The Choir Invisible

Deeper insight would have been needed to discover how true and earnest a

soul he was; how high a value he set on what the future had in store for him

and on what his life would be worth to himself and to others; and how,

liking rather to help himself than to be helped, he liked less to be trifled

with and least of all to be seriously thwarted.

He was thinking, as his eyes rested on the watch, that if this were one of

his ordinary days he would pursue his ordinary duties; he would go up street

to the office of Marshall and for the next hour read as many pages of law as

possible; then get his supper at his favourite tavern--the Sign of the

Spinning, Wheel--near the two locust trees; then walk out into the country

for an hour or more; then back to his room and more law until midnight by

the light of his tallow dip.

But this was not an ordinary day--being one that he had long waited for and

was destined never to forget. At dusk the evening before, the post-rider, so

tired that he had scarce strength of wind to blow his horn, had ridden into

town bringing the mail from Philadelphia; and in this mail there was great

news for him. It had kept him awake nearly all of the night before; it had

been uppermost in his mind the entire day in school. At the thought of it

now he thrust his watch into his pocket, pulled his hat resolutely over his

brow, and started toward Main Street, meaning to turn thence toward Cross

Street, now known as Broadway. On the outskirts of the town in that

direction lay the wilderness, undulating away for hundreds of miles like a

vast green robe with scarce a rift of human making.

He failed to urge his way through the throng as speedily as he may have

expected, being withheld at moments by passing acquaintances, and at others

pausing of his own choice to watch some spectacle of the street.

The feeling lay fresh upon him this afternoon that not many years back the

spot over which the town was spread had been but a hidden glade in the heart

of the beautiful, awful wilderness, with a bountiful spring bubbling up out

of the turf, and a stream winding away through the green, valley-bottom to

the bright, shady Elkhorn: a glade that for ages had been thronged by

stately-headed elk and heavy-headed bison, and therefore sought also by

unreckoned generations of soft-footed, hard eyed red hunters. Then had come

the beginning of the end when one summer day, toward sunset, a few tired,

rugged backwoodsmen of the Anglo-Saxon race, wandering fearless and far into

the wilderness from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge and the

Alleghanies, had made their camp by the margin of the spring; and always

afterwards, whether by day or by night, they had dreamed of this as the land

they must conquer for their homes. Now they had conquered it already; and

now this was the town that had been built there, with its wide streets under

big trees of the primeval woods; with a long stretch of turf on one side of

the stream for a town common; with inns and taverns in the style of those of

country England or of Virginia in the reign of George the Third; with shops

displaying the costliest merchandise of Philadelphia; with rude dwellings of

logs now giving way to others of frame and of brick; and, stretching away

from the town toward the encompassing wilderness, orderly gardens and

orchards now pink with the blossom of the peach, and fields of young maize

and wheat and flax and hemp.