Benjamin F. Crittenden

“ Next day she learned that Judith, despite her ill health and her father's protests, had gone to nurse the sick and the wounded—what Phyllis plead in vain to do. The following day a letter came from Mrs. Crittenden's elder son. He was well, and the mother must not worry about either him or Basil. He did not think there would be much fighting and, anyhow, the great risk was from disease, and he feared very little from that. Basil would be [Pg 139] much safer as an aid on a General's staff. ”

“ Phyllis turned her face quickly.
"He'll be here soon," said his mother, with a smile.
The doctor looked at his flushed face.
"Come on, my boy," he said, firmly. "You must get out of the sun."
Crittenden shook his head.
"Mother, have I ever done anything that you asked me not to do?"
"No, my son."
"Please don't make me begin now," he said, gently. "Is—is she at home?"
"Yes; but she is not very well. She has been ill a long while," she added, but she did not tell [Pg 197] him that Judith had been nursing at Tampa, and that she had been sent home, stricken with fever. ”

“ The gray walls of Indian summer tumbled at the horizon and let the glory of many fires shine out among the leaves. Once or twice the breath of winter smote the earth white at dawn. Christmas was coming, and God was good that Christmas.
Peace came to Crittenden during the long, dream-like days—and happiness; and high resolve had deepened.
Day by day, Judith opened to him some new phase of loveliness, and he wondered how he could have ever thought that he knew her; that he loved her, as he loved her now. He had given her the locket and had told her the story of that night at the hospital. ”

“ A drink or two mellowed him to their propaganda—at the mention of Crit he burst into a torrent of curses and as the night wore on he declared for the revolution, looking for his immediate revenge in drinking up all the Boss's whiskey. In the end their revelry rose [Pg 92] to such a height that Crittenden was drawn away from his rough wooing and finally, under the pretence of delivering the United States mail, he walked boldly in upon them, determined to protect his property at any risk. ”

“ It lights up the time when you could stand upright under life's Eastern eaves; when day broke in the thunder of a six-pounder, and the sun came up to the clangor of the village bell, and the bare and barkless spar they had raised and planted the night before, budded like Aaron's rod, and blossomed out with the broad field of stars. ”

“ These humble heroisms in every day life of the patient women all over the land, were inspired by as fervent patriotism as ever impelled the men of the family to face their country’s foes on the field of battle. Like the deeds and sufferings of the private soldiers they must ever remain unrecorded but like the nameless graves that the red demon of war left scattered all over the South, in which serenely slept the unknown dead, the memory of what they did in the great struggle “will never perish from the earth.” ”

“ The Man of Mount Vernon endowed February, that cheapest of the months, with a twenty-second it never owned before; took what had been a blank white leaf between a brace of nights, so bent back upon it the radiant truth of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it shines right on—the radiant truth that the man of truest symmetry is the man of truest power. ”

“ The East and the West have kissed each other across the Continent, and every body and thing between is brisk as a flea, and breathless as a king's trumpeter. Even Consumption has whipped up its pale horse to a gallop, and dashed into the steeple-chase of the Age. ”

“ Such stories thrive along old roads, even as the Mayweed, and the thistles, that nobody ever cuts, and on whose pink tops the yellow-birds rock up and down, like little boats at anchor, till the Fall winds whistle away the golden birds and the white down. ”

“ Then, with the warble of bugle and much clatter, clang and ring of hoofs and spurs and scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with eagles in their eyes; their holsters, small packages of thunder and lightning, at the saddle-bow; their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus snugly strapped behind; the terrible frown of a bear-skin cap lowering on every brow, its jaunty feather, tipped with emblematic blood, springing out of the fur like the blossom of a magnified and glorified bull-thistle—and the flare of the red-coats set the scene and your heart on fire together! ”

“ And year after year the old road grows dimmer, and the grass gets green across the track, and it is rechristened "the long pasture," and is surrendered to the lowing herds and the singing birds. In the midst of a region humming with life, it alone is silent, and almost awakens human sympathy, so wandering and lost and desolate it is. ”

“ No telescope shall ever bring to view time's brown October. But when the birds forget to build their summer homes and bless the woods, and roses lose their flush and fragrance; when on just such another scroll of mossy landscape as you are reading now, no promises are made, then know that earnest Nature has wearied of her work and seeks a Holiday at last. ”

“ A fortnight ago, John hung his jacket upon the fence, and to-day he shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and two eggs as blue as the sky.
There is singing everywhere: from the tuft of gray grass there comes a small tune of two notes and a rest, then two more; from the second rail of the fence a gush of melody; from the roof-ridge, a solo; from the depths of the air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds and the buds make it May, and May it shall be. ”

“ They will have a house full of children—I have heard her mother say that was her ambition and the ambition she had for her children; and they will live a sane, wholesome, useful, happy life."
The buggy behind had made a little spurt, and the horses were almost neck and neck. Wharton looked ugly, and the black-eyed girl with fluffy black hair was looking behind Judith's head at Crittenden and was smiling. Not once had Judith turned her head, even to see who they were. Crittenden hardly knew [Pg 77] whether she was conscious of the race, but they were approaching her gate now and he found out. ”

“ When you see a brace of iron bars laid parallel upon the ground, and a harp of wire strung along beside it, you see the fragment of a man that can never indulge in a soul without borrowing one. It is the line of a mighty muscle, and the thread of a fine nerve. ”

“ I would not give much for the American who has nowhere in the year a day domed like a tower and filled with a chime of bells. Now, the Fourth of July is one of my days with stars in it, and bells withal, that shine and ring and roar out of my childhood with an eloquence that always sets the heart pounding with the concussion of the anvil and the feet keeping step to the frolic of Yankee Doodle. ”

