Year: 1871

| 'Old DaVy Lindsey nVeu III queer
cabin on the Pomme d., Terre River. If
you should ever ride over the new North
| ern Pacific when it shall be completed, or
over that branch of it which crosses the
| Pomme de Terre, you can get out at sta
| ton which will, no doubt, be called for an
old settler, Gager's Station; and if you
would like to see some beautiful scenery,
take canoe and float down the Pomme de
Terre River. You will have to make
some portages, and you will have good
appetite for supper when you reach the
old Lindsey house, ten miles from Gager's,
but its present owner is hospitable.


A queer old chap was Lindsey the last
time saw him. l remember how he took
me all over his claim, and showed me the
beauties of Lindsleyville, as he called it.
His long iron-gray hair fluttered in the
wind, and his face seemed like wizards s,
penetrating but unearthly. That was long
before the great tide of immigrants had
begun to find their way into this paradise
through the highway of the Sauk valley.
Lindsleyville was a hundred and fifty miles
out of the world at that time. Its popula-
ton numbered two, Lindsey and his
daughter. The old man had tried to
make fortune in many. ways. There was
no sort of useless invention that he had not





Office models without number of bee
hives and cannons, steam cut-offs and baby
jumpers, lightning churns and flying ma
chimes, on which he had taken out pa
tents, assured of making a fortune from
each one. He had raised fancy chickens,
figured himself rich ON two swarms of
bees, travelled with magic lantern, writ
ten a philosophic novel, and started a
newspaper. There was but one purpose
in which he was fixed: which was to
guard his daughter jealously. To do this,
and to try the experiment of building an
Utopian city, he had travelled to the sum-
NIT of this knoll on the right
bank of the Pomme de Terre. There
never was a more beautiful landscape than
that which Lindsleyville commanded.
But the town did not grow, chiefly be-
cause it was so far beyond the border,
though the conditions in his deeds intend
ed to secure the character of the city from
deterioration were so many, that nobody
would have been willing to buy the lots.


At the time l speak of, David Lindsey
had dwelt on the Pomme de Terre for five
years. He had removed suddenly from
the Connecticut village in which he had
been living because he had discovered
that his daughter had, in spite of his
watchfulness, formed an attachment for a
young man who had the effrontery to dis
close the whole thing to him by politely
asking his consent to their marriage.


Marry my daughterr' choked the old
man; "why, Mr.. Brown, you are crazy. 1
have educated her upon the combined
principles of Rousseau, of Pestalozzi, of
Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And
you! you only graduated at Yale, an old
togy medieval institution! No, sir! not
till l meet a philosopher whose mind has
been symmeSrically developed can con-
sent for my Emilia to marry"


And the old man became so frantic that,
to save him from the mad house, Emilia
wrote letter, at his dictation, to young
Brown, peremptorily breaking off all rela-
tions; and he, a sensitive, romantic man,
was heart broken, and left the village. He
only sent farewell to his friends the day
before he was to sail from New Bedford on
whaling voyage. He carried with him
the impression that an unaccountable
change of mind in Emilia had left no hope
for him.


To prevent a recurrence of such an I'M
toward accident as this, and, as he ex-
pressed it, to bring his daughters mind
into intimate relations with nature" the
fanatical philosopher established the town
of Lindsleyville, determined that no
family in which there was a young man
should settle on his town-plot, unless, in
deed, the young man should prove the
paragon he was looking for.


Emilia's motherless life had not been a
cheerful one, subjected to the ever-chang
ing whims of visionary father, with
whom one of her practical cast of mind
could have no point of sympathy. And
since she came to Lindsleyville it was
harder than ever, for there was no neigh
Dor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away
and there was not a woman within fifty
miles. There is no place so lonesome as q
prairie; the horizon is so wide, and the
earth is SO empty


Lindsey had spent all his own money
long ago, and it was only the small annuity
of his daughter, inherited from hel
mothers family, the capital of which wa;
prevented them from starving. Emilia
was starving indeed, not in body, but il
soul. Cut off from human sympathy, sht
used to sit at the gable window of the cabi1
and look out over the boundless meadow
until it seemed to her that she would lost
her reason. The wild geese screaming
to one another overhead, the bald-eagle


building in the solitary elm that grew By
the side of the river, the flock of grea


white pelicans that were fishing on tn,


beach of Swan Lake, three miles away


were all objects of envy to the Lonesome


heart of the girl for they had companion


of their kind-they We're husbands ant


wives, and parents and children, while sh
here she checked her thoughts lest sh


should be disloyal to her father. To he
disordered fancy the universe seemed to b
wheel. The sun and the stars came u
l<,xxy -,


of grass with frightful regularity, and sh


could not tell whether there was God G
, not. When she thought of God at all,
was as relentless giant turning the Gran


that kept the sky going round. The un


verse was an awful machine. The prayer


her mother taught her in infancy died upo


her lips, and instead of praying to Go
she cried out to her mother. Un-protes
ant as the sentiment is l cannot forbes
3 saying that this talking to the dead is on
! of the most natural things in the worl'
l To Emilia the dimly remembered love {
her mother was all of tenderness thel
e was in the universe, the only revelation
7 God that had come to her, except only th
8 other love, which was to her Paradis
e lost. For the great hard Fate that turne
/ the prairie universe round with a Gran
1 motion had also, so it seemed to he
l snatched a. way from her the object of h
4 love. This disordered, faithless state VI
D all the fruit she tasted of the peculiar ed
), cation so much vaunted by her father. 81
4 had eaten the husks he gave her and w
d hungry.


I said she had no company. An old d
u guerreotype of her mother and careful
. hidden photograph (marked on the bat
!, in rather immature hand: "E. Brown
= seemed to answer with looks of love al
II sympathy when she wetted them with b
y tears. They were her rosary and her CT
l. cifix; they were the gifts of becloud'
E E life, through which God shone in dim
d upon her.


20 This poor girl looked and longed so f
< the company of human kind that s.
'e counted those red-letter days on which
: half breed voyageur travelled over the tr
in front of the house, and even party


begging and beggarly Sioux, hungry I
a all they could get to eat, offering imp,
e, tunately to sell hompoes''- es''-moccasins
W TO her father, were not wholly uuwelcou