Juniata sentinel and Republican. [volume] (Mifflintown, Juniata County, Pa.) 1873-1955, 1891-02-25
In which that ill-omened weed has
found place for its rootl

II
"There was none. Ny fingers be-
came sore in busying themselves with
the harsh and inhospitsble stones. Nv
feet slipped from the smooth and slimy
masonry beneath the water; and sever
al times my face came in rude contact
with the wall, where INV foothold gave
way on the instant that | seemed to
have found some diminutive rocky
cleat upon which could stay myself.
"Sir, did you ever see rat drowned
in a half-filled hogshead, how he
swims round, and round, and round /;
and after vainly trying the sides again
and again with his paws, fixes his ewes
upon the upper rim as if he would
look himself out of a watery prison?
81 thought of the miserable yermin.
thought of him as 1 watched thus his
dying agonies, when a cruel urchin of
eight or ten. BOYS are horribly cruel,
cir; boys, women, and savages. All
childlike things are cruel-cruel from
want of thought, from perverse in
genuity.
l thought then, l say, of the rat
drowning in half-tilled cask of water,
and lifting his gaze out of the vessel
as he grew desperate, and flung my
self on my back, and, floating thus,
fixed my eyes upon the moon.
"The moon is well enough in her
way, however you may look at her !;
but her appearance is, to say the least
of it, peculiar to a man floating on his
back in the centre of stone tank
with dead wall of some fifteen or
twenty feet rising .quarely on every
side of him!" (The young man smiled
bitterly as he said this, and shuddered
once or twice before he went on
musingly.)
"The last time had noted the plan
1t with any emotion she was on the
wane. Mary was with me; / had
brought her out here one morning to
look at the view from the top of the
Reservoir. She said little of the scene,
bnt as we talked of our old childish
loves, saw that its fresh features were
incorporating themselves with tender
memories of the past, and was con-
tent.
"There was rich golden haze upon
the landscape, and as my own spirits
rose amid the voluptuous atmosphere,
she pointed to the waning planet, dis
cernible like faint cash in the welkin,
and wondered how long it would be
before the leaves would fall. Strange
girl! did she mean to rebuke my joy
Gus mood, as if we had no right to be
happy while Nature, whitening in her
pomp, and the sickly moon wasting in
the blaze of neontide, were there to
remind us of the gone-forever'?
60 They will all renew themselves,
dear Mary said l, and there is one
that will ever keep tryst alike with thee
and nature through all seasons, if thou
wilt but be true to one of US, and re-
main as now a child of nature
ga tear sprsng to her eye, and then
searching her pocket for her card-case
she remembered an engagement to be
present at Miss Law.on's opening of
fall bonnets at two o'clock!
"And yet, dear, wild, wayward
Mary, thought of her now. You
have probably outlived this sort of
thing, sir; but 1, looking at the moon
as foated there upturned to her yell
low light, though of the loved being
she heard Of my singular fate, at once
so grote5que, yet melancholy to awful.
ness.
"And how often we have talked, too
of that Carian shepherd who spent his
damp nights upon the hills, gazing as
l do upon the lustrous planet! Who
will revel with her amid those old su-
perstitions! Who, from our own un-
legended woods, will evoke their yet
undetected haunting spirits? Who
peer with her in prying scrutiny into
natures laws, and challenge the whis-
pers of poetry from the voiceless throat
of matter2 Who laugh merrily over
the stupid guess-work of pedants, that
never mingled with the infinitude of
nature, through love exhalstless and
all-embracing, as we have? Poor girl
she will be companionless.
"Alasl companionless forever-ssve
in the exciting stages of some brisk
Irritation. She will live hereafter by
feeding other hearts with loves lore
she has learned from me, and then,
Pygmalion-like, grow fond of the
images she ha. herself endowed with
semblance of divinity. How anxious
she will be lest the coroner shall have
discovered any of her notes in my
pocketl
81 felt chilly as this last reflection
crossed my mind, partly at thought of
the coroner, partly at the idea of
Mary being unwillingly compelled to
wear mourning for me, in case of such
disclosure of our engagement. 1t is
provoking thing for a girl of nine
teen to have to GO in mourning for a
deceased lover at the beginning of her
second winter in the metropolis.
"The water, though, with my mo-
,;onless nosition. must have had some