Always with bright
"bits" of life between the long, grand silences--a group of men faring
on foot across the pine level; a rosy, bareheaded girl--the only girl
in the place--searching for calves in the dingle, who gave us flowers
and told us the road with the sweet, lingering cadence of the South in
her velvet voice; two men riding by turns the mule that bore their
sacks of corn to mill; two boys carrying a great cross-cut saw along a
sloping lakeside, a noble Newfoundland dog frisking beside them; the
fleet bay horse and erect military figure of our host at Crystal Lake
guiding us among the intricacies of the Lake Colony. Always with sunny
memories of happy hours--gypsy dinners beside golden-watered "branch"
or sapphire lake; the cheery half hour in the log house on the hill
above the little grist-mill, with the bright young Philadelphians who
have here cast in their lot; the abundant feast in the farm-house under
the orange trees, and the "old-time" stories of the after-dinner hour;
the pleasant days at Crystal Lake, where our first day's drenching
resulted so happily in a slight illness that detained us in that lovely
spot, and showed us, in the new colony lately settled on this and the
adjacent lakes, how refinement and cultivation, lending elegance to
rude toil and harsh privation, may realize even Utopian dreams.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28