 | Marjorie Daw, and other people |  |
7. THE FRIEND OF MY YOUTH.
IN one of the episodes in his entertaining volume
of Vagabond Adventures, Mr. Keeler takes
the reader with him on a professional cruise in
Dr. Spaulding's Floating Palace. This Floating
Palace, a sort of Barnum's Museum with a keel,
was designed for navigation in Southern and
Western rivers, and carried a cargo of complex
delights that must have much amazed the simple
dwellers on the banks of the Ohio and the
Mississippi. Here, on board of this dramatical
Noah's Ark, the reader finds himself on the pleasantest
terms conceivable with negro minstrels,
danseuses, apostolic wax-works, moral acrobats,
stuffed animals, vocalists, and a certain Governor
Dorr.
It was with a thrill of honest pleasure that
I came upon this picturesque outcast unexpectedly
embalmed, like a fly in amber, in Mr. Keeler's
autobiography. There was a time when I was
upon the rotund music of his lips, listened to his
marvellous stories of moving accidents by flood
and field, and was melted to the very heart at
those rare moments when, in a three-cornered
room in the rear of Wall's Drug Store, he would
favor me with some of the most lacrymose and
sentimental poems that ever came of a despondent
poet. At this epoch of my existence, Governor
Dorr, with his sarcastic winks, his comic melancholy,
his quotations from Shakespeare, and his
fearful knowledge of the outside world, was in
my eyes the personification of all that was learned,
lyrical, romantic, and daring. A little later my
boyish admiration was shattered by the discovery
that my Admirable Crichton was — well, it is of
no use now to mince words — an adventurer and
a gambler. With a kind of sigh that is at
present a lost art to me, I put him aside with
those dethroned idols and collapsed dreams which
accumulate on one's hands as one advances in
life, and of which I already had a promising
collection when I was about twenty. I cast off
Governor Dorr, I repeat; but, oddly enough,
Governor Dorr never cast me off, but persisted in
tender and pathetic character of “the friend
of my youth.”
As Governor Dorr is the only gentleman
in his line of business who ever evinced any
interest in me, I intend to make the most of
him; and, indeed, among my reputable acquaintances
there is none who deserves to fare better
at my hands. My reputable acquaintances have
sometimes bored me, and taught me nothing.
Now Governor Dorr, in the ethereal shape of
a reminiscence, has not only been a source of
great amusement to me at various times, but
has taught me by his own funest example that
whatever gifts a man may possess, if he have
no moral principle he is a failure. Wanting the
gift of honesty, Governor Dorr was a gambler
and a sharper, and is dead.
I was a school-boy at Rivermouth when Governor
Dorr swept like a brilliant comet into
the narrow are of my observation.[1] One day in
school when I saw standing in front of Wall's
Drug Store a showily dressed person, who seemed
to me well advanced in years, that is to say,
twenty-five or thirty; he was the centre of a
small circle of idle fellows about town, who were
drinking in with obvious relish one of those
pre-Raphaelite narratives which I was afterwards
destined to swallow with open-mouthed wonder.
The genial twinkle of the man's blue eyes, the
glow of his half-smoked cigar, and the blaze
of the diamond on his little finger, all seemed the
members of one radiant family. To this day
I cannot disassociate a sort of glitter with the
memory of my first glimpse of Governor Dorr.
He had finished speaking as I joined the group;
I had caught only the words, “and that was
the last of gallant Jack Martinway,” delivered
in a singularly mellow barytone voice, when he
turned abruptly and disappeared behind the
orange and purple jars in Dr. Wall's shopwindow.
Who is gallant Jack Martinway, I wondered,
and who is this dazzling person that wears his
best clothes on a week-day? I took him for
fine feeling for anachronism immediately connected
him with the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in
Mitchell's Geography, — a work I was at that
time neglecting with considerable perseverance.
The apparition of so bewildering a figure in
our staid, slow-going little town was likely to
cause a sensation. The next day in school I
learned all about him. He was Governor Dorr;
he had once been a boy in Rivermouth, like us,
but had gone off years ago to seek his fortune,
and now he had come back immensely wealthy
from somewhere,—South America or the Chincha
Islands, where he was governor,—and was going
to settle down in his native town and buy the
“Janvrin Place,”—an estate which the heirs
were too poor to keep and nobody else rich enough
to purchase.