“ The vast surging crowd was riddled and torn with the unceasing shower of death-dealing missiles. At last horror-stricken with the sight of heads, limbs and mangled bodies left, torn and bleeding on every side by the storm of iron, the Confederates turned and fled. ”

“ We feel them no more than we do the window-panes through which come the sunset and the starlight. But let something go wrong, and you are brought to a lively sense of possession in a twinkling. You begin to discover how rich you were without knowing it, and what an incalculable blessing you would lose if only one eye should be extinguished. ”

“ We may think what we will of it now, but the song and the story heard around the kitchen fire have colored the thoughts and lives of most of us; have given us the germs of whatever poetry blesses our hearts; whatever memory blooms in our yesterdays. Attribute whatever we may to the school and the school-master, the rays which make that little day we call life, radiate from the God-swept circle of the hearthstone. ”

“ One large ripe star used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods—I loved to fancy it would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for beech-nuts—a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not more than a breath or two farther off. ”

“ The haggard, dejected, living skeletons, crying for medical aid and food, and the ghastly corpses with glazed eyeballs staring up into vacant space, with flies swarming down their open mouths, and over their rags infested with swarms of lice and maggots, as they lay among the sick and dying, formed a picture of helpless, hopeless misery, impossible for words to portray. ”

“ The labored breathing of the locomotives behind you, the clouds of smoke and steam that wrap you as in a mantle, the noon-day eclipse of snow, the surging of the ship, the rattling of chains, the creak of timbers as if the craft were aground, and the sea getting out of its bed to whelm you altogether, the doubt as to what will come next—all combine to make a scene of strange excitement for a land-lubber. ”

“ Summer sends the bees thither to bugle among the thistle-blows, and the ground-sparrows build in its margins, and the faded ribbon of yellow sand grows bright in its glowing sun. The winds waft the breath of the morning over its desolate way, and the rains long ago beat out the old footprints it used to bear. Autumn sighs as it follows it through the ravine and among the hemlocks, and the drifts that Winter heaps are unbroken and stainless. ”

“ You roll out of Buffalo in the teeth of the wind, and the world is turned to snow. All goes merrily. The machine strikes little drifts, and they scurry away in a cloud. The three engines breathe easily, but by-and-by the earth seems broken into great billows of dazzling white. The sun comes out of a cloud, and touches it up till it outsilvers Potosi. Houses lie in the trough of the sea everywhere, and it requires little imagination to think they are pitching and tossing before your eyes. ”

“ Now, Lucy is pretty square-cornered mentally, but she comes of a stock on the mother's side somewhat given to dreaming. That mother of hers—she is seventy-six if she is a day—will see as much beauty in the sky and breathe the fragrance of the apple-blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world were only sixteen years old, and world and woman were born twins. ”

“ We like to stand by the deserted place, where only a broken thread of ice-cold water trickles its way down to the roadside, and fancy how eagerly, in the broad summer days, the horses, panting through the heavy sand and up the rocky hills, thrust their noses deep into the overflowing trough of crystal coolness, while, now and then, the cautious drivers pulled up their heads with a jerk, until they heard the long-drawn breath of inarticulate content. ”

“ No bolder feet, old Road, ever left their impress on other pathways; no truer hearts than hastened on thy rugged way, have ever turned beautiful in the "better land." If there were ever those whose laugh was music, then thy woods have heard it. The daughters of the West are passing fair, but those young brows of old, whose white flashed white again from thy singing streams, and eyes glanced back to eyes—no brighter and no purer were ever bent above a classic wave. ”

“ The tall man who stood there, nodding a welcome to them, must be Mr. Crittenden.
So that was the kind of man he was. Nothing special about him. Just a nice-looking American business-man, with a quiet, calm manner and a friendly face.
To the conversation which followed and which, like all such conversations, amounted to nothing at all, Mr. Welles made no contribution. What was the use? Mr. Bayweather and Vincent were there. The conversation would not flag. So he had the usual good chance of the silent person to use his eyes. He looked mostly at Mr. Crittenden. ”

“ You may forget the fashion of face and figure, but if
"There's a light in the window for thee,"
the expression of an eye will sometimes be all that remains to you of a dead friend. There it is that the soul comes the nearest to escaping. There it is more nearly undressed and out of doors than it can possibly be any where else without dying. ”

“ We like to think that the dripping cup was borne to bearded lips that were eloquent and true of old, and lips, maybe, of beauty, that are dusty and dumb to-day; that bees from the shimmering fields came bugling thither, and crept, with dainty feet, along the trough's damp edge; that birds sat there, and drank and rendered their little thanks, and rode away upon the billowy air; that now and then a squirrel, red and sleek, with snowy throat, flashed chattering along the zigzag rails, and flashed away again ”

“ It grows like a soap-bubble. She claps a love of a friz on her self-esteem, which allies her to angels; a coil of curl upon her firmness, which brings her, sometimes, within neighborly distance of donkeys; she borders her brow with ringlets, trails a braid about her inhabitiveness and constructiveness, touches up the tress on her veneration, and the head is artistically complete. She washes her face with a handkerchief, rights her collar, shakes out the creases, tosses the little hat upon the top of all things, and is ready for breakfast. ”

“ The timid children of the Rainbow, that fled before the plowshare, should grow bold again, and start up like young quails from their hiding, and cluster round the door-stone, and swing themselves up to the roof by green shrouds of their own, and swing themselves down the damp, mossy sides of the spring, and be numbered with the household. ”