University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
WHICH CONTAINS A DREAM OF THE
JUST ARISTIDES.

The opinion which McSnagley expressed
in references to a “change of heart,” as experienced
by Mliss, was more forcibly described
in the gulches and tunnels. It was thought
there that Mliss had struck a “good lead.”
And when there waa a new grave added to
the little enclosure, and, at the expense of
the master—a little board and inscription
put above it, the Red Mountain Banner came
out quite handsomely and did the correct
thing for the memory of one of “our noblest
pioneers,” alluding gracefully to that “bane
of noble intellects,” touching slightly on “the
viscissitudes of fortune,” and otherwise assist.
ing our dear brother into genteel obscurity
“He leaves an only child to mourn his loss,”
said the Banner, “who is now an exemplary
scholar, thanks to the efforts of the Rev. J.
McSnagley.” That reverend gentleman, in
fact, made a strong point of Mliss's conversion,
and indirectly attributing to her former
bad conduct the suicide of her father, made
affecting allusions in Sunday school to the
beneficial effects of “the silent tomb,” and
in that cheerful contemplation froze most of
the children into speechless horror, and caused
the fair complexioned scions of the first
families to howl dismally and refuse to be
comforted.

Of the homes that were offered to Mliss
when her conversion became known, the
master had preferred Mrs. Morpher, a womanly
and kind-hearted specimen of efflorescence,
known in her maidenhood as the
“Per - ra - rie Rose.'

By a close system of struggle and self sacrifice

gaushe had at last brought her naturally careless
disposition to principles of “order,” which as a
pious woman, she considered, with Pope, as
“Heaven's first law.” But she could not entirely
govern the orbits of her satellites, however
regular her own movements, and her old
nature asserted itself in her children. Lycurgus
dipped in the cupboard “between meals,” and
Aristides came home without shoes, leaving
those important articles at the threshold for
the delights of a barefooted walk down the
ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were “keerless”
of their clothes. So that with but one exception,
however the “Prairie Rose” might have
trimmed, pruned and trained her own natural
luxuriance, the little shoots came up defiantly
wild and straggling. That one exception was
Clytemnestra Morpher, aged fifteen. She was
the realization of her mother's most extravagant
dream. I stay my hand with difficulty at this
moment, for I long to describe this model of
deportment, but the progress of my story just
at present supplants Clytemnestra in the larger
prominence it gives to another member of the
family—the just Aristides.

The long dry summer had come. As each
fierce day seemed to burn itself out in little
whiffs of pearl gray smoke on the mountain
summits, and as the upspringing breeze scattered
what might have been i s red embers over
the landscape, the green wave, which in early
spring had upheaved above Smith's grave, grew
sere and dry and hard. In those days the master,
strolling in the little churchyard of a Sabbath
afternoon, was sometimes surprised to find
a few wild flowers plucked from the damp pine
forest scattered there, and oftener rude wreaths
hung upon the little pine cross. Most of these
wreaths were formed of a sweet-scented grass,
which the children loved to keep in their desks,
entwined with the pompon-like plumes of the
buckeye and syringa, the wood anemone, and
here and there the master noticed the dark blue
cowl of the monkshood or deadly aconite. One
day, during a walk in crossing a wooded ridge,
he came upon Mliss in the heart of the forest,
perched upon a prostrate pine, on a fantastic
throne formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless
branches, her lap full of grasses and pine
burrs, and crooning to the just Aristides, who
sat humbly at her feet, one of the negro melodies
of her younger life. It was perhaps the
influence of the season, or the memory of this
sylvan enjoyment, which caused Aristides, one
midsummer day, to have a singular vision.

