University of Virginia Library

THE PICKER AND PILER.

The nature of the strange incident I have to relate
forbids me to record either place or time.

On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever
been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a
snowdrift breast high, to the door of a small tavern in
the western country. The host turned out unwillingly
at the knock of my whip handle on the outer door,
and, wading before the tired animals to the barn, which
was nearly inaccessible from the banks of snow, he
assisted me in getting off their frozen harnesses, and
bestowing them safely for the night.

The “bar-room” fire burnt brightly, and never was
fire more welcome. Room was made for me by four
or five rough men who sat silent around it, and with a
keen comprehension of “pleasure after pain,” I took
off my furs and moccasins, and stretched my cold contracted
limbs to the blaze. When, a few minutes
after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought me, with a
corn cake and a mug of “flip” hissing from the poker,
it certainly would have been hard to convince me that
I would have put on my coats and moccasins again to
have ridden a mile to paradise.

The faces of my new companions, which I had not
found time to inspect very closely while my supper
lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine
knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord, and their
grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind, for the first
time since I had entered the room, of my errand in
that quarter of the country.

The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the rivers
of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado of every
description, a resource from want and (in their own
opinion) from crime, which is seized upon by all at
least who are willing to labor. The owners of the extensive
forests, destined to become so valuable, are
mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, who,
satisfied with the constant advance in the price of
lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable to nothing
but the laws of nature, and leave them unfenced and
unprotected, to increase in size and value till the land
beneath them is wanted for culture. It is natural
enough that solitary settlers, living in the neighborhood
of miles of apparently unclaimed land, should
think seldom of the owner, and in time grow to the
opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit gave the
land, the air, and the water, to all his children, and
they are free to all alike. Furnishing the requisite
teams and implements, therefore, the inhabitants of
these tracts collect a number of the stragglers through
the country, and forming what is called a “bee,” go
into the nearest woods, and for a month or more, work
laboriously at selecting, and felling the tallest and
straightest pines. In their rude shanty at night they
have bread, pork, and whiskey, which hard labor makes
sufficiently palatable, and the time is passed merrily
till the snow is right for sledding. The logs are then
drawn to the water sides, rafis are formed, and the
valuable lumber, for which they paid nothing but their
labor is run to the cities for their common advantage.

The only enemies of this class of men are the agents
who are sometimes sent out in the winter to detect
them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and
in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this
as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods.
They soon brightened and grew talkative when they
discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and
burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a talk
of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my inquiries,
that all the “men people” in the country were busy
“lumbering for themselves,” unless it were —
the “Picker and Piler.”

As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh
outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new-comer.

“Talk of the devil”—said the man in a lower tone,
and without finishing the proverb he rose with a
respect which he had not accorded to me, to make
room for the Picker and Piler.

A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to
drive back his horse, who had followed him nearly in.
I observed that the animal had neither saddle nor bridle.
Shutting the door upon him without violence, he exchanged
nods with one or two of the men, and giving
the landlord a small keg which he had brought, he
pleaded haste for refusing the offered chair, and stood
silent by the fire. His features were blackened with
smoke, but I could see that they were small and regular,
and his voice, though it conveyed in its deliberate
accents an indefinable resolution, was almost femininely
soft and winning.

“That stranger yonder has got a job for you,” said
the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and received
the money.

Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a very
eager scrutiny of himself, and for a moment I was
thrown too much off my guard to address him.

“Is it you, sir?” he asked, after waiting a moment.

“Yes,—I have some work to be done hereabouts,
but—you seem in a hurry. Could you call here to-morrow.”

“I may not be here again in a week.”

“Do you live far from here?” He smiled.

“I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a
piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you
would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give
you—”

That personage decided the question for me by
telling me in so many words that I had better go.
His beds were all taken up, and my horses should be
taken care of till my return. I saw that my presence
had interrupted something, probably the formation of
a “bee,” and more willingly than I would have believed
possible an hour before, I resumed my furs and
wrappers, and declared that I was ready. The Picker

and Piler had inspired me, and I knew not why, with
an involuntary respect and liking.

“It is a rough night, sir,” said he, as he shouldered
a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by a
leather strap over the neck of his horse, “but I will
soon show you a better climate. Come, sir, jump on!”

“And you?” I said inquisitively, as he held his
horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a Canadian
pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog.

