Matilda Montgomerie; Or, The Prophecy FulfilledRichardson, Major (John)
History
Matilda Montgomerie; Or, The Prophecy Fulfilled
Richardson, Major (John)
United States -- History -- War of 1812 -- Fiction
poignantly to remind him of the manner in which it had been engendered.
Upwards of a fortnight had elapsed since his arrival, and yet, although
Captain Jackson, prior to his return to Sandusky, had personally
introduced him to many highly respectable families in Frankfort, he
uniformly abstained from cultivating their acquaintance, until at length
he was, naturally enough, pronounced to be a most disagreeable specimen
of a British officer. Even with the inmates of the hotel, many of whom
were officers of his own age, and with whom he constantly sat down to
the ordinary, he avoided everything approaching to intimacy--satisfying
himself merely with discharging his share of the commonest courtesies
of life. They thought it pride--it was but an effect--an irremediable
effect--of the utter sinking of his sad and broken spirit. The only
distraction in which he eventually took pleasure, or sought to indulge,
was rambling through the wild passes of the chain of wooded hills which
almost encircles the capital of Kentucky, and extends to a considerable
distance in a westerly direction. The dense gloom of these narrow
valleys he had remarked on his entrance by the same route, and feeling
them more in unison with his sick mind than the hum and bustle of a
city, which offered nothing in common with his sympathies, he now
frequently passed a great portion of the day in threading their
mazes--returning, however, at a certain hour to his hotel, conformably
with the terms of his parole.
On one occasion, tempted by the mellow beauty of the season--it was now
the beginning of October--he had strayed so far, and through passes so
unknown to him, that when the fast advancing evening warned him of the
necessity of returning, he found he had utterly lost his way. Abstracted
as he usually was, he had yet reflection enough to understand that his
parole of honor required he should be at his hotel at an hour which it
would put his speed to the proof to accomplish. Despairing of finding
his way by the circuitous route he had originally taken, and the proper
clue to which he had moreover lost, he determined, familiar as he was
with the general bearings of the capital, to effect his return in a
direct line across the chain of hills already alluded to. The deepening
shadows of the wild scene, as he proposed to ascend that immediately
before him, told that the sun had sunk beneath the horizon, and when he
gained its summit, the last faint corruscations of light were passing
rapidly away in the west. Still, by the indistinct twilight, he could
perceive that at his feet lay a small valley, completely hemmed in by
the circular ridge on which he stood. This traversed, it was but to
ascend the opposite section of the ridge, and his destination would be
gained. Unlike the narrow, rocky passes which divided the hills in every
other direction in which he had previously wandered, this valley was
covered with a luxuriant verdure, and upon this the feet of Gerald moved
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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