The Other GirlsWhitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
General
The Other Girls
Whitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
Family life -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
Another bar-place let them in again to another narrow, wild,
bush-grown path around the edge of the cliff, the lower spur of the
great hill; and down over shelving rocks, a long, gradual descent,
to the foot of the fall.
The water foamed and rippled to their feet, as they walked along its
varying edge-line on the smooth, sloping stone that stretched back
against the perpendicular rampart of the cliff. The fall itself was
hidden in the turn around which, above, they had followed the
tangled pathway.
At the farthest projection of the platform they were now treading,
they came upon it; beneath it, rather, they looked back and up at
its showery silver sheet, falling in sweet, continual thunder into
the dark, hollow, rock-encircled pool, thence to tumble away
headlong, from point to point, lower and lower yet, by a thousand
little breaks and plunges, till it came out into a broad meadow
stretch miles and miles away.
"What a hurry it is in, to get down where it is wanted," said
Desire.
She had seated herself beside the curling edge of the swift stream,
where it seemed to trace and keep by its own will its boundary upon
the nearly level rock, and was gazing up where the white radiance
poured itself as if direct from out the blue above.
Mr. Kirkbright stood behind her.
"Most things come to us at last so quietly," he said. "It is good to
feel and see what a rush it starts with,--out of that heart of
heaven."
Desire had not said that; but it was just what she had been feeling.
Eager to get to us; coming in a hurry. Was that God's impulse toward
us?
"Making haste to help and satisfy the world," Mr. Kirkbright said
again.
"A river of clear water of life, coming down out of the throne,"
said Miss Euphrasia. "What a sign it is!"
Mr. Kirkbright walked along the margin of the ledge, farther and
farther down. He tried with his stick some stones that lay across
the current at a narrow point where beneath the opposite cliff it
bent and turned away, losing itself from their sight as they stood
here. Then he sprang across; crept, stooping, along the narrow
foothold under the projecting rock, until he could follow with his
eye the course of the rapid water, falling continually to its lower
level as it sped on and on, all its volume gathered in one deep,
rocky, unchangeable bed.
"What a waiting power!" he exclaimed, springing safely back, and
coming up toward them. "What a stream for mills! And it turns
nothing but the farmers' grists, till it gets to Tillington."
Desire was a very little disappointed at this utilitarianism. She
had been so glad and satisfied with the reading of its type; the
type of its far-back impulse.
"If there had been mills here, we should not have seen that," she
said; forgetting to explain what.
But Christopher Kirkbright knew.
"What was it that we did see?" he asked, coming beside her.
"The gracious hurry," she answered, with a half-vexed surprise in
her eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account