences that
+fall unregarded between us, I could no longer forbear to face an
+understanding.
+
+"Georgiana," I said, "do you know what became of the redbird?"
+
+Unwittingly the color of reproach must have lain upon my words, for she
+answered quickly with yet more in hers,
+
+"I had it buried!"
+
+It was my turn to be surprised.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"I am sure.  I told them where to bury it; I showed them the very
+spot--under the cedar.  They told me they had.  Why?"
+
+I thought it better that she should learn the truth.
+
+"You know we can't trust our negroes.  They disobeyed you.  They lied
+to you; they never buried it.  They threw it on the ash-pile.  The pigs
+tore it to pieces; I saw them; they were rooting at it and tearing it
+to pieces."
+
+She had clasped her hands, and turned towards me in acute distress.
+After a while, with her face aside, she said, slowly,
+
+"And you have believed that I knew of this--that I permitted it?"
+
+"I have believed nothing.  I have waited to understand."
+
+A few minutes later she said, as if to herself,
+
+"Many a person would have been only too glad to believe it, and to
+blame me."  Then folding her hands over one of mine, she said, with
+tears in her eyes:
+
+"Promise me--promise me, Adam, until we are married, and--yes, _after_
+we are married--as long as I live, that you will never believe anything
+of me until you _know_ that it is true!"
+
+"I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!"  I cried, trying to draw her
+to me, but she would not permit it.  "And you?"
+
+"I shall never misunderstand," she replied, as with a flash of white
+inward light.  "I know that you can never do anything that will make me
+think the less of you."
+
+
+Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I
+have paid little heed to the birds.  The subject has been a sore one.
+Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of
+Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and
+nearer and nearer to my own kind.
+
+When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on
+the outskirts of the town and of humanity.  On the side of them lay the
+sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as
+the sweet deep ocean of my poetry.  I called my neighbors my
+manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose
+passages.  The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume.
+There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there
+was and there is Mrs. Walters--may she last to the age of the eagle.
+In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality: an old preacher who
+was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old
+doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with
+others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and
+sweet-peas.  Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery,
+noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than
+succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.
+
+But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it.  I have
+become less a woodsman, more a civilian.  Unless she relents, it may
+end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the
+Legislature.  Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my
+fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come
+out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.
+
+It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my
+tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making;
+and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or
+strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are
+exerting themselves to marry.  I am more like a badger than like one of
+them; and indeed I find the image of my fate and my condition in a
+badger-like creature close at hand.
+
+For the carpenter who is at work upon bridal repairs in my house has
+the fancy not uncommon among a class hereabouts to keep a tamed
+raccoon.  He brings it with him daily, and fastens it by its chain to a
+tree in my front yard: a rough, burly, knowing fellow, loving wild
+nature, but forced to acquire the tediousness of civilization; meantime
+leading a desperately hampered life; wondering at his own teeth and
+claws, and sorely put to it to invent a decent occupation.  So am I;
+and as the raccoon paces everywhere after the carpenter, so do I in
+spirit pace everywhere after Georgiana; only his chain seems longer and
+more easily to be broken.  The restless beast enlivens his captivity by
+the keenest scrutiny of every object within his range; I too have
+busied myself with the few people that have come this way.
+
+First, early in the month, Georgiana's brother--down from West Point,
+very stately, and with his brow stern, as if for gory war.  When I
+called promptly to pay my respects, as his brother-in-law to be, he was
+sitting on the front porch surrounded by a subdued family, Georgiana
+alone remaining unawed.  He looked me over indifferently, as though I
+were a species of ancient earthworks not worth any more special
+reconnoissance, and continued his most superior remarks to his mother
+on the approaching visit of three generals.
+
+Upon leaving I invited him to join me on the morrow in a squirrel hunt
+with smooth-bores, whereupon he manifested surprise that I was
+acquainted with the use of fire-arms.  Whereupon I remarked that I
+would sometimes hit big game if it were so close that I could not miss
+it, and further urged him to have breakfast with me at a very early
+hour in order that we might reach the woods while the squirrels were at
+theirs.
+
+Going home, I knocked at the cabin where Jack and Dilsy lay snoring
+side by side with the velocity of rival saw-mills, and begged Dilsy to
+give me a bite about daybreak--coffee and corn-batter cakes--saying
+that I could get breakfast when I returned.  I shared this scant bite
+with my young soldier--to Dilsy's abject mortification, I not having
+told her of his coming.  Then we set off at a brisk pace towards a
+great forest south of the town some five miles away, where the
+squirrels had appeared and were doing great damage, being the last of a
+countless plague of them that overran northern and central Kentucky a
+year ago.
+
+On the way I dragged him through several canebrakes, a thicket of
+blackberry; kept him out all day; said not a word about dinner; avoided
+every spot where he could have gotten a swallow of water; not once sat
+down to rest; towards the middle of the afternoon told him I desired to
+take enough squirrels home to make Jack a squirrel-skin overcoat, and
+asked him to carry while I killed; loaded him with squirrels, neck,
+shoulders, breast, back, and loins, till as he moved he tottered and
+swayed like a squirrel pyramid; about sundown challenged him to what he
+had not yet had, some crack shooting, which in that light requires
+young eyesight, and barked the squirrel for him four times; later still
+snuffed the candle for him, having brought one along for the purpose;
+and then, with my step fresh, led him swiftly home.
+
+He has the blood of Georgiana in him, and stood it like a man.  But he
+was nearly dead.  He has saluted me since as though I were a murderous
+garrison intrenched on the Heights of Abraham.
+
+Then the three generals of the United States army descended in a
+body--or in three bodies; and the truth is that their three bodies
+scarce held them, they were in such a state of flesh when they reached
+Kentucky, and of being perpetually overfed while they remained.  The
+object of their joint visit under a recent act of Congress was to
+locate a military asylum for disabled soldiers; and had they stayed
+much longer they must have had themselves admitted to their own
+institution as foremost of the disabled.  Having spent some time at the
+Lower Blue Lick Springs, the proposed site--where this summer are over
+five hundred guests of our finest Southern society--they afterwards
+were drawn around with immense solidity towards Louisville, Frankfort,
+Maysville, Paris, and Lexington, being everywhere received with such
+honors and provisions that these great guns were in danger of becoming
+spiked forever in both barrel and tube.
+
+Upon reaching this town one of them detached himself from the heated
+rolling mass and accepted the invitation of young Cobb--who had formed
+the acquaintance at West Point--to make a visit in his home.  He had
+not been there many days before he manoeuvred to establish a private
+military retreat for himself in the affections of Mrs. Cobb.  So that
+his presence became a profanation to Georgiana, whose reverence for her
+heroic father burns like an altar of sacred fire, and whose nature
+became rent in twain between her mother's suitor and her brother's
+guest.
+
+A most pestiferous variety of caterpillar has infested the tops of my
+cherry-trees this summer, and during the general's encampment near Mrs.
+Cobb I happened several times to be mounted on my step-ladder, busy
+with my pruning-shears, when he was decoying her around her
+garden--just over the fence--buckled in to suffocation, and with his
+long epaulettes golden in the sun like tassels of the corn.  I was
+engaged in exterminating this insect on the last day of his sojourn.
+They were passing almost beneath me on the other side; he had been
+talking; I heard her brief reply, in a voice low and full of dignity,
+
+"I have been married, sir!"
+
+"Mother of Georgiana!" I cried, within myself.  But had she ever
+thought of taking a second husband she must have seen through "Old
+Drumbeater," as Sylvia called him.  There were times when their
+breakfast would be late--for the sake of letting his chicken be broiled
+in slow perfection or his rolls or waffles come to a faultless brown;
+and I, being at work near the garden fence, would hear him tramping up
+and down the walk on the other side and swearing at a family that had
+such irregular meals.  The camel, a lean beast, requires an
+extraordinary supply of food, which it proceeds to store away in its
+hump as nourishment to be drawn upon while it is crossing the desert.
+There may be no long campaigning before the general; but if there were
+and rations were short, why could he not live upon his own back?  It is
+of a thickness, a roundness, and an impenetrability that would have
+justified Jackson in using him as a cotton-bale at the battle of New
+Orleans.
+
+Thus in my little corner of the world we have all been at the same
+business of love, and I wonder whether the corner be not the world
+itself: Mrs. Cobb and the general, Georgiana and I the sewing-girl and
+the carpenter; for I had forgotten to note how quickly these two have
+found out that they want each other.  My arbor is at his service, if he
+wishes it; and Jack shall keep silent about the mastodon.
+
+It is true that from this sentimental enumeration I have omitted the
+name of Mrs. Walters; but there is a secret here which not even
+Georgiana herself will ever get from me.  Mrs. Walters came to this
+town twenty years ago from the region of Bowling Green.  Some years
+afterwards I made a trip into that part of the State to hear the
+mocking-bird--for it fills those more southern groves, but never visits
+ours; and while there I stepped by accident on this discovery: _There
+never was any Mr. Walters_.  It is her maiden name.  But as I see the
+freedom of her life and reflect upon the things that a widow can do and
+an old maid cannot--with her own sex and with mine--I commend her
+wisdom and leave her at peace.  Indeed I have gone so far, when she has
+asked for my sympathy, as to lament with her Mr. Walters's death.
+After all, what great difference is there between her weeping for him
+because he is no more, and her weeping for him because he never was?
+After which she freshens herself up with another handkerchief, a little
+Florida water, and a touch of May roses from the apothecary's.
+
+And I have omitted the name of Sylvia; but then Sylvia's name, like
+that of Lot's wife, can never be used as one of a class, and she
+herself must always be spoken of alone.  However, if Sylvia had been
+Lot's wife she would not have turned to a pillar of salt, she would
+most probably have become a geyser.
+
+I don't know why, but she went on a visit to Henderson after that
+evening in the arbor.  I suspect the governing power of Georgiana's
+wisdom to have been put forth here, for within a few days I received
+from Sylvia a letter which she asked me not to show to Georgiana, and
+in which she invited me to correspond with her secretly.  The letter
+was of a singularly adhesive quality as to the emotions.  Throughout
+she referred to herself as "the exile," although it was plain that she
+wrote in the highest spirits; and in concluding she openly charged
+Georgiana with having given her a black eye--a most unspeakable phrase,
+surely picked up in the school-room.  As a return for the black eye,
+Sylvia said that she had composed a poem to herself, a copy of which
+she enclosed.
+
+I quote Sylvia's commemorative verses upon her wrongs and her
+banishment.  They show features of metrical excess, and can scarcely
+claim to reflect the polish of her calmer art; but they are of value to
+me as proving that whatever the rebuke Georgiana may have given, it had
+rebounded from that elastic spirit.
+
+
+  LINES TO MYSELF
+
+  Oh! she was a lovely girl,
+    So pretty and so fair,
+  With gentle, love-lit _eyes_,
+    And wavy, dark brown hair.
+
+  I loved the gentle girl,
+    But, oh! I heaved a sigh
+  When first she told me she could see
+    Out of only _one_ eye.
+
+  But soon I thought within myself
+    I'd better save my tear and sigh
+  _To bestow upon an older person I know
+    Who has more than one eye_.
+
+  She is brave and intelligent
+    Too.  She is witty and wise.
+  She'll accomplish more now than _another person_ I know
+    Who has _two_ eyes.
+
+  Ah, you need not pity _her_!
+    _She_ needs not your tear and sigh.
+  She'll make good use, I tell you,
+    Of her _one_ remaining eye.
+
+  In the home where we are hastening,
+    In our eternal Home on High,
+  See that _you_ be not rivalled
+    By the girl with only _one_ eye.[*]
+
+
+[*]Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote
+that she had "composed" this poem.  It is known to be the work of
+another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and
+produced a version of her own.                           J. L. A.
+
+
+Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in
+the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days
+ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age--a boy,
+enormously fat--whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her
+mother had been decoyed by the general.  Further to satirize the
+similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of
+yellow ribbon.
+
+Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she
+has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on
+the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling
+elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby's daughter.  There is a
+real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy's true place in
+nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated
+with thick tissues of blubber.  If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she
+seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in
+deep.
+
+Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open
+letter in her hand.
+
+"Oh, read it!" she cried, her face kindling with glory.
+
+It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the
+Louisville _Journal_ accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and
+assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of
+Kentucky poetesses.  The title of the poem was, "My Lover Kneels to
+None but God."
+
+"I infer from this," I said, gravely, "that your lover is a Kentuckian."
+
+"He is," cried Sylvia.  "Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!"
+
+"Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I continued, mildly, "upon having
+such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover
+ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion."
+
+"Never!" cried Sylvia.  "I would spurn him as chaff!"
+
+"Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued, further,
+"you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something
+new to parse."
+
+Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.
+
+"Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's
+say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in
+Virgil and Homer.  And if he could do that then, think what he must he
+able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!"
+
+I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr.
+Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was
+based upon the fact that he could not parse it.
+
+
+There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.
+
+This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time
+during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the
+collar over his head and was gone.  Whither and how long no one knew;
+but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to
+the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs.
+Walters's house--poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such
+deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head.
+Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney.  Glancing down this,
+he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a
+hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to
+produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and
+friendly a passage.  His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at
+the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove
+of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but
+in Mrs. Walters's bedroom.  In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is
+not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could
+white it, and he dripping with soot.  Here the ground beneath him was
+of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently
+resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter.  In the course of
+his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he
+must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that
+so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.
+
+It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having
+left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom.  She
+threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a
+snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted
+outward.
+
+"Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank
+with bewilderment.  Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been
+her bed.  Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded
+with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes
+blazing green with defiance.
+
+She slammed and locked the door.
+
+"Run for the sheriff!" she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought
+her market basket; and she followed him as he fled.
+
+"What is it, Mrs. Walters?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and
+bringing the handcuffs.
+
+"There's somebody in my bed!" she cried, wringing her hands.  "I
+believe it's the devil."
+
+"It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing; for by this time we were
+all gathered together.
+
+"What a dear 'coon!" said the sewing-girl.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Walters!  You are like Little Red Riding-hood!" said Sylvia.
+
+"I can't arrest a 'coon, madam!" exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck
+at being made ridiculous.
+
+"Then arrest the carpenter!" cried poor, unhappy, excited Mrs. Walters,
+bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder.
+
+And among us all Georgiana was the only comforter.  She laid aside her
+own work for that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her
+desperately wounded neighbor, and at nightfall, over the bed, now
+peaceful and snowy once more, she spread a marvellous priceless quilt
+that she had long been making to exhibit at the approaching World's
+Fair in New York.
+
+"Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtime, "it seems to
+me that things happen in order to show you off."
+
+"Only think!" Georgiana replied; "she will never get into bed again
+without a shiver and a glance at the chimney.  I begrudge her the quilt
+for one reason: it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in
+it."
+
+"Did she tell you that she had had those bedclothes ever since her
+marriage?"
+
+"Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very
+long."
+
+"How long should you think?"
+
+"Oh, well--about a minute."
+
+"And yet she certainly has the clearest possible idea of Mr. Walters.
+I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as
+perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers."
+
+"Or perhaps wish to."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The end of August--the night before my marriage.
+
+Several earthquakes have lately been felt in this part of the globe.
+Coming events cast their shocks before.
+
+The news of it certainly came like the shock of an earthquake to many
+people of the town, who know perfectly well that no woman will allow
+the fruit and flowers to be carried off a place as a man will.  The
+sagacious old soul who visits me yearly for young pie-plant actually
+hurried out and begged for a basketful of the roots at once, thus
+taking time--and the rhubarb--by the forelock.  And the old epicurean
+harpy whose passion is asparagus, having accosted me gruffly on the
+street with an inquiry as to the truth of my engagement and been
+quietly assured, how true it was, informed me to my face that any man
+situated as happily as I am was an infernal fool to entangle himself
+with a wife, and bade me a curt and everlasting good-morning on the
+spot.  Yet every day the theme of this old troubadour's talk around the
+hotels is female entanglements--mendacious, unwifely, and for him
+unavailing.
+
+Through divers channels some of my fellow-creatures--specimens of the
+most dreadful prose--have let me know that upon marrying I shall
+forfeit their usurious regard.  As to them, I shall relapse into the
+privacy of an orchard that has been plucked of its fruit.  But my
+wonderment has grown on the other hand at the number of those to whom,
+as the significant unit of a family instead of a bachelor zero, I have
+now acquired a sterling mercantile valuation.  Upon the whole, I may
+fairly compute that my relation to the human race has been totally
+changed by the little I may cease to give away and by the less that I
+shall need to buy.
+
+And Mrs. Walters!  Although I prefer to think of Mrs. Walters as a
+singer, owing to her unaccountable powers of reminiscential
+vocalization, I have upon occasion classified her among the waders; and
+certainly, upon the day when my engagement to Georgiana transpired, she
+waded not only all around the town but all over it, sustained by a
+buoyancy of spirit that enabled her to keep her head above water in
+depths where her feet no longer touched the bottom.
+
+It was the crowning triumph of this vacant soul's life to boast that
+she had made this match; and for the sake of giving her so much
+happiness, I think I should have been willing to marry Georgiana
+whether I loved her or not.
+
+So we are all happy: Sylvia, who thus enters upon a family right to my
+flowers and to the distinction of being the only Miss Cobb; Dilsy, who,
+while gathering vegetables about the garden, long ago began to receive
+little bundles of quilt pieces thrown down to her with a smile and the
+right word from the window above; and Jack, who is to drive us on our
+bridal-trip to the Blue Lick Springs, where he hopes to renew his
+scientific studies upon the maxillary bones.  I have hesitated between
+Blue Lick and Mud Lick, though to a man in my condition there can be no
+great difference between blue and mud.  And I had thought of the
+Harrodsburg Springs, but the negro musicians there were lately hurried
+off to Canada by the underground railway, out of which fact has grown a
+lawsuit for damages between the proprietor and his abolitionist guest.
+
+
+A few weeks ago I intrusted a secret to Georgiana.  I told her that
+before she condescended to shine upon this part of the world--now the
+heavenlier part--I had been engaged upon certain researches and
+discoveries relating to Kentucky birds, especially to the Kentucky
+warbler.  I admitted that these studies had been wretchedly put aside
+under the more pressing necessity of fixing the attention of all my
+powers, ornithological and other, upon her garden window.  But as I
+placed specimens of my notes and drawings in her hand, I remarked
+gravely that after our marriage I should be ready to push my work
+forward without delay.
+
+All this was meant to give her a delightful surprise; and indeed she
+examined the evidences of my undertaking with devouring and triumphant
+eagerness.  But what was my amazement when she handed them back in
+silence, and with a face as white as though as fragrant as a rose.
+
+"I have distressed you, Georgiana!" I cried, "and my only thought had
+been to give you pleasure.  I am always doing something wrong!"
+
+She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow,
+as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares.  Then she
+sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap.
+
+"You have shared your secret with me," she said, solemnly, at length.
+"I'll share mine with yon.  It is the only fear that I have ever felt
+regarding our future.  It has never left me; and what you have just
+shown me fills me with terror."
+
+I sat aghast.
+
+"I am not deceived," she continued; "you have not forgotten nature.  It
+draws you more powerfully than anything else in the world.  Whenever
+you speak of it, you say the right thing, you find the right word, you
+get the right meaning.  With nature alone you are perfectly natural.
+Towards society you show your shabby, awkward, trivial, uncomfortable
+side.  But these drawings, these notes--there lies your power, your
+gift, your home.  You truly belong to the woodsmen."
+
+Never used to study myself, I listened, to this as to fresh talk about
+a stranger.
+
+"Do you not foresee what will happen?" she went on, with emotion.
+"After we have been married a while you will begin to wander off--at
+first for part of a day, then for a day, then for a day and a night,
+then for days and nights together.  That was the way with Audubon, that
+was the way with Wilson, that is the way with Thoreau, that will be the
+way with all whom nature draws as it draws you.  And, me--think of
+me--at home!  A woman not able to go with you!  Not able to wade the
+creeks and swim the rivers!  Not able to sleep out in the brown leaves,
+to endure the rain, the cold, the travel!  And, so I shall never be
+able to fill your life with mine as you fill mine with yours.  As time
+passes, I shall fill it less and less.  Every spring nature will be
+just as young to you; I shall be always older.  The water you love
+ripples, never wrinkles.  I shall cease rippling and begin wrinkling.
+No matter what happens, each summer the birds get fresh feathers; only
+think how my old ones will never drop out.  I shall want you to go on
+with your work.  If I am to be your wife, I must be wings to you.  But
+think of compelling me to furnish you the wings with which to leave me!
+What is a little book on Kentucky birds in comparison with my
+happiness!"
+
+She was so deeply moved that my one desire was to uproot her fears on
+the spot.
+
+"Then there shall be no little book on Kentucky birds!" I cried.  "I'll
+throw these things into the fire as soon as I go home.  Only say what
+you wish me to be, Georgiana," I continued, laughing, "and I'll be
+it--if it's the town pump."