The just Aristides had begun that morning
with a serious error. Loitering on his way to
school, occasionally stopping to inspect the
footprints of probable bears, or indulging in
cheerful badinage with the tunnel men—to
whom the apparition of a short-legged boy,
weighed down by a preternaturally large satchel,
was an object of boisterous solicitude—Aristides
suddenly found that he was an hour and a half
too late for school. Whether this circumstance
was purely accidental or not is a question of
some uncertainty, for Aristides, on finding himself
occupying this criminal attitude at once
resolved to play truant. I shall not stop to inquire
by what symtem of logic this result presented
itself to that just youth as a consistent
deduction, or whether some indistinct apprehension
of another and a better world beyond
the settlement where there were no schools and
blackberries were plenty, had not influenced
him in asking this fatal step. Enough that he
entered on his rash career by instantly eating
the dinner which he carried with him, and having
propitiated that terrible god whose seat is
every small boy's stomach, with a feeling of inexpressible
guiltiness creeping over him, he
turned his back upon the school-house and ran
into the woods

Retracing his steps, the truant presently came
to a semicircular opening in the side of Red
Mountain, which inclosed, like the walls of some
vast amphitheatre, what had been the arena of
the early struggles of the gladiators of fortune.
There were terrible traces of that struggle still
—in the rock blasted by fire—in the bank furrowed
by water—and in the debris of Red Mountain
scattered along the gulch two miles in extent.
Their forgotten engines were lying half,
buried in the ditches—the primeval structure
which had served them for a banking-house was
roofless, and held the hoards of field-mice and
squirrels. The unshapely stumps of ancient
pines dotted the ground, and Aristides remembered
that under the solitary Redwood, which of
all its brothers remained still standing, one of
those early pioneers lay buried. No wonder
that, as the gentle breeze of that summer day
swept through its branches, the just Aristides
might have heard, as part of his wonderful
dream, some echo of its far-off brothers of Lebanon,
saying:—“Since thou art fallen, no feller
has risen up against us!”

But the short legs of Aristides were aching'
and he was getting thirsty. There was a rough
cavern close at hand, and as most of these openings
condensed their general dampness somewhere
in a quiet pool, Aristides turned into the
first one. When he had slaked his thirst, he
looked around him and recognized Smith's
Pocket.

It had undergone little change in the last two
years. The winter rains had detached those portions
of the wall which were not upheld by decaying

timbers. It was certainly a dirty pocket—
a pocket filled with rubbish—a shabby pocket—
a worn out and ragged pocket. It was so unpromising
in its present exterior, so graphic in
its story of misfortune, and so terrible in its recent
memories, that the most sanguine prospector
would have passed it by, as though the
hopeless sentence of Dante had been written
over its ragged portal.

The active mind of Aristides, however, saw in
the lurking shadows of its arches, much promise
as a future play-room, to which he intended to
induct hereafter his classical brother Lycurgus.
In this reflection he threw himself on the ground
and luxuriously burying his bare feet in the
cool, loose soil, gave himself up to serene meditation.
But the heat and exertion were beginning
to exert a certain influence over him, and
once or twice his eyes closed. The water rippled
beside him with a sleepy sound. The sunlight
on the hill without, made him wink. The long-drawn
cawing of a crow on the opposite hillside,
and the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly who had
sought retreat in the cavern, had a like effect,
and he felt himself falling asleep. How long he
slept, or if he slept at all, he could not remember,
for he started suddenly, and listening a
moment sprang to his feet.

The low, heavy blows of a pick came deadened
and muffled from the extremity of the cavern.

At first a terrible fear took possession of him;
for an instant the white, rigid face of Smith, as
he had seen it on the day of the inquest, when
an irresistible curiosity led him to creep into
the room where the dead man was lying—for an
instant only, this fearful remembrance seemed
to rise before him out of the gloom of the pit.
The terror passed away. Ghosts were historically
unknown to Aristides, and even had his
imaginative faculty been more prominent, the
education of Smith's Pocket was not of a kind
to foster such weakness. Except a twinge of
conscience, a momentary recollection of the evil
that comes to bad boys through the severe passages
of Sunday-school books—with this exception,
Aristides was not long in recovering his
self-possession. He did not run away, for his
curiosity was excited. The same instinct which
prompted an examination of bear-tracks, gave
a fascination to the situation, and a nervous
energy to his frame.

