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Eric Hermannson's Soul

T was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse—a night when the Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and. The schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some mysterious psychic force. Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind, which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed “the Light.” On the floor, before the mourners' bench, lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged nature had sought her last resort. This “trance” state is the highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a close walking with God.

Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed cheeks there was a certain pallor, a grayness caught from many a vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it. To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from the south and the north, peasants from almost every country of Europe, most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. To-night Eric Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.

Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago, and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son. But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide. He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big cities and knew the ways of town-folk, who had never worked in the fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.

Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that dogged his steps. The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that this phantom was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him down. One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena good-by, and he went there no more.

The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his strength. In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises, and art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin. It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only bridge into the kingdom of the soul.

It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his impassioned pleading that night.

“Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Is there a Saul here to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to lose one of God's precious souls? Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that Eric Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.

“O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more prayer, brothers, a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!”

The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant of terror and rapture:

The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them all, fear.

A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed head, and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in the forest.

The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head, crying in a loud voice:

“Lazarus, come forth! Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!” The minister threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.

Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric's than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cow-punchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all women of her type—that desire to taste the unknown which allures and terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind—just once.

It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four. For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy river-bottom twenty miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

“This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from Kansas. It's the key-note of this country.”

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:

“I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it takes the taste out of things.”

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her own.

“Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one's strength out to such petty things any more.”

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the sky-line.

“No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't shake the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The war-cry would follow you.”

“You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men.”

“Naturally,” said Wyllis, “since you have decided to marry the most brilliant talker you know.”

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.

“Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as interesting as Eric Hermannson?”

“Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I fancy.”

“Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being.”

“Well,” said Wyllis, meditatively, “I don't read Bourget as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul somewhere. Nicht wahr?”

“Something like that,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “except that it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and he makes it known, somehow, without speaking.”

“I always have my doubts about loquacious souls,” Wyllis remarked, with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. “I knew it from the first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar things here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and the jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and would read only the great books that we never get time to read in the world, and would remember only the great music, and the things that are really worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And of course I played the intermezzo from 'Cavalleria Rusticana' for him; it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he didn't know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I heard his tears. Then it dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he had ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can't tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me.”

“Poor devil,” said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, “and so you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a girl's philanthropy for you!”

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at Margaret.

“Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will bring his fiddle—though the French don't mix with the Norwegians much.”

“Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the Norwegians in character at last,” cried Margaret, cordially.

“See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this scheme,” said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage at four to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton—well, it's tommy-rot, that's what it is!”

“Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three in the morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir, I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper.”

“But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired of dancing.”

“So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to go to a party before. It will be something to remember next month at Newport, when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable. This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty to-morrow night will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. Ill warrant you were adept enough at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many such young valkyrs as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them.”

Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate, while his sister went on.

“And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?”

Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of his plowshoe.

“Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard to get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire than shake 'em to a fiddle.”

Margaret made a gesture of impatience. “Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?”

“Well,” said Lockhart, cautiously, “I don't just like to pass judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an' that's a fact. They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the corn, an' I had to fire him. That's about the way it goes. Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer in all this section—called all the dances. Now he's got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can even get him to come in to-morrow night.”

“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off,” said Margaret, quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself!”

“I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,' said Lockhart, imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.

“'The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my Princess!'” chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed mischievously. “We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am beaten until I have asked him myself.”

Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. To-night Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before. He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” et cetera. The pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow. Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul it was necessary to starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road runs for some three that miles through the French settlement, where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, “It will be safe to run the horses here, won't it?”

“Yes, I think so, now,” he answered, touching his spur to his pony's flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that new-comers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these unconscious details. To him this beauty was something more than color and line; it was as a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish color because all colors are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him. To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her saddle.

“This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,” she said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

“I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,” he asked, timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the outline of his face, pityingly.

“Well, you might—but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like you to go to New York—and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some way,” she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: “There he would be altogether sordid, impossible—a machine who would carry one's trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why is it?” “No,” she added aloud, “I shouldn't like that.”

“Then I not go,” said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

“But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they say you know them all. Won't you?”

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his knee.

“Yes, I will,” he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his soul to hell as he said it.

They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.

“Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!” Eric called, throwing all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic fore feet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the pony's head toward him and crowding her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not roll.

“Hold tight, tight!” he shouted again, launching a kick at a snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs He struck out again and again, kicking right and left with all his might. Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.

Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her saddle. “You are not hurt?” he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and that his lips were working nervously.

“No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!” she cried in sharp alarm.

He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

“No, it is not that,” he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched at his side. “But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains out with my hands, I would kill them all. I was never afraid before. You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came like an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all that they have killed in me. I die for you to-night, to-morrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen—oh, my God!” he threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane, leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some sickness. His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his labored breathing. The horse stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her hand on Eric's head and said gently:

“You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?”

“No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe. I will not frighten you again.” His voice was still husky, but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.

When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

“The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty thoroughly scared myself,” she said as she took her brother's arm and went slowly up the hill toward the house. “No, I'm not hurt, thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me. He's a mighty fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to bed now. Good-night.”

When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the bed in her riding-dress face downward.

“Oh, I pity him! I pity him!” she murmured, with a long sigh of exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the village post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand, covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:—

“My Dearest Margaret: If I should attempt to say how like a winter hath thine absence been, 1 should incur the risk of being tedious. Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in particular without you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up. 'As You Like It' is of course the piece selected. Miss Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the part. Miss Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy; insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings and highly colored suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the emotional element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is épris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.