This was appetizing, and after school I wandered
up to Wall's Drug Store to take a look
at my gilded townsman, of whom I was not a
little proud.
I was so dazed at the time, that I do not recollect
how it all came about; but Governor Dorr
was in the shop holding a glass of soda-water in
fountain; I entered with the weak pretence of
buying a slate pencil; the Governor spoke to me,
and then—I can recall nothing except that, when
I recovered from my embarrassment and confusion,
I was drinking soda-water with the Great
Mogul, strangling myself with the lively beverage,
and eliciting from him the laughing advice
that I should n't drink it while it was boiling.
It was an aggravated case of friendship at first
sight. In less than a week my admiration for
Governor Dorr was so pure, unselfish, and unquestioning
that it saddens me now to remember
it, knowing that the stock is exhausted.
Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon—our
half-holidays—I hurried to Wall's Drug Store to
meet my friend. Here were his head-quarters,
and a most profitable customer he must have
been, for when he was not drinking soda-water
he was smoking the Doctor's cigars.
In the rear of the shop was a small triangular
room where Dr. Wall manufactured a patent
eclectic cough sirup, and where he allowed us to
sit rainy afternoons. Nothing about me as I
write is so real as a vision of that musty, pennyroyal-smelling
sitting on a reversed mortar and accenting the
spirited parts of some Homeric story with a circumflex
flourish of the Doctor's iron pestle, on
the end of which was always a thin crust of the
prescription last put up, Rows of croupy square
bottles filled with a dark-colored mixture and
labelled “Cough Sirup” look down on me from
their dusty shelves, and I am listening again as
of old!
In pleasant weather we sauntered about town,
or strolled off into those pretty lanes which make
Rivermouth, and rural places like Rivermouth, a
paradise for lovers. In all these hours with Governor
Dorr, I never knew him to let fall a word
that a child should not hear. Perhaps my innocence
and my unconcealed reverence for him
touched and drew the better part of his heart to
me, for it had a better part,—one uncontaminated
little piece for children.
Our conversation turned chiefly on his travels,
literature, literary men, and actors. His talk, I
may remark, was very full on literary men; he
knew them well, and was on astonishingly familiar
personal terms with all the American authors
Barlow, who, I subsequently learned, had quitted
this planet about half a century previous to the
birth of my friend. He called him “Joel,” quite
familiarly, and sometimes his “dear old friend
Joe Barlow, the Hasty-Pudding Man!”
Shakespeare, however, was the weakness or
the strength of Governor Dorr. I am glad he
did not have the effrontery to claim his acquaintance
in propria persona. I am afraid that would
have shaken my faith and spoiled me for enjoying
my comrade's constant quotations. I am not
sure, though, for I trusted so implicitly in the
superior knowledge of Governor Dorr that on
one occasion he convinced me that Herrick was
a contemporary American author, and not an old
English poet as I had read somewhere. “Why,
my dear boy,” he exclaimed, “I know him well.
He is a fellow of infinite jest, and his father edits
the New York Sunday Atlas!” And the Governor
drew forth a copy of the journal and
showed me the name of Anson Herrick in large
capitals at the head of the paper. After that I
was entirely adrift on what is called “the sea
of English literature.”
To return to the Bard of Avon, “the immortal
Bill,” as my friend apostrophized him in moments
of enthusiasm. The daily talk of the Governor
would have come to a dead-lock, if he had been
debarred the privilege of drawing at sight on his
favorite poet. Take Shakespeare from Dorr,
and naught remains. It was remarkable how
the plays helped him out; now it was Othello,
and now it was Touchstone, and now it was
Prospero who flew to his assistance with words
and phrases so pat that they seemed created
for the occasion. His voice, at that time rich,
strong, and varied as the lines themselves,
made it a delight to hear him repeat a long
passage. I was not often able to follow the
sense of the text, but the music bore me on with
it. I can hear him now, saying:—
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.
“In such a night,
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage.”
suddenly upon my shoulder, and fancy myself
standing on the old Mill-Dam Bridge at Rivermouth,
with the water rushing through the sluices
and the rest of the pond lying like a sheet of
crinkled silver in the moonlight.
My intercourse with Governor Dorr was not
carried on without the cognizance of my family.
They raised no objections. The Governor was
then in his best style, and by his good-nature
and free-and-easy ways more or less won everybody.