“I am more used to the road, sir, and will walk.
Come?”

It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if it
had been possible to resist the strange tone of authority
with which he spoke. So without more ado, I
sprang upon the animal's back, and holding on by the
long tuft upon his withers, suffered him passively to
plunge through the drift after his master.

Wondering at the readiness with which I had entered
upon this equivocal adventure, but never for an
instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my eyes
to the blinding cold, and accommodated my limbs as
well as I could to the bare back and scrambling paces
of the Canadian. The Picker and Piler strode on
before, the pony following like a spaniel at his heels,
and after a half hour's tramp, during which I had
merely observed that we were rounding the base of a
considerable hill, we turned short to the right, and
were met by a column of smoke, which, lifting, the
moment after, disclosed the two slopes of a considerable
valley enveloped in one sea of fire. A red, lurid
cloud, overhung it at the tops of the tallest trees, and
far and wide, above that, spread a covering of black
smoke, heaving upward in vast and billowy masses, and
rolling away on every side into the darkness.

We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire
to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk, and
its pitchy knots distributed like the eyes of the lamprey,
burning pure and steady amid the irregular flame. I
had once or twice, with an instinctive wish to draw
rein, pulled hard upon the tangled tuft in my hand,
but master and horse kept on. This burning tree,
however, was the first of a thousand, and as the pony
turned his eyes away from the intense heat to pass between
it and a bare rock, I glanced into the glowing
labyrinth beyond, and my faith gave way. I jumped
from his back and hailed the Picker and Piler, with a
halloo scarcely audible amid the tumult of the crackling
branches. My voice did not evidently reach his
ear, but the pony, relieved from my weight, galloped
to his side, and rubbed his muzzle against the unoccupied
hand of his master.

He turned back immediately. “I beg pardon,” he
said, “I have that to think of just now which makes
me forgetful. I am not surprised at your hesitation,
but mount again and trust the pony.”

The animal turned rather unwillingly at his master's
bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown
fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again on
his back.

“If you find the heat inconvenient, cover your face.”
And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Piler
turned on his heel, and once more strode away before
us.

Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the
corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned
myself to the horse. He overtook his master with a
shuffling canter, and putting his nose as close to the
ground as he could carry it without stumbling, followed
closely at his heels. I observed, by the green
logs lying immediately along our path, that we were
following an avenue of prostrate timber which had been
felled before the wood was fired; but descending
presently to the left, we struck at once into the deep
bed of a brook, and by the lifted head and slower gait
of the pony, as well as my own easier respiration, I
found that the hollow through which it ran, contained
a body of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains
of smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents
above. The pony now picked his way leisurely along
the brookside, and while my lungs expanded with the
relief of breathing a more temperate atmosphere, I
raised myself from my stooping posture in a profuse
perspiration, and one by one disembarrassed myself
from my protectives against the cold.

I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker
and Piler, and presumed by the pony's desultory
movements that he was near the end of his journey,
when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood suddenly
upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where the
brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken dell, and
after describing a half circle on a rocky platform, resumed
its onward course in the same direction as before.
This curve of the brook and the platform it
enclosed lay lower than the general level of the forest,
and the air around and within it, it seemed to me, was
as clear and genial as the summer noon. Over one
side, from the rocky wall, a rude and temporary roof
of pine slabs drooped upon a barricade of logs, forming
a low hut, and before the entrance of this, at the moment
of my appearance, stood a woman and a showily-dressed
young man, both evidently confused at the
sudden apparition of the Picker and Piler. My eyes
had scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing
at his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat
the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed his stooping
and quiet mien, set his rifle against the rock, and
came forward to give me his hand.

“My daughter!” he said, more in the way of explanation
than introduction, and without taking further
notice of the young man whose presence seemed
so unwelcome, he poured me a draught from the keg
he had brought, pointed to the water falling close at
my hand, and threw himself at his length upon the
ground.

The face and general appearance of the young man,
now seated directly opposite me, offered no temptation
for more than a single glance, and my whole attention
was soon absorbed by the daughter of my singular
host, who, crossing from the platform to the hut,
divided her attention between a haunch of venison
roasting before a burning log of hickory, and the arrangement
of a few most primitive implements for our
coming supper. She was slight, like her father, in
form, and as far as I had been able to distinguish his
blackened features, resembled him in the general outline.
But in the place of his thin and determined
mouth, her lips were round and voluptuous, and
though her eye looked as if it might wake, it expressed,
even in the presence of her moody father, a
drowsy and soft indolence, common enough to the
Asiatics, but seldom seen in America. Her dress was
coarse and careless, but she was beautiful with every
possible disadvantage, and, whether married or not,
evidently soon to become a mother.