“My new pictures arrived last week on the 'Gascogne.' The Puvis de Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A vale dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a stream of anemic water flows at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in all its florid splendor, the whole dominated by a glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness.”

Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid them by.

She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open the window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.

“Oh, it is all so little, so little there,” she murmured. “When everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be great? Why should one try to read highly colored suggestions into a life like that? If only I could find one thing in it all that mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will life never give me that one great moment?”

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum-bushes outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot of the bed for support. Again she felt herself pursued by some overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like the outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, “I love you more than Christ, who died for me!” ringing in her ears.

About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the old men who had come to “look on” caught the spirit of revelry and stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the violin from the Frenchman, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more and more characteristic—rude, half-mournful music, made up of the folk-songs of the North, that the villagers sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away. To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer Gynt music. She found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom in them to-night, something of the joyous childhood of the nations which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight. Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labor and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood. But what matter? To-night there was hot liquor in the glass and hot blood in the heart; to-night they danced.

To-night Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and looked hopelessly into her eyes. To-night he was a man, with a man's rights and a man's power. To-night he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes flashed like the blue water between the ice-packs in the North Seas. He was not afraid of Margaret to-night, and when he danced with her he held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like an all-pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all these years and that went out through her throbbing finger-tips to his that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her to-night, some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the first time in her life her heart held something stronger than herself, was not this worth while? Then she ceased to wonder. She lost sight of the lights and the faces, and the music was drowned by the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the memory of that face with all her strength.

“Let us stop, this is enough,” she whispered. His only answer was to tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past, no consideration of the future.

“Let us go out where it is cooler,” she said when the music stopped; thinking, “I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open air.” They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.

Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.

“You like to go up?” asked Eric, close to her ear.

She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. “How high is it?”

“Forty feet, about. I not let you fall.” There was a note of irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the Vestibule Limited and the world.

“Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb, when I was a little girl.”

Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent. Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her life, through all the routine of the days to come. Above them stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night, with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as in denser atmospheres. The moon would not be up for twenty minutes yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which seemed to reach around the world, lingered a pale, white light, as of a universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to them the heavy odors of the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly from below. Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died forever with the youth of Greece.

“How sweet the corn smells at night,” said Margaret nervously.

“Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think.”

She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this taciturn man spoke again.

“You go away to-morrow?”

“Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now.”

“You not come back any more?”

“No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip; half-way across the continent.”

“You soon forget about this country, I guess.” It seemed to him now a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all his eternity, that was a bitter thought.

“No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for that. And you won't be sorry you danced this one night, will you?”

“I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this one. I will dream sometimes, maybe.“

The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was as when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great ship goes down at sea.

She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and looked into her eyes.

“You are not always happy, too?” he asked.

“No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think.”

“You have a trouble?”

“Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I could cure it.”

He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when they pray, and said falteringly, “If I own all the world, I give him you.”

Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on his.

“Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I should not happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already.”

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: “I am here still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its destiny.”

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid! Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

“Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun again,” she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm about her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand trembled as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look had never shone for her before, would never shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always. This was Love's self, in a moment it would die. Stung by the agonized appeal that emanated from the man's whole being, she leaned forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while she held them there, and the riotous force under her heart became an engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all the resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed and yielded. When she drew her face back from his, it was white with fear.

“Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!” she muttered. And the drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love she had left upon his lips. “The devil is loose again,” whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.

But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! If ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his should go. For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading down the tempest of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether in ages gone, all the countless years of sinning in which men had sold and lost and flung their souls away, any man had ever so cheated Satan, had ever bartered his soul for so great a price.

It seemed but a little while till dawn.

The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his sister said good-by. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave him her hand, but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the carriage moved off, she gave him one swift glance that said, “I will not forget.” In a moment the carriage was gone.

Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the water-tank and went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after his wayward flock, with dragging men into the way of salvation.

“Good-morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?” he asked, sternly.

“A dance? Oh, yes, a dance,” replied Eric, cheerfully.

“Certainly you did not dance, Eric?”

“Yes, I danced. I danced all the time.”

The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.

“Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse generation!”

Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read flashed across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with dreamy exultation:

“'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.'”

title: Eric Hermannson's Soul


text: Talk:Eric Hermannson's Soul

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Eric Hermannson's Soul


text:
An Auld Licht Official

T was Snecky Hobart's pretty way of cleaning a dyke in the discharge of his official duties that first attracted my respectful notice. The wall was that which shuts in the 's house from the illiterate world, darkening the small windows, over whose peeling mason-work rose-bushes straggle, and stunting the garden into a prison yard. Mr. Aitken was divesting his gaunt pump of its wintry suit of straw, stripping the lanky skeleton of its artificial flesh, and I had my hand against the mouth of its wooden spout, my lips at the gimlet-hole above, when Snecky's right leg showed over the hen-house. Two hands followed, clutching desperately for holes in the wall that did not happen to be there; the leg worked as if it were turning a grinding-stone, and next moment Hobart sat breathlessly on the dyke. From this to the wire hen-house, under its roof of "divits," down a waterspout, the descent was comparatively tame, and a slanting board allowed the daring bellman to slide thence to the ground. Mr. Aitken, who had never thought of wondering at Snecky's invariable mode of effecting an entrance to his house, asked for Jewly, his visitor's help-mate, and having deliberated with him over the matter in hand, nodded him a frank good-day. Snecky was a polite, but he panted heavily, as with the remark, "Ay, weel, I'll hae to be ga'en," he turned to rescale the wall. I looked at the dominie, but he was again twisted round the pump, tearing the bonnet of stuffed sacks from its head. Diffidently I suggested to the bellman that he might find the gate easier. Snecky's face almost took some expression for a moment, and he let go his hold of the wire. "Is there a gate?" he said, chuckling over the resources of modern science, and went his way much relieved. He had always considered the climbing of the wall "a michty oncanny way o' winnin' oot an' in," though he was too considerate to say so.

