Eben Holden, a tale of the north country
Eben Holden a Tale of the North Country by Irving Bacheller PREFACE Early in the last century the hardy wood-choppers began to come west, out of Vermont. They founded their homes in the Adirondack wildernesses and cleared their rough acres with the axe and the charcoal pit. After years of toil in a rigorous climate they left their sons little besides a stumpy farm and a coon-skin overcoat. Far from the centres of life their amusements, their humours, their religion, their folk lore, their views of things had in them the flavour of the timber lands, the simplicity of childhood. Every son was nurtured in the love of honour and of industry, and the hope of sometime being president. It is to be feared this latter thing and the love of right living, for its own sake, were more in their thoughts than the immortal crown that had been the
we enter peace. We shall be walled in, from all darkness of whatsoever
meaning; our better selves will be the sole guests of those luminous
hours. And surely no greater good-fortune can befall any household
than to escape an ignoble evening. To attain a noble one is like lying
calmly down to sleep on a mountain-top towards which our feet have
struggled upward amid enemies all day long.
Although we have now been two months married, I have not yet captured
the old uncapturable loveliness of nature which has always led me and
still leads me on in the person of Georgiana, I know but too well now
that I never shall. The charm in her which I pursue, yet never
overtake, is part and parcel of that ungraspable beauty of the world
which forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit--of that
elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows from afar into all
terrestrial things, filling them as color fills the rose. Even while I
live with Georgiana in the closest of human relationships, she retains
for me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of a dream that does
not end and has no waking.
This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of my desire to enfold
her entire self into mine. We have been a revelation to each other,
but the revelation is not complete; there are curtains behind curtains,
which one by one we seek to lift as we penetrate more deeply into the
discoveries of our union. Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting
beside me, put her arm around my neck and look long into my eyes, full
of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at
Eben Holden a Tale of the North Country by Irving Bacheller PREFACE Early in the last century the hardy wood-choppers began to come west, out of Vermont. They founded their homes in the Adirondack wildernesses and cleared their rough acres with the axe and the charcoal pit. After years of toil in a rigorous climate they left their sons little besides a stumpy farm and a coon-skin overcoat. Far from the centres of life their amusements, their humours, their religion, their folk lore, their views of things had in them the flavour of the timber lands, the simplicity of childhood. Every son was nurtured in the love of honour and of industry, and the hope of sometime being president. It is to be feared this latter thing and the love of right living, for its own sake, were more in their thoughts than the immortal crown that had been the