University of Virginia Library

2. II.
MRS. ELLISON'S LITTLE MANŒUVRE.

THE next morning our tourists found
themselves at rest in Ha-Ha Bay, at the
head of navigation for the larger steamers.
The long line of sullen hills had fallen away,
and the morning sun shone warm on what in a
friendlier climate would have been a very lovely
landscape. The bay was an irregular oval, with
shores that rose in bold but not lofty heights on
one side, while on the other lay a narrow plain
with two villages clinging about the road that
followed the crescent beach, and lifting each the
slender tin-clad spire of its church to sparkle in
the sun.

At the head of the bay was a mountainous top,
and along its waters were masses of rocks, gayly
painted with lichens and stained with metallic
tints of orange and scarlet. The unchanging
growth of stunted pines was the only forest in sight,
though Ha-Ha Bay is a famous lumbering port, and
some schooners now lay there receiving cargoes of
odorous pine plank. The steamboat-wharf was all

astir with the liveliest toil and leisure. The boat
was taking on wood, which was brought in wheelbarrows
to the top of the steep, smooth gangway-planking,
where the habitant in charge planted his
broad feet for the downward slide, and was hurled
aboard more or less en mass by the fierce velocity
of his heavy-laden wheelbarrow. Amidst the confusion
and hazard of this feat a procession of other
habitans marched aboard, each one bearing under
his arm a coffin-shaped wooden box. The rising
fear of Colonel Ellison, that these boxes represented
the loss of the whole infant population of
Ha-Ha Bay, was checked by the reflection that
the region could not have produced so many children,
and calmed altogether by the purser, who said
that they were full of huckleberries, and that Colonel
Ellison could have as many as he liked for fifteen
cents a bushel. This gave him a keen sense
of the poverty of the land, and he bought of the
boys who came aboard such abundance of wild
red raspberries, in all manner of birch-bark canoes
and goblets and cornucopias, that he was obliged
to make presents of them to the very dealers whose
stock he had exhausted, and he was in treaty with
the local half-wit — very fine, with a hunchback,
and a massive wen on one side of his head — to take
charity in the wild fruits of his native province,
when the crowd about him was gently opened by
a person who advanced with a flourishing bow and
a sprightly “Good morning, good morning, sir!”
“How do you do?” asked Colonel Ellison; but
the other, intent on business, answered, “I am the
only person at Ha-Ha Bay who speaks English, and
I have come to ask if you would not like to make a
promenade in my horse and buggy upon the mountain
before breakfast. You shall be gone as long
as you will for one shilling and sixpence. I will
show you all that there is to be seen about the
place, and the beautiful view of the bay from the top
of the mountain. But it is elegant, you know, I
can assure you.”

The speaker was so fluent of his English, he had
such an audacious, wide-branching mustache, such
a twinkle in his left eye, — which wore its lid in a
careless, slouching fashion, — that the heart of man
naturally clove to him; and Colonel Ellison agreed
on the spot to make the proposed promenade, for
himself and both his ladies, of whom he went joyfully
in search. He found them at the stern of the
boat, admiring the wild scenery, and looking

He was not a close observer, and of his wife's wardrobe
he had the ignorance of a good husband, who,
as soon as the pang of paying for her dresses is
past, forgets whatever she has; but he could not
help seeing that some gayeties of costume which he
had dimly associated with his wife now enhanced
the charms of his cousin's nice little face and figure.
A scarf of lively hue carelessly tied about the throat
to keep off the morning chill, a prettier ribbon, a
more stylish jacket than Miss Ellison owned, — what
do I know?—an air of preparation for battle, caught
the colonel's eye, and a conscious red stole responsive
into Kitty's cheek.

“Kitty,” said he, “don't you let yourself be made
a goose of.”

“I hope she won't — by you!” retorted his wife,
“and I 'll thank you, Colonel Ellison, not to be a
Betty, whatever you are. I don't think it 's manly
to be always noticing ladies' clothes.”

“Who said anything about clothes?” demanded
the colonel, taking his stand upon the letter.

“Well, don't you, at any rate. Yes, I 'd like to
ride, of all things; and we 've time enough, for
breakfast is n't ready till half past eight. Where 's
the carriage?”

The only English scholar at Ha-Ha Bay had taken
the light wraps of the ladies and was moving
off with them. “This way, this way,” he said, waving
his hand towards a larger number of vehicles
on the shore than could have been reasonably attributed

to Ha-Ha Bay. “I hope you won't object
to having another passenger with you? There 's
plenty of room for all. He seems a very nice, gentlemanly
person,” said he, with a queer, patronizing
graciousness which he had no doubt caught
from his English patrons.

