The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
Philosophy
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Do you remember, at Niagara, a little cataract on the American side,
which throws its silver sheeny veil over a cave called the Grot of
Rainbows? Whoever stands on a rock in that grotto sees himself in the
centre of a rainbow-circle, above, below, around. In like manner, merry,
chatty, positive, busy, housewifely Katy saw herself standing in a
rainbow-shrine in her lover's inner soul, and liked to see herself so. A
woman, by-the-by, must be very insensible, who is not moved to come upon
a higher plane of being, herself, by seeing how undoubtingly she is
insphered in the heart of a good and noble man. A good man's, faith in
you, fair lady, if you ever have it, will make you better and nobler
even before you know it.
Katy made an excellent wife; she took home her husband's old mother and
nursed her with a dutifulness and energy worthy of all praise, and made
her own keen outward faculties and deft handiness a compensation for the
defects in worldly estate. Nothing would make Katy's black eyes flash
quicker than any reflections on her husband's want of luck in the
material line. "She didn't know whose business it was, if _she_ was
satisfied. She hated these sharp, gimlet, gouging sort of men that would
put a screw between body and soul for money. George had that in him that
nobody understood. She would rather be his wife on bread and water than
to take Captain Blatherem's house, carriages, and horse, and all,--and
she _might_ have had 'em fast enough, dear knows. She was sick of making
money when she saw what sort of men could make it,"--and so on. All
which talk did her infinite credit, because _at bottom_ she _did_ care,
and was naturally as proud and ambitious a little minx as ever breathed,
and was thoroughly grieved at heart at George's want of worldly success;
but, like a nice little Robin Redbreast, she covered up the grave of her
worldliness with the leaves of true love, and sung a "Who cares for
that?" above it.
Her thrifty management of the money her husband brought her soon bought
a snug little farm, and put up the little brown gambrel-roofed cottage
to which we directed your attention in the first of our story. Children
were born to them, and George found, in short intervals between voyages,
his home an earthly paradise. Ho was still sailing, with the fond
illusion, in every voyage, of making enough to remain at home,--when the
yellow fever smote him under the line, and the ship returned to Newport
without its captain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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