The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1902-12-14

beautiful, perfect body sheathed in a
garment that outlined each movement,
for the instant in suspense. Like a
mist the glimmering of her skin. the
shining of her hair, the elusive moon
like quality Of her whole personality
as she stood there ia the ghost-like
clearing listening, her fingers on her
lips.
Behind her lurked the low. even
shadow oe the forest where the moon
was not, band of velvet against
which the girl and the light-touched
twigs and bushes and grass blades
were etched like frost against a black
window pane. There was something,
too, of the frOst-work's evanescent
spiritual quality in the scene-as
though at any moment. with a mfr
of the balmy summer wind. the radi-
ant glade, the lowering figure, the fla
greed silver of the entire setting would
melt into the accustomed stern and
Inenaclng forest of the nOrthland with
its wolves, and its wild deer, and the
voices OF its sterner calling.
Thorpe held his breath and waited.
Again the white throat lifted his clear
spiritual note across the brightness,
slow, trembling with ecstacy. The girl
never moved. She stood in the moon
light like a beautiful emblem of silence,
half real, half fancy, part woman, Who'll
ly divine, listening to the little birds
message.
For the third time the song shiv-
cred across the night; then Thorpe
with a soft sob, dropped his face in
nus hands and looked no more
He did not feel the earth beneath
his knees, nor the whip of the sumach
across his face; he did not see the
moon shadows creep slowly along the
fallen birch; nor did he notice that
the White-throat had hushed its song
his Utmost spirit was shaken. Some
thing had entered his soul and filled
/ it to the briTn, so that he dared no
longer stand in the face of radiance
until he had accounted with himself
Another drop would overflow the cup.
All, sweet God, the beauty of it, the
beauty of it! That questing, childlike,
| starry gaze, seeking so purely to the
| stars themselves! That flower face
| those dropping, half parted lips! That
| inexpressible. unseizable something
they had meant Thorpe searched
| humbly-eagerIy- with agony
through his troubled spirit. and in it
furthermost depths saw the mystery as
/ beautifully remote as ever. 1t ap-
| preached and swept over him and left
| him gasping Passi0n-racked. All, sweet
God, the beauty of it, the beauty of
1t! the vision! the dreaml
He trembled and sobbed with his de-
sire to seize it. with his impotence to
express it. with his failure even to
| appreciate it as his heart told him it
| should be appreciated.
He dared not look. At length ne
( turned and stumbled back through the
moonlit forest crying on his old gods
| in vain.
At the banks of the river he came
| to halt. There in the velvet pines
| the moonlight slept calmly, and the
shadows rested quietly under the
breezeless sky. Near at hand the river
shouted as ever its cry of joy over
the vitality of life like spirited boy
before the face of inscrutable nature.
All else was silence. Then from the
| waste doomed a strange, hollow note
/ rising, dying, rising again. instinct
with the spirit of the Wilds 1t fell
and far away sounded a heavy but
! distant crash. The cry lifted again.
! 1t was the first bull moose calling
| across the wilderness to his mate.
| And then, faint but clear down the
current of a chance breeze drifted the
| chorus of the Fighting Forty.
THE forests so brown at our stroke go
/ down.
| And cities spring up where they fell;
| While logs well run and work wen done
/ Is the story the shanty boys tell
Thorpe turned from the river with a
/ thrust forward of his head. He was
not a religious man, and in his six
years woods experience had never
been to church. Now he looked up
over the tops of the pines to where the
Pleiades glittered family among the
/ brighter stars.
Thanks. God, said he briefly.