The venison was placed before us on the rock, and
the young man, uninvited, and with rather an air of
bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch and
broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter kept
as near him as her attention to her father's wants would
permit, but neither joined us in eating, nor encouraged
my attempts at conversation. The Picker and Piler
ate in silence, leaving me to be my own carver, and
finishing his repast by a deep draught from the keg
which had been the means of our acquaintance, he
sprang upon his feet and disappeared.

“The wind has changed,” said the daughter, looking
up at the smoke, “and he has gone to the western
edge to start a new fire. It's a full half mile, and he'll
be gone an hour.”

This was said with a look at me which was anything
but equivocal. I was de trop. I took up the
rifle of the Picker and Piler, forgetting that there was

probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood, and remarking
that I would have a look for a deer, jumped
up the water-fall side, and was immediately hidden by
the rocks.

I had no conception of the scene that lay around
me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which the
hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area of perhaps
an acre, which had been felled in the heart of the
wood before it was set on fire. The forest encircled
it with blazing columns, whose capitals were apparently
lost in the sky, and curtains of smoke and
flame, which flew as if lashed into ribands by a whirlwind.
The grandeur, the violence, the intense brightness
of the spectacle, outran all imagination. The
pines, on fire to the peak, and straight as arrows,
seemed to resemble, at one moment the conflagration
of an eastern city, with innumerable minarets abandoned
to the devouring element. At the next moment,
the wind, changing its direction, swept out every
vestige of smoke, and extinguished every tongue of
flame, and the tall trees, in clear and flameless ignition,
standing parallel in thousands, resembled some
blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of
miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the
day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into aisles
of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest, and the
next instant, like a tremendous surge alive with serpents
of fire, the smoke and flame swept through it,
and it seemed to me as if some glorious structure had
been consumed in the passing of a thought. For a
minute, again, all would be still except the crackling
of the fibres of the wood, and with the first stir of the
wind, like a shower of flashing gems, the bright coals
rained down through the forest, and for a moment the
earth glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were
alive with one bright ignition.

With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and the
variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I found my
eyes and brain growing giddy. The brook ran cool
below, and the heat had dried the leaves in the small
clearing, and with the abandonment of a man overcome
with the sultriness of summer, I lay down on the
rivulet's bank, and dipped my head and bathed my
eyes in the running water. Close to its surface there
was not a particle of smoke in the air, and, exceedingly
refreshed with its temperate coolness, I lay for sometime
in luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the
winter that howled without. Frost and cold were
never more difficult to realize in midsummer, though
within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man would
freeze to death in an hour.

“I have a better bed for you in the shanty,” said the
Picker and Piler, who had approached unheard in the
noise of the fires, and suddenly stood over me.

He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a
prostrate log, and looked anxiously toward the descent
to the hut.

“I am little inclined for sleep,” I answered, “and
perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation here.
The scene is new to me”—

“I have another guest to dispose of,” he answered,
“and we shall be more out of the smoke near the
shanty.”

I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the platform,
to find him angrily separating his daughter and the
stranger. The girl entered the hut, and with a decisive
gesture, he pointed the young man to a “shakedown”
of straw in the remotest corner of the rocky
enclosure.

“With your leave, old gentleman,” said the intruder,
after glancing at his intended place of repose,
`I'll find a crib for myself.” And springing up the
eraggy rock opposite the door of the shanty he gathered
a slight heap of brush, and threw it into a hollow
left in the earth by a tree, which, though full grown
and green, had been borne to the earth and partly
uprooted by the falling across it of an overblown and
gigantic pine. The earth and stones had followed the
uptorn mass, forming a solid upright wall, from which,
like struggling fingers, stretching back in agony to
the ground from which they had parted, a few rent
and naked roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel
will show why I am so particular in this description.

“When peace was declared between England and
this country,” said the Picker and Piler (after an
hour's conversation, which had led insensibly to his
own history), I was in command of a privateer. Not
choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the cruise,
I was set ashore in the West Indies by a crew in open
mutiny. My property was all on board, and I was
left a beggar. I had one child, a daughter; whose
mother died in giving her birth.

