Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction; Western stories
Harry was now arrayed for church. He was a figure to please any woman's
eye, thought his mother, as she walked beside him, and gloried silently
in his six feet of health and muscle and dainty cleanliness. He was in a
most amiable mood, what with the Saint Bernards and the season. As they
approached the cathedral close, Harry, not for the first time, admired
the pure Gothic lines of the cathedral, and the soft blending of grays
in the stone with the warmer hues of the brown network of Virginia
creeper that still fluttered, a remnant of the crimson adornings of
autumn. Beyond were the bare, square outlines of the old college, with
a wooden cupola perched on the roof, like a little hat on a fat man,
the dull-red tints of the professors' houses, and the withered lawns and
bare trees. The turrets and balconies and arched windows of the boys'
school displayed a red background for a troop of gray uniforms and
blazing buttons; the boys were forming to march to church. Opposite the
boys' school stood the modest square brick house that had served the
first bishop of the diocese during laborious years. Now it was the
dean's residence. Facing it, just as you approached the cathedral, the
street curved into a half-circle on either side, and in the centre the
granite soldier on his shaft looked over the city that would honor him.
Harry saw the tall figure of the dean come out of his gate, the long
black skirts of his cassock fluttering under the wind of his big steps.
Beside him skipped and ran, to keep step with him, a little man in
ill-fitting black, of whose appearance, thus viewed from the rear, one
could only observe stooping shoulders and iron-gray hair that curled at
the ends.
“He must be the poor missionary who built his church himself,” Mrs.
Lossing observed; “he is not much of a preacher, the dean said, but he
is a great worker and a good pastor.”
“So much the better for his people, and the worse for us!” says Harry,
cheerfully.
“Why?”
“Naturally. We shall get the poor sermon and they will get the good
pastoring!”
Then Harry caught sight of a woman's frock and a profile that he knew,
and thought no more of the preacher, whoever he might be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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