The echoes of the Civil War, in the injustice of Easton’s advancement in military rank over the head of his friend, come strangely to us who have just lived through another terrible conflict which has left this world weary and discouraged. In speaking of the two wars, my father said that a great difference lay in the spirit that came after them, for when the Civil War was done people in the North felt that all the troubles of the world were over, and that in the future everything was going to be right. Easton’s ideas about hunting and fishing, and his desire to help the helpless, are a reflection, I think, of the writer’s own feelings; and in the scene where Easton stops the rearing horse one wonders whether there survive faint traces of those early literary traditions that made my father, as he once said, feel when he began writing novels that he must have his hero do something to win the heroine, like rescuing her from a wild bull, until he observed that in real life nothing of the sort was necessary. His minute study of Easton’s emotions as a lover makes one feel the sympathetic interest of a writer who was young enough to go fully into them, and form a temptation to quote from a letter written in his later middle age, in which he says, “I do not think I can ever write of mating and marriage again.”
Mrs. Gilbert’s desire in her first talk with Mrs. Farrell of “a good stupid wooing—at least a year of it” for her, shows an early distrust of Romance as a foundation for life, but in their second talk together Mrs. Farrell’s answer, “Nothing that’s wrong can be one’s own affair, I suppose: it belongs to the whole world,” is of his latest, as well as his earliest philosophy.
Mildred Howells.
MRS. FARRELL
Chapter I
WEST PEKIN is one of those country places which have yielded to changing conditions and have ceased to be the simple farming towns of a past generation. The people are still farmers, but most of them are no longer farmers only. In the summer they give up the habitable rooms of their old square wooden houses to boarders from the cities, and lurk about in the nooks and crannies of their L’s and lean-to’s; and, whatever their guests may have to complain of, have hardly the best of the bargains they drive with them. But in this way they eke out the living grudged them by their neglected acres, and keep their houses in a repair that contrasts with the decay of their farming. Each place has its grove of maples, fantastically gnarled and misshapen from the wounds of many sugar seasons; and an apple orchard, commonly almost past bearing with age, stretches its knotted boughs over a slope near the house. Every year the men-folk plow up an area of garden ground, and plant it with those vegetables which, to the boarders still feeding in mid-July on last year’s potatoes and tough, new-butchered beef, seem so reluctant in ripening; but a furrow is hardly turned elsewhere on the farm. It yields a crop of hay about the end of June, in which the boarders’ children tumble, and a favorable season may coax from it a few tons of rowen grass. The old stone walls straggle and fall down even along the roadside; in the privacy of the wood lots and berry pastures they abandon themselves to reckless dilapidation.