CHAPTER XIII.
"Pleasure is oft a visitant, but pain
Clings cruelly to us—"
"Whoso encamps
To take a fancied city of delight—
Oh, what a wretch is he!"
Church was in. That meant that all the respected and self-respecting people of Jamestown had come forth, morally and physically clothed in their best, and bestowed themselves as comfortably as circumstances permitted in the wooden pews of Jamestown's only church.
From the preacher's desk, the congregation looked like a human theme with variations, the original motif being a stolid, expressionless mask of flesh, unanimated, immobile, with rudely carven features, and no decided tints. Upon this primitive scale nature had rung every change her shackled hands could compass; but between the highest note, struck perhaps in Ossie Annie Abbie Maria White, whose face was inoffensive, and the lowest personified by old Ann Lemon, whose countenance was a mere mass of flesh, there was but a short thought. The men were sandy-haired, meagre, undersized; or heavy, florid, dark, with lack-lustre eyes and coarse lips.
It was a delightful autumnal day—a day more provocative of tears than laughter, more suggestive of retrospect than anticipation; a day to dream old dreams, feel old heartaches, read old books, tell old tales, hear bygone singing, recall lost voices; a pure, sweet day—the air rarefied by the first touch of frost; a day, in short, to remind one of the sweet, the sad, the strange in life; but withal, a day to perfect the tint on the apples, mellow the juices of the late grapes, and promising a "fine spell of good weather for the fall ploughing," as each male member of the congregation had said to each other male member that morning.
Mother Earth got but little rest at the hands of these eager seekers. Hardly had her bosom been shorn of its crop of a yellow grain before the keen ploughshares were again plunged into the soil and it was lacerated afresh, and the man looked best content that morning behind whose plough there lay the greatest number of brown furrows, for the fall ploughing was of great furtherance when the rush of the spring came on; so the horses, loosed from the lumbering reaping machine, were yoked to the plough, that most graceful of all farmer's implements, and strained at their collars as it turned the furrow, sending its earthy fragrance to mingle with the fruity savor from the vineyards.
Light mists, prophetic of the later haze, floated in shreds and wisps across the fields, and gathered and lingered about the trunks of the trees in the woodland.
The birds were silent, and daily V-shaped flights of ducks and wild geese passed over the village, winging their way to the south.
Service went on in the church, to the staid and sedate measure of well-understood and long-established usage.