The leading men of the town touched
their hats to him on the street, and chatted with
him at the post-office. It must be confessed,
though, that the Governor was a sore puzzle
to those worthy people. His fluency of money
and language was not a local characteristic. He
had left the place about ten years before, a poor
boy, and now he had dropped down from nobody
knew where, like an aerolite, mysteriously gay
and possibly valuable.
The fact is, he must have been merely a gambler
at this period, and had not entered upon
that more aggressive career which afterwards
made him well known to the police of Boston,
fame had not reached Rivermouth; and though
my family wondered what I saw in him or he in
me to build a friendship on, — the disparity in
our ages being so great, — they by no means
objected to the intimacy, and it continued.
What impressed me most in Governor Dorr,
next to his literary endowments, was his generous
nature, his ready and practical sympathy for all
sorts of unfortunate people. I have known him
to go about the town half the morning with a
blind man, selling his brooms for him at extortionate
prices. I have seen the tears spring to
his eyes at the recital of some story of suffering
among the factory hands, many of whom were
children. His love for these pale little men and
women, as I think of it, is very touching; and it
seems one of the finest things in the world to me
now, and at the time it struck me as an epical
exhibition of human sympathy, that he once purchased
an expensive pair of skates for a little
boy who had been born a cripple.
No doubt these facile sympathies were as superficial
as letter-paper, as short-lived as those
midges which are born and become great-grandfathers
but they endeared the Governor to me, and maybe,
when the final reckoning comes, all those
good impulses will add up to something handsome;
who can tell?
Nearly six months had passed since the beginning
of our acquaintance, when one morning my
noble friend and my copy of Shakespeare—an
illegibly printed volume bound in seedy law-calf,
but the most precious of my earthly treasures—
disappeared from the town simultaneously. Governor
Dorr had gone, as he had come, without
a word of warning, leaving his “ancient,” as he
was pleased to call me, the victim of abject despair.
What complicated events caused the abrupt
departure of my friend and my calf-skin Shakespeare
from Rivermouth never transpired. Perhaps
he had spent all his money: perhaps he
was wanted by a pal in New York, for some
fresh piece of deviltry; or, what is more probable,
the pastoral sweetness of life at Rivermouth
had begun to cloy on his metropolitan palate.
It may have been five or it may have been ten
months after his exodus that my late companion
He had been tripped up in some disreputable
transaction or another, and had played a rather
unenviable rôle in the New York police reports.
I had been entertaining, not an angel, but a
gambler unawares. My mortification was unassumed,
and I banished the fascinating Governor
Dorr from my affections forever.
A few years afterwards I left Rivermouth myself.
The friend of my youth had become a faded
memory. I had neither seen nor heard of him in
the mean while; and the summer when I planned
to pass the whole of a long vacation at my boyhood's
home, the Governor assumed but a subordinate
part in the associations naturally evoked
by the proposed visit.
In my first walk through the town after my
arrival, it was with a sort of comical consternation
that I beheld Governor Dorr standing in
front of Wall's Drug Store, smoking the very
same cigar, it seemed, and skilfully catching the
sunlight on the facets of that identical diamond
ring.
The same, and not the same. He looked older,
and was not so well groomed as he used to be;
not improved. There was a hard expression in
his face, and that inexplicable something all over
him which says as plainly as a whisper to the
ear, “This is a Black Sheep.”
At the crossing our eyes met. Would he
recognize his quondam chum and dupe, after all
these years? The Governor gazed at me earnestly
for ten seconds, then slowly drew back, and
lifting his hat with a magnificent grand air quite
his own made me an obeisance so involved and
elaborate that it would be mere rashness to attempt
to describe it.
The lady at my side gave my arm a convulsive
grasp, and whispered, “Who is that dreadful
man?”
“O, that? — that is the friend of my youth!”
Though I made light of the meeting, I was by
no means amused by it. I saw that if Governor
Dorr insisted on presuming on his old acquaintance,
he might render it very disagreeable for
me; I might have to snub him, perhaps quarrel
with him. His presence was altogether annoying
and depressing.
