Mary Hallock Foote

“ A young man is not long satisfied with the mystery his thoughts have woven around the woman who is their object. Evesham had grown impatient; he had broken the spell of her sweet remoteness. He had touched her and found her human, deliciously, distractingly human, but with a streak of that obduracy which history has attributed to the Quakers under persecution. In vain he haunted the mill-dam, and bribed the boys with traps and pop-guns, and lingered at the well-curb to ask Dorothy for water that did not reach his thirst. ”

“ The shoes of a marching army would be cut from their feet before they had gone a dozen miles across it; horses would have no feet left; and water would have to be packed as on an ocean, or a desert, cruise.
I rode over places where the rock rang beneath my horse's hoofs like the iron cover of a manhole. I followed the hollow ridges that mounted often forty feet above my head, but always with that gruesome effect of thickening movement—that sluggish, atomic crawl; and I thought how one man pursuing another into this frozen hell might lose himself, but never find the object of his quest. ”

“ Thane! you have not surely profaned this solemn journey with such thoughts as these?"
"A man cannot always help his thoughts, Mr. Withers. I have not profaned my thoughts by putting them into words, till now. I cannot do them justice, but I have made them plain. This is not a question of taste or propriety with me, or even decency. It is my life,—all of it I shall ever place at the disposal of any woman. I am not a boy; I know what I want and how much I want it. The secret of success is to be in the right place at the right time: here is where I ask your help." ”

“ Beautiful as the great pine-trees, the sheltered beach, and the shadows on the water had looked to them after their long, hot ride over the mountain trail, there were always the granite cliff on one side and the lava bluffs on the other, and no far-off lines for the eye to rest upon. People who have lived in places where there is a great deal of sky and a wide horizon are never long contented in nooks and corners of the earth, however lovely their detail may be. ”

“ Nancy was piqued, but not resentful. The more he did not come, as evening after evening smiled upon the level land; the more she thought of Travis, alone in his dusty camp, alone on his blinding beat; the more she dwelt upon the singularity and constancy of his refusal, the more she respected him for it.
So one day he did see her again. She was sitting on the bridge planks, leaning forward, her arms in her lap, her hat tipped back, a star of white sunlight touching her forehead. ”

“ I should be a lost man the moment I ventured out of call. Woodcraft must be a sixth sense which we lost with the rest of our Eden birthright when we strayed from innocence, when we ceased to sleep with one ear on the ground, and to spell our way by the moss on tree-trunks. In these solitudes, as we call them, ranks and clouds of witnesses rise up to prove us deaf and blind. Busy couriers are passing every moment of the day; and we do not see, nor hear, nor understand. We are the stocks and stones. Packer John is our only wood-sharp;—yet the last half of the name doesn't altogether fit him. ”

“ The little hand-raised poplars about the ferry-house were shivering and tugging and straining their thin necks in the gale, the windows so loaded with dust that we could barely see if there were lights inside. We hooted and we howled,—the men did,—and the ferry-keeper came out and stared at us in blank amazement that we should be wanting supper and beds. As if we could have wanted anything else at that place except to cross the river, which we don't do. We go up on this side. We came down the hill merely to sleep at the ferry-house, the night being too bad for a road camp. ”

“ What that note of the deep-colored summer twilight means to her she hardly understands. It awakens no thought of expectation for herself, no definite desire. She knows that the trumpeter's sunset call is his good-by to duty on the eve of joy; it is the pæan of his love for Callie. Wonderful to be like Callie; who after all is just like any other girl,—like herself, just as she was a year ago, before she had ever spoken to Henniker.
Henniker was not only a trumpeter, one of four who made music for the small two-company garrison; he was an artist with a personality. ”

“ Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of the imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of humor at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when it came to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman, once his wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in extinction, after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for slipping off those cruel disguises that life weaves around us. ”

“ In June, when the sun lay hot on the whitening dust, Jack used to lean with his arms deep in the cool, green, springy mass of the hedge, his chin barely above its close-shorn twigs, and stare at the slow-moving tops of the tall chestnut-trees across the meadow, and dream of journeys and of circuses passing, with band wagons and piebald horses and tramp of elephants and zebras with stiff manes. How queer an elephant would look walking past the gate of Uncle Townsend’s meadow! ”

“ The boys had, in a measure, justified their father's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was released from much of her out-door work; but the silence of the kitchen, when she was there alone with her ironing and dish washing, was a heavier burden than she had yet known.
Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in remote farmhouses with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like besoms of destruction, but they scatter the web of stifling routine; they fling into the stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into crystal. ”