“The more the merrier,” answered Colonel Ellison,
and “Not in the least!” said his wife, not
meaning the proverb. Her eye had swept the
whole array of vehicles and had found them all
empty, save one, in which she detected the blamelessly
coated back of Mr. Arbuton. But I ought
perhaps to explain Mrs. Ellison's motives better
than they can be made to appear in her conduct.
She cared nothing for Mr. Arbuton; and she had
no logical wish to see Kitty in love with him.
But here were two young people thrown somewhat
romantically together; Mrs. Ellison was a born
match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting
their better acquaintance in the interest of abstract
matrimony was what never could have entered
into her thought or desire. Her whole being
closed for the time about this purpose; her heart,
always warm towards Kitty, — whom she admired
with a sort of generous frenzy, — expanded with
all kinds of lovely designs; in a word, every dress
she had she would instantly have bestowed upon

that worshipful creature who was capable of adding
another marriage to the world. I hope the
reader finds nothing vulgar or unbecoming in this,
for I do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple,
a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and I am
sure men ought to be sorry that they are not
worthier to be favored by it. Ladies have often
to lament in the midst of their finesse that, really,
no man is deserving the fate they devote themselves
to prepare for him, or, in other words, that women
cannot marry women.

I am not going to be so rash as try to depict
Mrs. Ellison's arts, for then, indeed, I should
make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was
not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance
of such matters. Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever
aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he was,
of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other
hand, he had seen far more of the world than Mrs.
Ellison, and she may have been clear as day to
him. Probably, though, he did not detect any
design; he could not have conceived of such a
thing in a person with whom he had been so irregularly
made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself
so hopelessly superior. A film of ice such as
in autumn you find casing the still pools early in
the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner

over night; but it thawed under the greetings of
the others, and he jumped actively out of the vehicle
to offer the ladies their choice of seats. When
all was arranged he found himself at Mrs. Ellison's
side, for Kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to
the front seat with the colonel. In these circumstances
it was pure zeal that sustained Mrs. Ellison
in the flattering constancy with which she
babbled on to Mr. Arbuton and refrained from
openly resenting Kitty's contumacy.

As the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road
was so rough that the springs smote together with
pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some irrepressible
moans. “Never mind, my dear,” said the
colonel, turning about to his wife, “we 've got all
the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any way.”
Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden
liking and good-fellowship. At the same time his
tongue was loosed, and he began to talk of himself.
“You see my dog, how he leaps at the
horse's nose? He is a moose-dog, and keeps himself
in practice of catching the moose by the nose.
You ought to come in the hunting season. I
could furnish you with Indians and everything you
need to hunt with. I am a dealer in wild beasts,
you know, and I must keep prepared to take them.”

“Wild beasts?”

“Yes, for Barnum and the other showmen. I
deal in deer, wolf, bear, beaver, moose, cariboo,
wild-cat, link —”

“What?”

“Link — link! You say deer for deers, and
link for lynx, don't you?”

“Certainly,” answered the unblushing colonel.
“Are there many link about here?”

“Not many, and they are a very expensive
animal. I have been shamefully treated in a link
that I have sold to a Boston showman. It was a
difficult beast to take; bit my Indian awfully;
and Mr. Doolittle would not give the price he
promised.”

“What an outrage!”

“Yes, but it was not so bad as it might have
been. He wanted the money back afterwards;
the link died in about two weeks,” said the dealer
in wild animals, with a smile that curled his
mustache into his ears, and a glance at Colonel
Ellison. “He may have been bruised, I suppose.
He may have been homesick. Perhaps he was
never a very strong link. The link is a curious
animal, miss,” he said to Kitty, in conclusion.

They had been slowly climbing the mountain
road, from which, on either hand, the pasturelands
fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows.

The tops were quite barren, but in the
little vales, despite the stones, a short grass grew
very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine
tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance
as they cropped the herbage. Below, the
bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny expanse,
and the white steamer, where she lay beside
the busy wharf, and the black lumber-ships, gave
their variety to the pretty scene, which was completed
by the picturesque villages on the shore.
It was a very simple sight, but somehow very
touching, as if the soft spectacle were but a
respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it
was.

