The Cook County herald. [volume] (Grand Marais, Minn.) 1893-1909, 1902-08-16

Auther Of "A MAID OF THE WEST" "FER0Y
copyrighted, 1901. by I
CHAPTER l.
The Breaking of an Environment.
The single street of Grayborough
runs down hills that face the sea on
that rock-bound coast of Maine where
all winter long turbulent waves show
changing gray faces to gray sky. Far
out are little islands of stones that
serve as picturesque visions for sum-
mer tourists and, when the storms
come down, eat ships. 1t is a COM
munity of shopkeepers, boarding
house keepers, retired seamen, resi-
dent farmers, a lawyer or two, one
doctor, four ministers, woman who
writes for fiction weeklies, and is
therefore literary person. seagoing
men who sail along the coast In
schooners, and listless mechanics, car
penters, wheelwrights and so on. For
three hundred years the same families
have lived there and they have inter-
married until every one is akin to
every one else. You cannot stand in
front of the little hotel and say that
Jedediah Robbins is skinhint with
out arousing the wrath Of Mehitabel
Brown, whose great-grandmother mar
rted great-grand-second-c Of
Robbins. In the summertime, occa-
sional visitors come from the great cit
les, attracted there by the singing salt
air and quiet. For six weeks the place
is excited into spasms by men in knick-
-erbockers, girls in bicycle skirts, the
whack Of tennis rackets, the click of
golf balls, moonlight flirtatiors, man
dolin serenades, light laughter and
song. The residents look with set re-
proving faces upon these evidences of
immortality and when the chill Septem-
Der has come settle back into the won't
ed routine with gossip-material to last
them through the winter. The life in
'Grayborough is hard, narrow, devo-
dOnal, monotOnous. In 1897 old Eph-
CAIN Butler, who used to be mate of
the schooner Polly" to and from the
>Bermudas for onions, went to Bangor,
stayed three days and returned with a
quart Of Medford rum, from which he
publicly and fearlessly drank in Sam
uel Higgins grocery. It will take him
three years longer to regain his social
status.
Near the end of the street furthest
from the bay lives Miss Tabitha Eng
aish, who owns to forty-five years. She
is narrow-hipped and flat-bosomed,
with iron gray hair. thin lips and a
large nose. Earlier in life she had
teanings toward Universalism, but has
byterian. She has a little house and a
little garden and a little income de-
rived from her fathers estate. With
her lived her niece, Lois English. AS
the story under narration is practically
the story of this young woman, it is
proper here to state who and what she
was.
In that staid, still, somber town she
oloomed as some strange tropical flow
er might bloom for an hour upon
rock-ribbed pinnacle of Greenland. She
was of straight New England strain,
except that three generations back
upon the distaff side of the house there
had been an admixture of French
blood from Canada, and in her the
deathless Latin fire showed as 1t had
showed in her mother and her mothers
mother. With this dash of the fiery
song-inspired fluid of Provence came
her name, Lois. Her mother had died
when the child was five months old.
Three years later her father, as brave
and competent seaman as ever set his
life upon cast in all those stormy wa
tors, went to grave which had
yawned before him since his boyhood.
Aunt Tabitha took the infant and
reared her into womanhood according
to her lights, which were dim but
steady. The girl, showing evidence
oven when child of strange beauty
and strange contradictions of charac-
ter. went through the public school at
Grayborough, through the high school
at Augusta and through a modest SEM
mary for young ladies in Massachu-
aetts. Her father had left enough
money to educate her and the wish
that it should be expended in fitting
her for battle with the world, Her
rigid aunt scrupulously accounted for
every dollar of it. subsequently Lois
was trained for year as profession
al nurse in Philadelphia, sickened Of
the business, attended a Normal" or
two and became school teacher. She
spoke German slowly but correctly and.
as gift of 'heredity, battered French
with the soft slurs and ease of the
people just above Marseilles. She was
an expert needle-worker and fair mu-
stefan, possessing a contralto voice OF
wonderful depth and purity with
strange pathos and passion in it that
sounded strangely to the people among
whom she was born. Upon the native
warmth of her character was grated
through early environment a certain
repression of manner. She walked
among them q volcano Of an icy out,
ward seeming 'Th0rOuph1v MIRO thor.