Both his bell and his nickname were inherited by Hobart from a worthy father, and he was as proud of the one as he stormed at the mention of the other. When Auld Licht bairns (egged on, doubtless, by children of other denominations) felt life growing stale and flat, they could always give it a zest by piping "Snecky" down the bellman's lum and casting a nice damp clod of earth after the cry, ere escaping fearfully along the other stone roofs. In the early days of the century, the elder Hobart's bell had roused the village on hazy mornings to drive back the threatened French invasion, and the bellman, in a fine martial frenzy, himself joined the volunteers. The Auld Lichts never got an opportunity of sweeping "Nap" and his hordes into the sea, but they practised diligently for the fray. Gradually it was noticed that Hobart contented himself with levelling his musket, telescope-like, at the target, then retiring proudly without firing. His comrades questioned him, but the bellman only regarded them slyly in reply. Then the officers took the matter up, and Hobart had to make a clean breast of it. "If you please, sire," he whispered them darkly, "the snecky winna' dra'." The humorous Auld Lichts christened him Snecky on the spot, and though his son left at the age of ten for the distant farm of Tullin, and did not return until the old man's death a score of years afterwards, his greeting on re-entering the village was a shrewd wife's surmise that he "would be little Snecky come to bury auld Snecky."

It was perhaps because his soul was in his bell that on great occasions, such as the loss of little Effie Lunan, Snecky became officially puffed up. Ordinary announcements he took as they came, crying sales of bankrupt stock, or the arrival of one dozen barrels of fine apples, or even the invasion of the village by a cheap Jock as (to him) mere bagatelles. I see the bent legs of the snuffy old man still, as they used to straighten to the sound of his beloved bell, the complacent wink with which he let the populace gather round him, the "gly" that informed him how his words were telling. In one hand he showingly displayed the paper on which his news was written (his insignia of office), but he scorned to "read" as much as the minister in the pulpit himself. The bell carefully tucked under his oxter, he spoke in a crescendo rasping voice that broke into gutturals at awkward moments. "There will be soald—this morning (D.V.)—in the market place—by public roup—that faine stock of ladies' and gents'—boots and shoes—belonging to Mr. Alexander Phin—late boot and shoe makker—Growrie's close—of this toon.—-Sale to cum-mence—at eight o'clock-precisely." It would have broken his heart to think that, in the discharge of his official functions, he spoke one word of Scotch, but no one thought he did. Reluctantly he dropped the news into the mouths that gaped around, and then, carrying his bell by the tongue as carefully as if it were a flagon of milk, he hobbled off to repeat the announcement in the other wynds, with a score of admiring urchins at his heels. Snecky, though the fault was not his own, for he was continually agitating on the subject, wore no official uniform, but before crying matters of moment, he put on his tall lum hat. A swallow-tail was not for him, but he had fallen heir to a heavy great-coat, which he carried, perhaps a little ostentatiously, during the cloudless days of summer.

The tacit understanding between Government and its servants, that the latter should cover their heads with a veil when their employers go a kennin wrong, was not known to the philosophy of Hobart. His instructions he, on all occasions, carried out to the letter (except in the notorious case of the atheist Eassie, who wanted the letters D.V. to be omitted, but having once cried these, his soul was his own. Snecky was a pernickitty, cantankerous body, and liked to unburden himself on the matter he had been crying. To listen to these criticisms from his official mouth was like taking counsel's opinion. Busy as a tax-collector he always was during the time of the hill-market, when the public common was given over to long tents that reeked of whisky, when the tails of the farm horses were gaudily decked with straw and ribbon, and impassable were the bleating roads. Cattle took their nearest way to the common, with a fine contempt for private property, and on one occasion, the exasperated laird of Platts sent round the bellman with the announcement that every cattle-driver caught trespassing on his grounds would be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law. There was consternation among Hobart's listeners. "Hoots, lads," Snecky said, as he folded up the paper, "dinna tak' on; it's juist a haver o' the grieve's."

An ugly rumour once went through the community to the effect that Snecky only awaited the offer of the kirk officership of the new Free Church to accept it. People looked askance at him at the time, and I remember he did have a hang-dog appearance. But the temptation was greater than most of us understood. The new seceders had a bell that put every other musical instrument in the village to shame. It was the kirk officer's sacred privilege to toll it, and with Snecky it would have been a labour of love. The poor "stock" who got the post merely took it as a matter of money, and gave the minister "up his foot" for asking him to toll the prayer-meeting in on Wednesdays. Snecky would have rung it in and out every night in the week and tried variations between times. As it was he had to content himself with sneering audibly every time it rang; and wheresoever two or three Auld Lichts were gathered together in the square, with the bellman in their midst, one might be sure that Snecky, with a wistful eye in its direction, was laying down the law contemptuously concerning the Free Kirk bell.