+
+"Then if I could only be the town well," she said, with a poor little
+effort to make a heavy heart all at once go merrily again.
+
+Bent on making it go merrily as long as I shall live, the following day
+I called out to her at the window:
+
+"Georgiana, I'm improving.  I'm getting along."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"Well, in town this morning they chose me as one of the judges of
+vegetables at the fair next month.  I said, 'Gentlemen, I expect to be
+married before that time, and I do not intend to be separated from my
+wife.  Will she have the privilege of accompanying me among these
+competing vegetables?  And last month they made me director of a
+turnpike company--I suppose because it runs through my farm.  To-day at
+a meeting of the directors I said, 'Gentlemen, how far is this turnpike
+to run?  I will direct it to the end of my farm and not a step farther.
+I do not wish to be separated from my wife.'"
+
+Georgiana has teased me a good deal in my life.  It is well to let a
+woman taste of the tree of knowledge whose fruit she is fond of
+dispensing.
+
+"You'd better be careful!" she said, archly.
+
+"Remember, I haven't married you yet."
+
+"I _am_ careful," I replied.  "I haven't married _you_ yet, cither!  My
+idea, Georgiana," I continued, "is to plant a grove and raise cocoons.
+That would gratify my love of nature and your fancy for silk dresses.
+I could have my silk woven and spun in our manufactory at Newport,
+Kentucky; and you know that we couldn't possibly lose each other among
+the mulberry-trees."
+
+"You'd better take care!" she repeated.  "Do you expect to talk to me
+in this style after we are married?"
+
+"That will all depend upon how you talk to me," I answered.  "But I
+have always understood married life to be the season when the worm
+begins to turn."
+
+Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the
+monstrous selfishness that lay coiled like a canker in my words.  I was
+really no better than those men who say to their wives:
+
+"While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary--you
+were everything.  Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and
+you must not stand in the way."
+
+But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy
+with me at any cost.  I divine now the reason of the effort she has
+long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I
+have privately set about changing the character of my life with the
+idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content.
+And thus it has come about that during the August now ended--always the
+month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek
+its woodland peace--I have hung about the town as one who is offered
+for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he
+hates to do.  Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my
+fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble through which I walk in the
+September fields--the rotting wastage of harvests long since gathered
+in.  At other times I drive myself upon their sharp and piercing
+conflicts as a bird is blown uselessly again and again by some too
+strong a wind upon the spikes of the thorn.  I hear the angry talk of
+our farmers and merchants, I listen to the fiery orations of our
+statesmen and the warning sermons of our divines.  (Think of a human
+creature calling himself a divine.)  The troubled ebb and flow of
+events in Kentucky, the larger movements of unrest throughout the great
+republic--these have replaced for me the old communings with nature
+that were full of music and of peace.
+
+Evening after evening now I turn my conversations with Georgiana as
+gayly as I can upon some topic of the time.  She is not always pleased
+with what I style my researches into civilized society.  One evening in
+particular our talk was long and serious, beginning in shallows and
+then steering for deep waters.
+
+"Well, Georgiana," I had said, "Miss Delia Webster has suddenly
+returned to her home in Vermont."
+
+"And who is Miss Delia Webster?" she had inquired, with unmistakable
+acidity.
+
+"Miss Delia Webster is the lady who was sentenced to the State
+penitentiary for abducting our silly old servants into Ohio.  But the
+jury of Kentucky noblemen who returned the verdict--being married men,
+and long used to forgiving a woman anything--petitioned the governor to
+pardon Miss Delia on the ground that she belongs to the sex that can do
+no wrong--and be punished for it.  Whereupon the governor, seasoned to
+the like large experience, pardoned the lady.  Whereupon Miss Webster,
+having passed a few weeks in the penitentiary, left, as I stated, for
+her home in Vermont, followed by her father, who does not, however,
+seem to have been able to overtake her."
+
+"If she'd been a man, now," suggested Georgiana.
+
+"If she'd been a man she would have shared the fortunes of her
+principal, the Reverend Mr. Fairbanks, who has _not_ returned to his
+home in Ohio, and will not--for fifteen years."
+
+"Do you think it an agreeable subject of conversation?" inquired
+Georgiana.
+
+"Then I will change it," I said.  "The other day the editor of the
+Smithland _Bee_ was walking along the street with his little daughter
+and was shot down by a doctor."
+
+"Horrible!" exclaimed Georgiana.  "Why?"
+
+"Self-defence," I answered.  "And last week in the court-room in Mount
+Sterling a man was shot by his brother-in-law during the sitting of
+court."
+
+"And why did _he_ kill _him_?"
+
+"Self-defence!" I answered.  "And in Versailles a man down in the
+street was assassinated with a rifle fired from the garret of a tavern.
+Self-defence.  And in Lexington a young man shot and killed another for
+drawing his handkerchief from his pocket.  Self-defence!--the sense of
+the court being that whatever such an action might mean in other
+civilized, countries, in Kentucky and under the circumstances--the
+young fellows were quarrelling--it naturally betokened the reaching for
+a revolver.  Thus in Kentucky, Georgiana, and during a heated
+discussion, a man cannot blow his nose but at the risk of his life."
+
+"I'll see that you never carry a handkerchief," said Georgiana.  "So
+remember--don't you ever reach for one!"
+
+"And the other day in Eddysville," I went on, "two men fought a duel by
+going to a doctor's shop and having him open a vein in the arm of each.
+Just before they fainted from exhaustion they made signs that their
+honor was satisfied, so the doctor tied up the veins.  I see that you
+don't believe it, but it's true."
+
+"And why did they fight a duel in that way?"
+
+"I give it up," I said, "unless it was in self-defence.  We are a most
+remarkable society of self-defenders.  But if every man who fights in
+Kentucky is merely engaged in warding off a murderous attack upon his
+life, who does all the murderous attacking?  You know the seal of our
+commonwealth: two gentlemen in evening dress shaking hands and with one
+voice declaring, 'United we stand, divided we fall.'  So far as the
+temper of our time goes, these two gentlemen might well be represented
+as twenty paces apart, and as calling out, 'United, we stood; divided,
+_you_ fall!'  Killings and duels!  Killings and duels!  Do you think we
+need these as proofs of courage?  Do you suppose that the Kentuckians
+of our day are braver than the pioneers?  Do you suppose that any
+people ever elevated its ideal of courage in the eyes of the world by
+all the homicides and all the duels that it could count?  There is only
+one way in which any civilized people has ever done that, there is only
+one way in which any civilized people has ever been able to impress the
+world very deeply with a belief in the reality and the nobility of its
+ideal of courage: it is by the warlike spirit of its men in times of
+war, and by the peaceful spirit of its men in times of peace.  Only,
+you must add this: that when those times of peace have come on, and it
+is no longer possible for such a people to realize its ideal of courage
+in arms, it is nevertheless driven to express the ideal in other
+ways--by monuments, arches, inscriptions, statues, literature,
+pictures, all in honor of those of their countrymen who lived the ideal
+before the world and left it more lustrous in their dying.  That is the
+full reason why we know how brave a people the Greeks were--by their
+peaceful ways of honoring valor in times of peace.  And that in part is
+why no nation in the world doubts the courage of the English, because
+when the English are not fighting they are forever doing something to
+honor those who have fought well.  So that they never have a peace but
+they turn it into preparation for the next war.
+
+"And that is why, as the outside world looks in upon us to-day and
+sifts the evidence of whether or not we are a brave people, it does not
+find the proof of this in our homicides and duels, but in the spirit of
+our forefathers of the Revolution, in the soldiers of the wilderness
+and of Indian warfare, of the war of 1812, of the war with Mexico, at
+Cerro Gordo, at Buena Vista, at Palo Alto, at Resaca de la Palma.
+Wherever the Kentuckians have fought as soldiers, many or few, on
+whatever battle-field, in whatsoever cause, there you may see whether
+they know what it is to be men, and whether they have an ideal of
+courage that is worth the name.
+
+"Then a few years ago in Frankfort twenty thousand people followed to
+the grave the bodies of the men who had fallen in Mexico.  The State
+has raised a monument to them, to the soldiers of 1812, to those who
+fought at the river Raisin.  The Legislature has ordered a medal to be
+struck in honor of a boy who had defended his ensign.  No man can make
+a public speech in Kentucky without mention of Encancion and Monterey,
+or of the long line of battles in which every generation of our people
+has fought.  This is the other proof that in times of peace we do not
+forget.  It is not much, but it is of the right kind--it is the
+soldier's monument, it is the soldier's medal, it is the soldier's
+funeral oration, it is the recognition by the people of its ideal of
+courage in times of peace.  And with every other brave people this
+proof passes as the sign universal.  But our homicides and our duels,
+nearly all of them brought about in the name--even under the fear--of
+courage, what effect have they had in giving us abroad our reputation
+as a community?  I ask myself the question, what if all the men who
+have killed their personal enemies or been killed by them in Kentucky,
+and if all the men who have killed their personal friends or been
+killed by them in Kentucky, had spent their love of fighting and their
+love of courage upon a monument to the Pioneers--such a monument as
+stands nowhere else in the world, and might fitly stand in this State
+to commemorate the winning of the West?  Would the world think the
+better or the worse of the Kentucky ideal of bravery?
+
+"I had not meant to talk to you so long on this subject," I added, in
+apology, "but I have been thinking of these things lately since I have
+been so much in town."
+
+"I am interested," said Georgiana; "but as I agree with you we need not
+both speak."  But she looked pained, and I sought to give a happier
+turn to the conversation.
+
+"There is only one duel I ever heard of that gave me any pleasure, and
+that one never came off.  A few years ago a Kentuckian wrote a
+political satire on an Irishman in Illinois--wrote it as a widow.  The
+Irishman wished to fight.  The widow offered to marry the Irishman, if
+such a sacrifice would be accepted as satisfactory damages.  The
+Irishman sent a challenge, and the Kentuckian chose cavalry broadswords
+of the largest size.  He was a giant; he had the longest arms of any
+man in Illinois; he could have mowed Erin down at a stroke like a green
+milkweed; he had been trained in duelling with oak-trees.  You never
+heard of him: his name is Abraham Lincoln."
+
+"I have heard of him, and I have seen him--in Union County before I
+came here," said Georgiana, with enthusiasm.
+
+"He came here once to hear Mr. Clay speak," I resumed; "and I saw them
+walking together one day under the trees at Ashland--the two most
+remarkable-looking men that I ever beheld together or in human form."
+
+My few acres touch the many of the great statesman.  Georgiana and I
+often hear of the movements of his life, as two little boats in a quiet
+bay are tossed by the storms of the ocean.  Any reference to him always
+makes us thoughtful, and we fell silent now.
+
+"Georgiana," I said at length, softly.  "It's all in self-defence.  I
+believe you promised to marry me in self-defence."
+
+"I did!" she said, promptly.
+
+"Well, I certainly asked you in self-defence, Miss Cobb," I replied.
+"And now in a few days, according to the usage of my time, I am going
+to take your life--even at the peril of my own.  If you desire, it is
+your privilege to examine the deadly weapons before the hour of actual
+combat," and I held out my arms to her appealingly.
+
+She bent her body delicately aside, as always.  "I am upset," she said,
+discouragingly.  "You have been abusing Kentucky."
+
+"Ah, that is the trouble!" I answered.  "You wish me to become more
+interested in my fellow-creatures.  And then you will not let me speak
+of what they do.  And the other day you told me that I am not perfectly
+natural with anything but nature.  Nature is the only thing that is
+perfectly natural with me.  When I study nature there are no delicate
+or dangerous or forbidden subjects.  The trees have no evasions.  The
+weeds are honest.  Running water is not trying to escape.  The sunsets
+are not colored with hypocrisy.  The lightning is not revenge.
+Everything stands forth in the sincerity of its being, and nature
+invites me to exercise the absolute liberty of my mind upon all life.
+I am bidden to master and proclaim whatsoever truth she has fitted me
+to grasp.  If I am worthy to investigate, none are offended; if I
+should be wise enough to discover any law of creation, the entire world
+would express its thanks.  Imagine my being assassinated because I had
+published a complete report upon the life and habits of the
+field-mouse!"
+
+"If one mouse published a report on the life and habits of another,
+there'd be a fight all over the field," said Georgiana.
+
+"A ridiculous extreme," I replied.  "But after you have grown used to
+study nature with absolute freedom and absolute peace, think how human
+life repels you.  You may not investigate, you may not speak out, you
+may not even think, you may not even feel.  You are not allowed to
+reveal what is concealed, and you are required to conceal what is
+revealed.  Natural!  Have you ever known any two men to be perfectly
+natural with each other except when they were fighting?  As for the men
+that I associate with every day, they weigh their words out to one
+another as the apothecary weighs his poisons, or the grocer his
+gunpowder."
+
+"You forget," said Georgiana, "that we are living in a very
+extraordinary time, when everybody is sensitive and excited."
+
+"It is so always and everywhere," I replied.  "You may never study life
+as you study nature.  With men you must take your choice: liberty for
+your mind and a prison for your body; liberty for your body and a
+prison for your mind.  Nearly all people choose the latter; we know
+what becomes of the few who do not."
+
+But this reference to the times led us to speak slowly and solemnly of
+what all men now are speaking--war that must come between the North and
+the South.  We agreed that it would come from each side as a blazing
+torch to Kentucky, which lies between the two and is divided between
+the two in love and hate--to Kentucky, where the ideal of a soldier's
+life is always the ideal of a man's duty and utmost glory.
+
+At last I felt that my time had come.
+
+"Georgiana," I said, "there is one secret I have never shared with you.
+It is the only fear I have ever felt regarding our future.  But, if
+there should be a war--you'd better know it now--leave you or not leave
+you, I am going to join the army."
+
+She grew white and faint with the thought of a day to come.  But at
+last she said:
+
+"Yes; you must go."
+
+"I know one thing," I added, after a long silence; "if I could do my
+whole duty as a Kentuckian--as an American citizen--as a human being--I
+should have to fight on both sides."
+
+I have thus set down in a poor way a part of the only talk I ever had
+with Georgiana on these subjects during the year 1851.
+
+
+Yesterday, about sunset, the earth and sky were beautiful with that
+fulness of peace which things often attain at the moment before they
+alter and end.  The hour seemed to me the last serene loveliness of
+summer, soon to be ruffled by gales and blackened by frosts.
+
+Georgiana stood at her window looking into the west.  The shadows of
+the trees in my yard fell longer and longer across the garden towards
+her.  Darkest among these lay the shapes of the cedars and the pines in
+which the redbird had lived.  Her whole attitude bespoke a mood
+surrendered to memory; and I felt sure that we two were thinking of the
+same thing.
+
+As she has approached that mystical revelation of life which must come
+with our marriage, Georgiana's gayety has grown subtly overcast.  It is
+as if the wild strain in her were a little sad at having to be captured
+at last; and I too experience an indefinable pain that it has become my
+lot to subdue her in this way.  The thought possesses me that she
+submits to marriage because she cannot live intimately with me and
+lavish her love upon me in any other relation; and therefore I draw
+back with awe from the idea of taking such possession of her as I will
+and must.
+
+As she stood at her window yesterday evening she caught sight of me
+across the yard and silently beckoned.  I went over and looked up at
+her, waiting and smiling.
+
+"Well, what is it?" I asked at length, as her eyes rested on me with
+the fulness of affection.
+
+"Nothing.  I wanted to see you standing down there once more.  Haven't
+you thought of it?  This is the last time--the last of the window, the
+last of the garden, the end of the past.  Everything after this will be
+so different.  Aren't you a little sorry that you are going to marry
+me?"
+
+"Will you allow me to fetch the minister this instant?"
+
+In the evening they put on her bridal dress and sent over for me, and,
+drawing the parlor doors aside, blinded me with the sight of her
+standing in there, as if waiting in duty for love to claim its own.  As
+I saw her then I have but to close my eyes to see her now.  I scarce
+know why, but that vision of her haunts my mind mysteriously.
+
+I see a fresh snow-drift in a secret green valley between dark
+mountains.  The sun must travel far and be risen high to reach it; but
+when it does, its rays pour down from near the zenith and are most
+powerful and warm; then in a little while the whole valley is green
+again and a white mist, rising from it, muffles the face of the sun.
+
+Oh, Georgiana!  Georgiana!  Do not fade away from me as I draw you to
+me.
+
+My last solitary candle flickers in the socket: it is in truth the end
+of the past.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Last summer I felled a dead oak in the woods and had the heart of him
+stored away for my winter fuel: a series of burnt-offerings to the
+worshipful spirit of my hearth-stone.  There should have been several
+of these offerings already, for October is almost ended now, and it is
+the month during which the first cool nights come on in Kentucky and
+the first fires are lighted.
+
+A few twilights ago I stood at my yard gate watching the red domes of
+the forest fade into shadow and listening to the cawing of crows under
+the low gray of the sky as they hurried home.  A chill crept over the
+earth.  It was a fitting hour; I turned in-doors and summoned Georgiana.
+
+"We will light our first fire together," I said, straining her to my
+heart.
+
+Kneeling gayly down, we piled the wood in the deep, wide chimney.  Each
+of us then brought a live coal, and together we started the blaze.  I
+had drawn Georgiana's chair to one side of the fireplace, mine
+opposite; and with the candles still unlit we now sat silently watching
+the flame spread.  What need was there of speech?  We understood.
+
+By-and-by some broken wreaths of smoke floated, outward into the room.
+My sense caught the fragrance.  I sniffed it with a rush of memories.
+Always that smell of smoke, with other wild, clean, pungent odors of
+the woods, had been strangely pleasant to me.  I remember thinking of
+them when a boy as incense perpetually and reverently set free by
+nature towards the temple of the skies.  They aroused in me even then
+the spirit of meditation on the mystery of the world; and later they
+became in-wrought with the pursuit and enjoyment of things that had
+been the delight of my life for many years.  So that coming now, at the
+very moment when I was dedicating myself to my hearth-stone and to
+domestic life, this smell of wood smoke reached me like a message from
+my past.  For an instant ungovernable longings surged over me to return
+to it.  For an instant I did return; and once more I lay drowsing
+before my old camp-fires in the autumn woods, with the frosted trees
+draping their crimson curtains around me on the walls of space and the
+stars flashing thick in the ceiling of my bedchamber.  My dog, who had
+stretched himself at my feet before the young blaze, inhaled the smoke
+also with a full breath of reminiscence, and lay watching me out of the
+corner of his eye--I fancied with reproachful constancy.  I caught his
+look with a sense of guilt, and glanced across at Georgiana.
+
+Her gaze was buried deep in the flames.  And how sweet her face was,
+how inexpressibly at peace.  She had folded the wings of her whole
+life, and sat by the hearth as still as a brooding dove.  No past laid
+its disturbing touch upon her shoulder.  Instead, I could see that if
+there were any flight of her mind away from the present it was into the
+future--a slow, tranquil flight across the years, with all the
+happiness that they must bring.  As I set my own thoughts to journey
+after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld
+Georgiana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temples,
+spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her
+face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with unconquerable gayety and
+youth.
+
+"How sweet that smoke is, Georgiana," I said, rousing us both, and
+feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may
+speak.  "And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back
+into his elements--smoke and light, heat and ashes.  What a magnificent
+work he was on natural history, requiring hundreds of years for his
+preparation and completion, written in a language so learned that not
+the wisest can read him wisely, and enduringly bound in the finest of
+tree calf!  It is a dishonor to speak of him as a work.  He was a
+doctor of philosophy!  He should have been a college professor!  Think
+how he could have used his own feet for a series of lectures on the
+laws of equilibrium, capillary attraction, or soils and moisture!  Was
+there ever a head that knew as much as his about the action of light?
+Did any human being ever more grandly bear the burdens of life or
+better face the tempests of the world?  What did he not know about
+birds?  He had carried them in his arms and nurtured them in his bosom
+for a thousand years.  Even his old coat, with all its rents and
+patches--what roll of papyrus was ever so crowded with the secrets of
+knowledge?  The august antiquarian!  The old king!  Can you imagine a
+funeral urn too noble for his ashes?  But to what base uses, Georgiana!
+He will not keep the wind away any longer; we shall change him into a
+kettle of lye with which to whiten our floors."
+
+What Georgiana's reply could have been I do not know, for at that
+moment Mrs. Walters flitted in.
+
+"I saw through the windows that you had a fire," she said, volubly,
+"and ran over to get warm.  And, oh! yes, I wanted to tell you--"
+
+"Stop, _please_, Mrs. Walters!" I cried, starting towards her with an
+outstretched hand and a warning laugh.  "You have not yet been formally
+introduced to this room, and a formal introduction is necessary.  You
+must be made acquainted with the primary law of its being;" and as Mrs.
+Walters paused, dropping her hands into her lap and regarding me with
+an air of mystification, I went on:
+
+"When I had repairs made in my house last summer, I had this fireplace
+rebuilt, and I ordered an inscription to be burnt into the bricks.  We
+expect to ask that all our guests will kindly notice this inscription,
+in order to avoid accidents or misunderstandings.  So I beg of you not
+to speak until you have read the words over the fireplace."
