Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools: Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists
General
Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools: Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists
American literature
It was noon when the body of Tennessee was delivered into the hands of
his partner. As the cart drew up to the fatal tree, we noticed that it
contained a rough oblong box,--apparently made from a section of
sluicing,--and half filled with bark and the tassels of pine. The cart
was further decorated with slips of willow and made fragrant with
buckeye-blossoms. When the body was deposited in the box, Tennessee's
Partner's drew over it a piece of tarred canvas, and gravely mounting
the narrow seat in front, with his feet upon the shafts, urged the
little donkey forward. The equipage moved slowly on, at that decorous
pace which was habitual with Jenny even under less solemn
circumstances. The men--half curiously, half jestingly, but all
good-humoredly--strolled along beside the cart, some in advance, some a
little in the rear of the homely catafalque. But whether from the
narrowing of the road or some present sense of decorum, as the cart
passed on, the company fell to the rear in couples, keeping step, and
otherwise assuming the external show of a formal procession. Jack
Folinsbee, who had at the outset played a funeral march in dumb show
upon an imaginary trombone, desisted from a lack of sympathy and
appreciation,--not having, perhaps, your true humorist's capacity to be
content with the enjoyment of his own fun.
The way led through Grizzly Cañon, by this time clothed in funereal
drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the
red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth
benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare,
surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the
ferns by the roadside as the cortège went by. Squirrels hastened to gain
a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the blue-jays, spreading their
wings, fluttered before them like outriders, until the outskirts of
Sandy Bar were reached, and the solitary cabin of Tennessee's Partner.
Viewed under more favorable circumstances, it would not have been a
cheerful place. The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines,
the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the
California miner, were all here with the dreariness of decay superadded.
A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the
brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used
as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it, we
were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at
cultivation was the broken soil about an open grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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