Mr. Arbuton must have been talking of travel
elsewhere, for now he said to Mrs. Ellison, “This
looks like a bit of Norway; the bay yonder might
very well be a fjord of the Northern sea.”

Mrs. Ellison murmured her sense of obligation
to the bay, the fjord, and Mr. Arbuton, for their
complaisance, and Kitty remembered that he had
somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing
any suggestive grace to the native scenery.
“Then you 've really found something in an
American landscape. I suppose we ought to congratulate
it,” she said, in smiling enjoyment of her
triumph.

The colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous
question; Mrs. Ellison looked blank; and
Mr. Arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had
said to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled
and answered nothing: for he had this trait also
in common with the sort of Englishman for
whom he was taken, that he never helped out
your conversational venture, but if he failed to
respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted
remark upon your hands, as it were. In his
silence, Kitty fell a prey to very evil thoughts of
him, for it made her harmless sally look like a
blundering attack upon him. But just then the
driver came to her rescue; he said, “Gentlemen
and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade,”
and, turning his horse's head, drove rapidly
back to the village.

At the foot of the hill they came again to the
church, and his passengers wanted to get out and
look into it. “O certainly,” said he, “it is n't
finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as
you like in it.”

The church was decent and clean, like most
Canadian churches, and at this early hour there
was a good number of the villagers at their devotions.
The lithographic pictures of the stations
to Calvary were, of course, on its walls, and there

was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and carving
about the high altar.

“I don't like to see these things,” said Mrs.
Ellison. “It really seems to savor of idolatry.
Don't you think so, Mr. Arbuton?”

“Well, I don't know. I doubt if they 're the
sort of people to be hurt by it.”

“They need a good stout faith in cold climates,
I can tell you,” said the colonel. “It helps to
keep them warm. The broad church would be too
full of draughts up here. They want something
snug and tight. Just imagine one of these poor
devils listening to a liberal sermon about birds
and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments,
and then driving home over the hills with the
mercury thirty degrees below zero! He could n't
stand it.”

“Yes, yes, certainly,” said Mr. Arbuton, and
looked about him with an eye of cold, uncompassionate
inspection, as if he were trying it by a
standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the
poor little church vulgar.

When they mounted to their places again, the
talk fell entirely to the colonel, who, as his wont
was, got what information he could out of the
driver. It appeared, in spite of his theory, that
they were not all good Catholics at Ha-Ha Bay.

“This chap, for example,” said the Frenchman,
touching himself on the breast and using the slang
he must have picked up from American travellers,
“is no Catholic, — not much! He has made
too many studies to care for religion. There 's
a large French party, sir, in Canada, that 's opposed
to the priests and in favor of annexation.”

He satisfied the colonel's utmost curiosity, discoursing,
as he drove by the log-built cottages
which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark,
upon the local affairs, and the character and history
of such of his fellow-villagers as they met.
He knew the pretty girls upon the street and
saluted them by name, interrupting himself with
these courtesies in the lecture he was giving the
colonel on life at Ha-Ha Bay. There was only
one brick house (which he had built himself, but
had been obliged to sell in a season unfavorable
for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped
through the social scale to some picturesque barns
thatched with straw. These he excused to his
Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch
was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the
cattle toward the end of an unusually long, hard
winter.

“And the people,” asked the colonel, “what do
they do in the winter to pass the time?”

“Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the
ladies. — But would n't you like to see the inside
of one of our poor cottages? I shall be very
proud to have you look at mine, and to have you
drink a glass of milk from my cows. I am sorry
that I cannot offer you brandy, but there's none
to be bought in the place.”

“Don't speak of it! For an eye-opener there is
nothing like a glass of milk,” gayly answered the
colonel.

They entered the best room of the house, —
wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by two small windows,
and fortified against the winter by a huge Canada
stove of cast-iron. It was rude but neat, and had
an air of decent comfort. Through the window
appeared a very little vegetable garden with a
border of the hardiest flowers. “The large beans
there,” explained the host, “are for soup and
coffee. My corn,” he said, pointing out some rows
of dwarfish maize, “has escaped the early August
frosts, and so I expect to have some roasting-ears
yet this summer.”

“Well, it is n't exactly what you 'd call an inviting
climate, is it?” asked the colonel.