Disappointment in a vale of tears is the occasional lot even of public men, as Lang Tammas used to remind the bellman over a capacious mull of snuff. Snecky would rake the fire gloomily and shake his head. Among his trials was the callousness of Doctor Lament. Hobart was a body whose happiness lay from an early age in his medical man's hands. An ambition of his life was to be stricken with a fell disease, but the doctor never sympathized with his case, even to the extent of a trumpery cold. It was a great day for Snecky when he fell through Andra Cowrie's pig-stye and had to be carried home on a stretcher. But such occasions were rare, and even then he healed quickly. There never was a man with a more beautiful faith in pills, and in its way it was touching to see the bellman's trembling hands going out toward cough bottles. When he had the luck (for this was his only chance) to have relatives unwell in his house, he rubbed their rheumatic backs with a glee that would only have been excelled had the back been his own, enjoying the reflected glory; and the Auld Lichts who loved him, sent their medicinal drugs to him with their compliments. The bellman was a little injudicious in his mixture?, smacking his thin lips over whatever fell in his way, without asking questions; and I have seen him draw a very long face over ointments wasted on flannel. He thought all medicines should be taken inwardly. Snecky looked forward to the drear day with a Christian fortitude that few Auld Lichts ever could manifest. His ideal death was after a lingering illness and much medicine taken from a spoon three times a day. There was poetry to him in the phrase "shake the bottle; and complacently he awaited the time when he would be stricken down, and so turn the tables on the doctor. The impression was general among the Auld Lichts, though to do them justice they never mentioned it to him, that the reason why the bellman got no "treatment" was because he was so strong.

title: An Auld Licht Official


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text: Index:New Peterson magazine 1857 Vol. XXXI.pdf


text: Page:New Peterson magazine 1857 Vol. XXXI.pdf/1


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Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/42

38 but a patient to be restrained. He is sick. You cannot cure him; it is useless to say to him: "Thou ailest here and there"; it is useless to say anything to him but " Thou shalt not." His unreason is what he is a socialist with. That, too, is the cause of his inefficiency in the competitions of life, for which, naturally, he would substitute something " more nearly to the heart's desire"— an order of things in which all would share the rewards of efficiency. Always it is the incapable who most loudly preaches the gospel of Equality and Fraternity — which, being interpreted, means stand and deliver and look pleasant about it. In the Cave of Adullam the credentialing shibboleth is " Love me, damn you, as I love myself."

A distinguishing feature of socialism as we have the happiness to know it in this country is its servitude to anarchism. In theory the two are directly antithetical. They are the North and the South Pole of political thought, leagues and leagues removed from zones of intellectual fertility. Anarchism says: "Ye shall have no law"; socialism: "Law is all that ye shall have." They "pool their issues" and make common cause, but let them succeed in their work of destruction and their warfare


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Page:An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding - Locke (1690).djvu/57

RV 41 (Chap II.) were? And whether one of them might not be very happy, and the other very miserable? Just by the same reason, they make the Soul and the Man two persons, who make the Soul think apart, what the Man is not conscious of. For, I suppose, no body will make Identity of persons, to consist in the Soul's being united to the very same numerical particles of matter: For if that be necessary to Identity, 'twill be impossible, in that constant flux of the particles of our Bodies, that any Man should be the same person, two days, or two moments together.

§. 13. Thus, methinks, every drousie nod shakes their Doctrine, who teach, That the Soul is always thinking. Those, at least, who do at any time sleep without dreaming, can never be convinced, That their Thoughts are sometimes for four hours busie without their knowing of it; and if they are taken in the very act, waked in the middle of that sleeping contemplation, can give no manner of account of it.

§. 14. 'Twill perhaps be said, That the Soul thinks, even in the soundest Sleep, but the Memory retains it not. That the Soul in a sleeping Man should be this moment busie a thinking, and the next moment in a waking Man, not remember, nor be able to recollect one jot of all those Thoughts, is very hard to be conceived, and would need some better Proof than bare Assertion to make it be believed. For who can without any more ado, but being barely told so, imagine, That the greatest part of Men, do, during all their Lives, for several hours every Day, think of something, which if they were asked, even in the middle of these Thoughts, they could remember nothing at all of? Most Men, I think, pass a great part of their Sleep without dreaming. I once knew a Man, that was bred a Scholar, and had no bad Memory, who told me, he had never dream'd in his Life, till he had that Fever, he was then newly recovered of, which was about the Five or Six and Twentieth Year of his Age. I suppose the World affords more such Instances: At least every ones Acquaintance, will furnish him with Examples enough of such, as pass most of their Nights without dreaming.

