"Though fame is smoke,
Its fumes are frankincense to human thought."
And how poor a potsherd the human temple is, when savored with no incense of endeavor! Better the bitter breath of failure than the dank vapor of stagnating faculties. The haloes of defeated effort are sweeter than the lotus of inaction.
Jamestown's religion? If the God of whom preachers prate so familiarly really exists, with what awful scorn must He behold such worship! As monkeys, mowing and moping, might mock a pageant, so did these people simulate religion. Old Eliza—Mrs. Wilson's mad cousin—worshipped better when she dabbled her hands in the wayside horse-trough, rejoicing in its coolness; when she smoothed with tender fingers the torn fur of a half-shot rabbit; when she replaced the unfledged birds in the nest from which they had fallen—nay, even when she sped across the sunlit fields, her sodden face irradiate with an inarticulate feeling of the warmth and freedom of the air.
Nature spread about and before these people all her beauties, unfolded to their gaze all the enchantment of her seasons, but in vain; their eyes were darkened, their hearts hardened; the magical mystery of Spring left them ineloquent; Summer came and lingered, and went reluctantly; Autumn browned, and Winter fulfilled its bitterness, and they were unmoved save by the effect upon the crops.
The site of Jamestown and the country surrounding it was historic ground. Here men had fought and bled and died. The fathers and mothers of the present generation told how, when children, they had been hurried off to the woods, to hide there whilst the soldiers ransacked the deserted houses, eating and appropriating all they fancied, and spitefully spilling milk, wantonly cutting holes in the cheeses, and throwing the frying-pans and flatirons down the wells for mischief. These leisurely warriors were not, however, the ones whose blood had darkened the soil in so many adjacent spots. The Jamestown people had no personal reminiscences or knowledge of these sterner fighters, but evidences of their existence and warfare were plentiful.
Year by year, the neighboring farmers, in tilling their land, found bullets, broken bayonets, portions of old-fashioned guns, military buttons, and Indian arrow heads of flint. These latter relics were often defaced, pointless, and chipped, but sometimes they had preserved in perfection their venomous pointed form, sharp to sting to the death when hurled through the air from a hostile bow. Year after year, these tokens of conflict were found in the fresh furrows; the supply seemed inexhaustible. It was as though the earth was determined to cast forth from her bosom those deadly fragments whose mission had been to maim and slay her children. Yet Mother Earth is but a cruel stepdame to some of us, less kindly than the bullet, more cruel than the flint arrowhead.
The people in Jamestown thought little enough of these relics, though in springtime they were to be found in the pockets of every ploughman; but little Bing White had a collection of some hundreds of them. They had a strange fascination for the little elfish boy. People said he had just escaped being an idiot: that was far from the truth.
A keen and acute intelligence shone from his eyes, but perverted by morbid and horrible cravings. He was of a Newtonian and speculative turn of mind also, and was perpetually pondering upon problems of weighty import, suggested to him by the simplest manifestations of every-day life: Why dogs barked at bakers? Why blacksmith-shops were never new? Why buttered bread falls butter-side down? were questions that he strove with. The wonder of the arrowheads appearing year after year in the furrows was to him a source of never-ceasing thought. How was it they came to the surface? What strange grinding went on below the grain and the grass, to produce that flinty grist each springtime? He brooded much over the matter, turning his many specimens over and over with lingering, affectionate touches.
Bing kept his treasures in the space between the lath and plaster of the second story and the roof of his father's house. There was no room for garrets there—but there was a space in which Bing's diminutive figure could stand erect. The ingress to this long, low, dark chamber was through a tiny trap-door, in the ceiling of one of the back rooms. Through this, he would wriggle swiftly, replace the trap-door (in reality only a broad board), speed like a cat from joist to joist across the whole length of the house to where, through the round panes of the little gable window, the light fell full upon his collection, laid out in rows upon boards placed across the joists.
Each arrowhead of the lot had an individuality for this boy; every misshapen fragment a story. Indeed he dwelt longer over the pointless and defaced specimens than over the others, for more fascinating than any perfection of curve or point was the speculation as to where the fragments of the broken ones rested. Could it be possible that the long tapering point of the arrowhead he held in his hand had pierced some red-clad bosom, some dusky naked breast brought low, some helmeted head, some feather-decked crown, and won a costly coffin for itself to be buried in? Those notches on the side of the heavy white flint one, were they the scars of a conflict between the arrow and armor?