The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 1850-1873, 1873-06-20
BY HORSLEY BROS. & FIGUERs

starting the day before it arrived, but
would doubtless return soon, and in the
mean time no effort should be spared
to find and hasten him.
When she went to dinner, that after.
noon, there was the usual stare at the
newcomer, with a reaction of excessive
masculine Difference, which quite dis.
concerted poor Amy, and made hel
feel very much out of place. She had
begun to entertain q conscious longing
for companionship with her own sex,
but a generous specimen of female cor
pulency at the end of the table, talking
necessarily with most gratuitous prod
igality of voice, to select coterie OF
admirers, and two elaborately dressed
young ladies, with dash of bold pref
tiness and an extravaganza of white
powder on their faces, bandying Jokes
and slang phrases with their vis-asfis
across the table; robbed isolation of its
sense of loss. Her convictions on this
point was somewhat confirmed, when,
an hour later, Mr.. Bliss, at her request,
guided her to the little cabin on the
side-hill where Harry had been bach
ing it, whence she discovered what
seemed to her strange phenomenon in
the person of a richly-dressed lady sit
ting in remote doorway, smoking a
cigar, with all the nonchalance of one
well accustomed to that innocent diver
sion.
Harry's cabin was rude one, like its
fellows, which seemed to have perched
like so many crows in the most precari-
GUS situations on the barren hillside !;
but Harry was proverbially nice in his
tastes, and so the legendary dishes,
cleaned by turning on the other side,
were put away in all the dull neatness
of the most orthodox propriety, and
the bunk on which Harry had enjoyed
the main room by the ordinary cloth
partition, was cleanly draped; while, in
spite of the thick covering of dust which
had sifted through the inevitable
cracks, the floor gave evidence of inti-
macy with the broom, doing inverted
penance behind the door. On the ta-
BILE lay a scrap of paper full of penciled
figures, and, over all, "Amy" was
scribbled in two or three places, as if
the writer's mind had involuntarily
wandered from his mathematical COM
putations to the dearer thoughts of
home ; and, in one corner, Harry"
was carefully executed in large hand,
then, within the parallels of the Fl,
" Amy" was written in small characters,
and within the A was the tiny word,
" Baby" This papery circumstance,
the subtle kinship of mind and
matter, threw Amy into a lachrymose
alike distressing to Mr..
Bliss and baby and, after little, the
three returned
Next day, Amy learned the fabulous
cost of living at the hotel, counted her
money twice over, calculated just how
long it would give her a right to stay
there, looked greatly perplexed for half
an hour, then paid her bill, and with
baby made her way to Harry's cabin on
the hill. When Mr.. Bliss found her
there, he demonstrated, as he would
have done to any independent mind,
on the ground of unsafety, with hint
that it was not best, for some other
reason wholly unintelligible to Amy;
but she, with child-like innocence,
trusted all humanity, and was not
afraid. Dependent all her life upon
the wisdom of others, she would have
readily obeyed command, but none
came, and so her own Judgment pre-
vailed.
Her appearance at the hotel as the
protege of a notoriously fast man "
had inspired some unhallowed coniect-
1res, in spite of the contradiction in
her face and demeanor, and now, from
her sudden disappearance, had sprung
mp a whole crop of wicked differences.
Nevada society has never adjusted it.
self to the stereotyped grooves of social
teas and neighborly gossip, and it new
er will. Two unsophisticated ladies
from the east once conceived the be-
nevolent device of both leavening the
and benefting the poor,
by means of a sewing society. 1t began
we'll, with the moral support of the
best female influence In town but a
deficiency of that mild
type of gossip which is the natural
pabulum of such institutions, and a Sc
ries of social shocks which caused ev-
erybody to regard everybody else with
that distant Difference which one might
accord to an electric eel,
caused it soon to degenerate into an
evening sociable, which few
ladies found time to attend, and where
gentlemen, to whom the attractions of
the saloons had become monotonOus,
made free contribution, ranging from
g four bits to five dollars. until the
treasury was overburdened. Everv-
body was then living in the enjoyment
of prospective opulence, since the fat
down the canon had
&c struck it rich, and two or three illit-
crate miners had suddenly found them
selves transformed to wealthy specula-
tors, while several Irish ladies had
risen, by means of wildcat stock, from
Biddies to a high state of
eligibility, not to mention
those of more pretentious quality who
had taken fortune at the food;" so,
in sheer lack of more legitimate benef-
Charles, the money was donated to the
wife, and the society aband-
oned to quiet death.
Physical barrenness and moral rank
ness and excess is the law of life there
The same climatic influences which dry
up the springs of sanitary vegetation,
seem to foster tropical luxuriance of
evil in the moral soul. There are few
souls whose unsoiled spt tlessness has
proved their utter lack of chemical af-
Unity with the surrounding elements,
Or rather the steadfastness of tina mys-
tic anchor within the vail but the great
multitude of men and women are in
tent on "making their pile" and their
escape as speedily as possible, and
they are willing to free them
selves of the hampering amenities of a
more deco. Gus life. Timid natures do
not seek such fields cf enterprise and
so, where hundreds of buildings go up
in a day, and fortunes are made and
lost in Intoxicating succession, slander
bursts full-blown into existence, with
out the ordinary germ and bud of ges-
sip. The women, be it said to their
praise, being vastly in the minority,
and their services much in demand,
attended to their own bust
ness, and found little time to form orig
inal conclusions concerning thir neigh
bors. The rigidly conservative among
them seemed inclined to consign new
comers of their own sex, who lacked the
flourish of an endorsement, to an eter-
nal quarantine, fearing, doubtless, some
deadly contagion; but, with feminine
they welcomed newly-ar-
rived gentlemen as if their manhood was
mail-proof against infection.
Amy's lonely life and the unvitalizing