§. 15. To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very useless sort of thinking: and the Soul in such a state of thinking, does very little, if at all, excel that of a Looking-glass, which constantly receives variety of Images, or Ideas, but retains none; they disappear and vanish, and there remain no footsteps of them; the Looking-glass is never the better for such Ideas, nor the Soul for such Thoughts. Perhaps it will be said, that in a waking Man, the materials of the Body are employ'd, and made use of, in thinking; and that the memory of Thoughts, is retained by the impressions that are made on the Brain, and the traces there left after such thinking; but that in the thinking of the Soul, which is not perceived in a sleeping Man, there the Soul thinks apart, and making no use of the Organs of the Body, leaves no impressions on it, and consequently no memory of such Thoughts. Not to mention again the absurdity of two distinct Persons, which follows from this Supposition, I answer farther, That whatever Ideas the Mind can receive, and contemplate without the help of the Body, it is reasonable to conclude, it can retain without the help of the Body too, or else the Soul, or any separate Spirit, will have but little advantage by thinking. If it has no memory of its own Thoughts; if it cannot record them for its use, and be able to recall them upon any occasion; if it cannot reflect upon what is past, and make use of its former Experiences, Reasonings, and Contemplations, to what purpose does it think? They who make the Soul a thinking Thing, at this rate will not make it a much more noble Being, than those do, whom they


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text: Index:Sweet Home; or Friendships Golden Altar (Google scan).pdf


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Rh

almost home. Dear native home,—in this quiet little village, nestled down closely by this sweet murmuring river,—how many sweet memories cling to thee! how beautiful thou art, surrounded by these proud hills and fine groves, scattered among which are neat cottages, green fields, and flourishing gardens!—the delight of the sober farmer and his prudent, loving wife. Where else does the glorious sun look down so cheerfully? How like a mantle of gold is his light thrown over these distant hills! and with what beauty does he tinge the heads of those stately oaks, silver maples, and proud pines, as they bow a welcome to the morning! Nor has he forgotten to gild the spire of the dear old church, with which are connected sweet and sad recollections. There I received instructions from the sacred Scriptures, and heard holy words from the man of God, never to be forgotten. But where are those who listened with me? I must go read the


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 on those plain monuments and marble slabs within the churchyard, (sacred place!) within whose bosom is locked the precious dust of loved ones. Here, in this corner, is my dear grandfather, the old man with silver hair, whose face shone so brightly when he talked of heaven and rest for the weary. And here, beside him, is one who shared his sunny days and dreary hours through many a year, but, weary of life, laid down to rest before him. Here is little Freddie's grave, and there his dear Alice, too.

O Death, thou hast sent gloom into many a happy heart; ay, and taken those who once made happy and bright a home in this little cottage. Dear old home—every thing around has a peculiar beauty to me; and each tells of joyous days and sunny hours. The old maple still stands firm, though the fierce winds of many a winter have beat upon it; and the elm spreads out his arms as lovingly as when I played beneath its shade with a merry group. I see them now, those honest, rosy faces; and "would I were a child again." Our young hearts had never known sorrow then, the bitter tears of disappointment had never dimmed our eyes, nor had our ears ever heard the last adieu of a dear sister, a fond father, and a tender mother. The future was then one long, bright, happy day of gladness and mirth.


text: Index:New Peterson magazine 1854 Vol. XXV.pdf


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  Though sad changes, dark days, and gloomy scenes from the past ever come before me, here, still, it's a loved spot, a sacred place; for here I first heard the story of God and heaven, learned my first lesson of gentleness and forbearance, and was first taught to lisp my wants in the ear of Him who giveth every good.

remember the time when I first sought your home, When a smile, not a word, was the summons to come, When you called me a friend, till you found, with surprise, That our friendship turned out to be love in disguise, You remember it—don't you? You will think of it—won't you? Yes, yes, of all this the remembrance will last Long after the present fades into the past.

You remember the grief that grew lighter when shared; With the bliss, you remember, could aught be compared? You remember how fond was my earliest vow— Not fonder than that which I breathe to thee now. You remember it—don't you? You will think of it—won't you? Yes, yes, of all this the remembrance will last Long after the present fades into the past.


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Law Bureau Senate Secretariat

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text: Sweet Home; or, Friendship's Golden Altar/The Wayside


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Author:Angus Stewart Woodburne

Works

 * Reactions of Welfare Work on Religious Work in The Biblical World (1920)
 * The Indianization of Christianity in The Journal of Religion (1921)
 * The Psychological Study of Conversion in India in The Journal of Religion (1921)
 * The Present Religious Situation in India in The Journal of Religion (1927)

title: Author:Angus Stewart Woodburne


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 As long as no provision of law has been amended or no new law has been enacted to enable the local administration to proceed in line with the provisions of section 214, section 216, and section 217, but not be over two years from the day of coming into force of this Constitution, the provisions of the said three sections shall not be applied.

All the orders given by the Prime Minister by virtue of the power under section 17 of the Charter for Administration of the Kingdom, 2515 Buddhist Era, which are still in force on the day of coming into force of this Constitution, shall continue to be in force. Their repeal or modification shall be effected by acts.

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text: Sweet Home; or, Friendship's Golden Altar


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 In a referendum organised for the people to vote in accordance with section 229, a majority of votes shall govern. If the public resolution is in favour of the draft constitution, the Monarch would then sign it within thirty days from the day of announcement of the referendum results, and such constitution shall come into force upon its publication in the Royal Gazette. If the public resolution is not in favour of the draft constitution, the draft constitution shall lapse.

In the initial period, the Senators under the provisions of this Constitution will be appointed by the Monarch on the day of the election of Members of the House of Representatives under section 233.

An election of Members of the House of Representatives under the provisions of this Constitution shall be held and finished within one hundred and twenty days from the day of coming into force of this Constitution.

From the day of coming into force of this Constitution to the day of the election of Members of the House of Representatives under section 233, the National Legislative Assembly under the Charter for Administration of the Kingdom, 2515

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Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/451

 Here, for instance, is a typical passage from "Man, the Social Creator":

The establishment of the intricate co-operative commonwealth by a rush of eighty million flushed


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 Buddhist Era, shall act as the National Assembly under the provisions of this Constitution, and the provisions of section 102 and section 103 shall not be applied to the holding of positions of Members of the National Legislative Assembly according to this section.

