Year: 1874

Narcissa came back to town some time ago.
You saw her coming, perhaps, one OF those
rainy days, in the express train (she al
WAYS travels pOst. AS for the weather, why
should that stop herf Waterproof and UNI
brella are always beside her, snug in the
shawl straps; in her little locked satche are
linen, medicine, books, and the thousand where
withals necessary to keep her small body and
mind in order. She could have stepped out of
the car ready for an Arctic journey or vOy-
age ND the Nile. She did not look out of the
window with the other passengers at the soft
falling rain sinking through the singed scrub
oaks and cedars in Jersey into the parched
sand below she was too busy reading the last
Plymouth Statement; and as you looked at
her, compact, wiry, thin-nOstriled and stiff
collared, with not a superhuOus ounce
of useless flesh, not loose hair, not
an inch of womanish limp rufling about
her, you felt that the mass of turgid bOsh
and ill-smelling fervOr typical of one kind OF
American culture. was on trial before this
flinty bit of common sense, which was the
product of another, and would meet with no
lax, spshOd verdict. You hugged yourself in
the security that your own little filtration or
net bit of sentiment would never be brought
before this wise young Daniel for judgment.
You were comfortable in the thought that she
had not seen you vagabOndizng at Bar Har-
Dor, or that her thin visage had not come be-
tween the moon and you in those nights up
in the mountains.


We, with whom Narcissa summered, resent
her thinness and common sense, yet with an
aggrieved sense of personal injury. She
invaded our old camping ground, the nook in
the mountains which we discovered dozen
years ago, and held secret and sacred from
Summer boarders, Saratoga trunks, or
croquet hoops. We had been used to fish for
trout in the far off brooks, to climb the peaks
to see the sun rise, to lie somewhere idle half
the day, watching the blue-gray mist creeping
ND the opposite hight, or heron fishing in
the pool, or the driving shadows OF the clouds
over the matted sides of the hills we knew
lust how the clouds would burn into fire
when the sun sank and darken into storm
after he was gone, and how, as sailors know,
{" the moon would kill them" But we did not
mean to make poems or newspaper articles
ont of inspiring sunrises or picturesque herons,
or to turn an honest penny with them in any
way. They came into the days just as
the dewy air of the mountains did, or
the ferns, or red trumpet creepers,
or the thousand blooms of color or surprises
of sound which lifted that month of the year
out of the rest of our jog-trOt lives and per-
suaded us that we were better men than we
showed ourselves on Wall Street or Broadway.
The hoary old hills and their air and sky
never called out shrieks of admiration from
us. We did not even talk of them to each
other, lust as q man does not go eackling on
the streets of the virtues of his wife or child.
But when Narcssa came, reform began. She
had been a New-YOrk saleswOman for years,
until one day it occurred to her that artists
were better paid than saleswomen. She be-
came an artist. She studied at the Academy
of Design three months, with the intention Of
learning wood engraving, then turned her at
tention to designing on wood, but in the
course of year devoted herself to oil painting
figures at first, afterward landscapes. She
| came to the mountains for material"
Brown (the still life painter) had two or three
queer old pots, glasses, and bits of drapery as
his stock; she seized our sunrses, trout
streams, and storms to serve her in the place of
| glasses and pots. She generously unvailed the
beauty of the place to us, its old familiar
| friends; kept us on the qui rire to detect
"nice effects" in the sunset, or pretty bits
"of color in the storms; routed us up from
! our cigar and noon dOze to observe the pecu-
liar chrome yellow in the peaks. Nature
| dwndled and shrank for US day by day into