John Stevens' Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon War — John Shaqi
John Stevens' Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon WarGates, Susa Young
General
John Stevens' Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon War
Gates, Susa Young
Latter Day Saints -- Fiction; Utah Expedition (1857-1858) -- Fiction
There were many wakeful hours spent in that gay little tented village
and long before the peep of day the next morning, men were hitching
up and packing wagons. Ere long the whole cavalcade had taken up the
line of march, and soon the silence of the mountain peaks chained the
whispers of pine and quaking-aspens within the long vale, leaving the
circling memories alone to sweep forever over the lake like shadowy
wraiths of summer mist.
VI.
WHO SHALL FEAR MAN?
At the time of this story (in 1857-8) there stood in Salt Lake City,
in the Thirteenth Ward, a small adobe house of four rooms, with the
tiny square-framed windows, set at regular intervals from a central
brilliantly green door which gayly faced the street. Not only was the
green door rare because of its extremely unconventional color; it was
also unusual in its quick response of welcome to black or white, bond
or free, in a place where welcome grew more lavishly than did the grass
in the streets. There was something so aggressively bright about that
loudly painted door that even the Indians grew to love its restful
color and the atmosphere that it betokened for all who pushed ever so
lightly at its ready portals. The green was such a happy blending of
the dark shades of the cool pine with the yellowed masses of creeping
mosses that one's eyes were rested just to glance at it. None who
passed within could fail to recognize that some one out of the ordinary
lived behind those gaudy yet pleasing door-panels. The poor, the sick,
the halt, the lame and the blind, all learned the ease with which that
bright door opened, and the wealth of gentle welcome which spoke in
the brighter eyes of dear old widowed Aunt Clara Tyler. The Indians,
too, knew where they would receive plenty of "shutcup," and if one had
a bruise or a wound, only Aunt Clara's hand could soothe and dress, to
the complete satisfaction, the injured member.
Dear Aunt Clara! The mind traces in golden light her lovely picture.
Bright and black were her eyes, but never sharp and cruel; she had a
sweet mouth and the blackest of hair. She was short and very stout; but
who ever saw aught but the lovely spirit which was enshrined within her
active body. People used to wonder why Aunt Clara had no enemies, and
why everything animate looked to her for succor and protection. The
secret could all be told in two words--womanly sympathy, such sympathy
as the noblest of women and the purest of angels can bestow; a sympathy
which never encouraged evil because it made a sharp distinction
between sin and sinner, but which drew the whole sting from the wound
before dropping in the needed tonic of wise counsel, and covering all
softly with the vial of loving tenderness. That was the secret of her
popularity with young and old in the whole neighborhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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