Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances — John Shaqi
Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and RomancesAllen, James Lane
General
Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances
Allen, James Lane
Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Slowly down the street was coming a short funeral train. It passed--a
rude cortege: a common cart, in the bottom of which rested a box of
plain boards containing the body of the old French dancing-master;
walking behind it, with a cambric handkerchief to his eyes, the old
French confectioner; at his side, wearing the robes of his office and
carrying an umbrella to ward off the burning sun, the beloved Bishop
Smith; and behind them, two by two and with linked arms, perhaps a
dozen men, most of whom had been at the ball.
No head was lifted or eye turned to notice the vagrant seated on the
sidewalk. But when the train had passed he rose, laid his mattock and
spade across his shoulder, and, stepping out into the street, fell into
line at the end of the procession.
They moved down Short Street to the old burying-ground, where the
Baptist church-yard is to-day. As they entered it, two grave-diggers
passed out and hurried away. Those before them had fled. They had been
at work but a few hours. Overcome with horror at the sight of the dead
arriving more and more rapidly, they, too, deserted that post of peril.
No one was left. Here and there in the church-yard could be seen bodies
awaiting interment. Old King Solomon stepped quietly forward and,
getting down into one of the half-finished graves, began to dig.
The vagrant had happened upon an avocation.
IV.
All summer long, Clatterbuck's dancing-pavilion was as silent in its
grove of oaks as a temple of the Druids, and his pleasure-boat nestled
in its moorings, with no hand to feather an oar in the little lake. All
summer long, no athletic young Kentuckians came to bathe their white
bodies in Hugh Lonney's new bath-house for twelve and a half cents,
and no one read Daukins Tegway's advertisement that he was willing
to exchange his Dunstable bonnets for flax and feathers. The likely
runaway boy, with a long, fresh scar across his face, was never found,
nor the buffalo bull roasted for Daniel Webster, and Peter Leuba's
guitars were never thrummed on any moonlit verandas. Only Dewees and
Grant were busy, dispensing, not snuff, but calomel.
Grass grew in the deserted streets. Gardens became little wildernesses
of rank weeds and riotous creepers. Around shut window-lattices roses
clambered and shed their perfume into the poisoned air, or dropped
their faded petals to strew the echoless thresholds. In darkened rooms
family portraits gazed on sad vacancy or looked helplessly down on
rigid sheeted forms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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