The Choir Invisible

He had learned a great deal about her past, and held it mirrored in his

memory. The general picture of it rose before his eyes now, as he leaned on

the fence this pleasant afternoon in May and watched her restoring to its

place, with delicate strokes of her finger-tips, the lock of her soft,

shining hair.How could any one so fine have thriven amid conditions so

exhausting?

Those hard toiling fingers, now grasping the heavy hoe, once

used to tinkle over the spinet; the small, sensitive feet, now covered with

coarse shoe-packs tied with leather thongs, once shone in rainbow hues of

satin slippers and silken hose. A sunbonnet for the tiara of osprey plumes;

a dress spun and woven by her own hand out of her own flax, instead of the

stiff brocade; log hut for manor-house; one negro boy instead of troops of

servants: to have possessed all that, to have been brought down to all this,

and not to have been ruined by it, never to have lost distinction or been

coarsened by coarseness never to have parted with grace of manner or grace

of spirit, or been bent or broken or overclouded in character and

ideals,--it was all this that made her in his eyes a great woman, a great

lady.

He held her in such reverence that, as he caught the serious look in her

eyes at his impulsive question, he was sorry he had asked it: the last thing

he could ever have thought of doing would have been to intrude upon the

privacy of her reflections.

"What was I thinking of?"

There was a short silence and then she turned to him eagerly, brightly, with

an entire change of voice and expression-"But the news from town--you haven't told me the news."

"Oh, there is any amount of news!" he cried, glad of a chance to retreat

from his intrusion. And he began lightly, recklessly: "A bookbinder has opened a shop on Cross Street--a capital hand at the

business, by the name of Leischman--and he will bind books at the regular

market prices in exchange for linen rags, maple sugar, and goose-quills. I

advise you to keep an eye on your geese, if the major once takes a notion to

have his old Shakespeare and his other volumes, that had their bindings

knocked off in crossing the Alleghanies, elegantly rebound. You can tell him

also that after a squirrel-hunt in Bourbon County the farmers counted

scalps, and they numbered five thousand five hundred and eighty-nine; so

that he is not the only one who has trouble with his corn. And then you can

tell him that on the common the other day Nelson Tapp and Willis Tandy had a

fearful fight over a land-suit. Now it was Tandy and Tapp; now it was Tapp

and Tandy; but they went off at last and drowned themselves and the memory

of the suit in a bowl of sagamity.""And there is no news for me, I suppose?"