+
+Mrs. Walters wonderingly read the following legend, running in an arch
+across the chimney:
+
+
+  Good friend, around these hearth-stones speak
+         no evil word of any creature.
+
+
+She wheeled towards me with instantaneous triumph.
+
+"I'm glad you put it there!" she cried.  "I'm glad you put it there!
+It will teach them a lesson about their talking.  If there is one thing
+I _cannot_ stand it is a gossip."
+
+I have observed that a fowl before a looking-glass will fight its own
+image.
+
+"Take care, Mrs. Walters!" I said, gently.  "You came very near to
+violating the law just then."
+
+"He meant it for me, Mrs. Walters," said Georgiana, fondling our
+neighbor's hand, and looking at me with an awful rebuke.
+
+"I meant it for myself," I said.  "And now it is doing its best to make
+me feel like a Pharisee.  So I hasten to add that there are other rooms
+in the house in which it will be allowed human nature to assert itself
+in this long-established, hereditary, and ineradicable right.  Our
+guests have only to intimate that they can no longer restrain their
+propensities and we will conduct them to another chamber.  Mrs. Moss
+and I will occasionally make use of these chambers ourselves, to
+relieve the tension of too much virtue.  But it is seriously our idea
+to have one room in the house where we shall feel safe, both as
+respects ourselves and as respects others, from the discomfort of
+evil-speaking.  As long as these walls stand or we dwell in them, this
+is to be the room of charity and kindness to all creatures."
+
+Although we exerted ourselves, conversation flagged during the visit of
+Mrs. Walters.  Several times she began to speak, but, with a frightened
+look at the fireplace, dropped into a cough, or cleared her throat in a
+way that called to mind the pleasing habit of Sir Roger de Coverly in
+the Gardens of Gray's Inn.
+
+Later in the evening other guests came.  Upon each the law of that
+fireside was lightly yet gravely impressed.  They were in the main the
+few friends I know in whom such an outward check would call for the
+least inner restraint; nevertheless, on what a footing of confidence it
+placed our conversation!  To what a commanding level we were safely
+lifted!  For nothing so releases the best powers of the mind as the
+understanding that the entire company are under bond to keep the peace
+of the finest manners and of perfect breeding.
+
+And Georgiana--how she shone!  I knew that she could perfectly fill a
+window; I now see that she can as easily fill a room.  Our bodies were
+grouped about the fireplace; our minds centred around her, and she
+flashed like the evening star along our intellectual pathway.
+
+The next day Mrs. Walters talked a long time to Georgiana on the edge
+of the porch.
+
+
+Thus my wife and I have begun life together.  I think that most of our
+evenings will be spent in the room dedicated to a kind word for life
+universal.  No matter how closely the warring forces of existence,
+within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there
+we enter peace.  We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever
+meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous
+hours.  And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household
+than to escape an ignoble evening.  To attain a noble one is like lying
+calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have
+struggled upward amid enemies all day long.
+
+Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured
+the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and
+still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now
+that I never shall.  The charm in her which I pursue, yet never
+overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world
+which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit--of that
+elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all
+terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose.  Even while I
+live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains
+for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does
+not end and has no waking.
+
+This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold
+her entire self into mine.  We have been a revelation to each other,
+but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains,
+which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the
+discoveries of our union.  Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting
+beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full
+of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at
+what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live.  Yet,
+folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment.  Often
+she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere,
+seeking an entrance to where I really am.  Even during the intimate
+silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing
+walls of flesh--we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs
+of individual being.
+
+During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the
+earth been flooded with beauty.
+
+Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky
+its rays stream through the open shutter and fall upon Georgiana in her
+sleep.  Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float
+upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily
+downward along her figure.  How august she is in her purity! The
+whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the silvering orb is as
+pitch to the whiteness of her nature.
+
+The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of
+the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin covering had
+slipped aside, leaving Georgiana's feet exposed.
+
+With a start of pain I recollected an old story about her childhood:
+that one day for the sake of her rights she had received a wound in one
+of her feet--how serious I had never known, but perhaps deforming,
+irremediable.  My head was raised on the pillow; the moonlight was
+moving down that way; it would cross her feet; it would reveal the
+truth.
+
+I turned my face away and closed my eyes.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+It is nearly dark when I reach home from town these January evenings.
+However the cold may sting the face and dart inward to the marrow,
+Georgiana is waiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled
+and ringed about with petticoats--like a tree within its layers of
+bark--that she looks like the most thick-set of ordinary sized women;
+for there is a heavenly but very human secret hiding in this household
+now, and she is thoughtfully keeping it.
+
+"We press our half-frozen cheeks together, as red as wine-sap apples,
+and grope for each other's hand through our big lamb's-wool mittens,
+and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes.  One
+evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside
+the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle.  When I started to
+enter she seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the
+countersign.
+
+"Love, captain," I said, "If it be not that, slay me at your feet!"
+
+She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck.
+
+"It is 'Peace,'" she said.  "But I desert to the enemy."
+
+Without going to my fireside that evening I hurried on to the stable;
+for I do not relinquish to my servants the office of feeding my stock.
+
+Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the
+divine right to be kingly men, which all men share; but truly a divine
+right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in
+winter.  It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who
+dwell in the Dark Ages of their kind--dwell on and on in affection,
+submission, and trust, while their lord demands of them their labor,
+their sustenance, or their life.
+
+Of a winter's day, when these poor dumb serfs have been scattered over
+the portionless earth, how often they look towards this fortress and
+lift up their voices with cries for night to come; the horses, ruffled
+and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted
+fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing
+their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded to
+leeward of some deep-buried haystack, the exposed side of the outermost
+of them white with whirling flakes; the sheep, turning their pitiful,
+trusting eyes about them over the fields of storm in earth and sky!
+
+What joy at nightfall to gather them home to food and warmth and rest!
+If there is ever a time when I feel myself a mediaeval lord to trusty
+vassals, it is then.  Of a truth I pass entirely over the Middle Ages,
+joining my life to the most ancient dwellers of the plains, and
+becoming a simple father of flocks and herds.  When they have been duly
+stabled according to their kinds, I climb to the crib in the barn and
+create a great landslide of the fat ears that is like laughter; and
+then from every stall what a hearty, healthy chorus of cries and
+petitions responds to that laughter of the corn!  What squeals and
+grunts persuasive beyond the realms of rhetoric!  What a blowing of
+mellow horns from the cows!  And the quick nostril trumpet-call of the
+horse, how eager, how dependent, yet how commanding!  As I mount to the
+top of the pile, if I ever feel myself a royal personage it is then; I
+ascend my throne; I am king of the corn; and there is not a brute
+peasant in my domain that does not worship me as ruler of heaven and
+earth.
+
+Or I love to catch up the bundles of oats as they are thrown down from
+the loft and send them whirling through the cutting-box so fast that
+they pour into the big baskets like streams of melted gold; or,
+grasping my pitchfork, I stuff the ricks over the mangers with the rich
+aromatic hay until I am as warm as when I loaded the wagons with it at
+midsummer noons.
+
+With what sweet sounds and odors now the whole barn is filled!  How
+robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts!  In what comfort of mind I
+can turn to my own roof and store!
+
+This hour in my stable is the only one out of the twenty-four left to
+me in which my feet may cross the boundary of human life into the world
+of the other creatures; for I have gone into business in town to
+gratify Georgiana.  I think little enough of this business otherwise.
+Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual
+satisfaction in it than I feel an intellectual satisfaction in passing
+my legs through my pantaloons of a morning.  But a man can study
+nothing in nature that does not outreach his powers.
+
+If time is left, I veer off from the barn to the wood-pile, for I love
+to wield an axe, besides having a taste to cut my own wood for the
+nightly burning.  This evening I could but stop to notice how the
+turkeys in the tree tops looked like enormous black nutgalls on the
+limbs, except that the wind whisked their tails about as cheerily as
+though they were already hearth-brooms.
+
+It is well for my poor turkeys that their tails contain no moisture;
+for on a night like this they would freeze stiff, and the least
+incautious movement of a fowl in the morning would serve to crack its
+tail off--up to the pope's-nose.
+
+As I set my foot on the door-step, I went back to see whether the two
+snow-birds were in their nightly places under the roof of the
+porch--the guardian spirits of our portal.  There they were, wedged
+each into a snug corner as tightly as possible, so not to break their
+feathers, and leaving but one side exposed.  Happening to have some
+wheat in my pocket, I pitched the grains up to the projecting ledge;
+they can take their breakfast in bed when they wake in the morning.
+Little philosophers of the frost, who even in their overcoats combine
+the dark side and the white side of life into a wise and weathering
+gray--the no less fit external for a man.
+
+The thought of them to-night put me strongly in mind of a former habit
+of mine to walk under the cedar-trees at such dark winter twilights and
+listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and settled
+down.  I have no time for such pleasant ways now, they have been given
+up along with my other studies.
+
+This winter of 1851 and 1852 has been cold beyond the memory of man in
+Kentucky--the memory of the white man, which goes back some
+three-quarters of a century.  Twice the Ohio River has been frozen
+over, a sight he had never seen.  The thermometer has fallen to thirty
+degrees below zero.  Unheard of snows have blocked the two or three
+railroads we have in the State.
+
+News comes that people are walking over the ice on East River, New
+York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis bears the weight of a man a
+hundred yards from the bank.
+
+Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown,
+destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants.  It
+set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that
+to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me
+occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how
+one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild
+beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins
+of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding
+for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners.  If he had had
+opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a
+buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a
+wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer
+left shivering outside as truly as if they had all been human beings.
+
+Such a spring, with its destruction of seed-bearing and nut-hearing
+vegetation, followed by a winter that seals under ice what may have
+been produced, has spread starvation among the wild creatures.  A
+recent Sunday afternoon walk in the woods--Georgiana being away from
+home with her mother--showed me that part of the earth's surface rolled
+out as a vast white chart, on which were traced the desperate travels
+of the snow-walkers in search of food.  Squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit,
+weasel, mouse, mink, fox--their tracks crossed and recrossed, wound in
+and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful
+and pitiful to behold.  Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the
+field.  At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove--starved at the
+brink of plenty.  Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip
+and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus
+at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I
+buried my vegetables.  I told Georgiana:
+
+"They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets
+out what we need.  Think of it--a whole neighborhood of rabbits
+hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible
+leaf."  Once that night I turned in bed, restless.  Georgiana did the
+same.
+
+"Are you awake?" she said, softly.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+"Are you thinking about the rabbits?"
+
+"Yes; are you?"
+
+"What do you suppose they think about us?"
+
+"I'd rather not know."
+
+
+Georgiana tells me that the birds in unusual numbers are wintering
+among the trees, driven to us with the boldness of despair.  God and
+nature have forgotten them; they have nothing to choose between but
+death and man.  She has taken my place as their almoner and nightly
+renders me an account of what she has done.  This winter gives her a
+great chance and she adorns it.  It seems that never before were so
+many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never
+mentioned between us, unconsciously she dwells upon these in her talk,
+and plainly favors them in her affection for the sake of the past.
+There are many stories I could relate to show how simple and beautiful
+is this whole aspect of her nature.
+
+A little thing happened to-night.
+
+Towards ten o'clock she brought my hat, overcoat, overshoes, mittens,
+comforter.
+
+"Put them on," she said, mysteriously.
+
+She also got ready, separating herself from me by so many clothes that
+I could almost have felt myself entitled to a divorce.
+
+It was like day out-of-doors with the moon shining on the snow.  We
+crept towards the garden, screened behind out-buildings.  When we
+reached the fence, we looked through towards the white pyramids.  All
+that part of the ground was alive with rabbits.  Georgiana had spread
+for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar's feast.  It had been done
+to please me, I knew, and out of a certain playfulness of her own; out
+there are other charities of hers, which she thinks known only to
+herself, that show as well the divine drift of her thoughtfulness.
+
+She is asleep now--for the sake of the Secret.  After she had gone to
+bed, what with the spectacle of the rabbits and what with our talk
+beforehand of the many cardinals in the cedars, my thoughts began to
+run freshly on old subjects, and, unlocking my bureau, I got out my
+notes and drawings for the work on Kentucky birds.  Georgiana does not
+know that they exist; she never shall.  With what authority those
+studies call me still, as with a trumpet from the skies! and I know
+that trumpet will sound on till my ears are past hearing.  Sometimes I
+look upon myself as a man who has had two hearts; one lies buried in
+the woods, and the other sits at the fireside thinking of it.  But
+sleep on, Georgiana--mother that is to be.  The dreams of your life
+shall never be disturbed by the old dreams of mine.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The population of this town on yesterday was seven thousand nine
+hundred and twenty; today it is seven thousand, nine hundred and
+twenty-_one_.  The inhabitants of the globe are enriched by the same
+stupendous unit; the solar system must adjust itself to new laws of
+equilibrium; the choir of angels is sweetened by the advent of another
+musician.  During the night Georgiana bore a son--not during the night,
+but at dawn, and amid such singing of birds that every tree in the yard
+became a dew-hung belfry of chimes, ringing a welcome to the heir of
+this old house and of these old trees--to the dispenser of seed during
+winters to come--to the proprietor of a whole race of seed-scatterers
+as long as nature shall be harsh and seasons shall return.
+
+I had already bought the largest family Bible in the town as a
+repository for his name, Adam Cobb Moss, which in clear euphony is most
+fit to be enrolled among the sweetly sounding vocables of the Hebrew
+children.  The page for the registration of later births in my family
+is so large and the lines ruled across it are so many that I am deeply
+mortified over this solitary entry at the top.  But surely Georgiana
+and I would have to live far past the ages of Abraham and Sarah to fill
+it with the requisite wealth of offspring, beginning as we do, and
+being without divine assistance.  When the name of our eldest-born is
+inscribed in this Bible, not far away will be found a scene in the home
+of his first parents, Georgiana and I being only the last of these, and
+giving, as it were, merely the finishing Kentucky touch to his Jewish
+origin.
+
+But I gambol in spirit like a hawk in the air.  Let me hood myself with
+parental cares: I have been a sire for half a day.
+
+I am speechless before the stupendous wisdom of my son in view of his
+stupendous ignorance.  Already he lectures to the old people about the
+house on the perfect conduct of life, and the only preparation that he
+requires for his lectures is a few drops of milk.  By means of these,
+and without any knowledge of anatomy, he will show us, for instance,
+what it is to be master of the science of vital functions.  When he
+regards it necessary to do anything, he does it instantly and
+perfectly, and the world may take the consequences and the result.  He
+forthwith addresses himself to fresh comfort and new enterprises for
+self-development.  Beyond what is vital he refuses to go; things that
+do not concern him he lets alone.  He has no cares beyond his needs;
+all space to him is what he can fill, all time his instant of action.
+He does not know where he came from, what he is, why here, whither
+bound; nor does he ask.
+
+My heart aches helplessly for him when he shall have become a man and
+have grown less wise: when he shall find it necessary to act for
+himself and shall yet be troubled by what his companions may think;
+when he shall no longer live within the fortress of the vital, but take
+up his wandering abode with the husks and swine; when he shall no
+longer let the world pass by him with heed only as there is need, but
+weary himself to better the unchangeable; when space shall not be some
+quiet nook of the world large enough for the cradle of his life, but
+the illimitable void filled with floating spheres, out upon the myriads
+of which, with his poor, puzzled, human eyes, he will pitifully gaze;
+when time shall not be his instant of action, but two eternities, past
+and future, along the baffling walls of which he will lead his groping
+faith; and when the questioning of his stoutest years shall be: Whence
+came I?  And what am I?  Why here for a little while?  Where to be
+hereafter?  A swimmer is drowned by a wave originating in the moon; a
+traveller is struck down by a bolt originating in a cloud; a workman is
+overcome by the heat originating in the sun; and so, perhaps, the end
+will come to him through his solitary struggle with the great powers of
+the universe that perpetually reach him, but remain forever beyond his
+reach.  If I could put forth one protecting prayer that would cover all
+his years, it would be that through life he continue as wise as the day
+he was born.
+
+
+The third of June once more.  Rain fell all yesterday, all last night.
+This morning earth and sky are dark and chill.  The plants are bowed
+down, and no wind releases them from their burden of large white drops.
+About the yard the red-rose bushes fall away from the fences, the
+lilacs stand with their purple clusters hanging down as heavily as
+clusters of purple grapes.  I hear the young orioles calling drearily
+from wet nests under dripping boughs.  A plaintive piping of lost
+little chickens comes from the long grass.
+
+How unlike the day is to the third of June two years ago.  I was in the
+strawberry bed that crystalline morning; Georgiana came to the window,
+and I beheld her for the first time.  How unlike the same day one year
+back.  Again I was in the strawberry bed, again Georgiana came to
+window and spoke to me as before.  This morning as I tipped into her
+room where she lay in bed, she turned her face to me on the pillow, and
+for the third time she said, fondly;
+
+"Old man, are you the gardener?"
+
+The sky being so blanketed with cloud, although the shutters were open
+only a faint gray light filled the room.  It was the first day that she
+had been well enough to have it done; but now the bed in which
+Georgiana lay was spread with the most beautiful draperies of white;
+the pillows were rich with needle-work and lace, and for the first time
+she had put on the badge of her new dignity, a little white cap of
+ribbons and lace, the long wide streamers of which, edged with lace,
+lay out upon the counterpane like bauds of the most delicate frost.
+The fingers of one hand rested lightly on the child beside her, as
+though she were counting the pulse of its oncoming life.  Out in the
+yard the lilies of the valley, slipping out of their cool sheaths of
+green leaves, were not more white, more fresh.  And surely Georgiana's
+gayety is the unconquerable gayety of the world, the youthfulness of
+youth immortal.
+
+I went over to her with the strange new awe I feel at my union with the
+young mother, where hitherto there has but been a union with the woman
+I love.  She stretched out her hands to me, almost hidden under the
+lace of her sleeves, and drew my face down against hers, as she said in
+my ear,
+
+"_Now_ you are the old Adam!"
+
+When she released me, she bent over the child and added, reproachfully,
+
+"You haven't paid the least attention to the baby yet."
+
+"I haven't noticed that the baby has bestowed the least attention upon
+me.  He is the youngest."
+
+"He is the guest of the house!  It is your duty to speak to him first."
+
+"He doesn't act like a guest in my house.  He behaves as though he
+owned it.  I'm nobody since he arrived--not even his body-servant."
+
+Georgiana, who was still bending over the child, glanced up with a look
+of confidential, whimsical distress.
+
+"How could anything so old be born so young!"
+
+"He will look younger as he gets older," I replied.  "And he will not
+be the first bachelor to do that.  At present this youngster is an
+invaluable human document in too large an envelope; that's all."
+
+Georgiana, with a swift, protecting movement, leaned nearer to the
+child, and spoke to him:
+
+"It's your house; tell him to leave the room for his impertinence."
+
+"He may have the house, since it's his," I replied.  "But there is one
+thing I'll not stand; if he ever comes between me and you, he'll have
+to go; I'll present him to Mrs. Walters."
+
+I was not aware of the expression with which I stood looking down upon
+my son, but Georgiana must have noticed it.
+
+"And what if he supplants me some day?" she asked, suddenly serious,
+and with an old fear reviving.
+
+"Oh, Georgiana!" I cried, kneeling by the bedside and putting my arms
+around her, "you know that as long as we are in this world I am your
+lover."
+
+"No longer?" she whispered, drawing me closer.
+
+"Through eternity!"
+
+By-and-by I went out to the strawberry-bed.  The season was too
+backward.  None were turning.  With bitter disappointment I searched
+the cold, wet leaves, bending them apart for the sight of as much as
+one scarlet lobe, that I might take it in to her if only for
+remembrance of the day.  At last I gathered a few perfect leaves and
+blossoms, and presented them to her in silence on a plate with a waiter
+and napkin.
+
+She rewarded me with a laugh, and lifted from the plate a spray of
+blossoms.
+
+"They will be ripe by the time I am well," she said, the sunlight of
+memory coming out upon her face.  Then having touched the wet blossoms
+with her finger-tips, she dropped them quickly back into the plate.
+
+"How cold they are!" she said, as a shiver ran through her.  At the
+same time she looked quickly at me, her eyes grown dark with dread.
+
+I set the plate hastily down, and she put her hands in mine to warm
+them.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A month has gone by since Georgiana passed away.
+
+To-day, for the first time, I went back to the woods.  It was pleasant
+to be surrounded again by the ever-living earth that feels no loss and
+has no memory; that was sere yesterday, is green to-day, will be sere
+again to-morrow, then green once more; that pauses not for wounds and
+wrecks, nor lingers over death and change; but onward, ever onward,
+along the groove of law, passes from its red origin in universal flame
+to its white end in universal snow.