The Canadian seemed a hard little man, but he
answered now with a kind of pathos, “It 's cruel!
I came here when it was all bush. Twenty years

I have lived here, and it has not been worth while.
If it was to do over again, I should rather not live
anywhere. I was born in Quebec,” he said, as if
to explain that he was used to mild climates,
and began to tell of some events of his life at
Ha-Ha Bay. “I wish you were going to stay
here awhile with me. You would n't find it so
bad in the summer-time, I can assure you. There
are bears in the bush, sir,” he said to the colonel,
“and you might easily kill one.”

“But then I should be helping to spoil your
trade in wild beasts,” replied the colonel, laughing.

Mr. Arbuton looked like one who might be very
tried of this. He made no sign of interest either
in the early glooms and privations or the summer
bears of Ha-Ha Bay. He sat in the quaint parlor,
with his hat on his knee, in the decorous and
patient attitude of a gentleman making a call.

He had no feeling, Kitty said to herself; but
that is a matter about which we can easily be
wrong. It was rather to be said of Mr. Arbuton
that he had always shrunk from knowledge of
things outside of a very narrow world, and that
he had not a ready imagination. Moreover, he
had a personal dislike, as I may call it, of poverty;
and he did not enjoy this poverty as she
did, because it was strange and suggestive, though

doubtless he would have done as much to relieve
distress.

“Rather too much of his autobiography,” he
said to Kitty, as he waited outside the door with
her, while the Canadian quieted his dog, which
was again keeping himself in practice of catching
the moose by making vicious leaps at the horse's
nose. “The egotism of that kind of people is
always so aggressive. But I suppose he 's in the
habit of throwing himself upon the sympathy
of summer visitors in this way. You can't offer
a man so little as shilling and sixpence who 's
taken you into his confidence. Did you find
enough that was novel in his place to justify him
in bringing us here, Miss Ellison?” he asked with
an air he had of taking you of course to be of his
mind, and which equally offended you whether you
were so or not.

Every face that they had seen in their drive had
told its pathetic story to Kitty; every cottage
that they passed she had entered in thought, and
dreamed out its humble drama. What their host
had said gave breath and color to her fancies of
the struggle of life there, and she was startled and
shocked when this cold doubt was cast upon the
sympathetic tints of her picture. She did not know
what to say at first; she looked at Mr. Arbuton

with a sudden glance of embarrassment and trouble;
then she answered, “I was very much interested.
I don't agree with you, I believe”; which, when
she heard it, seemed a resentful little speech, and
made her willing for some occasion to soften its
effect. But nothing occurred to her during the
brief drive back to the boat, save the fact that the
morning air was delicious.

“Yes, but rather cool,” said Mr. Arbuton, whose
feelings apparently had not needed any balm; and
the talk fell again to the others.

On the pier he helped her down from the wagon,
for the colonel was intent on something the driver
was saying, and then offered his hand to Mrs.
Ellison.

She sprang from her place, but stumbled slightly,
and when she touched the ground, “I believe
I turned my foot a little,” she said with a laugh.
“It 's nothing, of course,” and fainted in his
arms.

Kitty gave a cry of alarm, and the next instant
the colonel had relieved Mr. Arbuton. It was a
scene, and nothing could have annoyed him more
than this tumult which poor Mrs. Ellison's misfortune
occasioned among the bystanding habitans
and deck-hands, and the passengers eagerly craning
forward over the bulwarks, and running ashore

to see what the matter was. Few men know just
how to offer those little offices of helpfulness which
such emergencies demand, and Mr. Arbuton could
do nothing after he was rid of his burden; he
hovered anxiously and uselessly about, while Mrs.
Ellison was carried to an airy position on the bow
of the boat, where in a few minutes he had the
great satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes. It
was not the moment for him to speak, and he
walked somewhat guiltily away with the dispersing
crowd.

Mrs. Ellison addressed her first words to pale
Kitty at her side. “You can have all my things,
now,” she said, as if it were a clause in her will,
and perhaps it had been her last thought before
unconsciousness.

“Why, Fanny,” cried Kitty, with an hysterical
laugh, “you 're not going to die! A sprained
ankle is n't fatal!”

“No; but I 've heard that a person with a
sprained ankle can't put their foot to the ground
for weeks; and I shall only want a dressing-gown,
you know, to lie on the sofa in.” With that, Mrs.
Ellison placed her hand tenderly on Kitty's head,
like a mother wondering what will become of a
helpless child during her disability; in fact she
was mentally weighing the advantages of her

wardrobe, which Kitty would now fully enjoy,
against the loss of the friendly strategy which she
would now lack. Helpless to decide the matter,
she heaved a sigh.

