The Cup of Trembling, and Other StoriesFoote, Mary Hallock
General
The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories
Foote, Mary Hallock
United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
We are here to be hurt, so the strong ones tell us, and perhaps the best
apology the strong can make to the weak for the vast superiority that
training gives is to show how long they can hold their fire amidst a mob
of brute ignorances, and how much better they can bear their hurts when
the senseless missiles fly. We love the forbearance of our "unpitied
strong;" it is what we expect of them: but we trust also in their
firmness when the time for forbearance is past.
Little Ross Henniker--named for that mythical great Scotchman, his
supposed grandfather--was deeply disappointed because he did not see the
soldiers go. To have lived next door to them all his life, seven whole
years, and watched them practicing and preparing to be fit and ready to
go, and then not to see them when they did march away for actual service
in the field, was hard indeed.
Ross was not only one of those brightest boys of his age known to
parents and grand-parents by the million, but he was really a very
bright and handsome child. If Mother Meadows, now "granny," had ever had
any doubts at all about the Scottish chief of the Hudson's Bay Company,
the style and presence of that incomparable boy were proof enough. It
was a marked case of "throwing-back." There was none of the Bannock
here. Could he not be trusted like a man to do whatever things he liked
to do; as riding to fetch the cows and driving them hillward again, on
the weird little spotted pony, hardly bigger than a dog, with a huge
head and a furry cheek and a hanging under-lip, which the tributary
Bannocks had brought him? It was while he was on cow-duty far away, but
not out of sight of the post, that he saw the column move. "Great
Scott!" how he did ride! He broke his stick over the pony's back, and
kicked him with his bare heels, and slapped him with his hat, till the
pony bucked him off into a sagebush whence he picked himself up and flew
as fast as his own legs would spin; but he was too late. Then, for the
first time in six months at least, he howled. Aunt Callie comforted him
with fresh strawberry jam for supper, but the lump of grief remained,
until, as she was washing the dishes, she glanced at him, laughing out
of the corner of her eye, and began to make up the song about Coxey's
army. For some time Ross refused to smile, but when it came to the
chorus about the soldiers who were going
"To turn back Coxey's army, hallelujah!
To turn back Coxey's army, halleloo!"
he began to sing "hallelujah" too. Then gun-fire broke in with a
lonesome sound, as if the cavalry up on the hill missed its comrades of
the white stripes who were gone to "turn back" that ridiculous army.
Mother Meadows wished "that man Coxey had never been born," so weary did
she get of the Coxey song. Coxeyism had taken complete possession of the
young lord of the house, now that his friends the soldiers had gone to
take a hand in the business.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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