+
+And yet, as I approached the edge of the forest, it was as though an
+invisible company of influences came gently forth to meet me and sought
+to draw me back into their old friendship.  I found myself stroking the
+trunks of the trees as I would throw my arm around the shoulders of a
+tried comrade; I drew down the branches and plunged my face into the
+new leaves as into a tonic stream.
+
+Yesterday a wind storm swept this neighborhood.  Later, deep in the
+woods, I came upon an elm that had been struck by a bolt at the top.
+Nearly half the trunk had been torn away; and one huge limb lay across
+my path.
+
+As I stood looking at it, the single note of a bird fell on my
+ear--always the same note, low, quiet, regular, devoid of feeling, as
+though the bird had been stunned and were trying to say: _What can I
+do_?  _What can I do_?  _What can I do_?
+
+I knew what that note meant.  It was the note with which a bird now and
+then lingers around the scene of the central tragedy of its life.
+
+After a long search I found the nest, crushed against the ground under
+the huge limb, and a few feet from it, in the act of trying to escape,
+the female.  The male, sitting meantime on the end of a bough near by,
+watched me incuriously, and with no change in that quiet, regular,
+careless note--he knew only too well that she was past my harming.  The
+plan for his life had reached an end in early summer.
+
+I sat down near him for a while, thinking of the universal tragedy of
+the nest.
+
+It was the second time to-day that this divine wastage in nature had
+forced itself on my thought, and this morning the spectacle was on a
+scale of tragic greatness beyond anything that has ever touched human
+life in this part of the country: Mr. Clay was buried amid the long sad
+blare of music, the tolling of bells, the roll of drums, the boom of
+cannon, and the grief of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
+people--a vast and solemn pageant, yet as nothing to the multitude that
+will attend afar.  For him this day the flags of nations will fly at
+half-mast; and the truly great men of the world, wherever the tidings
+may reach them of his passing, will stand awe-stricken that one of
+their superhuman company has been too soon withdrawn.
+
+Too soon withdrawn!  Therein is the tragedy of the nest, the wastage of
+the divine, the law of loss, whose reign on earth is unending, but
+whose right to reign no creature, brute or human, ever acknowledges.
+
+The death of Mr. Clay is one of the many things that are happening to
+change all that made up my life with Georgiana.  She was a true
+hero-worshipper, and she worshipped him.  I no less.  Now that he is
+dead, I feel as much lonelier as a soldier feels whose chosen tent-mate
+and whose general have fallen on the field together.
+
+As I turned, away from the overcrowded town this afternoon towards the
+woods and was confronted by the wreck of the storm, my thoughts being
+yet full of Mr. Clay, of his enemies and disappointment, there rose
+before my mind a scene such as Audubon may once have witnessed:
+
+The light of day is dying over the forests of the upper Mississippi.
+The silence of high space falls upon the vast stream.  On a
+thunder-blasted tree-top near the western bank sits a lone, stern
+figure waiting for its lordliest prey--the eagle waiting for the swan.
+Long the stillness continues among the rocks, the tree-tops, and above
+the river.  But far away in the north a white shape is floating nearer.
+At last it comes into sight, flying heavily, for it is already weary,
+being already wounded.  The next moment the cry of its coming is heard
+echoing onward and downward upon the silent woods.  Instantly the
+mighty watcher on the summit is alert and tense; and as the great snowy
+image of the swan floats by, in mid-air and midway of the broad expanse
+of water, he meets it.  No battle is fought up there--the two are not
+well matched; and thus, separated from all that is little and
+struggling far above all that is low, with the daylight dying on his
+spotlessness, the swan receives the blow in its heart.
+
+So came Death to the great Commoner.
+
+
+Oh, Georgiana!  I do not think of Death as ever having come to you.  I
+think of you as some strangely beautiful white being that one day rose
+out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler, and uttering
+your note of divine farewell, spread your wings towards the open sea of
+eternity, there to await my coming.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+It is a year and four months since Georgiana left me, and now
+everything goes on much as it did before she came.  The family have
+moved back to their home in Henderson, returning like a little company
+of travellers who have lost their guide.  Sylvia has already married;
+her brother writes me that he is soon to be; the mother visits me and
+my child, yearningly, but seldom, on account of her delicate health;
+and thus our lives grow always more apart.  None take their places, the
+house having passed to people with whom, beyond all neighborly
+civilities, I have naught to do.  Nowadays as I stroll around my garden
+with my little boy in my arms strange faces look down upon us out of
+Georgiana's window.
+
+And I have long since gone back to nature.
+
+When the harvest has been gathered from our strong, true land, a growth
+comes on which late in the year causes the earth to regain somewhat of
+its old greenness.  New blades spring up in the stubble of the wheat;
+the beeless clover runs and blossoms; far and wide over the meadows
+flows the tufted billows of the grass; and in the woods the oak-tree
+drops the purple and brown of his leaf and mast upon the verdure of
+June.  Everywhere a second spring puts forth between summer gone and
+winter nearing.  It is the overflow of plenty beyond the filling of the
+barns.  It is a wave of life following quickly upon the one that broke
+bountifully at our feet.  It is nature's refusal to be once reaped and
+so to end.
+
+The math: then the aftermath.
+
+Upon the Kentucky landscape during these October days there lies this
+later youth of the year, calm, deep, vigorous.  And as I spend much
+time in it for the fine, fresh work it brings to hand and thought, I
+feel that in my way I am part of it, that I can match the aftermath of
+nature with the aftermath of my life.  The Harvester passed over my
+fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the winter's edge.
+
+The thought has now come into my mind that I shall lay aside these
+pages for my son to ponder if he should ever grow old enough to value
+what he reads.  They will give him some account of how his father and
+mother met in the old time, of their courting days, of their happy life
+together.  And since it becomes more probable that there will be a war,
+and that I might not be living to speak to him of his mother in ways
+not written here, I shall set down one thing about her which I pray he
+may take well to heart.  He ought to know and to remember this: that
+his life was the price of hers; she was extinguished that he might
+shine, and he owes it to her that the flame of his torch be as white as
+the altar's from which it was kindled.
+
+Perhaps the most remarkable thing, then, in the character of his
+mother--which, please God, he will have, or, getting all things else,
+he can never be a gentleman--was honor.  It shone from her countenance,
+it ran like melody in her voice, it made her eyes the most beautiful in
+expression that I have ever seen, it enveloped her person and demeanor
+with a spiritual grace.  Honor in what are called the little things of
+life, honor not as women commonly understand it, but as the best of men
+understand it--that his mother had.  It was the crystalline, unshakable
+rock upon which the somewhat fragile and never to be completed
+structure of her life was reared.
+
+If he be anything of a philosopher, he may reason that this trait must
+have made his mother too serious and too hard.  Let him think again.
+It was the very core of soundness in her that kept her gay and sweet.
+I have often likened her mind to the sky in its power of changeableness
+from radiant joyousness to sober calm; but oftenest it was like the
+vault of April, whose drops quicken what they fall upon; and she was of
+a soft-heartedness that ruled her absolutely--but only to the
+unyielding edge of honor.  Yet she did not escape this charge of being
+both hard and serious upon the part of men and women who were used to
+the laxness of small misdemeanors, and felt ill at ease before the
+terrifying truth that she was a lady.
+
+Beyond this single trait of hers--which, if it please God that he
+inherit it, may he keep though he lose everything else--I set nothing
+further down for his remembrance, since naught could come of my
+writing.  By words I could no more give him an idea of what his mother
+was than I could point him to a few measures of wheat and bid him
+behold a living harvest.
+
+
+Upon these fields of cool October greenness there risen out of the
+earth a low, sturdy weed.  Upon the top of this weed small white
+blossoms open as still as stars of frost.  Upon these blossoms lies a
+fragrance so pure and wholesome that the searching sense is never
+cloyed, never satisfied.  Years after the blossoms are dried and yellow
+and the leaves withered and gone, this wholesome fragrance lasts.  The
+common people, who often put their hopes into their names, call it
+life-everlasting.  Sometimes they make themselves pillows of it for its
+virtue of bringing a quiet sleep.
+
+This plant is blooming out now, and nightly as I wend homeward I pluck
+a handful of it, gathering along with its life the tranquil sunshine,
+the autumnal notes of the cardinal passing to better lands, and all the
+healthful influences of the fields.  I shall make me a tribute of it to
+the memory of her undying sweetness.
+
+If God wills, when I fall asleep for good I shall lay my head beside
+hers on the bosom of the Life Everlasting.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13554 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13554 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13554)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Aftermath, by James Lane Allen
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Aftermath
+
+Author: James Lane Allen
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2004  [eBook #13554]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFTERMATH***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+AFTERMATH
+
+Part Second of _A Kentucky Cardinal_
+
+by
+
+JAMES LAKE ALLEN
+
+Author of _The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky_, _Flute and Violin_, etc.
+
+1899
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+I was happily at work this morning among my butterbeans--a vegetable of
+solid merit and of a far greater suitableness to my palate than such
+bovine watery growths as the squash and the beet.  Georgiana came to
+her garden window and stood watching me.
+
+"You work those butterbeans as though you loved _them_," she said,
+scornfully.
+
+"I do love them.  I love all vines."
+
+"Are you cultivating them as vines or as vegetables?"
+
+"It makes no difference to nature."
+
+"Do you expect me to be a vine when we are married?"
+
+"I hope you'll not turn out a mere vegetable.  How should you like to
+be my Virginia-creeper?"
+
+"And what would you be?"
+
+"Well, what would you like?  A sort of honeysuckle frame?"
+
+"Oh, anything!  Only support me and give me plenty of room to bloom."
+
+I do not always reply to Georgiana, though I always could if I chose.
+Whenever I remain silent about anything she changes the subject.
+
+"Did you know that Sylvia once wrote a poem on a vegetable?"
+
+"I did not."
+
+"You don't speak as though you cared."
+
+"You must know how deeply interested I am."
+
+"Then why don't you ask to see the poem?"
+
+"Was it on butterbeans?"
+
+"The idea!  Sylvia has better taste."
+
+"I suppose I'd better look into this poem."
+
+"You are not to laugh at it!"
+
+"I shall weep."
+
+"No; you are not to weep.  Promise."
+
+"What am I to promise?"
+
+"That you will read it unmoved."
+
+"I do promise--solemnly, cheerfully."
+
+"Then come and get it."
+
+I went over and stood under the window.  Georgiana soon returned and
+dropped down to me a piece of writing-paper.
+
+"Sylvia wrote it before she began to think about the boys."
+
+"It must be a very early poem."
+
+"It is; and this is the only copy; please don't lose it."
+
+"Then I think you ought to take it back at once.  Let me beg of you not
+to risk it--"  But she was gone; and I turned to my arbor and sat down
+to read Sylvia's poem, which I found to be inscribed to "The Potato,"
+and to run as follows:
+
+
+  "What on this wide earth
+    That is made or does by nature grow
+  Is more homely yet more beautiful
+    Than the useful Potato?
+
+  "What would this world full of people do,
+    Rich and poor, high and low,
+  Were it not for this little-thought-of
+    But very necessary Potato?
+
+  "True, 'tis homely to look on,
+    Nothing pretty even in its blow,
+  But it will bear acquaintance,
+    This useful Potato.
+
+  "For when it is cooked and opened
+    It's so white and mellow,
+  You forget it ever was homely,
+    This useful Potato.
+
+  "On the whole it is a very plain plant,
+    Makes no conspicuous show,
+  But the internal appearance is lovely
+    Of the unostentatious Potato.
+
+  "On the land or on the sea,
+    Wherever we may go,
+  We are always glad to welcome
+    The sound Potato."[*]
+
+[*]The elder Miss Cobb was wrong in thinking this poem Sylvia's.  It
+was extant at the time over the signature of another writer, whose
+authorship is not known to have been questioned.  Miss Sylvia perhaps
+copied it out of admiration, or as a model for her own use.
+
+    J.L.A.
+
+
+In the afternoon I was cutting stakes at the wood-pile for my
+butterbeans, and a bright idea struck me.  During my engagement to
+Georgiana I cannot always be darting in and out of Mrs. Cobb's front
+door like a swallow through a barn.  Neither can I talk freely to
+Georgiana--with her up at the window and me down on the ground--when I
+wish to breathe into her ear the things that I must utter or die.
+Besides, the sewing-girl whom Georgiana has engaged is nearly always
+there.  So that as I was in the act of trimming a long slender stick,
+it occurred to me that I might make use of this to elevate any little
+notes that I might wish to write over the garden fence up to
+Georgiana's window.
+
+I was greatly taken with the thought, and, dropping my hand-axe,
+hurried into the house and wrote a note to her at once, which I
+thereupon tied to the end of the pole by a short string.  But as I
+started for the garden this arrangement looked too much like catching
+Georgiana with a bait.  Therefore, happening to remember, I stopped at
+my tool-house, where I keep a little of everything, and took from a peg
+a fine old specimen of a goldfinch's nest.  This I fastened to the end
+of the pole, and hiding my note in it, now felt better satisfied.  No
+one but Georgiana herself would ever be able to tell what it was that I
+might wish to lift up to her at any time; and in case of its being not
+a note, but a plum--a berry--a peach--it would be as safe as it was
+unseen.  This old house of a pair of goldfinches would thus become the
+home of our fledgling hopes: every day a new brood of vows would take
+flight across its rim into our bosoms.
+
+Watching my chance during the afternoon, when the sewing-girl was not
+there, I rushed over and pushed the stick up to the window.
+
+"Georgiana," I called out, "feel in the nest!"
+
+She hurried to the window with her sewing in her arms.  The nest swayed
+to and fro on a level with her nose.
+
+"What is it?" she cried, drawing back with extreme distaste.
+
+"You feel in it!" I repeated.
+
+"I don't wish to feel in it," she said.  "Take it away!"
+
+"There's a young dove in it," I persisted--"a young cooer."
+
+"I don't wish any young cooers," she said, with a grimace.
+
+Seeing that she was not of my mind, I added, pleadingly; "It's a note
+from me, Georgiana!  This is going to be our little private
+post-office!"  Georgiana sank back into her chair.  She reappeared with
+the flush of apple-blossoms and her lashes wet with tears of laughter.
+But I do not think that she looked at me unkindly.  "Our little private
+post-office," I persisted, confidingly.
+
+"How many more little private things are we going to have?" she
+inquired, plaintively.
+
+"I can't wait here forever," I said.  "This is growing weather; I might
+sprout."
+
+"A dry stick will not," said Georgiana, simply, and went back to her
+sewing.
+
+I took the hint, and propped the pole against the house under the
+window.  Later, when I took it down, my note was gone.
+
+I have set the pole under Georgiana's window several times within the
+last two or three days, It looks like a little dip-net, high and dry in
+the air; but so far as I can see with my unaided eye, it has caught
+nothing so large as a gnat.  It has attracted no end of attention from
+the birds of the neighborhood, however, who never saw a goldfinch's
+nest swung to the end of a leafless pole and placed where it could be
+so exactly reached by the human hand.  In particular it has fallen
+under the notice of a pair of wrens, which are like women, in that they
+usually have some secret business behind their curiosity.  The business
+in this case is the matter of their own nest, which they have located
+in a broken horse-collar in my saddle-house.  At such seasons they are
+alert for appropriating building materials that may have been fetched
+to hand by other birds; and they have already abstracted a piece of
+candle-wick from the bottom of my post-office.
+
+Georgiana has been chilly towards me for two days, and I think is doing
+her best not to freeze up altogether.  I have racked my brain to know
+why; but I fear that my brain is not of the sort to discover what is
+the matter with a woman when nothing really is the matter.  Moreover,
+as I am now engaged to Georgiana, I have thought it better that she
+should begin to bring her explanations to me--the steady sun that will
+melt all her uncertain icicles.
+
+At last this morning she remarked, but very carelessly, "You didn't
+answer my note."
+
+"What note, Georgiana?" I asked, thunderstruck.
+
+She gave me such a look.
+
+"Didn't you get the note I put into that--into that--"  Her face grew
+pink with vexation and disgust.
+
+"Did you put a note into the--into the--" I could not have spoken the
+word just then.
+
+I retired to my arbor, where I sat for half an hour with my head in my
+hands.  What could have become of Georgiana's note?  A hand might have
+filched it; unlikely.  A gust of wind have whisked it out; impossible.
+I debated and rejected every hypothesis to the last one.  Acting upon
+this, I walked straight to the saddle-house, and in a dark corner
+peered at the nest of the wrens.  A speck of white paper was visible
+among the sticks and shavings.  I tore the nest out and shook it to
+pieces.  How those wrens did rage!  The note was so torn and mudded
+that I could not read it.  But suppose a jay had carried it to the high
+crotch of some locust!  I ran joyfully back to the window.
+
+"I've found it, Georgiana!" I called out.
+
+She appeared, looking relieved, but not exactly forgiving.
+
+"Where!"
+
+My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth.
+
+"Where did you find it?" she repeated, imperiously.
+
+"What do you want to know for?" I said, savagely.
+
+"Let me see it!" she demanded.
+
+My clasp on it suddenly tightened.
+
+"Let me see it!" she repeated, with genuine fire.
+
+"What do you want to see it for?" I said.
+
+She turned away.
+
+"Here it is," I said, and held it up.
+
+She looked at it a long time, and her brows arched.
+
+"Did the pigs get it?"
+
+"The wrens.  It was merely a change of post-office."
+
+"I'd as well write the next one to them," she said, "since they get the
+letters."
+
+Georgiana was well aware that she slipped the note into the nest when
+they were looking and I was not; but women--_all_ women--now and then
+hold a man responsible for what they have done themselves.  Sylvia, for
+instance.  She grew peevish with me the other day because my garden
+failed to furnish the particular flowers that would have assuaged her
+whim.  And yet for days Sylvia has been helping herself with such lack
+of stint that the poor clipped and mangled bushes look at me as I pass
+sympathetically by them, and say, "If you don't keep her away, we'd as
+well be weeds!"
+
+The truth is that Sylvia's rampant session in school, involving the
+passage of the Greatest Common Divisor--far more dreadful than the
+passage of the Beresina--her blue rosettes at the recent Commencement,
+and the prospect of a long vacation, together with further miscellany
+appertaining to her age and sex, have strung the chords of her
+sentimental being up to the highest pitch.  Feeling herself to be
+naturally a good instrument and now perfectly in tune, Sylvia requires
+that she shall be continually played upon--if not by one person, then
+by another.  Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry
+straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies;
+and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at
+the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end.
+The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to
+supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the
+teeth of all known estimates of mortality.  How unlike Georgiana!
+
+I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when
+they are rarest.  Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a
+blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing
+high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its
+shining leaves.  But what beauty, purity, freshness!  You must hunt to
+find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it
+all--there is not a trace left for another.  But Sylvia!  I am afraid
+Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public
+pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape.
+
+I caught some one taking a grape the other evening--a sort of green
+grape.  Sylvia has been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her
+escort on the evening of her Commencement--him of the duck trousers and
+webbed feet.  On one occasion I have observed her walking along the
+borders of my garden in his company and have overheard her telling him
+that _he_ could come in and get flowers whenever he wished.  I wish I
+might catch him once.
+
+To cap the climax, after twilight on the evening in question, I
+strolled out to my arbor for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana.
+Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling! deep in the
+shadow of the vines.  He had his arm around her and was kissing her.
+
+"Upon my honor!" I said; and striding over to him I thrust my hand
+under his coattails, gripped him by the seat of his ducks, dragged him
+head downward to the front fence and dropped him out into the street.
+
+"Let me catch _you_ in here kissing anybody again!" I said.
+
+He had bit me viciously on one of my calves--which are sizable--as I
+had dragged him along; so that, I had been forced to stoop down and
+twist him loose by screwing the end of his spongy nose.  I met him on
+the street early the next morning, and it wore the hue of a wild plum
+in its ripeness.  I tapped it.
+
+"Only three persons know of your misbehavior last night," I said.  "If
+you ever breathe it to a soul that you soiled that child by your touch,
+the next time I get hold of you it will not be your nose: it will be
+your neck!"
+
+My mortification at Sylvia's laxness was so keen that I should have
+forborne returning to the arbor had I not felt assured that she must
+have escaped to the house through modesty and sheer shame.  But she had
+not budged.
+
+"I blush for you, Sylvia!" I exclaimed.  "I know all about that fellow!
+He shouldn't kiss--my old cat!"
+
+"I don't see what _you_ have to do with it!" said Sylvia, placidly.
+"And I have waited to tell you that I hope you will never interrupt me
+again when I am engaged in entertaining a young gentleman."
+
+"Sylvia, my dear child!" I said, gravely, sitting down beside her.
+"How old are you?"
+
+"I am of the proper age to manage my own affairs," said Sylvia, "with
+the assistance of my immediate family."