“Having left a sufficient sum for her education in
the hands of a brother of my own, under whose roof
she had passed the first years of her life, I determined
to retrieve my fortunes before she or my friends should
be made acquainted with my disaster.

“Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer
and a beggar.

“I determined to see my child, and came back
like one from the dead, to my brother's door. He had
forgotten me, and abused his trust. My daughter,
then seventeen, and such as you see her here, was the
drudge in the family of a stranger—ignorant and friendless.
My heart turned against mankind with this last
drop in a bitter cup, and, unfitted for quiet life, I looked
around for some channel of desperate adventure.
But my daughter was the perpetual obstacle. What
to do with her? She had neither the manners nor
the education of a lady, and to leave her a servant was
impossible. I started with her for the west, with the
vague design of joining some tribe of Indians, and
chance and want have thrown me into the only mode
of life on earth that could now be palatable to me.”

“Is it not lonely,” I asked, “after your stirring adventures?”

“Lonely! If you knew the delight with which I
live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut out
the world! The labor is hard it is true, but I need it,
to sleep and forget. There is no way else in which I
could seclude my daughter. Till lately, she has been
contented, too. We live a month together in one
place—the centre like this of a burning wood. I can
bear hardship, but I love a high temperature—the
climate of the tropics—and I have it here. For weeks
I forget that it is winter, tending my fires and living
on the game I have stored up. There is a hollow or
a brook—a bed or a cave, in every wood, where the
cool air, as here, sinks to the bottom, and there I can
put up my shanty, secure from all intrusion—but such
as I bring upon myself.”

The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the
sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last clause
unnecessary. He thought not of me.

“Some months since,” continued the Picker and
Piler, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, “I
met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I
met you. He is the owner of this land. After
engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I
did yourself, from a momentary fever for company
which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go with
me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered in the
neighborhood awhile, under pretext of hunting, and
twice on my return from the village, I found that my
daughter had seen him. Time has betrayed the
wrong he inflicted on me.

The voice of the agitated father sank almost to a
whisper as he pronounced the last few words, and,
rising from the rock on which we were sitting, he
paced for a few minutes up and down the platform in
silence.

The reader must fill up from his own imagination

he drama of which this is but the outline, for the
Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned, and
I can tell but what I saw and heard. In the narration
of his story he seemed but recapitulating the prominent
events for his own self-converse, rather than attempting
to tell a tale to me, and it was hurried over
as brokenly and briefly as I have put it down. I sat in
a listening attitude after he concluded, but he seemed
to have unburthened his bosom sufficiently, and his
lips were closed with stern compression.

“You forget,” he said, after pacing awhile, “that I
offered you a place to sleep. The night wears late.
Stretch yourself on that straw, with your cloak over
you. Good night!”

I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling
heavily into the sky till I slept.

I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me
from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the
hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the
morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke.
I looked around for a place to warm myself. The
hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire had been
kindled under the overblown pine, and its pitchy heart
was now flowing with the steady brilliancy of a torch.
I took up one of its broken branches, cracked it on my
knee, and stirring up the coals below, soon sent up a
merry blaze, which enveloped the whole trunk.

Turning my back to the increasing heat, I started,
for, creeping toward me, with a look of eagerness for
which I was at a loss to account, came the Picker and
Piler.

“Twice doomed!” he muttered between his teeth,
“but not by me!”

He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots, laid
his axe against a burning tree, and with a branch of
hemlock, swept off the flame from the spot where the
fire was eating through, as if to see how nearly it was
divided.

I began to think him insane, for I could get no
answer to my questions, and when he spoke, it was
half audible, and with his eyes turned from me fixedly.
I looked in the same direction, but could see nothing
remarkable. The seducer slept soundly beneath his
matted wall, and the rude door of the shanty was behind
us. Leaving him to see phantoms in the air, as
I thought, I turned my eyes to the drips of the water-fall,
and was absorbed in memories of my own, when
I saw the girl steal from the shanty, and with one
bound overleap the rocky barrier of the platform. I
laid my hand on the shoulder of my host, and pointed
after her, as with stealthy pace looking back occasionally
to the hut, where she evidently thought her
father slept, she crept round toward her lover.