It appears that the man had been lying about
was there before he had mystified the town, but
now he terrified it. The people were afraid of
him, and Governor Dorr knew it, and was having
what he would have described as “a very soft
thing.” He touched his hat to all the pretty
girls in the place, talked to everybody, and ministered
to the spiritual part of his nature, now and
then, by walking down the street familiarly with
an eminent divine who did not deem it prudent
to resent the impertinence. For it was noticed
by careful observers, that when any person repelled
Governor Dorr, that person's wood-house
caught on fire mysteriously, or a successful raid
was undertaken in the direction of that person's
family plate.
These trifling mishaps could never be traced to
the Governor's agency, but the remarkable precision
with which a catastrophe followed any
slight offered to him made the townspeople rather
civil than otherwise to their lively guest.
The authorities, however, were on the alert,
and one night, a week after my arrival, the Governor
was caught flagrante delicto, and lodged
by Sheriff Adams in the Stone Jail, to my great
man in my walks to the post-office and the reading-room
had given me the air of a person seeking
to elude the vigilance of justice.
I forget which of the laws the Governor had
offended, — he was quite impartial in his transgressions,
by the way, — but it was one that
insured him a stationary residence for several
months, and I considered myself well rid of the
gentleman. But I little knew the resources of
Governor Dorr.
He had been in the habit of contributing
poems and sketches of a lurid nature to one of
the local newspapers, and now, finding the time
to hang heavily on his hands in the solitude of
his cell, — the window of which overlooked the
main street of the town, — he began a series of
letters to the editor of the journal in question.
These letters were dated from the Hôtel
d'Adams (a graceful tribute to the sheriff of the
county), and consisted of descriptions of what
he saw from his cell window, with sharp, shrewd,
and witty hits at the peculiarities of certain notable
persons of the town, together with some
attempts at fine writing not so successful. His
He had a neat, humorous touch which, with
training and under happier stars, might have
won him reputation.
How I enjoyed those letters! How impatiently
I awaited the semiweekly appearance of the
squalid journal containing them; with what
eager fingers I unfolded the damp sheet, until,
alas! one luckless morning there came a letter
devoted wholly to myself. The “Leaves from
the Diary of a Gentleman of Elegant Leisure”
no longer seemed witty to me. And in truth
this leaf was not intended to be witty. It was
in the Governor's best sentimental vein. He informed
me that he had “from afar” watched
over my budding career with the fondness of an
elder brother, and that his heart, otherwise humble
and unassuming, owned to a throb of honest
pride and exultation when he remembered that it
was he who had first guided my “nursling feet”
over the flowery fields of English poesy, and
bathed with me up to the chin in that “Pierian
flood” which I had since made all my own. And
so on through a column of solid nonpareil type.
Altogether, his panegyric placed me in a more
have done. His sentiment was a thousand times
more deadly than his satire.
Though my vacation was not at an end by
several weeks, I quietly packed my valise that
night, and fled from the friend of my youth.
I find that I am using the capital letter I rather
freely in this sketch,—a reprehensible habit into
which people who write autobiography are apt to
fall; but really my intention is to give as little
of myself and as much of my friend as possible.
In the two or three years that followed this
ignominious flight from my native town, I frequently
heard of Governor Dorr indirectly. He
had become famous now in his modest way. I
heard of him in New Orleans and in some of the
Western cities. Once, at least, he reappeared in
Rivermouth, where he got into some difficulty
with a number of noncombatant turkeys prepared
for Thanksgiving, the result of which was
he spent that day of general festivity at the
Hôtel d'Adams. But New York was, I believe,
his favorite field of operations, as well as mine.
I cannot explain why the man so often came
thought of him a great deal at intervals, and was
thinking of him very particularly one dismal
November afternoon in 185-, as I sat alone in
the editorial room of the Saturday Press, where
I had remained to write after the departure of
my confrères.
It was a melancholy small room, up two flights
of stairs, in the rear of a building used as a warehouse
by a paper firm doing business in the
basement. Though bounded on all sides by turbulent
streams of traffic, this room was as secluded
and remote as if it had stood in the middle
of the Desert of Sahara. It would have made
an admirable scenic background for a noiseless
midday murder in a melodrama. But it was an
excellent place in which to write, in spite of the
cobwebbed rafters overhead and the confirmed
symptoms of scrofula in the plastering.