+
+"Well, I don't think you are," I replied.  "And since your brother is
+at West Point, there is one thing that I am going to take the liberty
+of telling you, which the other members of your family may not fully
+understand.  If you were younger, Sylvia, you might do a good deal of
+this and not be hurt by it; or you might not be hurt by it if you were
+a good deal older; but at your age it is terrible; in time it will
+affect your character."
+
+"How old must I be?" said Sylvia, wickedly.
+
+"Well, in your case," I replied, warmly, a little nettled by her tone,
+"you'd better abstain altogether."
+
+"And in your case?" said Sylvia.
+
+"You never mind my case!" I retorted.
+
+"But I do mind it when I suffer by it," said Sylvia.  "I do mind it if
+it's going to affect my character!"
+
+"You know very well, Sylvia," I replied, "that I never kissed you but
+three times, and then as a brother."
+
+"I do not wish any one but my brother to kiss me in that way," said
+Sylvia, with a pout of contempt.
+
+It seemed to me that this was a fitting time to guide Sylvia's powers
+of discrimination as to the way she should act with indifferent
+men--and as to the way that different men would try to act with her.
+
+I had been talking to her in a low tone I do not know how long.  Her
+ill-nature had quickly vanished; she was, in her way, provoking,
+charming.  I was sitting close to her.  The moonlight played upon her
+daring, wilful face through the leaves of the grape-vines.  It was
+unpremeditated; my nature was, most probably, unstrung at the instant
+by ungratified longings for Georgiana; but suddenly I bent down and
+kissed her.
+
+Instantly both Sylvia and I started from the seat.  How long Georgiana
+had been standing in the entrance to the arbor I do not know.  She may
+that instant have come.  But there she was, dressed in white--pure,
+majestic, with the moon shining behind her, and shedding about her the
+radiance of a heavenly veil.
+
+"Come, Sylvia," she said, with perfect sweetness; and, bidding me
+good-night with the same gentlewoman's calm, she placed her arm about
+the child's waist, and the two sisters passed slowly and silently out
+of my garden.
+
+At that moment, if I could have squeezed myself into the little
+screech-owl perched in a corner of the arbor, I would gladly have crept
+into the hollow of an oak and closed my eyes.  Still, how was I to
+foresee what I should do?  A man's conversation may be his own; his
+conduct may vibrate with the extinct movements of his ancestors.
+
+Georgiana's behavior then was merely the forerunner of larger marvels.
+For next morning I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman's inability
+to understand Man and Man's inability to understand Himself, and set it
+under her window.  It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch's
+nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich
+egg.  All day I waited with a heart as silent as a great clock run
+down; my system of philosophy swung dead in the air.  To my tortured
+vision as I eyed it secretly from my porch, it took on the semblance of
+one of Sylvia's poetical potatoes, and I found myself urging in its
+behalf Sylvia's fondest epithets: "how homely, yet how beautiful,"
+"little thought of, but very necessary," "unostentatious, but of lovely
+internal appearance."
+
+Towards sunset I took it sadly down.  On top of the nest lay
+Georgiana's old scarlet emery-bag stuck full of her needles!  She had
+divined what all the writing meant and would not have it.  Instead she
+sent me this emblem not only of her forgiveness but of her surrender.
+When a man expects a woman to scold him and she does not, he either
+gets to be a little afraid of her morally or he wants to take her in
+his arms.  Henceforth, if Georgiana were removed to another planet, I
+would rather worship her there simply as my evening or morning star
+than coexist with any earthly woman.  One thought besets me: did she
+realize that perhaps she herself was the cause of my misdemeanors with
+Sylvia?  Has she the penetration to discover that when a woman is
+engaged to a man she cannot deny him all things except at her own peril?
+
+This proof of her high-mindedness and the enchanting glimpses of her
+face that she has vouchsafed me since, goaded me yesterday morning to
+despatch a reckless note: "Will you come to the arbor for a little
+while tonight?  I have never dared ask this before, but you know how I
+have desired it.  It is so much more private there.  Write on the back
+of this paper one word, 'Yes.'  There is a pencil in the nest."
+
+The shutters were nearly closed, but I caught sight of the curve of a
+shoulder and the movement of a busy hand.  As I pushed the note up I
+said:
+
+"Read it at once.  I am waiting."
+
+A hand came out and took in the note, then the pencil; then note and
+pencil were put back.  On the former was written, "Yes."
+
+I think I must have done a dozen things in five minutes, and then I
+started aimlessly off to town.  On the way I met Georgiana.
+
+"Good God, Georgiana!" I exclaimed.  "You _here_!"
+
+"Where else?" said she.  "And why not?"
+
+"I thought I just saw you at the window--"  And then my awful soul
+within me said: "H-sh-sh-sh!  Not a word of this to a human being!"
+
+After supper last night I called old Jack and Dilsy into the garden,
+and led them around it, giving orders; thence to the arbor, where I
+bade them sit down.
+
+In the year of 1805 Mr. Jefferson, as president of the Philosophical
+Society, ordered excavations to be made at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky
+for the skeletons of extinct animals.  My father, who was interested in
+antiquities, had had much correspondence with Mr. Jefferson in regard
+to earlier discoveries at that spot; and when this expedition was
+undertaken he formed one of the explorers.  Jack, his servant, at that
+time a strapping young fellow, had been taken along as one of the
+negroes who were to do the digging.
+
+The wonders then unearthed have always been the greenest spot in old
+Jack's memory; so that they have been growing larger ever since.
+Whenever I wish to hear him discourse with the dogmatic bluster of a
+sage who had original information as to geological times, I set Jack to
+talking about the bones of the Mastodon-Maximus, the name of which he
+gets from me, with a puzzled shake of his head, about regularly once a
+year.  It is my private opinion that old Jack believes Big Bone Lick to
+have been the place where the Ark settled, and these to have been the
+bones of animals that had been swept out by Noah on landing.
+
+Last night I had merely to ask him whether he credited the story of an
+old traveller that he had once used some ribs found there for his
+tent-poles and a tooth for his hominy beater; whereupon Dilsy,
+foreseeing what was coming, excused herself on the plea of sudden
+rheumatism and went to bed, as I wished she should.
+
+The hinges on the little private gate under Georgiana's window I keep
+rusty; this enables me to note when any one enters my garden.
+By-and-by I heard the hinges softly creak, whereupon I feigned not to
+believe what Jack was telling me; whereupon he fell into an harangue of
+such affectionate and sustained vehemence that when the hinges creaked
+again I was never able to determine.  Was ever such usage made before
+of an antediluvian monster?
+
+To-day the sewing-girl thrust out spiteful faces at me several times.
+
+She is the one that helped Georgiana last year when she was making her
+wedding-clothes to marry the West Point cousin.  God keep him safely in
+the distance, or guide him firmly to the van of war!  How does a woman
+feel when she is making her wedding-clothes for the second time and for
+another man?  I know very well how the other man feels.  Upon my urging
+Georgiana to marry me at once--nature does not recognize engagements;
+they are a device of civilization--she protested:
+
+"But I must get ready!  Think of the sewing!"
+
+"Oh, bother!" I grumbled.  "Where are all those clothes that you made
+last year?"
+
+How was I to suppose that Georgiana must have everything made over as
+part of her feeling for me?  I would not decree it otherwise; yet I
+question whether this delicacy may not impose reciprocal obligations,
+and remove from my life certain elements of abiding comfort.  What if
+it should engender a prejudice against my own time-worn
+acquaintances--the familiars of my fireside?  It might be justifiable
+sagacity in me to keep them locked up for the first year or so after
+Georgiana and I become a diune being; and, upon the whole, she should
+never know what may have been the premarital shortcomings of my
+wardrobe as respects things unseen.  No matter how well a bachelor may
+appear dressed, there is no telling what he conceals upon his person.
+I feel sure that the retrospective discovery of a ravelling would
+somehow displease Georgiana as a feature of our courtship.  Nature is
+very stringent here, very guarded, truly universal.  Invariably the
+young men of my day grow lavish in the use of unguents when they are
+preparing for natural selection; and I flatter myself that even my own
+garments--in their superficial aspects at least, and during my long
+pursuit of Georgiana--have not been very far from somewhat slightly
+ingratiating.
+
+This pursuit is now drawing to a close.  It is nearly the last of June.
+She has given me her word that she will marry me early in September.
+Two months for her to get the bridal feathers ready; two for me to
+prepare the nest.
+
+II
+
+I have forgotten nature.  I barely know that July, now nearly gone, has
+passed, sifted with sweetness and ablaze with light.  Time has swept
+on, the world run round; but I have stood motionless, abiding the hour
+of my marriage as a tree the season of its leaves.  For all that it
+looks so calm, within goes on a tremendous surging of sap against its
+moments of efflorescence.
+
+After which I pray that, not as a tree, but as a man, I may have a
+little peace.  When Georgiana confessed her love, I had supposed this
+confession to mark the end of her elusiveness.  When later on she
+presented to me the symbol of a heart pierced with needles, I had taken
+it for granted that thenceforth she would settle down into something
+like a state of prenuptial domestication, growing less like a swift and
+more like a hen.  But there is nothing gallinaceous about my Georgiana.
+I took possession of her vow and the emery-ball, not of her; the
+privilege was merely given to plant my flag-staff on the uncertain edge
+of an unknown land.  In war it sometimes becomes necessary to devastate
+a whole country in order to control a single point: I should be pleased
+to learn what portion of the earth's surface I am required to subdue
+ere I shall hold one little citadel.
+
+As for me, Georgiana requires that I shall be a good deal like an old
+rock jutting out of the quiet earth: never ruffled, never changing
+either on the surface or at heart, bearing whatever falls upon me, be
+it frost or sun, and warranted to waste away only by a sort of
+impersonal disintegration at the rate of half an inch to the thousand
+years.  Meantime she exacts for herself the privilege of dwelling near
+as the delighted cave of the winds.  The part of wisdom in me then is
+not to heed each sallying gust, but to capture the cave and drive the
+winds away.
+
+For I know in whom I have believed; I know that this myriad caprice is
+but the deepening of excitement on the verge of captivity; I know that
+on ahead lie the regions of perpetual calm--my Islands of the Blest.
+
+Georgiana does not play upon the pianoforte; or, as Mrs. Walters would
+declare, she does not perform upon the instrument.  Sylvia does; she
+performs, she executes.  There are times when she will execute a piece
+called "The Last Hope" until the neighbors are filled with despair and
+ready to stretch their heads on the block to any more merciful
+executioner.  Nor does Georgiana sing to company in the parlor.  That
+is Sylvia's gift; and upon the whole it was this unmitigated practice
+in the bosom--and in the ears--of her family that enabled Sylvia to
+shine with such vocal effulgence in the procession on the last Fourth
+of July and devote a pair of unflagging lungs to the service of her
+country.
+
+But Georgiana I have never known to sing except at her sewing and
+alone, as the way of women often is.  During a walk across the summer
+fields my foot has sometimes paused at the brink of a silvery runlet,
+and I have followed it backward in search of the spring.  It may lead
+to the edge of a dark wood; thence inward deeper and deeper;
+disappearing at last in a nook of coolness and shadow, green leaves and
+mystery.  The overheard rill of Georgiana's voice issues from inner
+depths of being that no human soul has ever visited, or perhaps will
+ever visit.  What would I not give to thread my way, bidden and alone,
+to that far region of uncaptured loveliness?
+
+Of late some of the overhead lullabies have touched me inexpressibly.
+They beat upon my ear like the musical reveries of future mother
+hood--they betoken in Georgiana's maidenhood the dreaming unrest of the
+maternal.
+
+One morning not long ago, with a sort of pitiful gayety, her song ran
+in the wise of saying how we should gather our rose-buds while we may.
+The warning could not have been addressed to me; I shall gather mine
+while I may--the unrifled rose of Georgiana's life, body and spirit.
+
+Naturally she and I have avoided the subject of the Cardinal.  But to
+the tragedy of his death was joined one circumstance of such coarse and
+brutal unconcern that it had left me not only remorseful but resentful.
+As we sat together the other evening, after one of those silences that
+fall unregarded between us, I could no longer forbear to face an
+understanding.
+
+"Georgiana," I said, "do you know what became of the redbird?"
+
+Unwittingly the color of reproach must have lain upon my words, for she
+answered quickly with yet more in hers,
+
+"I had it buried!"
+
+It was my turn to be surprised.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"I am sure.  I told them where to bury it; I showed them the very
+spot--under the cedar.  They told me they had.  Why?"
+
+I thought it better that she should learn the truth.
+
+"You know we can't trust our negroes.  They disobeyed you.  They lied
+to you; they never buried it.  They threw it on the ash-pile.  The pigs
+tore it to pieces; I saw them; they were rooting at it and tearing it
+to pieces."
+
+She had clasped her hands, and turned towards me in acute distress.
+After a while, with her face aside, she said, slowly,
+
+"And you have believed that I knew of this--that I permitted it?"
+
+"I have believed nothing.  I have waited to understand."
+
+A few minutes later she said, as if to herself,
+
+"Many a person would have been only too glad to believe it, and to
+blame me."  Then folding her hands over one of mine, she said, with
+tears in her eyes:
+
+"Promise me--promise me, Adam, until we are married, and--yes, _after_
+we are married--as long as I live, that you will never believe anything
+of me until you _know_ that it is true!"
+
+"I do promise, dear, dear, dearest one-!"  I cried, trying to draw her
+to me, but she would not permit it.  "And you?"
+
+"I shall never misunderstand," she replied, as with a flash of white
+inward light.  "I know that you can never do anything that will make me
+think the less of you."
+
+
+Since the sad, sad day on which I caused the death of the Cardinal, I
+have paid little heed to the birds.  The subject has been a sore one.
+Besides, my whole life is gradually changing under the influence of
+Georgiana, who draws me farther and farther away from nature, and
+nearer and nearer to my own kind.
+
+When, two years ago, she moved into this part of the State, I dwelt on
+the outskirts of the town and of humanity.  On the side of them lay the
+sour land of my prose; the country, nature, rolled away on the other as
+the sweet deep ocean of my poetry.  I called my neighbors my
+manifestations of prose; my doings with the townspeople, prose
+passages.  The manifestations and passages scarce made a scrimp volume.
+There was Jacob, who lived on his symptoms and died without any; there
+was and there is Mrs. Walters--may she last to the age of the eagle.
+In town, a couple of prose items of cheap quality: an old preacher who
+was willing to save my soul while my strawberries were ripe, and an old
+doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with
+others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and
+sweet-peas.  Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery,
+noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than
+succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.
+
+But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it.  I have
+become less a woodsman, more a civilian.  Unless she relents, it may
+end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the
+Legislature.  Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my
+fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come
+out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.
+
+It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my
+tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making;
+and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or
+strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are
+exerting themselves to marry.  I am more like a badger than like one of
+them; and indeed I find the image of my fate and my condition in a
+badger-like creature close at hand.
+
+For the carpenter who is at work upon bridal repairs in my house has
+the fancy not uncommon among a class hereabouts to keep a tamed
+raccoon.  He brings it with him daily, and fastens it by its chain to a
+tree in my front yard: a rough, burly, knowing fellow, loving wild
+nature, but forced to acquire the tediousness of civilization; meantime
+leading a desperately hampered life; wondering at his own teeth and
+claws, and sorely put to it to invent a decent occupation.  So am I;
+and as the raccoon paces everywhere after the carpenter, so do I in
+spirit pace everywhere after Georgiana; only his chain seems longer and
+more easily to be broken.  The restless beast enlivens his captivity by
+the keenest scrutiny of every object within his range; I too have
+busied myself with the few people that have come this way.
+
+First, early in the month, Georgiana's brother--down from West Point,
+very stately, and with his brow stern, as if for gory war.  When I
+called promptly to pay my respects, as his brother-in-law to be, he was
+sitting on the front porch surrounded by a subdued family, Georgiana
+alone remaining unawed.  He looked me over indifferently, as though I
+were a species of ancient earthworks not worth any more special
+reconnoissance, and continued his most superior remarks to his mother
+on the approaching visit of three generals.
+
+Upon leaving I invited him to join me on the morrow in a squirrel hunt
+with smooth-bores, whereupon he manifested surprise that I was
+acquainted with the use of fire-arms.  Whereupon I remarked that I
+would sometimes hit big game if it were so close that I could not miss
+it, and further urged him to have breakfast with me at a very early
+hour in order that we might reach the woods while the squirrels were at
+theirs.
+
+Going home, I knocked at the cabin where Jack and Dilsy lay snoring
+side by side with the velocity of rival saw-mills, and begged Dilsy to
+give me a bite about daybreak--coffee and corn-batter cakes--saying
+that I could get breakfast when I returned.  I shared this scant bite
+with my young soldier--to Dilsy's abject mortification, I not having
+told her of his coming.  Then we set off at a brisk pace towards a
+great forest south of the town some five miles away, where the
+squirrels had appeared and were doing great damage, being the last of a
+countless plague of them that overran northern and central Kentucky a
+year ago.
+
+On the way I dragged him through several canebrakes, a thicket of
+blackberry; kept him out all day; said not a word about dinner; avoided
+every spot where he could have gotten a swallow of water; not once sat
+down to rest; towards the middle of the afternoon told him I desired to
+take enough squirrels home to make Jack a squirrel-skin overcoat, and
+asked him to carry while I killed; loaded him with squirrels, neck,
+shoulders, breast, back, and loins, till as he moved he tottered and
+swayed like a squirrel pyramid; about sundown challenged him to what he
+had not yet had, some crack shooting, which in that light requires
+young eyesight, and barked the squirrel for him four times; later still
+snuffed the candle for him, having brought one along for the purpose;
+and then, with my step fresh, led him swiftly home.
+
+He has the blood of Georgiana in him, and stood it like a man.  But he
+was nearly dead.  He has saluted me since as though I were a murderous
+garrison intrenched on the Heights of Abraham.
+
+Then the three generals of the United States army descended in a
+body--or in three bodies; and the truth is that their three bodies
+scarce held them, they were in such a state of flesh when they reached
+Kentucky, and of being perpetually overfed while they remained.  The
+object of their joint visit under a recent act of Congress was to
+locate a military asylum for disabled soldiers; and had they stayed
+much longer they must have had themselves admitted to their own
+institution as foremost of the disabled.  Having spent some time at the
+Lower Blue Lick Springs, the proposed site--where this summer are over
+five hundred guests of our finest Southern society--they afterwards
+were drawn around with immense solidity towards Louisville, Frankfort,
+Maysville, Paris, and Lexington, being everywhere received with such
+honors and provisions that these great guns were in danger of becoming
+spiked forever in both barrel and tube.
+
+Upon reaching this town one of them detached himself from the heated
+rolling mass and accepted the invitation of young Cobb--who had formed
+the acquaintance at West Point--to make a visit in his home.  He had
+not been there many days before he manoeuvred to establish a private
+military retreat for himself in the affections of Mrs. Cobb.  So that
+his presence became a profanation to Georgiana, whose reverence for her
+heroic father burns like an altar of sacred fire, and whose nature
+became rent in twain between her mother's suitor and her brother's
+guest.
+
+A most pestiferous variety of caterpillar has infested the tops of my
+cherry-trees this summer, and during the general's encampment near Mrs.
+Cobb I happened several times to be mounted on my step-ladder, busy
+with my pruning-shears, when he was decoying her around her
+garden--just over the fence--buckled in to suffocation, and with his
+long epaulettes golden in the sun like tassels of the corn.  I was
+engaged in exterminating this insect on the last day of his sojourn.
+They were passing almost beneath me on the other side; he had been
+talking; I heard her brief reply, in a voice low and full of dignity,
+
+"I have been married, sir!"
+
+"Mother of Georgiana!" I cried, within myself.  But had she ever
+thought of taking a second husband she must have seen through "Old
+Drumbeater," as Sylvia called him.  There were times when their
+breakfast would be late--for the sake of letting his chicken be broiled
+in slow perfection or his rolls or waffles come to a faultless brown;
+and I, being at work near the garden fence, would hear him tramping up
+and down the walk on the other side and swearing at a family that had
+such irregular meals.  The camel, a lean beast, requires an
+extraordinary supply of food, which it proceeds to store away in its
+hump as nourishment to be drawn upon while it is crossing the desert.
+There may be no long campaigning before the general; but if there were
+and rations were short, why could he not live upon his own back?  It is
+of a thickness, a roundness, and an impenetrability that would have
+justified Jackson in using him as a cotton-bale at the battle of New
+Orleans.
+
+Thus in my little corner of the world we have all been at the same
+business of love, and I wonder whether the corner be not the world
+itself: Mrs. Cobb and the general, Georgiana and I the sewing-girl and
+the carpenter; for I had forgotten to note how quickly these two have
+found out that they want each other.  My arbor is at his service, if he
+wishes it; and Jack shall keep silent about the mastodon.