The Council of Ministers handling the government affairs of the State on the day of coming into force of this Constitution, or a Council of Ministers established before the election of Members of the House of Representatives under section 233, if any, shall become the Council of Ministers that handle the government affairs of the State under the provisions of this Constitution, and the provisions of section 179 and section 180 shall not be applied to the holding of ministerial positions according this section.

Upon the election of Members of the House of Representatives, the Council of Ministers under paragraph 1 shall retire from office but it must remain in office to continue working until a new Council of Ministers is established.

As long as no provision of law has been amended or no new law has been enacted to enable men and women to have equal rights, but not over two years from the day of coming into force of this Constitution, the provisions of paragraph 2 of section 28 shall not be applied.

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text: Index:New Peterson magazine 1854 Vol. XXVI.pdf


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 Local chief executive officers or local executive board may be elected through direct and secret ballot or elected by local assemblies from amongst their own members according to the provisions of law.

The criteria and methods for the elections under this section shall be as in the law thereon.

The Constitutional Tribunal is composed of nine Constitutional Justices selected from amongst competent persons by the National Assembly, the Council of Ministers, and the Judicial Commission under section 210, three per each organisation.

The Judicial Commission shall be the first to select Constitutional Justices and shall notify the National Assembly and Council of Ministers of the selection results. After the National Assembly has carried out its selection, it shall notify the Council of Ministers of the selection results. After the Council of Ministers has carried out its selection, the Prime Minister shall submit the names of all the selectees to the Monarch for

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text: Sweet Home; or, Friendship's Golden Altar/You remember


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Rh seems, in the meantime, that Dietrich, which signifies Rich in People, is the same name which in Greek becomes Theodoricus; for at first (as in Procopius) this very Theodoricus is always written Θευδεριχ, which almost exactly corresponds with the German sound. But such are the inconsistencies involved in both hypotheses, that we are forced to conclude one of two things: either that the Singers of those old Lays were little versed in the niceties of History, and unambitious of passing for authorities therein; which seems a remarkably easy conclusion: or else, with Lessing, that they meant some quite other series of persons and transactions, some Kaiser Otto, and his two Anti-Kaisers (in the twelfth century); which, from what has come to light since Lessing’s day, seems now an untenable position.

However, as concerns the “Nibelungen,” the most remarkable coincidence, if genuine, remains yet to be mentioned, “Thwortz,” a Hungarian Chronicler (or perhaps Chronicle), of we know not what authority, relates, “that Attila left his kingdom to his two sons Chaba and Aladar, the former by a Grecian mother, the latter by Kremheilch (Chriemhild) a German; that Theodoric, one of his followers, sowed dissension between them; and, along with the Teutonic hosts, took part with his half-countryman the younger son; whereupon rose a great slaughter, which lasted for fifteen days, and terminated in the defeat of Chaba (the Greek), and his flight into Asia.” Could we but put faith in this Thwortz, we might fancy that some vague rumour of that Kremheilch Tragedy, swoln by the way, had reached the German ear and imagination; where, gathering round older Ideas and Mythuses, as Matter round its Spirit, the first rude form of “Chriemhilde’s Revenge and the Wreck of the Nibelungen” bodied itself forth in Song.

Thus any historical light emitted by these old Fictions is little better than darkness visible; sufficient at most to indicate that


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 appointing them as Constitutional Justices. However, this shall be finished within sixty days from the day the Members of the House of Representatives are elected.

The Constitutional Tribunal shall select a Constitutional Justice to serve as its President.

In the event that the President is absent or unable to perform duties, the Constitutional Justices shall elect one amongst themselves to serve as the president of the meeting in question.

No Constitutional Justice shall be a Senator, Member of the House of Representatives, government official with regular office or monthly salary, state enterprise official, or local official.

The Constitutional Justices will be given official allowances and other fringe benefits according to the provisions of law.

No person shall hold an office of Constitutional Justice for two consecutive times.

A Constitutional Justice retires from his office upon—

the opening of the first session of the National Assembly after a general election;

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lxvi great Northern Immigrations, and wars and rumours of war have been; but nowise how and what they have been. Scarcely clearer is the special history of the Fictions themselves; where they were first put together, who have been their successive redactors and new-modellers. Von der Hagen, as we said, supposes that there may have been three several series of such. Two, at all events, are clearly indicated. In their present shape we have internal evidence that none of these poems can be older than the twelfth century; indeed, great part of the “Hero-book” can be proved to be considerably later. With this last it is understood that Wolfram von Eschenbach and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, two singers otherwise noted in that era, were largely concerned; but neither is there any demonstration of this vague belief: while again, in regard to the Author of our actual “Nibelungen,” not so much as a plausible conjecture can be formed.

Some vote for a certain Conrad von Würzburg; others for the above named Eschenbach and Ofterdingen; others again for Klingsohr of Ungerland, a minstrel who once passed for a magician. Against all and each of which hypotheses there are objections; and for none of them the smallest conclusive evidence. Who this gifted singer may have been, only in so far as his Work itself proves that there was but One, and the style points to the latter half of the twelfth century,—remains altogether dark: the unwearied Von der Hagen himself, after fullest investigation, gives for verdict, “we know it not.” Considering the


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Rh high worth of the “Nibelungen,” and how many feeble balladmongers of that Swabian Era have transmitted us their names, so total an oblivion, in this infinitely more important case, may seem surprising. But those “Minnelieder” (Love-songs) and Provençal Madrigals were the Court Poetry of that time, and gained honour in high places; while the old National Traditions were common property and plebeian, and to sing them an unrewarded labour.