I did not settle down to work easily that afternoon;
my fancy busied itself with everything
except the matter in hand: I fell to thinking of
old times and Rivermouth, and what comical
things boys are with their hero-worship and their
monkey-shines, and how I used to regard Governor
and Sir Walter Raleigh, and what a pitiable,
flimsy hero he was in reality,—a king of shreds
and patches. “Why were such men born?” I
said to myself; “Nature in her severe economy
creates nothing useless, unless it be the ruminative
moth or the New Jersey mosquito; the
human species alone is full of failures monstrous
and inexplicable.”
In the midst of this the door opened, and Governor
Dorr stood before me. I have had pleasanter
surprises.
There was a certain deprecating air about him
as he raised his hat in a feeble attempt at his
old-time manner, a tacit confession that he
could n't do it. With his closely cropped hair he
looked like a prize-fighter retired from business.
He was unshaven and pathetically shabby. His
features were out of drawing, and wore that
peculiar retributive pallor which gin and water in
unfair proportions are said to produce. The dye
had faded from his heavy mustache, leaving it of
a dark greenish tint not becoming to his style of
beauty. His threadbare coat was buttoned unevenly
across his chest close up to the throat,
His hat had a weed on it, which struck me as
being strange, as I did not remember that anybody
had been hanged recently. I afterwards
formed a theory touching that weed, based on the
supposition that the hat was somebody else's
property. Altogether the Governor looked as if
he had fallen upon evil days since our last meeting.
There was a hard, cold look in his eyes
which, in spite of his half-apologetic attitude, was
far from reassuring.
Given a voice in the matter, I would not
have chosen to have a private conference with
him that dull November afternoon in that lonely
room in the old barracks on Spruce Street.
The space occupied by the editorial tables
was shut off from the rest of the office by a
slight wooden rail extending across the apartment.
In the centre of this rail was a gate, which my
visitor, after a moment's hesitation, proceeded to
open.
As I noted down all the circumstances of the
interview while it was fresh in my mind, I am
able to reproduce the Governor's words and
manner pretty faithfully.
He closed the gate behind him with laborious
care, advanced a few steps, rested one hand
upon the back of a chair, and fixed a pair of
fishy eyes upon me. If he intended to fascinate
me, he failed; if he intended to make me feel
extremely nervous, his success was complete.
“Telemachus,” he said, at length, in a voice
that had lost its old music and may be succinctly
described as ropy,—“you know I used to call
you Telemachus in those happy days when I
was your `guide, philosopher, and friend,'—you
see before you a reformed man.”
I suppose I was not entirely successful in
concealing my inward conviction.
“So help me Bob!” exclaimed the Governor.
“I am going to reform, and get some decent
clothes,”—casting a look of unutterable scorn
on his coat-sleeve.
The idea of connecting a reformatory measure
with an increase of wardrobe struck me as neat,
and I smiled.
“I am going to be honest,” continued Governor
Dorr, not heeding my unseemly levity; “ `Honest
Iago.' I am going to turn over a new leaf. I
don't like the way things have been going. I
adapted to being an outcast from society. `We
know what we are, but we don't know what
we may be,' as the sublime Shakespeare remarks.
Now, I know what I am, and I know what I'm
going to be. I'm going to be another man.
But I must get out of New York first. The boys
would n't let me reform. `The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at
me!' I know too many people here and too many
people know me. I am going to New Orleans.
My old friend Kendall of the Picayune knows
my literary qualifications, and would give me
an engagement on his paper at sight; but I'm
not proud, and if worst came to worst I could
get advertisements or solicit subscribers, and
work my way up. In the bright lexicon of a
man who means what he says, `there's no such
word as fail.' He does n't know how to spell
it.”
The Governor paused and looked at me for
a reply; but as I had nothing to say, I said it.
“I've been down to Rivermouth,” he resumed,
a trifle less spiritedly, “to see what my old chums
would do towards paying my way to New Orleans.
Colonel B—; but I am out just twenty
dollars, travelling expenses. Advice, however
excellent, does n't pay a fellow's passage to New
Orleans in the present disordered state of society.
I have collected some money, but not enough by a
few dollars; and presuming on the memory of
those days—those Arcadian days — when we
wandered hand in hand through the green
pastures of American poesy, I have come to
you for a temporary loan, — however small,”
he added hastily, “to help me in becoming an
honest citizen and a useful member of society.”
I listened attentively to the Governor's statement,
and believed not a syllable of it, not so
much as a hyphen. It had a fatally familiar
jingle; I had helped to reform people before.
Nevertheless, the man's misery was genuine, and
I determined not to throw him over altogether.