+
+It is true that from this sentimental enumeration I have omitted the
+name of Mrs. Walters; but there is a secret here which not even
+Georgiana herself will ever get from me.  Mrs. Walters came to this
+town twenty years ago from the region of Bowling Green.  Some years
+afterwards I made a trip into that part of the State to hear the
+mocking-bird--for it fills those more southern groves, but never visits
+ours; and while there I stepped by accident on this discovery: _There
+never was any Mr. Walters_.  It is her maiden name.  But as I see the
+freedom of her life and reflect upon the things that a widow can do and
+an old maid cannot--with her own sex and with mine--I commend her
+wisdom and leave her at peace.  Indeed I have gone so far, when she has
+asked for my sympathy, as to lament with her Mr. Walters's death.
+After all, what great difference is there between her weeping for him
+because he is no more, and her weeping for him because he never was?
+After which she freshens herself up with another handkerchief, a little
+Florida water, and a touch of May roses from the apothecary's.
+
+And I have omitted the name of Sylvia; but then Sylvia's name, like
+that of Lot's wife, can never be used as one of a class, and she
+herself must always be spoken of alone.  However, if Sylvia had been
+Lot's wife she would not have turned to a pillar of salt, she would
+most probably have become a geyser.
+
+I don't know why, but she went on a visit to Henderson after that
+evening in the arbor.  I suspect the governing power of Georgiana's
+wisdom to have been put forth here, for within a few days I received
+from Sylvia a letter which she asked me not to show to Georgiana, and
+in which she invited me to correspond with her secretly.  The letter
+was of a singularly adhesive quality as to the emotions.  Throughout
+she referred to herself as "the exile," although it was plain that she
+wrote in the highest spirits; and in concluding she openly charged
+Georgiana with having given her a black eye--a most unspeakable phrase,
+surely picked up in the school-room.  As a return for the black eye,
+Sylvia said that she had composed a poem to herself, a copy of which
+she enclosed.
+
+I quote Sylvia's commemorative verses upon her wrongs and her
+banishment.  They show features of metrical excess, and can scarcely
+claim to reflect the polish of her calmer art; but they are of value to
+me as proving that whatever the rebuke Georgiana may have given, it had
+rebounded from that elastic spirit.
+
+
+  LINES TO MYSELF
+
+  Oh! she was a lovely girl,
+    So pretty and so fair,
+  With gentle, love-lit _eyes_,
+    And wavy, dark brown hair.
+
+  I loved the gentle girl,
+    But, oh! I heaved a sigh
+  When first she told me she could see
+    Out of only _one_ eye.
+
+  But soon I thought within myself
+    I'd better save my tear and sigh
+  _To bestow upon an older person I know
+    Who has more than one eye_.
+
+  She is brave and intelligent
+    Too.  She is witty and wise.
+  She'll accomplish more now than _another person_ I know
+    Who has _two_ eyes.
+
+  Ah, you need not pity _her_!
+    _She_ needs not your tear and sigh.
+  She'll make good use, I tell you,
+    Of her _one_ remaining eye.
+
+  In the home where we are hastening,
+    In our eternal Home on High,
+  See that _you_ be not rivalled
+    By the girl with only _one_ eye.[*]
+
+
+[*]Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote
+that she had "composed" this poem.  It is known to be the work of
+another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and
+produced a version of her own.                           J. L. A.
+
+
+Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in
+the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days
+ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age--a boy,
+enormously fat--whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her
+mother had been decoyed by the general.  Further to satirize the
+similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of
+yellow ribbon.
+
+Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she
+has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on
+the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling
+elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby's daughter.  There is a
+real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy's true place in
+nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated
+with thick tissues of blubber.  If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she
+seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in
+deep.
+
+Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open
+letter in her hand.
+
+"Oh, read it!" she cried, her face kindling with glory.
+
+It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the
+Louisville _Journal_ accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and
+assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of
+Kentucky poetesses.  The title of the poem was, "My Lover Kneels to
+None but God."
+
+"I infer from this," I said, gravely, "that your lover is a Kentuckian."
+
+"He is," cried Sylvia.  "Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!"
+
+"Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I continued, mildly, "upon having
+such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover
+ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion."
+
+"Never!" cried Sylvia.  "I would spurn him as chaff!"
+
+"Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued, further,
+"you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something
+new to parse."
+
+Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.
+
+"Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's
+say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in
+Virgil and Homer.  And if he could do that then, think what he must he
+able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!"
+
+I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr.
+Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was
+based upon the fact that he could not parse it.
+
+
+There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.
+
+This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time
+during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the
+collar over his head and was gone.  Whither and how long no one knew;
+but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to
+the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs.
+Walters's house--poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such
+deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head.
+Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney.  Glancing down this,
+he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a
+hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to
+produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and
+friendly a passage.  His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at
+the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove
+of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but
+in Mrs. Walters's bedroom.  In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is
+not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could
+white it, and he dripping with soot.  Here the ground beneath him was
+of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently
+resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter.  In the course of
+his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he
+must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that
+so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.
+
+It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having
+left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom.  She
+threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a
+snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted
+outward.
+
+"Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank
+with bewilderment.  Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been
+her bed.  Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded
+with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes
+blazing green with defiance.
+
+She slammed and locked the door.
+
+"Run for the sheriff!" she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought
+her market basket; and she followed him as he fled.
+
+"What is it, Mrs. Walters?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and
+bringing the handcuffs.
+
+"There's somebody in my bed!" she cried, wringing her hands.  "I
+believe it's the devil."
+
+"It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing; for by this time we were
+all gathered together.
+
+"What a dear 'coon!" said the sewing-girl.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Walters!  You are like Little Red Riding-hood!" said Sylvia.
+
+"I can't arrest a 'coon, madam!" exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck
+at being made ridiculous.
+
+"Then arrest the carpenter!" cried poor, unhappy, excited Mrs. Walters,
+bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder.
+
+And among us all Georgiana was the only comforter.  She laid aside her
+own work for that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her
+desperately wounded neighbor, and at nightfall, over the bed, now
+peaceful and snowy once more, she spread a marvellous priceless quilt
+that she had long been making to exhibit at the approaching World's
+Fair in New York.
+
+"Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtime, "it seems to
+me that things happen in order to show you off."
+
+"Only think!" Georgiana replied; "she will never get into bed again
+without a shiver and a glance at the chimney.  I begrudge her the quilt
+for one reason: it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in
+it."
+
+"Did she tell you that she had had those bedclothes ever since her
+marriage?"
+
+"Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very
+long."
+
+"How long should you think?"
+
+"Oh, well--about a minute."
+
+"And yet she certainly has the clearest possible idea of Mr. Walters.
+I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as
+perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers."
+
+"Or perhaps wish to."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The end of August--the night before my marriage.
+
+Several earthquakes have lately been felt in this part of the globe.
+Coming events cast their shocks before.
+
+The news of it certainly came like the shock of an earthquake to many
+people of the town, who know perfectly well that no woman will allow
+the fruit and flowers to be carried off a place as a man will.  The
+sagacious old soul who visits me yearly for young pie-plant actually
+hurried out and begged for a basketful of the roots at once, thus
+taking time--and the rhubarb--by the forelock.  And the old epicurean
+harpy whose passion is asparagus, having accosted me gruffly on the
+street with an inquiry as to the truth of my engagement and been
+quietly assured, how true it was, informed me to my face that any man
+situated as happily as I am was an infernal fool to entangle himself
+with a wife, and bade me a curt and everlasting good-morning on the
+spot.  Yet every day the theme of this old troubadour's talk around the
+hotels is female entanglements--mendacious, unwifely, and for him
+unavailing.
+
+Through divers channels some of my fellow-creatures--specimens of the
+most dreadful prose--have let me know that upon marrying I shall
+forfeit their usurious regard.  As to them, I shall relapse into the
+privacy of an orchard that has been plucked of its fruit.  But my
+wonderment has grown on the other hand at the number of those to whom,
+as the significant unit of a family instead of a bachelor zero, I have
+now acquired a sterling mercantile valuation.  Upon the whole, I may
+fairly compute that my relation to the human race has been totally
+changed by the little I may cease to give away and by the less that I
+shall need to buy.
+
+And Mrs. Walters!  Although I prefer to think of Mrs. Walters as a
+singer, owing to her unaccountable powers of reminiscential
+vocalization, I have upon occasion classified her among the waders; and
+certainly, upon the day when my engagement to Georgiana transpired, she
+waded not only all around the town but all over it, sustained by a
+buoyancy of spirit that enabled her to keep her head above water in
+depths where her feet no longer touched the bottom.
+
+It was the crowning triumph of this vacant soul's life to boast that
+she had made this match; and for the sake of giving her so much
+happiness, I think I should have been willing to marry Georgiana
+whether I loved her or not.
+
+So we are all happy: Sylvia, who thus enters upon a family right to my
+flowers and to the distinction of being the only Miss Cobb; Dilsy, who,
+while gathering vegetables about the garden, long ago began to receive
+little bundles of quilt pieces thrown down to her with a smile and the
+right word from the window above; and Jack, who is to drive us on our
+bridal-trip to the Blue Lick Springs, where he hopes to renew his
+scientific studies upon the maxillary bones.  I have hesitated between
+Blue Lick and Mud Lick, though to a man in my condition there can be no
+great difference between blue and mud.  And I had thought of the
+Harrodsburg Springs, but the negro musicians there were lately hurried
+off to Canada by the underground railway, out of which fact has grown a
+lawsuit for damages between the proprietor and his abolitionist guest.
+
+
+A few weeks ago I intrusted a secret to Georgiana.  I told her that
+before she condescended to shine upon this part of the world--now the
+heavenlier part--I had been engaged upon certain researches and
+discoveries relating to Kentucky birds, especially to the Kentucky
+warbler.  I admitted that these studies had been wretchedly put aside
+under the more pressing necessity of fixing the attention of all my
+powers, ornithological and other, upon her garden window.  But as I
+placed specimens of my notes and drawings in her hand, I remarked
+gravely that after our marriage I should be ready to push my work
+forward without delay.
+
+All this was meant to give her a delightful surprise; and indeed she
+examined the evidences of my undertaking with devouring and triumphant
+eagerness.  But what was my amazement when she handed them back in
+silence, and with a face as white as though as fragrant as a rose.
+
+"I have distressed you, Georgiana!" I cried, "and my only thought had
+been to give you pleasure.  I am always doing something wrong!"
+
+She closed her eyes and passed her fingers searchingly across her brow,
+as we sometimes instinctively try to brush away our cares.  Then she
+sat looking down rather pitifully at her palms, as they lay in her lap.
+
+"You have shared your secret with me," she said, solemnly, at length.
+"I'll share mine with yon.  It is the only fear that I have ever felt
+regarding our future.  It has never left me; and what you have just
+shown me fills me with terror."
+
+I sat aghast.
+
+"I am not deceived," she continued; "you have not forgotten nature.  It
+draws you more powerfully than anything else in the world.  Whenever
+you speak of it, you say the right thing, you find the right word, you
+get the right meaning.  With nature alone you are perfectly natural.
+Towards society you show your shabby, awkward, trivial, uncomfortable
+side.  But these drawings, these notes--there lies your power, your
+gift, your home.  You truly belong to the woodsmen."
+
+Never used to study myself, I listened, to this as to fresh talk about
+a stranger.
+
+"Do you not foresee what will happen?" she went on, with emotion.
+"After we have been married a while you will begin to wander off--at
+first for part of a day, then for a day, then for a day and a night,
+then for days and nights together.  That was the way with Audubon, that
+was the way with Wilson, that is the way with Thoreau, that will be the
+way with all whom nature draws as it draws you.  And, me--think of
+me--at home!  A woman not able to go with you!  Not able to wade the
+creeks and swim the rivers!  Not able to sleep out in the brown leaves,
+to endure the rain, the cold, the travel!  And, so I shall never be
+able to fill your life with mine as you fill mine with yours.  As time
+passes, I shall fill it less and less.  Every spring nature will be
+just as young to you; I shall be always older.  The water you love
+ripples, never wrinkles.  I shall cease rippling and begin wrinkling.
+No matter what happens, each summer the birds get fresh feathers; only
+think how my old ones will never drop out.  I shall want you to go on
+with your work.  If I am to be your wife, I must be wings to you.  But
+think of compelling me to furnish you the wings with which to leave me!
+What is a little book on Kentucky birds in comparison with my
+happiness!"
+
+She was so deeply moved that my one desire was to uproot her fears on
+the spot.
+
+"Then there shall be no little book on Kentucky birds!" I cried.  "I'll
+throw these things into the fire as soon as I go home.  Only say what
+you wish me to be, Georgiana," I continued, laughing, "and I'll be
+it--if it's the town pump."
+
+"Then if I could only be the town well," she said, with a poor little
+effort to make a heavy heart all at once go merrily again.
+
+Bent on making it go merrily as long as I shall live, the following day
+I called out to her at the window:
+
+"Georgiana, I'm improving.  I'm getting along."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"Well, in town this morning they chose me as one of the judges of
+vegetables at the fair next month.  I said, 'Gentlemen, I expect to be
+married before that time, and I do not intend to be separated from my
+wife.  Will she have the privilege of accompanying me among these
+competing vegetables?  And last month they made me director of a
+turnpike company--I suppose because it runs through my farm.  To-day at
+a meeting of the directors I said, 'Gentlemen, how far is this turnpike
+to run?  I will direct it to the end of my farm and not a step farther.
+I do not wish to be separated from my wife.'"
+
+Georgiana has teased me a good deal in my life.  It is well to let a
+woman taste of the tree of knowledge whose fruit she is fond of
+dispensing.
+
+"You'd better be careful!" she said, archly.
+
+"Remember, I haven't married you yet."
+
+"I _am_ careful," I replied.  "I haven't married _you_ yet, cither!  My
+idea, Georgiana," I continued, "is to plant a grove and raise cocoons.
+That would gratify my love of nature and your fancy for silk dresses.
+I could have my silk woven and spun in our manufactory at Newport,
+Kentucky; and you know that we couldn't possibly lose each other among
+the mulberry-trees."
+
+"You'd better take care!" she repeated.  "Do you expect to talk to me
+in this style after we are married?"
+
+"That will all depend upon how you talk to me," I answered.  "But I
+have always understood married life to be the season when the worm
+begins to turn."
+
+Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the
+monstrous selfishness that lay coiled like a canker in my words.  I was
+really no better than those men who say to their wives:
+
+"While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary--you
+were everything.  Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and
+you must not stand in the way."
+
+But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy
+with me at any cost.  I divine now the reason of the effort she has
+long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I
+have privately set about changing the character of my life with the
+idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content.
+And thus it has come about that during the August now ended--always the
+month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek
+its woodland peace--I have hung about the town as one who is offered
+for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he
+hates to do.  Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my
+fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble through which I walk in the
+September fields--the rotting wastage of harvests long since gathered
+in.  At other times I drive myself upon their sharp and piercing
+conflicts as a bird is blown uselessly again and again by some too
+strong a wind upon the spikes of the thorn.  I hear the angry talk of
+our farmers and merchants, I listen to the fiery orations of our
+statesmen and the warning sermons of our divines.  (Think of a human
+creature calling himself a divine.)  The troubled ebb and flow of
+events in Kentucky, the larger movements of unrest throughout the great
+republic--these have replaced for me the old communings with nature
+that were full of music and of peace.
+
+Evening after evening now I turn my conversations with Georgiana as
+gayly as I can upon some topic of the time.  She is not always pleased
+with what I style my researches into civilized society.  One evening in
+particular our talk was long and serious, beginning in shallows and
+then steering for deep waters.
+
+"Well, Georgiana," I had said, "Miss Delia Webster has suddenly
+returned to her home in Vermont."
+
+"And who is Miss Delia Webster?" she had inquired, with unmistakable
+acidity.
+
+"Miss Delia Webster is the lady who was sentenced to the State
+penitentiary for abducting our silly old servants into Ohio.  But the
+jury of Kentucky noblemen who returned the verdict--being married men,
+and long used to forgiving a woman anything--petitioned the governor to
+pardon Miss Delia on the ground that she belongs to the sex that can do
+no wrong--and be punished for it.  Whereupon the governor, seasoned to
+the like large experience, pardoned the lady.  Whereupon Miss Webster,
+having passed a few weeks in the penitentiary, left, as I stated, for
+her home in Vermont, followed by her father, who does not, however,
+seem to have been able to overtake her."
+
+"If she'd been a man, now," suggested Georgiana.
+
+"If she'd been a man she would have shared the fortunes of her
+principal, the Reverend Mr. Fairbanks, who has _not_ returned to his
+home in Ohio, and will not--for fifteen years."
+
+"Do you think it an agreeable subject of conversation?" inquired
+Georgiana.
+
+"Then I will change it," I said.  "The other day the editor of the
+Smithland _Bee_ was walking along the street with his little daughter
+and was shot down by a doctor."
+
+"Horrible!" exclaimed Georgiana.  "Why?"
+
+"Self-defence," I answered.  "And last week in the court-room in Mount
+Sterling a man was shot by his brother-in-law during the sitting of
+court."
+
+"And why did _he_ kill _him_?"
+
+"Self-defence!" I answered.  "And in Versailles a man down in the
+street was assassinated with a rifle fired from the garret of a tavern.
+Self-defence.  And in Lexington a young man shot and killed another for
+drawing his handkerchief from his pocket.  Self-defence!--the sense of
+the court being that whatever such an action might mean in other
+civilized, countries, in Kentucky and under the circumstances--the
+young fellows were quarrelling--it naturally betokened the reaching for
+a revolver.  Thus in Kentucky, Georgiana, and during a heated
+discussion, a man cannot blow his nose but at the risk of his life."
+
+"I'll see that you never carry a handkerchief," said Georgiana.  "So
+remember--don't you ever reach for one!"
+
+"And the other day in Eddysville," I went on, "two men fought a duel by
+going to a doctor's shop and having him open a vein in the arm of each.
+Just before they fainted from exhaustion they made signs that their
+honor was satisfied, so the doctor tied up the veins.  I see that you
+don't believe it, but it's true."
+
+"And why did they fight a duel in that way?"
+
+"I give it up," I said, "unless it was in self-defence.  We are a most
+remarkable society of self-defenders.  But if every man who fights in
+Kentucky is merely engaged in warding off a murderous attack upon his
+life, who does all the murderous attacking?  You know the seal of our
+commonwealth: two gentlemen in evening dress shaking hands and with one
+voice declaring, 'United we stand, divided we fall.'  So far as the
+temper of our time goes, these two gentlemen might well be represented
+as twenty paces apart, and as calling out, 'United, we stood; divided,
+_you_ fall!'  Killings and duels!  Killings and duels!  Do you think we
+need these as proofs of courage?  Do you suppose that the Kentuckians
+of our day are braver than the pioneers?  Do you suppose that any
+people ever elevated its ideal of courage in the eyes of the world by
+all the homicides and all the duels that it could count?  There is only
+one way in which any civilized people has ever done that, there is only
+one way in which any civilized people has ever been able to impress the
+world very deeply with a belief in the reality and the nobility of its
+ideal of courage: it is by the warlike spirit of its men in times of
+war, and by the peaceful spirit of its men in times of peace.  Only,
+you must add this: that when those times of peace have come on, and it
+is no longer possible for such a people to realize its ideal of courage
+in arms, it is nevertheless driven to express the ideal in other
+ways--by monuments, arches, inscriptions, statues, literature,
+pictures, all in honor of those of their countrymen who lived the ideal
+before the world and left it more lustrous in their dying.  That is the
+full reason why we know how brave a people the Greeks were--by their
+peaceful ways of honoring valor in times of peace.  And that in part is
+why no nation in the world doubts the courage of the English, because
+when the English are not fighting they are forever doing something to
+honor those who have fought well.  So that they never have a peace but
+they turn it into preparation for the next war.
+
+"And that is why, as the outside world looks in upon us to-day and
+sifts the evidence of whether or not we are a brave people, it does not
+find the proof of this in our homicides and duels, but in the spirit of
+our forefathers of the Revolution, in the soldiers of the wilderness
+and of Indian warfare, of the war of 1812, of the war with Mexico, at
+Cerro Gordo, at Buena Vista, at Palo Alto, at Resaca de la Palma.
+Wherever the Kentuckians have fought as soldiers, many or few, on
+whatever battle-field, in whatsoever cause, there you may see whether
+they know what it is to be men, and whether they have an ideal of
+courage that is worth the name.