“He dies!” cried the infuriated man: but as he
jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched
out of sight, and my own first thought was to awake
the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked back, for
I heard no footstep.

“Stand clear!” shouted a voice of almost supernatural
shrillness! and as I caught sight of the Picker
and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burning
tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth flashed
on me.

Down came the axe into the very heart of the pitchy
flame, and trembling with the tremendous smoke, the
trunk slowly bent upward from the fire.

The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne
ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness in
my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper.

One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth,
and the shock startled him from his sleep. A whole
age seemed to me elapsing while the other rose with
the slow lift of the ash. As it slid heavily away, the
vigorous tree righted, like a giant springing to his
feet. I saw the root pin the hand of the seducer to
the earth—a struggle—a contortion and the leafless
and waving top of the recovered and upright tree
rocked with its effort, and a long, sharp cry had gone
out echoing through the woods, and was still. I felt
my brain reel.

Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved about
in the sickly daylight, when I recovered; but the
Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I had yet
seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath the remnants
of the pine.

KATE CREDIFORD.

I found myself looking with some interest at the
back of a lady's head. The theatre was crowded, and
I had come in late, and the object of my curiosity,
whoever she might be, was listening very attentively to
the play.—She did not move. I had time to build a
life-time romance about her before I had seen a feature
of her face. But her ears were small and of an exquisite
oval, and she had that rarest beauty of woman
—the hair arched and joined to the white neck with
the same finish as on the temples. Nature often
slights this part of her masterpiece.

The curtain dropped, and I stretched eagerly forward
to catch a glimse of the profile.—But no! she
sat next one of the slender pilasters, and with her head
leaned against it, remained immovable.

I left the box, and with some difficulty made my
way into the crowded pit. Elbowing, apologizing,
persevering, I at last gained a point where I knew I
could see my incognita at the most advantage. I
turned—pshaw!—how was it possible I had not recognised
her?

Kate Crediford!

There was no getting out again, for a while at least,
without giving offence to the crowd I had jostled so
unceremoniously. I sat down—vexed—and commenced
a desperate study of the figure of Shakspere on
the drop-curtain.

Of course I had been a lover of Miss Crediford's,
or I could not have turned with indifference from the
handsomest woman in the theatre. She was very
beautiful—there was no disputing. But we love women
a little for what we do know of them, and a great
deal more for what we do not. I had love-read Kate
Crediford to the last leaf. We parted as easily as a
reader and a book. Flirtation is a circulating library,
in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume,
and I gave up Kate to the next reader, feeling no
property even in the marks I had made in her perusal.
A little quarrel sufficed as an excuse for the closing of
the book, and both of us studiously avoided a reconciliation.

As I sat in the pit, I remembered suddenly a mole
on her left cheek, and I turned toward her with the
simple curiosity to knew whether it was visible at that
distance. Kate looked sad. She still leaned immoveable
against the slight column, and her dark eyes, it
struck me, were moist. Her mouth, with this peculiar
expression upon her countenance, was certainly
inexpressibly sweet—the turned-down corners ending
in dimples, which in that particular place, I have always
observed, are like wells of unfathomable melancholy.
Poor Kate! what was the matter with her?

As I turned back to my dull study of the curtain, a
little pettish with myself for the interest with which I
had looked at an old flame, I detected half a sigh
under my white waistcoat; but instantly persuading
myself that it was a disposition to cough, coughed, and
began to hum “suoni la tromba.” The curtain rose
and the play went on.

It was odd that I never had seen Kate in that humor
before. I did not think she could be sad. Kate
Crediford sad! Why, she was the most volatile, light-hearted,
care-for-nothing coquette that ever held up
her fingers to be kissed. I wonder, has any one really
annoyed you, my poor Kate! thought I. Could I,
by chance, be of any service to you—for, after all, I
owe you something! I looked at her again.

Strange that I had ever looked at that face without
emotion! The vigils of an ever-wakeful, ever-passionate,
yet ever-tearful and melancholy spirit, seemed set,
and kept under those heavy and motionless eyelids.
And she, as I saw her now, was the very model and
semblance of the character that I had all my life been
vainly seeking! This was the creature I had sighed
for when turning away from the too mirthful tenderness
of Kate Crediford! There was something new,
or something for the moment miswritten, in that
familiar countenance.