“But, Fanny, you won't expect to travel in a
dressing-gown.”

“Indeed, I wish I knew whether I could travel
in anything or not. But the next twenty-four
hours will show. If it swells up, I shall have to
rest awhile at Quebec; and if it does n't, there
may be something internal. I 've read of accidents
when the person thought they were perfectly
well and comfortable, and the first thing
they knew they were in a very dangerous state.
That 's the worst of these internal injuries: you
never can tell. Not that I think there 's anything
of that kind the matter with me. But a few days'
rest won't do any harm, whatever happens; the
stores in Quebec are quite as good and a little
cheaper than in Montreal; and I could go about
in a carriage, you know, and put in the time as
well in one place as the other. I 'm sure we
could get on very pleasantly there; and the colonel
need n't be home for a month yet. I suppose
that I could hobble into the stores on a crutch.”

Whilst Mrs. Ellison's monologue ran on with
scarcely a break from Kitty, her husband was gone

to fetch her a cup of tea and such other light
refreshment as a lady may take after a swoon.
When he returned she bethought herself of Mr.
Arbuton, who, having once come back to see if all
was going well, had vanished again.

“Why, our friend Boston is bearing up under his
share of the morning's work like a hero — or a
lady with a sprained ankle,” said the colonel as he
arranged the provision. “To see the havoc he 's
making in the ham and eggs and chiccory is to be
convinced that there is no appetizer like regret for
the sufferings of others.”

“Why, and here 's poor Kitty not had a bite
yet!” cried Mrs. Ellison. “Kitty, go off at once
and get your breakfast. Put on my — ”

“O, don't, Fanny, or I can't go; and I 'm really
very hungry.”

“Well, I won't them,” said Mrs. Ellison, seeing
the rainy cloud in Kitty's eyes. “Go just as you
are, and don't mind me.” And so Kitty went,
gathering courage at every pace, and sitting down
opposite Mr. Arbuton with a vivid color to be sure,
but otherwise lion-bold. He had been upbraiding
the stars that had thrust him further and further
at every step into the intimacy of these people, as
he called them to himself. It was just twenty-four
hours, he reflected, since he had met them,

and resolved to have nothing to do with them, and
in that time the young lady had brought him under
the necessity of apologizing for a blunder of
her own; he had played the eavesdropper to her
talk; he had sentimentalized the midnight hour
with her; they had all taken a morning ride together;
and he had ended by having Mrs. Ellison
sprain her ankle and faint in his arms. It was
outrageous; and what made it worse was that
decency obliged him to take henceforth a regretful,
deprecatory attitude towards Mrs. Ellison,
whom he liked least among these people. So he
sat vindictively eating an enormous breakfast, in
a sort of angry abstraction, from which Kitty's
coming roused him to say that he hoped Mrs.
Ellison was better.

“O, very much! It 's just a sprain.”

“A sprain may be a very annoying thing,” said
Mr. Arbuton dismally. “Miss Ellison,” he cried,
“I 've been nothing but an affliction to your party
since I came on board this boat!”

“Do you think evil genius of our party would
be too harsh a term?” suggested Kitty.

“Not in the least; it would be a mere euphemism,
— base flattery, in fact. Call me something worse.”

“I can't think of anything. I must leave you
to your own conscience. It was a pity to end our

ride in that way; it would have been such a
pleasant ride!” And Kitty took heart from his
apparent mood to speak of some facts of the
morning that had moved her fancy. “What a
strange little nest it is up here among these half-thawed
hills! and imagine the winter, the fifteen
or twenty months of it, they must have every
year. I could almost have shed tears over that
patch of corn that had escaped the early August
frosts. I suppose this is a sort of Indian summer
that we are enjoying now, and that the cold weather
will set in after a week or two. My cousin and
I thought that Tadoussac was somewhat retired
and composed last night, but I 'm sure that I shall
see it in its true light, as a metropolis, going back.
I 'm afraid that the turmoil and bustle of Eriecreek,
when I get home — ”

“Eriecreek? — when you get home? — I thought
you lived at Milwaukee.”

“O no! It 's my cousins who live at Milwaukee.
I live at Eriecreek, New York State.”

“Oh!” Mr. Arbuton looked blank and not altogether
pleased. Milwaukee was bad enough,
though he understood that it was largely peopled
from New England, and had a great German element,
which might account for the fact that these
people were not quite barbaric. But this Eriecreek,

New York State! “I don't think I 've heard
of it,” he said.