The regular blows of the pick still resounded
through the cavern. He crept cautiously to the
deepest recesses of the Pocket and held his
breath and listened. The sound seemed to come
from the bowels of the mountain. There was
no sign of opening or ingress; an impenetrable
vail of quartz was between him and the mysterious
laborer. He was creeping back, between
the displaced rafters, when a light glanced suddenly
in his face, and flashed on the wet roof
above him. Looking fearfully down, Aristides
beheld between the interstices of the rafters,
which formed a temporary flooring, that there
was another opening below, and in that opening
a man was working. In the queer fantasy of
Aristides's dream, it took the aspect of a second
Pocket and a duplicate Smith!

He had no time to utter his astonishment, for
at that moment an ominous rattling of loose soil
upon his back made him look up, and he had
barely time to spring away before a greater portion
of the roof of Smith's Pocket, loosened by
the displacement of its supports in his search,
fell heavily to the ground. But in the fall, a
long-handled shovel, which had been hidden
somewhere in the crevices of the rock above,
came rattling down with it, and seizing this as
a trophy, Aristides emerged from Smith's Pocket,
at a rate of speed which seemed singularly
disproportionate with his short legs and round
stomach.

When he reached the road the sun was setting.
Inspecting his prize by that poetic light, he
found that the shovel was a new one, and bore
neither mark of use or exposure. Shouldering
it again, with the intention of presenting it as
a peace-offering to propitiate the just wrath of
his parents, Aristides had gone but a few rods
when an unexpected circumstance occurred
which dashed his fond hopes, and to the conscientious
child seemed the shadow of an inevitable
Nemesis. At the curve of the road, as
the settlement of Smith's Pocket came into
view, with its straggling street, and its churchspire
that seemed a tongue of flame in the setting
sun, a broad-shouldered figure sprang, apparently
from out of the bank, and stood in the
path of that infelix infant.

“Where are you going with that shovel, you
young devil?”

Aristides looked up, and saw that his interlocutor
was a man of powerful figure, whose face,
though partially concealed by a red handkerchief,
even in that uncertain light was not prepossessing.
Children are quick physiognomists,
and Aristides, feeling the presence of evil, from
the depths of his mighty little soul then and
there took issue with the giant.

“Where are you going with that shovel—
d—n you—do you hear?” said he of the red handkerchief,
impatiently.

“Home,” said Aristides, stoutly.

“Home, eh!” said the stranger, sneeringly.
“And where did you steal it, you young thief?”

The Morpher stock not being of a kind to receive
opprobrious epithets meekly, Aristides,

slowly and with an evident effort, lifted the
shovel in a menacing attitude.

A single step was all that separated six feet of
strength from three feet of valor. The stranger
eyed Aristides with an expression of surly amazement
and hesitated. The elephant quailed before
the gad-fly. As that precious infant waved
the threatening shovel, his youthful lips slowly
fashioned this tremendous sentence:

“You let me pass and I won't hit you!”

And here I must pause. I would that for the
sake of poetry I could leave my hero bathed in
that heroic light erect and menacing. But alas,
in this practical world of ours the battle is too
often to the strong. And I hasten over the humiliating
spectacle of Aristides, spanked,
cuffed, and kicked, and pick him from the ditch
into which he was at last ignominiously tossed,
a defeated but still struggling warrior, and so
bring him as the night closes charitably around
him, in contrite tears and muddy garments to
his father's door.

When the master stopped at Mrs. Morpher's to
inquire after his errant pupil that night, he
found Aristides in bed, smelling strongly of soap
and water, and sinking into a feverish sleep.
As he muttered from time to time some incoherent
sentence, tossing restlessly in his cot, the
master turned to those about him and asked
what it was he said.

It was nothing. Yet a dream that foreshadowed
a slow coming but unerring justice that
should give the little dreamer in after years
some credit to the title of Aristides the Just.