A Country Idyl, and Other StoriesBolton, Sarah Knowles
General
A Country Idyl, and Other Stories
Bolton, Sarah Knowles
United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The next year Hannah, at the age of thirty-eight, died of consumption,
her health broken by the exposure on the ice-floe. She had long been an
earnest Christian, loving and reading her Bible daily. She was tenderly
cared for by Mrs. Captain Budington and others, saying at the last,
“Come, Lord Jesus, and take thy poor creature home!” A handsome stone
marks the grave of the faithful Hannah in the cemetery. Joe came often
to the graves on the hillside of Groton, and said at last, “Hannah
gone! Punna gone! Me go now again to King William Land; I have to
fight; me no care.” He went with Lieutenant Schwatka in the Franklin
search party, June 19, 1878, and never returned to the United States.
BURTON CONE’S REASON.
YEARS after Coleridge wrote the beautiful “Hymn before Sunrise in the
Valley of Chamouni,” which Felicia Hemans said she would give all her
poems to have written,—among a group of strangers standing in awe
before Mont Blanc was a man who seemed forty-five, from his hair fully
half gray and his quiet, dignified bearing, though he must have been
younger. He was absorbed in his own thoughts. He did not look at any
face about him, but seemed spell-bound by the sublimity of the scene.
In that vast mountain, white with eternal snows, with the rivers,
fed by the glaciers, turbulent at its base, the sun clothing it with
rainbows, he saw the same God who had compassed his life, as the
stalwart pines hedged in the grand mount before him.
After a time, as through that as yet undeveloped science of unseen
power between mind and mind, he felt a presence. He was conscious of
eyes fixed upon him, conscious that somebody he had known and loved
was near him. A hand was laid on his shoulder.
“Burton, you’re the last man in all the world I thought of seeing. Ten
years since you and I travelled together, and you yet on the wing? I
supposed you had settled down to some life-work, and was surrounded by
loves and cares ere this. You and I have stood here together before.”
The speaker was a genial, generous man, somewhat Cone’s junior in
look and manner, whose sorrows, whether many and great or not, could
not long crush his happy heart. His sympathies were quick, his hopes
naturally bright, and his nature ardent. The decade that had passed
since the former companionship had aged one more than the other. The
one had been giving time and heart to business, but had lived alone,
though a crowded world was about him. The other had been kept young and
fresh by the love of a cheerful wife and sunny daughter, and the years
had gone by rapidly and more than ordinarily well stored with good
deeds.
“Come, Burton, I am tiring of this road and grandeur. Let’s go back to
the hotel and have one of the old friendly talks. Nature has lost half
its beauty now that only one pair of eyes sees it—and I have no one
to tell of the beautiful or strange things I have seen. You don’t need
friendship as I do. You are made of sterner stuff. You are Mont Blanc
personified.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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