“It 's a small place,” observed Kitty, “and I
believe it is n't noted for anything in particular;
it 's not even on any railroad. It 's in the northwest
part of the State.”

“Is n't it in the oil-regions?” groped Mr. Arbuton.

“Why, the oil-regions are rather migratory, you
know. It used to be in the oil-regions; but the
oil was pumped out, and then the oil-regions gracefully
withdrew and left the cheese-regions and
grape-regions to come back and take possession of
the old derricks and the rusty boilers. You might
suppose from the appearance of the meadows, that
all the boilers that ever blew up had come down
in the neighborhood of Eriecreek. And every field
has its derrick standing just as the last dollar or
the last drop of oil left it.”

Mr. Arbuton brought his fancy to bear upon
Eriecreek, and wholly failed to conceive of it. He
did not like the notion of its being thrust within
the range of his knowledge; and he resented its
being the home of Miss Ellison, whom he was beginning
to accept as a note quite comprehensible
yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a
disposition to cast her off as something incredible.

He asked no further about Eriecreek, and presently
she rose and went to join her relatives, and
he went to smoke his cigar, and to ponder upon
the problem presented to him in this young girl
from whose locality and conjecturable experiences
he was at loss how to infer her as he found her
here.

She had a certain self-reliance mingling with an
innocent trust of others which Mrs. Isabel March
had described to her husband as a charm potent to
make everybody sympathetic and good-natured, but
which it would not be easy to account for to Mr.
Arbuton. In part it was a natural gift, and partly
it came from mere ignorance of the world; it was
the unsnubbed fearlessness of a heart which did
not suspect a sense of social difference in others, or
imagine itself misprized for anything but a fault.
For such a false conception of her relations to polite
society, Kitty's Uncle Jack was chiefly to
blame. In the fierce democracy of his revolt from
his Virginian traditions he had taught his family
that a belief in any save intellectual and moral
distinctions was a mean and cruel superstition; he
had contrived to fix this idea so deeply in the education
of his children, that it gave a coloring to
their lives, and Kitty, when her turn came, had
the effect of it in the character of those about her.

In fact she accepted his extreme theories of equality
to a degree that delighted her uncle, who,
having held them many years, was growing perhaps
a little languid in their tenure and was glad
to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. Socially
as well as politically Eriecreek was almost
a perfect democracy, and there was little in Kitty's
circumstances to contradict the doctor's teachings.
The brief visits which she had made to
Buffalo and Erie, and since the colonel's marriage,
to Milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her;
she had never suffered slight save from the ignorant
and uncouth; she innocently expected that in
people of culture she should always find community
of feeling and ideas; and she had met Mr. Arbuton
all the more trustfully because as a Bostonian
he must be cultivated.

In the secluded life which she led perforce at
Eriecreek there was an abundance of leisure, which
she bestowed upon books at an age when most
girls are sent to school. The doctor had a good
taste of an old-fashioned kind in literature, and he
had a library pretty well stocked with the elderly
English authors, poets and essayists and novelists,
and here and there an historian, and these Kitty
read childlike, liking them at the time in a certain
way, and storing up in her mind things that she did

not understand for the present, but whose beauty
and value dawned upon her from time to time, as
she grew older. But of far more use and pleasure
to her than these now somewhat mouldy classics
were the more modern books of her cousin Charles,
— that pride and hope of his father's heart, who
had died the year before she came to Eriecreek.
He was named after her own father, and it was as
if her Uncle Jack found both his son and his
brother in her again. When her taste for reading
began to show itself in force, the old man one day
unlocked a certain bookcase in a little upper room,
and gave her the key, saying, with a broken pride
and that queer Virginian pomp which still clung
to him, “This was my son's, who would one day
have been a great writer; now it is yours.” After
that the doctor would pick up the books out of
this collection which Kitty was reading and had
left lying about the rooms, and look into them a
little way. Sometimes he fell asleep over them;
sometimes when he opened on a page pencilled
with marginal notes, he would put the volume gently
down and go very quickly out of the room.

“Kitty, I reckon you 'd better not leave poor
Charley's books around where Uncle Jack can get
at them,” one of the girls, Virginia or Rachel,
would say; “I don't believe he cares much for

those writers, and the sight of the books just tries
him.” So Kitty kept the books, and herself for
the most part with them, in the upper chamber
which had been Charles Ellison's room, and where,
amongst the witnesses of the dead boy's ambitious
dreams, she grew dreamer herself and seemed to
inherit with his earthly place his own fine and
gentle spirit.

