When I next knew life, it was spring; and I saw the lilac buds leafing by my window in the garden. I had been saved by the others—some of them had followed me up the river—unconscious, they told me, the dagger still clinched in my hand.
Althea I have never seen again. First I heard that she had married him; but then, after some years, came a rumor that she had not married him. Her father lost his fortune in a vain search for her, and died. After many years, she returned, alone. She lives, her beauty faded, in the old place.
AN ALABAMA COURTSHIP
ITS SIMPLICITIES AND ITS COMPLEXITIES
1.
I must first tell you how I came to be ever a commercial traveller. My father was a Higginbotham—one of the Higginbothams of Salem—but my mother, Marie Lawrence, was a far-off cousin of the wife of old Thomas Lawrence, the great tobacconist of New York. Horatio Higginbotham was both an author and an artist, but he neither wrote nor painted down to the popular taste; and as he was also a gentleman, and had lived like one, he left very little money. Not that he took it with him when he died, but he had spent it on the way. It costs considerable to get through this world, if you travel first-class and pay as you go. And, at least, my father left no debts.
He left my dear mother, however, and his assets were represented by me, an expensive Junior at Newbridge. And as none of the family counting-rooms and cotton-mills seemed to open the door for me—so degenerate a scion of a money-making race as to have already an artist behind him—I was glad to enter the wide portal of Cousin Lawrence’s tobacco manufactory.
Here, as in most successful trades, you were, all but the very heir-presumptive, put through a regular mill. First, a year or two in the factory, just to get used to the sneezing; and then you took to the road; and after a few years of this had thoroughly taught you the retail trade, you were promoted to be a gentleman and hob-nob with the planters in Cuba, and ride over their landed estates.
I got through the factory well enough; but the road, as you may fancy, was a trial in prospect. When my time came (being then, as you will see, something of a snob) I was careful to choose the wildest circuit, most remote from Boston and from Boston ways. The extreme West—Denver, Kansas City, Omaha—was out of the question; even the South—New Orleans, Charleston, Florida particularly—was unsafe. Indiana was barbarous enough, but went with Ohio and Michigan; and I finally chose what was called the Tennessee Circuit, which included all the country west of the Alleghanies, from the Ohio River to the Gulf States. Louisville belonged to my Cincinnati colleague, but the rest of Kentucky and Tennessee, from the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains to the hills of Alabama and the plains of Memphis, were mine.
And by no means uninteresting I found it. I travelled, you must know, in snuff; and the Southern mountains, with the headwaters of the Western rivers, Cumberland, Alabama, Tennessee, are the country of the snuff-taker in America.
The civilization, the picturesqueness of our country lies always between the mountains and the seaboard. Trace the Appalachian summits from their first uprearing at Tracadiegash or Gaspé, to that last laurel-hill near Tupelo in Mississippi—on the left of you lies history, character, local identity; on the right that great common place, that vast central prairie, lying stolidly spread out between the Rockies and the Blue Ridge, producing food. Heaven keep us above that central plain, one would say, and from the men and moods and motives that it breeds—but that out of it, in the very unidentified middle of it, the Lord upreared a Lincoln.