Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1912-02-21


find what lie had found. Mankind,
gold-lusting, would swarm and hive
upon the hills and fight and love and
breed and die. Great God!
he could of course move on, but
where? And went he whithersoeYer
he might, he would now of necessity
carry with him another memory
which would not dwell within his
mind in harmony with the memory
which until that day had been para.
mount there alone.
Slowly. laboriously, painfully, he
had built his house upon the sand,
and the winds had blown and the
floods had come, not only in literal
but in spiritual significance, and in
one day that house had fallen. He
stood amid the wrecked remains Of it
trying to recreate it, to endow once
more with the fitted precision of the
past the shapeless broken units of the
fabric of his fond imagination.
While he resented the fierce, saw
age, passionate intensity the interrupt
ton of this woman into his life.
While he throbbed with equal inten-
sity and almost as much passion at
the thought of her
Have you ever climbed a mountain
early in the morning while it was yet
dark and having gained some domi-
nant crest stood staring at the far
horizon, the empurpled east, while the
dawn came up like thunder?" Or
better still, have you ever stood with
in the cold, dark recesses of some
deep valley Of river or pass and
watched the clear light spread it's
bars athwart the heavens like nebu-
lous mighty pinions along the light
touched crest of a towering range, IN
til all of a sudden, with a leap almost
of joy, the great sun blazed in the
high horizon?
You might be born a child of the
dark, and light might scar and burn
your eye balls accustomed to cooler
deeper shades, yet you could no more
turn away from this glory, though you
might hate it, than by mere effort Of
will you could cease to breathe the
air. The shock that you might feel,
the sudden surprise, is only family sug-
gestive of the emotions in the breast
of this man.
Once long ago the gentIest and ten
derest of voices called from the dark
to the light, the blind. And it is given
to modern science and to modern skill
sometimes to emulate that godlike
achievement. Perhaps the surprise,
the amazement, the bewiIderment, of
him who having been blind doth now
see, if we can imagine it not having
been in the case ourselves, will be a bet
ter guide to the understanding of this
mans emotion when this woman came
suddenly into his lonely orbit. His
eyes were opened although he would
not know it. He fought down his new
consciousness and would have none Of
it. Yet it was there. He loved her!
With what joy did Selkirk welcome
the savage sharer Of his solitude! Sup
pose she had been a woman of his own
race; had she been old, withered, hid
eOus, he must have loved her on the
instant, much more if she were young
and beautiful The thing was inev-
liable. Such passions are born. God
forbid that we should deny it. In the
busy haunts Of men where women are
as plenty as blackberries, to use Fal-
staff's smile, and where man may
sometimes choose between a hundred,
or a thousand, such loves are born, for
ever.
A voice in the night, a face in the
street, a whispered word, the touch
of hand, the answering throb of an
other heart-and behold! two walk to-
gether where before each walked
alone. Sometimes the man or the wom-
an who is born again of love knows it
not, refuses to admit it, refuses to
recognize it. Some birth pain must
awaken the consciousness of the new
life.
If those things are true and posi-
BILE under every day conditions and
to ordinary men and women, how
much more to this solitary. He had
seen this woman, white breasted like
the foam, rising as the ancient god
dress from the Paphian sea. Over that
recollection, as he was a gentleman
and Christian, he would fain draw a
curtain, before it erect a wall. He
must not dwell upon that fact, he
would not linger over that moment.
Yet he could not forget it.
Then he had seen her lying prone,
yet uncOnsciously graceful in her aban-
donment, on the sward; he had caught
a glimpse of her white face desperate
ly uptossed by the rolling water; he
had looked into the unbelievable
depth of her eyes at that moment
when she had awakened in his arms
after such struggle as had taxed his
manhood and almost broken his heart;
he had carried her unconsciously,
CHASTITY white with her pain-drawn
face, stumbling desperately over the
rocks in the beating rain to this, his
home. There he had held that poor,
bruised slender little foot in his hand,
gently, skiIfully treating it, when he
lOnged to press his lips passionately
upon it. Last of all he had looked