+
+"Then a few years ago in Frankfort twenty thousand people followed to
+the grave the bodies of the men who had fallen in Mexico.  The State
+has raised a monument to them, to the soldiers of 1812, to those who
+fought at the river Raisin.  The Legislature has ordered a medal to be
+struck in honor of a boy who had defended his ensign.  No man can make
+a public speech in Kentucky without mention of Encancion and Monterey,
+or of the long line of battles in which every generation of our people
+has fought.  This is the other proof that in times of peace we do not
+forget.  It is not much, but it is of the right kind--it is the
+soldier's monument, it is the soldier's medal, it is the soldier's
+funeral oration, it is the recognition by the people of its ideal of
+courage in times of peace.  And with every other brave people this
+proof passes as the sign universal.  But our homicides and our duels,
+nearly all of them brought about in the name--even under the fear--of
+courage, what effect have they had in giving us abroad our reputation
+as a community?  I ask myself the question, what if all the men who
+have killed their personal enemies or been killed by them in Kentucky,
+and if all the men who have killed their personal friends or been
+killed by them in Kentucky, had spent their love of fighting and their
+love of courage upon a monument to the Pioneers--such a monument as
+stands nowhere else in the world, and might fitly stand in this State
+to commemorate the winning of the West?  Would the world think the
+better or the worse of the Kentucky ideal of bravery?
+
+"I had not meant to talk to you so long on this subject," I added, in
+apology, "but I have been thinking of these things lately since I have
+been so much in town."
+
+"I am interested," said Georgiana; "but as I agree with you we need not
+both speak."  But she looked pained, and I sought to give a happier
+turn to the conversation.
+
+"There is only one duel I ever heard of that gave me any pleasure, and
+that one never came off.  A few years ago a Kentuckian wrote a
+political satire on an Irishman in Illinois--wrote it as a widow.  The
+Irishman wished to fight.  The widow offered to marry the Irishman, if
+such a sacrifice would be accepted as satisfactory damages.  The
+Irishman sent a challenge, and the Kentuckian chose cavalry broadswords
+of the largest size.  He was a giant; he had the longest arms of any
+man in Illinois; he could have mowed Erin down at a stroke like a green
+milkweed; he had been trained in duelling with oak-trees.  You never
+heard of him: his name is Abraham Lincoln."
+
+"I have heard of him, and I have seen him--in Union County before I
+came here," said Georgiana, with enthusiasm.
+
+"He came here once to hear Mr. Clay speak," I resumed; "and I saw them
+walking together one day under the trees at Ashland--the two most
+remarkable-looking men that I ever beheld together or in human form."
+
+My few acres touch the many of the great statesman.  Georgiana and I
+often hear of the movements of his life, as two little boats in a quiet
+bay are tossed by the storms of the ocean.  Any reference to him always
+makes us thoughtful, and we fell silent now.
+
+"Georgiana," I said at length, softly.  "It's all in self-defence.  I
+believe you promised to marry me in self-defence."
+
+"I did!" she said, promptly.
+
+"Well, I certainly asked you in self-defence, Miss Cobb," I replied.
+"And now in a few days, according to the usage of my time, I am going
+to take your life--even at the peril of my own.  If you desire, it is
+your privilege to examine the deadly weapons before the hour of actual
+combat," and I held out my arms to her appealingly.
+
+She bent her body delicately aside, as always.  "I am upset," she said,
+discouragingly.  "You have been abusing Kentucky."
+
+"Ah, that is the trouble!" I answered.  "You wish me to become more
+interested in my fellow-creatures.  And then you will not let me speak
+of what they do.  And the other day you told me that I am not perfectly
+natural with anything but nature.  Nature is the only thing that is
+perfectly natural with me.  When I study nature there are no delicate
+or dangerous or forbidden subjects.  The trees have no evasions.  The
+weeds are honest.  Running water is not trying to escape.  The sunsets
+are not colored with hypocrisy.  The lightning is not revenge.
+Everything stands forth in the sincerity of its being, and nature
+invites me to exercise the absolute liberty of my mind upon all life.
+I am bidden to master and proclaim whatsoever truth she has fitted me
+to grasp.  If I am worthy to investigate, none are offended; if I
+should be wise enough to discover any law of creation, the entire world
+would express its thanks.  Imagine my being assassinated because I had
+published a complete report upon the life and habits of the
+field-mouse!"
+
+"If one mouse published a report on the life and habits of another,
+there'd be a fight all over the field," said Georgiana.
+
+"A ridiculous extreme," I replied.  "But after you have grown used to
+study nature with absolute freedom and absolute peace, think how human
+life repels you.  You may not investigate, you may not speak out, you
+may not even think, you may not even feel.  You are not allowed to
+reveal what is concealed, and you are required to conceal what is
+revealed.  Natural!  Have you ever known any two men to be perfectly
+natural with each other except when they were fighting?  As for the men
+that I associate with every day, they weigh their words out to one
+another as the apothecary weighs his poisons, or the grocer his
+gunpowder."
+
+"You forget," said Georgiana, "that we are living in a very
+extraordinary time, when everybody is sensitive and excited."
+
+"It is so always and everywhere," I replied.  "You may never study life
+as you study nature.  With men you must take your choice: liberty for
+your mind and a prison for your body; liberty for your body and a
+prison for your mind.  Nearly all people choose the latter; we know
+what becomes of the few who do not."
+
+But this reference to the times led us to speak slowly and solemnly of
+what all men now are speaking--war that must come between the North and
+the South.  We agreed that it would come from each side as a blazing
+torch to Kentucky, which lies between the two and is divided between
+the two in love and hate--to Kentucky, where the ideal of a soldier's
+life is always the ideal of a man's duty and utmost glory.
+
+At last I felt that my time had come.
+
+"Georgiana," I said, "there is one secret I have never shared with you.
+It is the only fear I have ever felt regarding our future.  But, if
+there should be a war--you'd better know it now--leave you or not leave
+you, I am going to join the army."
+
+She grew white and faint with the thought of a day to come.  But at
+last she said:
+
+"Yes; you must go."
+
+"I know one thing," I added, after a long silence; "if I could do my
+whole duty as a Kentuckian--as an American citizen--as a human being--I
+should have to fight on both sides."
+
+I have thus set down in a poor way a part of the only talk I ever had
+with Georgiana on these subjects during the year 1851.
+
+
+Yesterday, about sunset, the earth and sky were beautiful with that
+fulness of peace which things often attain at the moment before they
+alter and end.  The hour seemed to me the last serene loveliness of
+summer, soon to be ruffled by gales and blackened by frosts.
+
+Georgiana stood at her window looking into the west.  The shadows of
+the trees in my yard fell longer and longer across the garden towards
+her.  Darkest among these lay the shapes of the cedars and the pines in
+which the redbird had lived.  Her whole attitude bespoke a mood
+surrendered to memory; and I felt sure that we two were thinking of the
+same thing.
+
+As she has approached that mystical revelation of life which must come
+with our marriage, Georgiana's gayety has grown subtly overcast.  It is
+as if the wild strain in her were a little sad at having to be captured
+at last; and I too experience an indefinable pain that it has become my
+lot to subdue her in this way.  The thought possesses me that she
+submits to marriage because she cannot live intimately with me and
+lavish her love upon me in any other relation; and therefore I draw
+back with awe from the idea of taking such possession of her as I will
+and must.
+
+As she stood at her window yesterday evening she caught sight of me
+across the yard and silently beckoned.  I went over and looked up at
+her, waiting and smiling.
+
+"Well, what is it?" I asked at length, as her eyes rested on me with
+the fulness of affection.
+
+"Nothing.  I wanted to see you standing down there once more.  Haven't
+you thought of it?  This is the last time--the last of the window, the
+last of the garden, the end of the past.  Everything after this will be
+so different.  Aren't you a little sorry that you are going to marry
+me?"
+
+"Will you allow me to fetch the minister this instant?"
+
+In the evening they put on her bridal dress and sent over for me, and,
+drawing the parlor doors aside, blinded me with the sight of her
+standing in there, as if waiting in duty for love to claim its own.  As
+I saw her then I have but to close my eyes to see her now.  I scarce
+know why, but that vision of her haunts my mind mysteriously.
+
+I see a fresh snow-drift in a secret green valley between dark
+mountains.  The sun must travel far and be risen high to reach it; but
+when it does, its rays pour down from near the zenith and are most
+powerful and warm; then in a little while the whole valley is green
+again and a white mist, rising from it, muffles the face of the sun.
+
+Oh, Georgiana!  Georgiana!  Do not fade away from me as I draw you to
+me.
+
+My last solitary candle flickers in the socket: it is in truth the end
+of the past.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Last summer I felled a dead oak in the woods and had the heart of him
+stored away for my winter fuel: a series of burnt-offerings to the
+worshipful spirit of my hearth-stone.  There should have been several
+of these offerings already, for October is almost ended now, and it is
+the month during which the first cool nights come on in Kentucky and
+the first fires are lighted.
+
+A few twilights ago I stood at my yard gate watching the red domes of
+the forest fade into shadow and listening to the cawing of crows under
+the low gray of the sky as they hurried home.  A chill crept over the
+earth.  It was a fitting hour; I turned in-doors and summoned Georgiana.
+
+"We will light our first fire together," I said, straining her to my
+heart.
+
+Kneeling gayly down, we piled the wood in the deep, wide chimney.  Each
+of us then brought a live coal, and together we started the blaze.  I
+had drawn Georgiana's chair to one side of the fireplace, mine
+opposite; and with the candles still unlit we now sat silently watching
+the flame spread.  What need was there of speech?  We understood.
+
+By-and-by some broken wreaths of smoke floated, outward into the room.
+My sense caught the fragrance.  I sniffed it with a rush of memories.
+Always that smell of smoke, with other wild, clean, pungent odors of
+the woods, had been strangely pleasant to me.  I remember thinking of
+them when a boy as incense perpetually and reverently set free by
+nature towards the temple of the skies.  They aroused in me even then
+the spirit of meditation on the mystery of the world; and later they
+became in-wrought with the pursuit and enjoyment of things that had
+been the delight of my life for many years.  So that coming now, at the
+very moment when I was dedicating myself to my hearth-stone and to
+domestic life, this smell of wood smoke reached me like a message from
+my past.  For an instant ungovernable longings surged over me to return
+to it.  For an instant I did return; and once more I lay drowsing
+before my old camp-fires in the autumn woods, with the frosted trees
+draping their crimson curtains around me on the walls of space and the
+stars flashing thick in the ceiling of my bedchamber.  My dog, who had
+stretched himself at my feet before the young blaze, inhaled the smoke
+also with a full breath of reminiscence, and lay watching me out of the
+corner of his eye--I fancied with reproachful constancy.  I caught his
+look with a sense of guilt, and glanced across at Georgiana.
+
+Her gaze was buried deep in the flames.  And how sweet her face was,
+how inexpressibly at peace.  She had folded the wings of her whole
+life, and sat by the hearth as still as a brooding dove.  No past laid
+its disturbing touch upon her shoulder.  Instead, I could see that if
+there were any flight of her mind away from the present it was into the
+future--a slow, tranquil flight across the years, with all the
+happiness that they must bring.  As I set my own thoughts to journey
+after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld
+Georgiana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temples,
+spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her
+face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with unconquerable gayety and
+youth.
+
+"How sweet that smoke is, Georgiana," I said, rousing us both, and
+feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may
+speak.  "And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back
+into his elements--smoke and light, heat and ashes.  What a magnificent
+work he was on natural history, requiring hundreds of years for his
+preparation and completion, written in a language so learned that not
+the wisest can read him wisely, and enduringly bound in the finest of
+tree calf!  It is a dishonor to speak of him as a work.  He was a
+doctor of philosophy!  He should have been a college professor!  Think
+how he could have used his own feet for a series of lectures on the
+laws of equilibrium, capillary attraction, or soils and moisture!  Was
+there ever a head that knew as much as his about the action of light?
+Did any human being ever more grandly bear the burdens of life or
+better face the tempests of the world?  What did he not know about
+birds?  He had carried them in his arms and nurtured them in his bosom
+for a thousand years.  Even his old coat, with all its rents and
+patches--what roll of papyrus was ever so crowded with the secrets of
+knowledge?  The august antiquarian!  The old king!  Can you imagine a
+funeral urn too noble for his ashes?  But to what base uses, Georgiana!
+He will not keep the wind away any longer; we shall change him into a
+kettle of lye with which to whiten our floors."
+
+What Georgiana's reply could have been I do not know, for at that
+moment Mrs. Walters flitted in.
+
+"I saw through the windows that you had a fire," she said, volubly,
+"and ran over to get warm.  And, oh! yes, I wanted to tell you--"
+
+"Stop, _please_, Mrs. Walters!" I cried, starting towards her with an
+outstretched hand and a warning laugh.  "You have not yet been formally
+introduced to this room, and a formal introduction is necessary.  You
+must be made acquainted with the primary law of its being;" and as Mrs.
+Walters paused, dropping her hands into her lap and regarding me with
+an air of mystification, I went on:
+
+"When I had repairs made in my house last summer, I had this fireplace
+rebuilt, and I ordered an inscription to be burnt into the bricks.  We
+expect to ask that all our guests will kindly notice this inscription,
+in order to avoid accidents or misunderstandings.  So I beg of you not
+to speak until you have read the words over the fireplace."
+
+Mrs. Walters wonderingly read the following legend, running in an arch
+across the chimney:
+
+
+  Good friend, around these hearth-stones speak
+         no evil word of any creature.
+
+
+She wheeled towards me with instantaneous triumph.
+
+"I'm glad you put it there!" she cried.  "I'm glad you put it there!
+It will teach them a lesson about their talking.  If there is one thing
+I _cannot_ stand it is a gossip."
+
+I have observed that a fowl before a looking-glass will fight its own
+image.
+
+"Take care, Mrs. Walters!" I said, gently.  "You came very near to
+violating the law just then."
+
+"He meant it for me, Mrs. Walters," said Georgiana, fondling our
+neighbor's hand, and looking at me with an awful rebuke.
+
+"I meant it for myself," I said.  "And now it is doing its best to make
+me feel like a Pharisee.  So I hasten to add that there are other rooms
+in the house in which it will be allowed human nature to assert itself
+in this long-established, hereditary, and ineradicable right.  Our
+guests have only to intimate that they can no longer restrain their
+propensities and we will conduct them to another chamber.  Mrs. Moss
+and I will occasionally make use of these chambers ourselves, to
+relieve the tension of too much virtue.  But it is seriously our idea
+to have one room in the house where we shall feel safe, both as
+respects ourselves and as respects others, from the discomfort of
+evil-speaking.  As long as these walls stand or we dwell in them, this
+is to be the room of charity and kindness to all creatures."
+
+Although we exerted ourselves, conversation flagged during the visit of
+Mrs. Walters.  Several times she began to speak, but, with a frightened
+look at the fireplace, dropped into a cough, or cleared her throat in a
+way that called to mind the pleasing habit of Sir Roger de Coverly in
+the Gardens of Gray's Inn.
+
+Later in the evening other guests came.  Upon each the law of that
+fireside was lightly yet gravely impressed.  They were in the main the
+few friends I know in whom such an outward check would call for the
+least inner restraint; nevertheless, on what a footing of confidence it
+placed our conversation!  To what a commanding level we were safely
+lifted!  For nothing so releases the best powers of the mind as the
+understanding that the entire company are under bond to keep the peace
+of the finest manners and of perfect breeding.
+
+And Georgiana--how she shone!  I knew that she could perfectly fill a
+window; I now see that she can as easily fill a room.  Our bodies were
+grouped about the fireplace; our minds centred around her, and she
+flashed like the evening star along our intellectual pathway.
+
+The next day Mrs. Walters talked a long time to Georgiana on the edge
+of the porch.
+
+
+Thus my wife and I have begun life together.  I think that most of our
+evenings will be spent in the room dedicated to a kind word for life
+universal.  No matter how closely the warring forces of existence,
+within or without, have pressed upon us elsewhere, when we enter there
+we enter peace.  We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever
+meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous
+hours.  And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household
+than to escape an ignoble evening.  To attain a noble one is like lying
+calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have
+struggled upward amid enemies all day long.
+
+Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured
+the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and
+still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now
+that I never shall.  The charm in her which I pursue, yet never
+overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world
+which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit--of that
+elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all
+terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose.  Even while I
+live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains
+for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does
+not end and has no waking.
+
+This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold
+her entire self into mine.  We have been a revelation to each other,
+but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains,
+which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the
+discoveries of our union.  Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting
+beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full
+of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at
+what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live.  Yet,
+folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment.  Often
+she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere,
+seeking an entrance to where I really am.  Even during the intimate
+silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing
+walls of flesh--we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs
+of individual being.
+
+During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the
+earth been flooded with beauty.
+
+Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky
+its rays stream through the open shutter and fall upon Georgiana in her
+sleep.  Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float
+upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily
+downward along her figure.  How august she is in her purity! The
+whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the silvering orb is as
+pitch to the whiteness of her nature.
+
+The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of
+the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin covering had
+slipped aside, leaving Georgiana's feet exposed.
+
+With a start of pain I recollected an old story about her childhood:
+that one day for the sake of her rights she had received a wound in one
+of her feet--how serious I had never known, but perhaps deforming,
+irremediable.  My head was raised on the pillow; the moonlight was
+moving down that way; it would cross her feet; it would reveal the
+truth.
+
+I turned my face away and closed my eyes.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+It is nearly dark when I reach home from town these January evenings.
+However the cold may sting the face and dart inward to the marrow,
+Georgiana is waiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled
+and ringed about with petticoats--like a tree within its layers of
+bark--that she looks like the most thick-set of ordinary sized women;
+for there is a heavenly but very human secret hiding in this household
+now, and she is thoughtfully keeping it.
+
+"We press our half-frozen cheeks together, as red as wine-sap apples,
+and grope for each other's hand through our big lamb's-wool mittens,
+and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes.  One
+evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside
+the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle.  When I started to
+enter she seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the
+countersign.
+
+"Love, captain," I said, "If it be not that, slay me at your feet!"
+
+She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck.
+
+"It is 'Peace,'" she said.  "But I desert to the enemy."
+
+Without going to my fireside that evening I hurried on to the stable;
+for I do not relinquish to my servants the office of feeding my stock.
+
+Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the
+divine right to be kingly men, which all men share; but truly a divine
+right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in
+winter.  It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who
+dwell in the Dark Ages of their kind--dwell on and on in affection,
+submission, and trust, while their lord demands of them their labor,
+their sustenance, or their life.
+
+Of a winter's day, when these poor dumb serfs have been scattered over
+the portionless earth, how often they look towards this fortress and
+lift up their voices with cries for night to come; the horses, ruffled
+and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted
+fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing
+their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded to
+leeward of some deep-buried haystack, the exposed side of the outermost
+of them white with whirling flakes; the sheep, turning their pitiful,
+trusting eyes about them over the fields of storm in earth and sky!
+
+What joy at nightfall to gather them home to food and warmth and rest!
+If there is ever a time when I feel myself a mediaeval lord to trusty
+vassals, it is then.  Of a truth I pass entirely over the Middle Ages,
+joining my life to the most ancient dwellers of the plains, and
+becoming a simple father of flocks and herds.  When they have been duly
+stabled according to their kinds, I climb to the crib in the barn and
+create a great landslide of the fat ears that is like laughter; and
+then from every stall what a hearty, healthy chorus of cries and
+petitions responds to that laughter of the corn!  What squeals and
+grunts persuasive beyond the realms of rhetoric!  What a blowing of
+mellow horns from the cows!  And the quick nostril trumpet-call of the
+horse, how eager, how dependent, yet how commanding!  As I mount to the
+top of the pile, if I ever feel myself a royal personage it is then; I
+ascend my throne; I am king of the corn; and there is not a brute
+peasant in my domain that does not worship me as ruler of heaven and
+earth.
+
+Or I love to catch up the bundles of oats as they are thrown down from
+the loft and send them whirling through the cutting-box so fast that
+they pour into the big baskets like streams of melted gold; or,
+grasping my pitchfork, I stuff the ricks over the mangers with the rich
+aromatic hay until I am as warm as when I loaded the wagons with it at
+midsummer noons.
+
+With what sweet sounds and odors now the whole barn is filled!  How
+robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts!  In what comfort of mind I
+can turn to my own roof and store!
+
+This hour in my stable is the only one out of the twenty-four left to
+me in which my feet may cross the boundary of human life into the world
+of the other creatures; for I have gone into business in town to
+gratify Georgiana.  I think little enough of this business otherwise.
+Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual
+satisfaction in it than I feel an intellectual satisfaction in passing
+my legs through my pantaloons of a morning.  But a man can study
+nothing in nature that does not outreach his powers.
+
+If time is left, I veer off from the barn to the wood-pile, for I love
+to wield an axe, besides having a taste to cut my own wood for the
+nightly burning.  This evening I could but stop to notice how the
+turkeys in the tree tops looked like enormous black nutgalls on the
+limbs, except that the wind whisked their tails about as cheerily as
+though they were already hearth-brooms.
+
+It is well for my poor turkeys that their tails contain no moisture;
+for on a night like this they would freeze stiff, and the least
+incautious movement of a fowl in the morning would serve to crack its
+tail off--up to the pope's-nose.
+
+As I set my foot on the door-step, I went back to see whether the two
+snow-birds were in their nightly places under the roof of the
+porch--the guardian spirits of our portal.  There they were, wedged
+each into a snug corner as tightly as possible, so not to break their
+feathers, and leaving but one side exposed.  Happening to have some
+wheat in my pocket, I pitched the grains up to the projecting ledge;
+they can take their breakfast in bed when they wake in the morning.