But I did not wish him to consider me the victim
of his cleverness; so I frankly told him that
I did not believe a word about his reforming,
and that if I gave him a little pecuniary assistance,
it was solely because I used to think kindly
of him when I was a boy.
The Governor was so affected by this that he
searched in several pockets for a handkerchief,
but not finding one, he wiped away what I should
call a very dry tear with the cuff of his sleeve.
“ `Had I but served my God,' ” he remarked,
“ `with half the zeal' I have fooled away my
chances, `he would not have left me in mine age'
to solicit financial succor in this humiliating
fashion.”
It was the mendaciousness of Jeremy Diddler
toned down by the remorse of Cardinal Wolsey.
“I am well aware,” I said coldly, “that the
few dollars I intend to give you will be staked at
the nearest faro-table or squandered over the bar
of some drinking-shop. I want you to understand
distinctly that you are not imposing on me.”
Now the journal of which I was part proprietor
had a weekly circulation of less than forty thousand
copies, and at the end of the week, when we
had paid a sordid printer and an unimaginative
paper-maker, we were in a condition that entitled
us to rank as objects of charity rather than as
benefactors of the poor. A five-dollar bill was
all my available assets that November afternoon,
and out of this I purposed to reserve two dollars
plainly to the Governor, suggesting that I could
get the note changed at the Tribune office.
He picked up the bill which I had spread out
on the table between us, remarking that he
thought he could change it. Whereupon he produced
a portly pocket-book from the breast of his
coat, and from the pocket-book so fat a roll of
bank-notes that I glowed with indignation to
think he had the coolness to appropriate three
fifths of my slender earnings.
“New Orleans, you know,” he remarked, explanatorily.
The Governor was quite another man now,
running dexterously over the bills with a moist
forefinger in the gayest of spirits. He handed
me my share of the five-dollar bill with the manner
of a benevolent prince dispensing his bounties,
accorded me the privilege of grasping his
manly hand, raised his hat with a good deal of
his old quasi aristocratic flourish, and was gone.
There is this heavenly quality in a deed of
even misplaced charity,—it makes the heart of
the doer sit lightly in his bosom. I treated myself
handsomely that afternoon at dinner, regarding
to dine well, and was worthy of at least half a
pint of table-claret. I tested the delicacies of
Mataran's cuisine as far as my purse would
allow; but when I stepped to the desk to pay
the reckoning, those two one-dollar bills rather
awkwardly turned out to be counterfeits!
Well, I suppose I deserved it.
The frequency with which Governor Dorr's
name figured in the local police reports during
the ensuing twelve months leads me to infer that
he did not depart for New Orleans as soon as he
expected.
Time rolled on, and the Saturday Press, being
loved by the gods, died early, and one morning
in 1861 I found myself at liberty to undertake a
long-deferred pilgrimage to Rivermouth.
On arriving at my destination, cramped with a
night's ride in the cars, I resolved to get the
kinks out of me by walking from the station.
Turning into one of the less-frequented streets in
order not to meet too many of my townsfolk, I
came abruptly upon a hearse jogging along very
pleasantly and followed at a little distance by a
into a single hack, perhaps it is best that one
should be buried expeditiously.
A malign urchin stood on the corner whistling
shrilly through his fingers, which he removed
from his lips with an injured air long enough to
answer my question. “Who's dead? Why,
Guvner Dorr's dead. That's 'im,” curving a
calliopean thumb in the direction of the hearse.
The pity of it! The forlornness of the thing
touched me, and a feeling of gratitude went out
from my bosom towards the two or three hacks
which now made their appearance around the
corner and joined the funeral train.
Broken down in his prime with careless living,
Governor Dorr a few months previously had
straggled back to the old place to die; and thus
had chance—which sometimes displays a keen
appreciation of dramatic effect—once more, and
for the last time, brought me in contact with the
friend of my youth. Obeying the impulse, I
turned and followed the procession until it came
to the head of that long, unbuilt street which,
stretching in a curve from the yawning gate of
the cemetery into the heart of the town, always
life from Rivermouth. Here I halted and watched
the black carriages as they crawled down the
road, growing smaller and smaller, until they
appeared to resolve themselves into one tiny
coach, which, lessening in the distance, finally
vanished through a gateway that seemed about
a foot high.
| Marjorie Daw, and other people | |