A LEAF IN THE LIFE OF LEDYARD LINCOLN.
A SKETCH.
BY MARY SPENCER PEASE.
It was in the joyous leaf-giving, life-giving month of June, of 18—, after an absence of six years, that I found myself once more among my own dearly loved native hills.
An intense worshiper of Nature, I had gratified to the utmost my passion and curiosity by exploring all the accessible regions of the old world. I had studied every scene that was in any way famous, or infamous I might say with regard to some, if the necessity of clambering down or up unclimbable precipices, or wading through interminable swamps, could render them so.
With all the fatigue and hardships I had undergone my reward was great, and had more than repaid me for the perilous dangers I had courted and conquered. I had gazed, and dreamed, and raved by turns. I had been melted into tears of tenderness by the perfect harmony and loveliness of some scenes, and had been frozen into awe by the magnificent grandeur and terrible sublimity of others. And, after those six years of travel in foreign lands, I had returned, my brain one endless panorama of hills, valleys and cloud-capped mountains, earth, skies, wood and water. Not one of those gorgeous scenes, however, had moved me as I was moved when once again I beheld my boyhood's home—the stately mansion of my fathers. Half hidden, it rose majestically amid the noble elms that surrounded it; there lay the velvet-green sloping lawn in front—down which, as a boy, I had rolled in the summer and sledded in the winter—there the wild, night-dark ravine in the rear—fit haunt for elves and gnomes—that terminated amid jagged rocks and tangled trees, in a rushing, roaring brook of no mean dimensions, almost as large as many of the so-called rivers of the mother country. Just at this point, at the turn of the old time-worn stage-road, where the venerable, picturesque old homestead of my sires burst thus suddenly into view, an opening in the trees, whether by accident or design, revealed one of the very merriest, maddest of musical water-falls, that went foaming and tumbling its snow-white, sparkling waters over a bed of huge rocks, and then, by a sudden wilful bend, that same loud-uttering brook was lost to view.