New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
There is very little grass at the top of the lonely height, and that of
a husky, whispering sort, in thin ribbons that flutter low little songs
in the breeze. They never cease; for, at Horn o' the Moon, there is
always a wind blowing, differing in quality with the season. Sometimes
it is a sighing wind from other heights, happier in that they are sweet
with firs. Sometimes it is exasperating enough to make the March
breezes below seem tender; then it tosses about in snatching gusts,
buffeting, and slapping, and excoriating him who stands in its way.
Somehow, all the peculiarities of Horn o' the Moon seem referable, in a
mysterious fashion, to the wind. The people speak in high, strenuous
voices, striving to hold their own against its wicked strength. Most of
them are deaf. Is that because the air beats ceaselessly against the
porches of their ears? They are a stunted race; for they have grown into
the habit of holding the head low, and plunging forward against that
battling element. Even the fowl at Horn o' the Moon are not of the
ordinary sort. Their feathers grow the wrong way, standing up in a
ragged and disorderly fashion; and they, too, have the effect of having
been blown about and disarranged, until nature yielded, and agreed to
their permanent roughness.
Moreover, all the people are old or middle-aged and possibly that is
why, again, the settlement is so desolate. It is a disgrace for us below
to marry with Horn o' the Mooners, though they are a sober folk; and now
it happens that everybody up there is the cousin of everybody else. The
race is dying out, we say, as if we considered it a distinct species;
and we agree that it would have been wiped away long ago, by weight of
its own eccentricity, had not Mary Dunbar been the making of it. She is
the one righteous among many. She is the good nurse whom we all go to
seek, in our times of trouble, and she perpetually saves her city from
the odium of the world.
Mary was born in Tiverton Street. We are glad to remember that, we who
condemn by the wholesale, and are assured that no good can come out of
Nazareth. When she was a girl of eighteen, her father and mother died;
and she fell into a state of spiritual exaltation, wherein she dreamed
dreams, and had periods of retirement within her house, communing with
other intelligences. We said Mary had lost her mind; but that was
difficult to believe, since no more wholesome type of womanhood had ever
walked our streets. She was very tall, built on the lines of a beauty
transcending our meagre strain. Nobody approved of those broad shoulders
and magnificent arms. We said it was a shame for any girl to be so
overgrown; yet our eyes followed her, delighted by the harmony of line
and action. Then we whispered that she was as big as a moose, and that,
if we had such arms, we never'd go out without a shawl. Her "mittins"
must be wide enough for any man!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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