A Country Idyl, and Other Stories

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

The lips that before quivered with fear now opened with hunger. He laid her down, went out to a log box adjoining the cave, coaxed his goat to a fresh supply of milk, and the babe drank from his hand, nestled her head against his breast, and slept. She was not tucked away in a corner, but rested next his heart through that long night.

Giles Mortimer was written fatherless and motherless in boyhood. A pleasant home was sold, a small sum of money laid away, and a youth just needing a father’s care and mother’s affection was thrust upon the charities of the world. He soon found employment in a factory, and there, day by day, when others walked and laughed upon the highway, he worked and looked beyond to a successful future, saved his money carefully, dressed simply, and in a few years had nearly enough to defray the expenses of three years’ study. College days followed. Those four years brought head and hand work to Mortimer. By forethought and exertion he gained the privilege of sweeping the college chapel, took the agency of books and pictures in vacation, and in numerous other ways partially paid for his education. His companions loved him for his geniality, and admired him for his broad grasp of mind and manly soul.

Life looked full of promise. Towards what should it tend? The professions were full. Among those who held out the gospel of life to the famishing, there were too many whom Christ had never called with His especial calling. There were lawyers at every corner quarrelling for a petty office, or looking over dusty books while sighing for the bright skies. There were teachers who needed to be taught. Chemistry, geology, and philosophy had so many votaries that only one in a century rose to eminence, and the remainder, in unsatisfying mediocrity, plodded on with little happiness to themselves and still less to others.

He turned to business. Here was an opening to gain honorable power by effort of will, by energy of hand, and by vigor of mind. There was beauty to him in the smoke that curled now lazily, now swiftly, from the chimneys of a hundred manufactories. If he could not be a merchant prince to give with blessed munificence one hundred thousand dollars for homes for the poor, he might have a home for some one who loved him, and many mites to scatter in the alleys of the great cities.

With Giles Mortimer’s man-physique and mind there was a woman’s sensitiveness, and a will that could not always bear the shock of opposition. A mountain is not all quartz, studded with jasper and amethyst, nor is it all trap, brown and coarse. All lives are elements from God’s great storehouse, and earth a crucible which melts and moulds. He needed what most men need, the stimulus of love to give position or wealth or fame; the encouragement of a voice that has inspiration in it; the touch of a hand that carries hope in its pressure; the look of an eye that shines like a lone star on a dark night. He had seen some who might have walked beside him, but for his fear of taking them from a hall to a hovel.

He went to a strange city. Counting-rooms were filled, and clerkships engaged for months in advance. He knew no trade, or he might have worked and given honor to that. At last he obtained a place in a hardware establishment, and for two years, on a small salary, the student did uncongenial work to live; then the firm failed, and he was again adrift. He would have loved manufacturing; he would have been proud to have aided America with the labor of his brain and hands combined; but the old question, the one that has settled upon and crushed so many young men, came back—“What business can be carried on without money?”

Many men have struggled through poverty up to affluence. Many more have struggled in it down to a grave. There are not wanting those who tell us that every man may succeed, if he will; and yet ninety of every hundred who enter the whirlpool of trade are lost.

Like many others, when his heart was saddest he sang—sang like Carligny, who was dying when he made Paris intoxicated with his wit. No publisher was obtained for his poems; he had not found that spring that opens all portals—a name. Every house was already filled with manuscripts, every journal with hastily-written fragments. A living earned by writing was one that too often gave straw for a bed, and bread and water for food. He was growing tired of the battle. There were no victories—all defeats. Perhaps he lacked proper training of self; perhaps the now weakened physical had dimmed the mental; perhaps circumstances without were as strong as the powers within. Men were no longer brothers to him. He sighed for the freedom of solitude, stepped one evening on a freight train going West, and, careless for the future, went forward to an unknown fate. He crossed foaming Lake Erie; flat, woody Michigan and its lake; passed through Milwaukee with its forests and few inhabitants, where now rises one of the loveliest cities of the West, out into the uncivilized country. The land was rolling, with here and there a prairie shut in by a border of oak or cotton-wood trees. The lakes—long Pewaukee; graceful Pine; clear Kotchee, that makes the highway an arch and circles under it; and Neponset, with green, scalloped bank and a tree in each scallop reflected by the waters—all these were like oases to him.

He reached the Indian village, Oconomowoc, and stood at the foot of the peninsula that almost touches the island. On one side was a lake bordered with hawthorn, on whose bank a neat church now stands; on the other, five lakes, some small, one seventeen miles in length, surrounding islands covered with spruce and hemlock and oak. Hills, with their outcropping quarries of limestone, stood out against the blue sky. Back of this landscape, one of the most beautiful of the West, he found a cave worn into the mountain—a gloomy place, but free from dampness, and comfortable for one who had no care for humanity.