Sevenoaks: A Story of Today

by J. G. Holland

"Yates! Yates!" arose on all sides.

Yates was at home in any performance of this kind, and, mounting a low stump, said:

"Boys, Jim wants me to thank you for the great service you've rendered him. You have come a long distance to do a neighborly deed, and that deed has been generously completed. Here, in these forest shades, you have reared a monument to human civilization. In these old woods you have built a temple to the American household gods. The savage beasts of the wilderness will fly from it, and the birds will gather around it. The winter will be the warmer for the fire that will burn within it, and the spring will come earlier in prospect of a better welcome. The river that washes its feet will be more musical in its flow, because finer ears will be listening. The denizens of the great city will come here, year after year, to renew their wasted strength, and they will carry back with them the sweetest memories of these pure solitudes.

"To build a human home, where woman lives and little children open their eyes upon life, and grow up and marry and die—a home full of love and toil, of pleasure and hope and hospitality, is to do the finest thing that a man can do. I congratulate you on what you have done for Jim, and what so nobly you have done for yourselves. Your whole life will be sweeter for this service, and when you think of a lovely woman presiding over this house, and of all the comfort it will be to the gentle folk that will fill it full, you will be glad that you have had a hand in it."

Yates made his bow and stepped down. His auditors all stood for a moment, under an impression that they were in church and had heard a sermon. Their work had been so idealized for them—it had been endowed with so much meaning—it seemed so different from an ordinary "raising"—that they lost, momentarily, the consciousness of their own roughness and the homeliness of their surroundings.

"Be gorry!" exclaimed Mike, who was the first to break the silence, "I'd 'a' gi'en a dollar if me owld woman could 'a' heard that. Divil a bit does she know what I've done for her. I didn't know mesilf what a purty thing it was whin I built me house. It's betther nor goin' to the church, bedad."

Three cheers were then given to Yates and three to Jim, and, the spell once dissolved, they went noisily back to the cabin and their supper.

That evening Jim was very silent. When they were about lying down for the night, he took his blankets, reached into the chest, and withdrew something that he found there and immediately hid from sight, and said that he was going to sleep in his house. The moon was rising from behind the trees when he emerged from his cabin. He looked up at the tall skeleton of his future home, then approached it, and swinging himself from beam to beam, did not pause until he had reached the cupola. Boards had been placed across it for the convenience of the framers, and on these Jim threw his blankets. Under the little package that was to serve as his pillow he laid his Bible, and then, with his eyes upon the stars, his heart tender with the thoughts of the woman for whom he was rearing a home, and his mind oppressed with the greatness of his undertaking, he lay a long time in a waking dream. "If so be He cares," said Jim to himself—"if so be He cares for a little buildin' as don't make no show 'longside o' His doin's up thar an' down here, I hope He sees that I've got this Bible under my head, an' knows what I mean by it. I hope the thing'll strike 'im favorable, an' that He knows, if He cares, that I'm obleeged to 'im."

At last, slumber came to Jim—the slumber of the toiler, and early the next morning he was busy in feeding his helpers, who had a long day's walk before them. When, at last, they were all ferried over the river, and had started on their homeward way, Jim ascended to the cupola again, and waved his bandanna in farewell.

Two days afterward, Sam Yates left his host, and rowed himself down to the landing in the same canoe by which he had reached Number Nine. He found his conveyance waiting, according to arrangement, and before night was housed among his friends at Sevenoaks.