The Girl at the Halfway House: A Story of the PlainsHough, Emerson
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The Girl at the Halfway House: A Story of the Plains
Hough, Emerson
Great Plains -- Fiction; Historical fiction, American
The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the
horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as
usual to the Cottage--all these departed with the more or less
recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had
given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new
significance. Really this was Magna Charta. All those who, tired and
sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home
upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something
had been done. Each might have told you in his way that a new web of
human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom.
Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to
become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the
failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.
There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who
classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to
tolerance, if they be spared contempt. They are but provincials
themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an
ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called
intolerance. The city is no better than the town, the town is no
better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from
the other. Everywhere the problems are the same. Everywhere it is
Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured,
to be enjoyed. Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase
it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their
veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as
much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who
sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or
on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.
Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains
admittedly a town. A sun had set, and a sun had arisen. It was
another day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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