+Little philosophers of the frost, who even in their overcoats combine
+the dark side and the white side of life into a wise and weathering
+gray--the no less fit external for a man.
+
+The thought of them to-night put me strongly in mind of a former habit
+of mine to walk under the cedar-trees at such dark winter twilights and
+listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and settled
+down.  I have no time for such pleasant ways now, they have been given
+up along with my other studies.
+
+This winter of 1851 and 1852 has been cold beyond the memory of man in
+Kentucky--the memory of the white man, which goes back some
+three-quarters of a century.  Twice the Ohio River has been frozen
+over, a sight he had never seen.  The thermometer has fallen to thirty
+degrees below zero.  Unheard of snows have blocked the two or three
+railroads we have in the State.
+
+News comes that people are walking over the ice on East River, New
+York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis bears the weight of a man a
+hundred yards from the bank.
+
+Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown,
+destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants.  It
+set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that
+to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me
+occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how
+one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild
+beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins
+of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding
+for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners.  If he had had
+opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a
+buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a
+wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer
+left shivering outside as truly as if they had all been human beings.
+
+Such a spring, with its destruction of seed-bearing and nut-hearing
+vegetation, followed by a winter that seals under ice what may have
+been produced, has spread starvation among the wild creatures.  A
+recent Sunday afternoon walk in the woods--Georgiana being away from
+home with her mother--showed me that part of the earth's surface rolled
+out as a vast white chart, on which were traced the desperate travels
+of the snow-walkers in search of food.  Squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit,
+weasel, mouse, mink, fox--their tracks crossed and recrossed, wound in
+and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful
+and pitiful to behold.  Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the
+field.  At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove--starved at the
+brink of plenty.  Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip
+and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus
+at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I
+buried my vegetables.  I told Georgiana:
+
+"They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets
+out what we need.  Think of it--a whole neighborhood of rabbits
+hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible
+leaf."  Once that night I turned in bed, restless.  Georgiana did the
+same.
+
+"Are you awake?" she said, softly.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+"Are you thinking about the rabbits?"
+
+"Yes; are you?"
+
+"What do you suppose they think about us?"
+
+"I'd rather not know."
+
+
+Georgiana tells me that the birds in unusual numbers are wintering
+among the trees, driven to us with the boldness of despair.  God and
+nature have forgotten them; they have nothing to choose between but
+death and man.  She has taken my place as their almoner and nightly
+renders me an account of what she has done.  This winter gives her a
+great chance and she adorns it.  It seems that never before were so
+many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never
+mentioned between us, unconsciously she dwells upon these in her talk,
+and plainly favors them in her affection for the sake of the past.
+There are many stories I could relate to show how simple and beautiful
+is this whole aspect of her nature.
+
+A little thing happened to-night.
+
+Towards ten o'clock she brought my hat, overcoat, overshoes, mittens,
+comforter.
+
+"Put them on," she said, mysteriously.
+
+She also got ready, separating herself from me by so many clothes that
+I could almost have felt myself entitled to a divorce.
+
+It was like day out-of-doors with the moon shining on the snow.  We
+crept towards the garden, screened behind out-buildings.  When we
+reached the fence, we looked through towards the white pyramids.  All
+that part of the ground was alive with rabbits.  Georgiana had spread
+for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar's feast.  It had been done
+to please me, I knew, and out of a certain playfulness of her own; out
+there are other charities of hers, which she thinks known only to
+herself, that show as well the divine drift of her thoughtfulness.
+
+She is asleep now--for the sake of the Secret.  After she had gone to
+bed, what with the spectacle of the rabbits and what with our talk
+beforehand of the many cardinals in the cedars, my thoughts began to
+run freshly on old subjects, and, unlocking my bureau, I got out my
+notes and drawings for the work on Kentucky birds.  Georgiana does not
+know that they exist; she never shall.  With what authority those
+studies call me still, as with a trumpet from the skies! and I know
+that trumpet will sound on till my ears are past hearing.  Sometimes I
+look upon myself as a man who has had two hearts; one lies buried in
+the woods, and the other sits at the fireside thinking of it.  But
+sleep on, Georgiana--mother that is to be.  The dreams of your life
+shall never be disturbed by the old dreams of mine.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The population of this town on yesterday was seven thousand nine
+hundred and twenty; today it is seven thousand, nine hundred and
+twenty-_one_.  The inhabitants of the globe are enriched by the same
+stupendous unit; the solar system must adjust itself to new laws of
+equilibrium; the choir of angels is sweetened by the advent of another
+musician.  During the night Georgiana bore a son--not during the night,
+but at dawn, and amid such singing of birds that every tree in the yard
+became a dew-hung belfry of chimes, ringing a welcome to the heir of
+this old house and of these old trees--to the dispenser of seed during
+winters to come--to the proprietor of a whole race of seed-scatterers
+as long as nature shall be harsh and seasons shall return.
+
+I had already bought the largest family Bible in the town as a
+repository for his name, Adam Cobb Moss, which in clear euphony is most
+fit to be enrolled among the sweetly sounding vocables of the Hebrew
+children.  The page for the registration of later births in my family
+is so large and the lines ruled across it are so many that I am deeply
+mortified over this solitary entry at the top.  But surely Georgiana
+and I would have to live far past the ages of Abraham and Sarah to fill
+it with the requisite wealth of offspring, beginning as we do, and
+being without divine assistance.  When the name of our eldest-born is
+inscribed in this Bible, not far away will be found a scene in the home
+of his first parents, Georgiana and I being only the last of these, and
+giving, as it were, merely the finishing Kentucky touch to his Jewish
+origin.
+
+But I gambol in spirit like a hawk in the air.  Let me hood myself with
+parental cares: I have been a sire for half a day.
+
+I am speechless before the stupendous wisdom of my son in view of his
+stupendous ignorance.  Already he lectures to the old people about the
+house on the perfect conduct of life, and the only preparation that he
+requires for his lectures is a few drops of milk.  By means of these,
+and without any knowledge of anatomy, he will show us, for instance,
+what it is to be master of the science of vital functions.  When he
+regards it necessary to do anything, he does it instantly and
+perfectly, and the world may take the consequences and the result.  He
+forthwith addresses himself to fresh comfort and new enterprises for
+self-development.  Beyond what is vital he refuses to go; things that
+do not concern him he lets alone.  He has no cares beyond his needs;
+all space to him is what he can fill, all time his instant of action.
+He does not know where he came from, what he is, why here, whither
+bound; nor does he ask.
+
+My heart aches helplessly for him when he shall have become a man and
+have grown less wise: when he shall find it necessary to act for
+himself and shall yet be troubled by what his companions may think;
+when he shall no longer live within the fortress of the vital, but take
+up his wandering abode with the husks and swine; when he shall no
+longer let the world pass by him with heed only as there is need, but
+weary himself to better the unchangeable; when space shall not be some
+quiet nook of the world large enough for the cradle of his life, but
+the illimitable void filled with floating spheres, out upon the myriads
+of which, with his poor, puzzled, human eyes, he will pitifully gaze;
+when time shall not be his instant of action, but two eternities, past
+and future, along the baffling walls of which he will lead his groping
+faith; and when the questioning of his stoutest years shall be: Whence
+came I?  And what am I?  Why here for a little while?  Where to be
+hereafter?  A swimmer is drowned by a wave originating in the moon; a
+traveller is struck down by a bolt originating in a cloud; a workman is
+overcome by the heat originating in the sun; and so, perhaps, the end
+will come to him through his solitary struggle with the great powers of
+the universe that perpetually reach him, but remain forever beyond his
+reach.  If I could put forth one protecting prayer that would cover all
+his years, it would be that through life he continue as wise as the day
+he was born.
+
+
+The third of June once more.  Rain fell all yesterday, all last night.
+This morning earth and sky are dark and chill.  The plants are bowed
+down, and no wind releases them from their burden of large white drops.
+About the yard the red-rose bushes fall away from the fences, the
+lilacs stand with their purple clusters hanging down as heavily as
+clusters of purple grapes.  I hear the young orioles calling drearily
+from wet nests under dripping boughs.  A plaintive piping of lost
+little chickens comes from the long grass.
+
+How unlike the day is to the third of June two years ago.  I was in the
+strawberry bed that crystalline morning; Georgiana came to the window,
+and I beheld her for the first time.  How unlike the same day one year
+back.  Again I was in the strawberry bed, again Georgiana came to
+window and spoke to me as before.  This morning as I tipped into her
+room where she lay in bed, she turned her face to me on the pillow, and
+for the third time she said, fondly;
+
+"Old man, are you the gardener?"
+
+The sky being so blanketed with cloud, although the shutters were open
+only a faint gray light filled the room.  It was the first day that she
+had been well enough to have it done; but now the bed in which
+Georgiana lay was spread with the most beautiful draperies of white;
+the pillows were rich with needle-work and lace, and for the first time
+she had put on the badge of her new dignity, a little white cap of
+ribbons and lace, the long wide streamers of which, edged with lace,
+lay out upon the counterpane like bauds of the most delicate frost.
+The fingers of one hand rested lightly on the child beside her, as
+though she were counting the pulse of its oncoming life.  Out in the
+yard the lilies of the valley, slipping out of their cool sheaths of
+green leaves, were not more white, more fresh.  And surely Georgiana's
+gayety is the unconquerable gayety of the world, the youthfulness of
+youth immortal.
+
+I went over to her with the strange new awe I feel at my union with the
+young mother, where hitherto there has but been a union with the woman
+I love.  She stretched out her hands to me, almost hidden under the
+lace of her sleeves, and drew my face down against hers, as she said in
+my ear,
+
+"_Now_ you are the old Adam!"
+
+When she released me, she bent over the child and added, reproachfully,
+
+"You haven't paid the least attention to the baby yet."
+
+"I haven't noticed that the baby has bestowed the least attention upon
+me.  He is the youngest."
+
+"He is the guest of the house!  It is your duty to speak to him first."
+
+"He doesn't act like a guest in my house.  He behaves as though he
+owned it.  I'm nobody since he arrived--not even his body-servant."
+
+Georgiana, who was still bending over the child, glanced up with a look
+of confidential, whimsical distress.
+
+"How could anything so old be born so young!"
+
+"He will look younger as he gets older," I replied.  "And he will not
+be the first bachelor to do that.  At present this youngster is an
+invaluable human document in too large an envelope; that's all."
+
+Georgiana, with a swift, protecting movement, leaned nearer to the
+child, and spoke to him:
+
+"It's your house; tell him to leave the room for his impertinence."
+
+"He may have the house, since it's his," I replied.  "But there is one
+thing I'll not stand; if he ever comes between me and you, he'll have
+to go; I'll present him to Mrs. Walters."
+
+I was not aware of the expression with which I stood looking down upon
+my son, but Georgiana must have noticed it.
+
+"And what if he supplants me some day?" she asked, suddenly serious,
+and with an old fear reviving.
+
+"Oh, Georgiana!" I cried, kneeling by the bedside and putting my arms
+around her, "you know that as long as we are in this world I am your
+lover."
+
+"No longer?" she whispered, drawing me closer.
+
+"Through eternity!"
+
+By-and-by I went out to the strawberry-bed.  The season was too
+backward.  None were turning.  With bitter disappointment I searched
+the cold, wet leaves, bending them apart for the sight of as much as
+one scarlet lobe, that I might take it in to her if only for
+remembrance of the day.  At last I gathered a few perfect leaves and
+blossoms, and presented them to her in silence on a plate with a waiter
+and napkin.
+
+She rewarded me with a laugh, and lifted from the plate a spray of
+blossoms.
+
+"They will be ripe by the time I am well," she said, the sunlight of
+memory coming out upon her face.  Then having touched the wet blossoms
+with her finger-tips, she dropped them quickly back into the plate.
+
+"How cold they are!" she said, as a shiver ran through her.  At the
+same time she looked quickly at me, her eyes grown dark with dread.
+
+I set the plate hastily down, and she put her hands in mine to warm
+them.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A month has gone by since Georgiana passed away.
+
+To-day, for the first time, I went back to the woods.  It was pleasant
+to be surrounded again by the ever-living earth that feels no loss and
+has no memory; that was sere yesterday, is green to-day, will be sere
+again to-morrow, then green once more; that pauses not for wounds and
+wrecks, nor lingers over death and change; but onward, ever onward,
+along the groove of law, passes from its red origin in universal flame
+to its white end in universal snow.
+
+And yet, as I approached the edge of the forest, it was as though an
+invisible company of influences came gently forth to meet me and sought
+to draw me back into their old friendship.  I found myself stroking the
+trunks of the trees as I would throw my arm around the shoulders of a
+tried comrade; I drew down the branches and plunged my face into the
+new leaves as into a tonic stream.
+
+Yesterday a wind storm swept this neighborhood.  Later, deep in the
+woods, I came upon an elm that had been struck by a bolt at the top.
+Nearly half the trunk had been torn away; and one huge limb lay across
+my path.
+
+As I stood looking at it, the single note of a bird fell on my
+ear--always the same note, low, quiet, regular, devoid of feeling, as
+though the bird had been stunned and were trying to say: _What can I
+do_?  _What can I do_?  _What can I do_?
+
+I knew what that note meant.  It was the note with which a bird now and
+then lingers around the scene of the central tragedy of its life.
+
+After a long search I found the nest, crushed against the ground under
+the huge limb, and a few feet from it, in the act of trying to escape,
+the female.  The male, sitting meantime on the end of a bough near by,
+watched me incuriously, and with no change in that quiet, regular,
+careless note--he knew only too well that she was past my harming.  The
+plan for his life had reached an end in early summer.
+
+I sat down near him for a while, thinking of the universal tragedy of
+the nest.
+
+It was the second time to-day that this divine wastage in nature had
+forced itself on my thought, and this morning the spectacle was on a
+scale of tragic greatness beyond anything that has ever touched human
+life in this part of the country: Mr. Clay was buried amid the long sad
+blare of music, the tolling of bells, the roll of drums, the boom of
+cannon, and the grief of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
+people--a vast and solemn pageant, yet as nothing to the multitude that
+will attend afar.  For him this day the flags of nations will fly at
+half-mast; and the truly great men of the world, wherever the tidings
+may reach them of his passing, will stand awe-stricken that one of
+their superhuman company has been too soon withdrawn.
+
+Too soon withdrawn!  Therein is the tragedy of the nest, the wastage of
+the divine, the law of loss, whose reign on earth is unending, but
+whose right to reign no creature, brute or human, ever acknowledges.
+
+The death of Mr. Clay is one of the many things that are happening to
+change all that made up my life with Georgiana.  She was a true
+hero-worshipper, and she worshipped him.  I no less.  Now that he is
+dead, I feel as much lonelier as a soldier feels whose chosen tent-mate
+and whose general have fallen on the field together.
+
+As I turned, away from the overcrowded town this afternoon towards the
+woods and was confronted by the wreck of the storm, my thoughts being
+yet full of Mr. Clay, of his enemies and disappointment, there rose
+before my mind a scene such as Audubon may once have witnessed:
+
+The light of day is dying over the forests of the upper Mississippi.
+The silence of high space falls upon the vast stream.  On a
+thunder-blasted tree-top near the western bank sits a lone, stern
+figure waiting for its lordliest prey--the eagle waiting for the swan.
+Long the stillness continues among the rocks, the tree-tops, and above
+the river.  But far away in the north a white shape is floating nearer.
+At last it comes into sight, flying heavily, for it is already weary,
+being already wounded.  The next moment the cry of its coming is heard
+echoing onward and downward upon the silent woods.  Instantly the
+mighty watcher on the summit is alert and tense; and as the great snowy
+image of the swan floats by, in mid-air and midway of the broad expanse
+of water, he meets it.  No battle is fought up there--the two are not
+well matched; and thus, separated from all that is little and
+struggling far above all that is low, with the daylight dying on his
+spotlessness, the swan receives the blow in its heart.
+
+So came Death to the great Commoner.
+
+
+Oh, Georgiana!  I do not think of Death as ever having come to you.  I
+think of you as some strangely beautiful white being that one day rose
+out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler, and uttering
+your note of divine farewell, spread your wings towards the open sea of
+eternity, there to await my coming.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+It is a year and four months since Georgiana left me, and now
+everything goes on much as it did before she came.  The family have
+moved back to their home in Henderson, returning like a little company
+of travellers who have lost their guide.  Sylvia has already married;
+her brother writes me that he is soon to be; the mother visits me and
+my child, yearningly, but seldom, on account of her delicate health;
+and thus our lives grow always more apart.  None take their places, the
+house having passed to people with whom, beyond all neighborly
+civilities, I have naught to do.  Nowadays as I stroll around my garden
+with my little boy in my arms strange faces look down upon us out of
+Georgiana's window.
+
+And I have long since gone back to nature.
+
+When the harvest has been gathered from our strong, true land, a growth
+comes on which late in the year causes the earth to regain somewhat of
+its old greenness.  New blades spring up in the stubble of the wheat;
+the beeless clover runs and blossoms; far and wide over the meadows
+flows the tufted billows of the grass; and in the woods the oak-tree
+drops the purple and brown of his leaf and mast upon the verdure of
+June.  Everywhere a second spring puts forth between summer gone and
+winter nearing.  It is the overflow of plenty beyond the filling of the
+barns.  It is a wave of life following quickly upon the one that broke
+bountifully at our feet.  It is nature's refusal to be once reaped and
+so to end.
+
+The math: then the aftermath.
+
+Upon the Kentucky landscape during these October days there lies this
+later youth of the year, calm, deep, vigorous.  And as I spend much
+time in it for the fine, fresh work it brings to hand and thought, I
+feel that in my way I am part of it, that I can match the aftermath of
+nature with the aftermath of my life.  The Harvester passed over my
+fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the winter's edge.
+
+The thought has now come into my mind that I shall lay aside these
+pages for my son to ponder if he should ever grow old enough to value
+what he reads.  They will give him some account of how his father and
+mother met in the old time, of their courting days, of their happy life
+together.  And since it becomes more probable that there will be a war,
+and that I might not be living to speak to him of his mother in ways
+not written here, I shall set down one thing about her which I pray he
+may take well to heart.  He ought to know and to remember this: that
+his life was the price of hers; she was extinguished that he might
+shine, and he owes it to her that the flame of his torch be as white as
+the altar's from which it was kindled.
+
+Perhaps the most remarkable thing, then, in the character of his
+mother--which, please God, he will have, or, getting all things else,
+he can never be a gentleman--was honor.  It shone from her countenance,
+it ran like melody in her voice, it made her eyes the most beautiful in
+expression that I have ever seen, it enveloped her person and demeanor
+with a spiritual grace.  Honor in what are called the little things of
+life, honor not as women commonly understand it, but as the best of men
+understand it--that his mother had.  It was the crystalline, unshakable
+rock upon which the somewhat fragile and never to be completed
+structure of her life was reared.
+
+If he be anything of a philosopher, he may reason that this trait must
+have made his mother too serious and too hard.  Let him think again.
+It was the very core of soundness in her that kept her gay and sweet.
+I have often likened her mind to the sky in its power of changeableness
+from radiant joyousness to sober calm; but oftenest it was like the
+vault of April, whose drops quicken what they fall upon; and she was of
+a soft-heartedness that ruled her absolutely--but only to the
+unyielding edge of honor.  Yet she did not escape this charge of being
+both hard and serious upon the part of men and women who were used to
+the laxness of small misdemeanors, and felt ill at ease before the
+terrifying truth that she was a lady.
+
+Beyond this single trait of hers--which, if it please God that he
+inherit it, may he keep though he lose everything else--I set nothing
+further down for his remembrance, since naught could come of my
+writing.  By words I could no more give him an idea of what his mother
+was than I could point him to a few measures of wheat and bid him
+behold a living harvest.
+
+
+Upon these fields of cool October greenness there risen out of the
+earth a low, sturdy weed.  Upon the top of this weed small white
+blossoms open as still as stars of frost.  Upon these blossoms lies a
+fragrance so pure and wholesome that the searching sense is never
+cloyed, never satisfied.  Years after the blossoms are dried and yellow
+and the leaves withered and gone, this wholesome fragrance lasts.  The
+common people, who often put their hopes into their names, call it
+life-everlasting.  Sometimes they make themselves pillows of it for its
+virtue of bringing a quiet sleep.
+
+This plant is blooming out now, and nightly as I wend homeward I pluck
+a handful of it, gathering along with its life the tranquil sunshine,
+the autumnal notes of the cardinal passing to better lands, and all the
+healthful influences of the fields.  I shall make me a tribute of it to
+the memory of her undying sweetness.
+
+If God wills, when I fall asleep for good I shall lay my head beside
+hers on the bosom of the Life Everlasting.
+
+
+
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