The doctor, as his daughter suggested, did not
care much for the modern authors in whom his son
had delighted. Like many another simple and
pure-hearted man, he thought that since Pope
there had been no great poet but Byron, and he
could make nothing out of Tennyson and Browning,
or the other contemporary English poets.
Amongst the Americans he had a great respect for
Whittier, but he preferred Lowell to the rest because
he had written The Biglow Papers, and he
never would allow that the last series was half so
good as the first. These and the other principal
poets of our nation and language Kitty inherited
from her cousin, as well as a full stock of the contemporary
novelists and romancers, whom she
liked better than the poets on the whole. She had
also the advantage of the magazines and reviews
which used to come to him, and the house overflowed
with newspapers of every kind, from the

Eriecreek Courier to the New York Tribune.
What with the coming and going of the eccentric
visitors, and this continual reading, and her rides
about the country with her Uncle Jack, Kitty's
education, such as it was, went on very actively
and with the effect, at least, to give her a great
liveliness of mind and several decided opinions.
Where it might have warped her out of natural
simplicity, and made her conceited, the keen and
wholsesome airs which breathed continually in the
Ellison household came in to restore her. There
was such kindness in this discipline, that she never
could remember when it wounded her; it was part
of the gayety of those times when she would sit
down with the girls, and they took up some work
together, and rattled on in a free, wild, racy talk,
with an edge of satire for whoever came near, a
fantastic excess in its drollery, and just a touch of
native melancholy tingeing it. The last queer
guest, some neighborhood gossip, some youthful
folly or pretentiousness of Kitty's, some trait of
their own, some absurdity of the boys if they happened
to be at home, and came lounging in, were
the themes out of which they contrived such jollity
as never was, save when in Uncle Jack's presence
they fell upon some characteristic action or
theory of his and turned it into endless ridicule.

But of such people, of such life, Mr. Arbuton
could have made nothing if he had known them.
In many things he was an excellent person, and
greatly to be respected for certain qualities. He
was very sincere; his mind had a singular purity
and rectitude; he was a scrupulously just person
so far as he knew. He had traits that would have
fitted him very well for the career he had once
contemplated, and he had even made some preliminary
studies for the ministry. But the very generosity
of his creed perplexed him, his mislikers
said; contending that he could never have got on
with the mob of the redeemed. “Arbuton,” said
a fat young fellow, the supposed wit of the class,
“thinks there are persons of low extraction in
heaven; but he does n't like the idea.” And Mr.
Arbuton did not like the speaker very well, either,
nor any of his poorer fellow-students, whose gloveless
and unfashionable poverty, and meagre board
and lodgings, and general hungry dependence upon
pious bequests and neighborhood kindnesses, offended
his instincts. “So he 's given it up, has
he?” moralized the same wit, upon his retirement.
“If Arbuton could have been a divinely commissioned
apostle to the best society, and been
obliged to save none but well-connected, old-established,
and cultivated souls, he might have gone

into the ministry.” This was a coarse construction
of the truth, but it was not altogether a perversion.
It was long ago that he had abandoned
the thought of the ministry, and he had since
travelled, and read law, and become a man of
society and of clubs; but he still kept the traits
that had seemed to make his vocation clear. On
the other hand he kept the prejudices that were
imagined to have disqualified him. He was an
exclusive by training and by instinct. He gave
ordinary humanity credit for a certain measure of
sensibility, and it is possible that if he had known
more kinds of men, he would have recognized
merits and excellences which did not now exist for
him; but I do not think he would have liked
them. His doubt of these Western people was the
most natural, if not the most justifiable thing in
the world, and for Kitty, if he could have known
all about her, I do not see how he could have believed
in her at all. As it was, he went in search
of her party, when he had smoked his cigar, and
found them on the forward promenade. She had
left him in quite a lenient mood, although, as she
perceived with amusement, he had done nothing
to merit it, except give her cousin a sprained
ankle. At the moment of his reappearance, Mrs.
Ellison had been telling Kitty that she thought it
was beginning to swell a little, and so it could not
be anything internal; and Kitty had understood
that she meant her ankle as well as if she had said
so, and had sorrowed and rejoiced over her, and
the colonel had been inculpated for the whole
affair. This made Mr. Arbuton's excuses rather
needless, though they were most graciously received.