Theodore Goodridge Roberts

“ I felt myself to be more than a match for a dozen old fools like Ruben Glashner. An old woodroad led me three miles on my way, through tall timber; and from that point forward I followed a ghost of a track through tangled underbrush and over rotted blow-downs. I broke clear at last, and looked out upon a scene of desolation which even the sun of a May morning could not enliven. Brown and gray and flat and set in a low black rim, the hardhack spread for miles to the east and north and south. Here were miles, thousands of acres, of life which looked like death, and death which fed that life. ”

“ The crows came ashore. A brown hawk went cruising over, flying low.
The level of the dreary waste was broken in five places within my range of vision. Two of these breaks were clumps of bushes and saplings lifted from four to five feet above the grim hardhack and tinted yellow and green with bloom and leaf; two others were solitary pines, half-grown and worse than half-dead, stooped like lost travelers in a desert; and the fifth was a knoll like a tiny island in that tideless sea, topped by a tall shaft of timber, gray as an old bone. ”

“ From an ancient volume bound in sheepshkin I cut a time-browned fly-leaf. With this, I retired to my room upstairs and locked myself in. For fifteen minutes I worked on a page of my notebook. Then I emptied my fountain-pen of ink, dipped it in diluted iodine and copied from the notebook onto the time-stained paper which I had brought from the library.
I contemplated my work with satisfaction. The paper was brown with age and the strokes and jots of the pen were brown as a mummy. Here was something for old Ruben Glashner and his unknown confederate to busy themselves with. ”