I made my way out of the pit with some difficulty,
and returned to sit near her. After a few minutes, a
gentleman in the next box rose and left the seat vacant
on the other side of the pilaster against which she
leaned. I went around while the orchestra were playing
a loud march, and, without being observed by the
thoughtful beauty, seated myself in the vacant place.

Why did my eyes flush and moisten, as I looked
upon the small white hand lying on the cushioned
barrier between us! I knew every vein of it, like the
strings of my own heart.—I had held it spread out in
my own, and followed its delicate blue traceries with
a rose-stem, for hours and hours, while imploring, and
reproaching, and reasoning over love's lights and
shadows. I knew the feel of every one of those exquisite
fingers—those rolled up rose-leaves, with nails
like pieces cut from the lip of a shell! Oh, the
promises I had kissed into oaths on that little chef-d'œuvre
of nature's tinted alabaster! the psalms and
sermons I had sat out holding it, in her father's pew!
the moons I had tired out of the sky, making of it a
bridge for our hearts passing backward and forward!
And how could that little wretch of a hand, that knew
me better than its own other hand (for we had been
more together), lie there, so unconscious of my presence?
How could she—Kate Crediford—sit next to
me as she was doing, with only a stuffed partition between
us, and her head leaning on one side of a pilaster,
and mine on the other, and never start, nor recognise,
nor be at all aware of my neighborhood? She was
not playing a part, it was easy to see. Oh, I knew
those little relaxed fingers too well! Sadness, indolent
and luxurious sadness, was expressed in her countenance,
and her abstraction was unfeigned and contemplative.
Could she have so utterly forgotten me—
magnetically, that is to say?—Could the atmosphere
about her, that would once have trembled betrayingly
at my approach, like the fanning of an angel's invisible
wing, have lost the sense of my presence?

I tried to magnetize her hand. I fixed my eyes on
that little open palm, and with all the intensity I could
summon, kissed it mentally in its rosy centre. I reproached
the ungrateful little thing for its dulness and
forgetfulness, and brought to bear upon it a focus of
old memories of pressures and caresses, to which a
stone would scarce have the heart to be insensible.

But I belie myself in writing this with a smile. I
watched those unmoving fingers with a heart. I could
not see the face, nor read the thought, of the woman
who had once loved me, and who sat near me, now, so
unconsciously—but if a memory had stirred, if a pulse
had quickened its beat, those finely-strung fingers I
well know would have trembled responsively. Had
she forgotten me altogether? Is that possible? Can
a woman close the leaves of her heart over a once-loved
and deeply-written name, like the waves over a vessel's
track—like the air over the division of a bird's flight?

I had intended to speak presently to Miss Crediford,
but every moment the restraint became greater. I felt
no more privileged to speak to her than the stranger
who had left the seat I occupied. I drew back, for
fear of encroaching on her room, or disturbing the
folds of her shawl. I dared not speak to her. And,
while I was arguing the matter to myself, the party
who were with her, apparently tired of the play, arose
and left the theatre, Kate following last, but unspoken
to, and unconscious altogether of having been near
any one whom she knew.

I went home and wrote to her all night, for there was
no sleeping till I had given vent to this new fever at my
heart. And in the morning, I took the leading thoughts
from my heap in incoherent scribblings, and embodied
them more coolly in a letter:—

“You will think, when you look at the signature,
that this is to be the old story. And you will be as
much mistaken as you are in believing that I was ever
your lover, till a few hours ago. I have declared love
to you, it is true. I have been happy with you, and
wretched without you; I have thought of you, dreamed
of you, haunted you, sworn to you, and devoted to
you all and more than you exacted, of time and outward
service and adoration; but I love you now for
the first time in my life. Shall I be so happy as to
make you comprehend this startling contradiction?

“There are many chambers in the heart, Kate; and
the spirits of some of us dwell, most fondly and secretly,
in the chamber of tears—avowedly, however, in the
outer and ever-open chamber of mirth. Over the
sacred threshold, guarded by sadness, much that we
select and smile upon, and follow with adulation in
the common walks of life, never passes. We admire
the gay. They make our melancholy sweeter by contrast,
when we retire within ourselves. We pursue
them. We take them to our hearts—to the outer
vestibules of our hearts—and if they are gay only, they
are content with the unconsecrated tribute which we
pay them there. But the chamber within is, meantime,
lonely. It aches with its desolation. The echo
of the mirthful admiration without jars upon its
mournful silence.—It longs for love, but love toned
with its own sadness—love that can penetrate deeper
than smiles ever came—love that, having once entered,
can be locked in with its key of melancholy, and
brooded over with the long dream of a life-time. But
that deep-hidden and unseen chamber of the heart
may be long untenanted. And, meantime, the spirit
becomes weary of mirth, and impatiently quenches the
fire even upon its outer altar, and in the complete
loneliness of a heart that has no inmate or idol, gay
or tearful, lives mechanically on.