Whoever he may be, Iet him have our gratitude, our love. Looking back with a farewell glance, over that wondrous old Tale, with its many-coloured texture “of joyances and hightides, of weeping and of woe,” so skilfully yet artlessly knit-up into a whole, we cannot but repeat that a true epic spirit lives in it; that in many ways it has meaning and charms for us. Not only as the oldest Tradition of Modern Europe, does it possess a high antiquarian interest; but farther, and even in the shape we now see it under, unless the “Epics of the Son of Fingal” had some sort of authenticity, it is our oldest Poem also; the earliest product of these New Ages, which on its own merits, both in form and essence, can be named Poetical. Considering its chivalrous, romantic tone, it may rank as a piece of literary composition, perhaps considerably higher than the Spanish “Cid”; taking in its historical significance, and deep ramifications into the remote Time, it ranks indubitably and greatly higher.

It has been called a Northern “Iliad”; but except in the fact that both Poems have a narrative character, and both sing “the destructive rage” of men, the two have scarcely any similarity. The Singer of the “Nibelungen” is a far different person from Homer; far inferior both in culture and in genius. Nothing of the glowing imagery, of the fierce bursting energy, of the mingled fire and gloom, that dwell in the old Greek, makes its appearance here. The German Singer is comparatively a simple nature; has never penetrated deep into life; never “questioned Fate;” or struggled with fearful mysteries; of all which we find traces in Homer, still more in Shakespeare; but with meek believing sub-


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is no place like ! It may be a rude, rough home, at the foot of some stern, snow-clad mountain; but wherever we wander, we look back to it with the utmost interest. The object of this book is to awaken the memories of home—to remind us of the old scenes and old times, and kindle on old hearthstones the old fires. It will assist us in living over past days, and we shall murmur,—

It is well often to go home, that the free innocence of childhood may be reflected from the hallowed scenes of early days upon our souls, which have been checkered with the joys and sorrows of life.


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 But home lives only in memory with some; its only existence is in the past. The cottage where we were born has been swept away, and a statelier edifice rises on the spot; the dear friends of our youth are dead, and their bones lie in the old churchyard, and we seldom go back to that old spot. This hook is designed to be the memorial of the home which has faded away, and the homestead which is now demolished or acquired by another; to call up old faces, and hang them like portraits on the walls of our active, busy lives; to sketch like the landscape the well with the old oaken bucket, the brook along which we often wandered, the meadow with its furrows, and the distant mountain with its misty drapery.

Some one draws a picture of a laborer returning at night to his home: "He has borne the heat and burden of the day, the descending sun has released him of his toil, and he is hastening home to enjoy repose. Half way down the lane, by the side of which stands his cottage, his children run to meet him. One he carries, and one he leads. The companion of his humble life is ready to furnish him with his plain repast. See his toil-worn countenance assume an air of cheerfulness! His hardships are forgotten; fatigue vanishes; he eats, and is satisfied.


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 The evening fair, he walks with uncovered head around his garden—enters again, and retires to rest; and 'the rest of the laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much.'" So we send this volume to be a companion for the evening hour, like the voices of his children, to cheer the weary laboring at night, believing all its readers will find it pure in morals, elevating in its tone, cheerful and hopeful in its disposition, and reverent in all its views of God—a transcript of home, sweet home.


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lxviii mission, has taken the Universe as he found it represented to him; and rejoices with a fine childlike gladness in the mere outward shows of things. He has little power of delineating character; perhaps he had no decisive vision thereof. His persons are superficially distinguished, and not altogether without, generic difference; but the portraiture is imperfectly brought out; there lay no true living original within him. He has little Fancy; we find scarcely one or two similitudes in his whole Poem; and these one or two, which moreover are repeated, betoken no special faculty that way. He speaks of the “moon among stars;” says often, of sparks struck from steel armour in battle, and so forth, that they were wie es wehte der wind, “as if the wind were blowing them.” We have mentioned Tasso along with him; yet neither in this case is there any close resemblance; the light playful grace, still more the Italian pomp and sunny luxuriance af Tasso are wanting in the other. His are humble wood-notes wild; no nightingale’s, but yet a sweet sky-hidden lark’s. In all the rhetorical gifts, to say nothing of rhetorical attainments, we should pronounce him even poor.

Nevertheless, a noble soul he must have been, and furnished with far more essential requisites for Poetry than these are; namely, with the heart and feeling of a Poet. He has a clear eye for the Beautiful and True; all unites itself gracefully and compactly in his imagination: it is strange with what careless felicity he winds his way in that complex Narrative, and, be the subject what it will, comes through it unsullied, and with a smile. His great strength is an unconscious instinctive strength; wherein truly lies his highest merit. The whole spirit of Chivalry, of Love, and heroic Valour, must have lived in him and inspired him. Everywhere he shows a noble Sensibility; the sad accents of parting friends, the lamentings of women, the high daring of men, all that is worthy and lovely prolongs itself in melodious echoes through his heart. A true old Singer, and taught of Nature herself! Neither let us call him an inglorious Milton, since now he is no longer a mute one. What good were it that


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Rh the four or five Letters composing his name could be printed, and pronounced, with absolute certainty? All that was mortal in him is gone utterly; of his life, and its environment, as of the bodily tabernacle he dwelt in, the very ashes remain not: like a fair heavenly Apparition, which indeed he was, he has melted into air, and only the Voice he uttered, in virtue of its inspired gift, yet lives and will live.

To the Germans this “Nibelungen Song” is naturally an object of no common love; neither if they sometimes overvalue it, and vague antiquarian wonder is more common than just criticism, should the fault be too heavily visited. After long ages of concealment, they have found it in the remote wilderness, still standing like the trunk of some almost antediluvian oak; may with boughs on it still green, after all the wind and weather of twelve hundred years. To many a patriotic feeling, which lingers fondly in solitary places of the Past, it may well be a rallying-point, and “Lovers’ Trysting-tree.”

For us also it has its worth. A creation from the old ages, still bright and balmy, if we visit it; and opening into the first History of Europe, of Mankind. Thus all is not oblivion; but on the edge of the abyss that separates the Old world from the New, there hangs a fair Rainbow-land; which also, in curious repetitions of itself (twice over, say the critics), as it were in a secondary and even a ternary reflex, sheds some feeble twilight fat into the deeps of the primeval Time.


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 {| class="sweet-home-toc" !colspan=3| Prose. !colspan=2| !Page.
 * + Contents.
 * - class="sweet-home-toc-aux"
 * /Preface/,
 * Frances E. Percival
 * 3
 * /The Two Homes/,
 * T. S. Arthur,
 * 13
 * /Good Nature/,
 * H. W. Beecher,
 * 36
 * /Good Manners/,
 * Charles Bray,
 * 42
 * /Milly Gray/,
 * Anonymous,
 * 44
 * /How to be happy/,
 * Anon.,
 * 56
 * /Not worth the Trouble/,
 * Anon.,
 * 58
 * /Saturday Night/,
 * Clara,
 * 63
 * /Say, No,/
 * Anon.,
 * 70
 * /The Two Palaces/,
 * Puritan,
 * 76
 * /Fanny and Flora/,
 * Anon.,
 * 86
 * /The Story of the Firefly/,
 * Anon.,
 * 89
 * /Mother, Mother/,
 * Henry Clay,
 * 104
 * /Tears/,
 * Dr. Johnson,
 * 108
 * /Influence of Woman/,
 * Daniel Webster,
 * 111
 * /Death of a Household Treasure/,
 * D. C. Eddy,
 * 119
 * /The Whole Family/,
 * Mrs. Sedgwick,
 * 132
 * /True Wife/,
 * Anon.,
 * 137
 * /The Wayside/,
 * Mrs. E. H. Gould,
 * 141
 * /How she found the Time/,
 * Mrs. Caroline A. Soule,
 * 146
 * /Witty Women/,
 * Anon.,
 * 164
 * /Correcting in Anger/,
 * Watchman,
 * 169
 * /The World of Mind/,
 * Anon.,
 * 173
 * /True Words better than Tears/,
 * Kate Sutherland,
 * 178
 * /The Marriage Relation/,
 * Morning Star,
 * 190
 * /Little Bennie/,
 * Anon.,
 * 197
 * /Influence of an Unkind Word/,
 * Anon.,
 * 200
 * /Contentment/,
 * Anon.,
 * 208
 * }
 * Watchman,
 * 169
 * /The World of Mind/,
 * Anon.,
 * 173
 * /True Words better than Tears/,
 * Kate Sutherland,
 * 178
 * /The Marriage Relation/,
 * Morning Star,
 * 190
 * /Little Bennie/,
 * Anon.,
 * 197
 * /Influence of an Unkind Word/,
 * Anon.,
 * 200
 * /Contentment/,
 * Anon.,
 * 208
 * }
 * 200
 * /Contentment/,
 * Anon.,
 * 208
 * }
 * }


text:
Page:Sweet Home; or Friendships Golden Altar (Google scan).pdf/289

 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY

L. P. CROWN & CO.

SCRIPTURE EMBLEMS AND ALLEGORIES.

Being a series of emblematical and allegorical engravings, with written explanations, miscellaneous observations and religious reflections, designed to illustrate divine truth in accordance with the cardi- nal principles of Christianity. By Rev. William Holmes and John W. Barber. Cloth, gilt back and centre, $1.25; full gilt, $1.50: morocco, full gilt, $2.

THE DESERTED FAMILY;

OR, WANDERINGS OF AN OUTCAST.

By Paul Creyton. Cloth, gilt back and centre, $1; full gilt, $1.25.

THE COTTAGE AND THE MANSION.

By 8. B. Emmons. This work might properly be called a Museum of isms, or popular fallacies; giving a description of the various hallucinations and early and modern ages. Cloth, gilt back, $1.
 * nine days’ wonders” which have existed both in

PERILS AND PLEASURES OF A HUNTERS LIFE.

By Peregrine Herne. [Illustrated with colored engravings. Cloth, gilt back and centre, $1.25.

* * * Responsible agents wanted in every part of the United States and British Provinces. For terms, &c., address

L. P. CROWN & CO.,

Publishers, 61 Cornhill, Boston.


text: Page:Sweet Home; or Friendships Golden Altar (Google scan).pdf/17


text: Page:Sweet Home; or Friendships Golden Altar (Google scan).pdf/18