“Do you guess at my meaning, Kate?—Do you
remember the merriment of our first meeting? Do
you remember in what a frolic of thoughtlessness you
first permitted me to raise to my lips those restless
fingers? Do you remember the mock condescension,
the merry haughtiness, the rallying and feigned incredulity,
with which you first received my successive
steps of vowing and love-making—the arch look when
it was begun, the laugh when it was over, the untiring
follies we kept up, after vows plighted, and the future
planned and sworn to? That you were in earnest, as
much as you were capable of being, I fully believe.
You would not else have been so prodigal of the sweet
bestowings of a maiden's tenderness. But how often
have I left you with the feeling, that in the hours I
had passed with you, my spirit had been alone! How
often have I wondered if there were depths in my heart,
which love can never reach! How often mourned
that in the procession of love there was no place allotted
for its sweetest and dearest followers—tears and
silence! Oh, Kate! sweet as was that sun-gleam of
early passion, I did not love you! I tired of your

smiles, waiting in vain for your sadness. I left you,
and thought of you no more?

“But now (and you will be surprised to know that
I have been so near to you unperceived)—I have drank
an intoxication from one glance into your eyes, which
throws open to you every door of my heart, subdues
to your control every nerve and feeling of my existence.
Last night, I sat an hour, tracing again the
transparent and well-remembered veins upon your
hand, and oh! how the language written in those
branching and mystic lines had changed in meaning
and power.—You were sad. I saw you from a distance,
and, with amazement at an expression upon
your face which I had never before seen. I came and
sat near you. It was the look I had longed for when
I knew you, and when tired of your mirth. It was
the look I had searched the world for, combined with
such beauty as yours. It was a look of tender and
passionate melancholy, which revealed to me an unsuspected
chamber in your heart—a chamber of tears.
Ah, why were you never sad before? Why have we
lost—why have I lost the eternity's worth of sweet
hours when you love me with that concealed treasure
in your bosom?—Alas! that angles must walk the
world, unrecognised, till too late! Alas, that I have
held in my arms and pressed to my lips, and loosed
again with trifling and weariness, the creature whom
it was my life's errand, the thirst and passionate longing
of my nature, to find and worship!

“Oh, Heaven! with what new value do I now
number over your adorable graces of person! How
spiritualized is every familiar feature, once so deplorably
misappreciated!—How compulsive of respectful
adoration is that flexible waist, that step of aerial lightness,
that swan-like motion, which I once dared to
praise triflingly and half-mockingly, like the tints of a
flower or the chance beauty of a bird! And those
bright lips! How did I ever look on them, and not
know that within their rosy portal slept voiceless, for
a while, the controlling spell of my destiny—the tearful
spirit followed and called in my dreams, with perpetual
longing? Strange value given to features and
outward loveliness by qualities within! Strange
witchery of sadness in a woman! Oh, there is, in
mirth and folly, dear Kate, no air for love's breathing,
still less of food for constancy, or of holiness to consecrate
and heighten beauty of person.

“What can I say else, except implore to be permitted
to approach you—to offer my life to you—to
begin, thus late, after being known so long, the worship
which till death is your due? Pardon me if I
have written abruptly and wildly. I shall await your
answer in an agony of expectation. I do not willingly
breathe till I see you—till I weep at your feet over my
blindness and forgetfulness. Adieu! but let it not be
for long I pray you!”

I despatched this letter, and it would be difficult to
embody in language the agony I suffered in waiting
for a reply. I walked my room, that endless morning,
with a death-pang in every step—so fearful was I—so
prophetically fearful—that I had forfeited for ever the
heart I had once flung from me.

It was noon when a letter arrived. It was in a handwriting
new to me. But it was on the subject which
possessed my existence, and it was of final import.
It follows:—

But I never called on Mrs. Samuel Smithers.