ADDENDUM.
“Histories leave oppressive legacies behind them. They may furnish
subjects for art and literature and poetry, but, as in family
inheritance, they burden posterity with considerable rubbish. Society
does not quickly free itself from superstition, nor from its habits of
thinking or of doing things. Even when they become anachronisms we are
loathe to part from them, because, to our own detriment, we are fond of
them. America has started fresh, and runs on the road of opportunity,
while other nations must hobble and limp as best they can, with the
clogs of old usage and prejudice hanging on their feet.”
It was the voice of our friend Leacraft, and he was standing on a broad
piazza built at the rear of a spacious villa on the topmost slopes
of Staten Island, in the harbor of New York city, looking at the
motionless ocean far beyond the fringe of land immediately before him,
flushed by the setting sun. That luminary with glorious opulence had
painted the sky a seething carmine in the west, and imparted its most
delicate reminders of the morn to the eastern arches of the heavens,
that hung above the sea. The picture was superbly satisfying. There
was enough detail in the landscape, enough isolation of house and wood
and field, of moor and strand, and not too much. The oncoming twilight
softly blended these nearer things, yet left them palpable. But the day
still flung its garlands of illumination over the broad skies; and the
sensitive surfaces of the water with lavish sympathy repeated on its
face the smiles of the blending zenith. And on either side of Leacraft
stood Miss Tobit and Mr. Thomsen, and the month was June, and the year,
narrated.
Before we satisfy our curiosity more closely as to their relation, or
note those changes which five years, however kindly inclined, must
leave behind them, let us follow this conversation which of itself
1915, five years after all the happenings previously may unroll some
curtains of the past.
“Well,” it was Thomsen who was now speaking, “then I suppose you are
not willing to quarrel with the material revolution we have been
through, because all that has come between the present and the past,
like the sundering of Damocles’ sword, has saved us from the necessity
of denuding ourselves of the old things, turning us loose in a fresh
field, where we may play high jinks with all we once venerated, and
where we may end by despising ourselves, for the very liberties you
seem anxious for us to indulge in.”
Leacraft motioned to the chairs, and the three sat down, in the
same order as they stood. The place obviously was Leacraft’s, or he
exercised some sort of control over it. And it was Miss Tobit’s voice
which next took up the thread of talk--it was noticeable that Leacraft
turned eagerly and looked at her, though his earnest face betrayed no
symptoms of possession, in truth, a contemplative sadness for a moment
rested on his features, vanishing even with its dawn.
“Why give up old things? Why change and change and change? You call
it progress. Is it anything but going around in a circle? You will
come back to the very things you now reject, and some centuries hence
the world will try the old experiments of Feudlism and Chivalry; and
Kings by Divine Right will be as popular as elected Presidents--indeed,
people may care some day as much as ever to say their prayers and go to
church.”
Both Leacraft and Thomsen laughed, but it was Leacraft who retorted,
and he leaned far back in the Morris chair, his eyes bent upon the
visionary ring of the horizon now webbed with bluescent shades.
“I think there will be no returns, Mrs. Thomsen”--Ah! then Leacraft had
lost again--“no Merry-go-round; our path, the path of humanity, is on
and on and on, not always straight, not always level, and never final
in its destinations. It was a physical chasm that separated the first
colonies of this land from Europe. They brought with them traditions,
customs, though luckily not of a very silly sort--but the lack of
continuity with the whole antecedent history of England practically
destroyed that history for them, and they began in untrammelled freedom
to think for themselves and determine the essence of manhood, of worth,
of liberty, of faith, of brotherhood, and their thinking throve upon
nothing so much as the contemplation of the as yet, humanly speaking,
unused world about them.
“And the vicissitudes of living, the peril, the undiminished levy made
by necessity upon their inventiveness, their industry, their courage,
expelled the remaining vestiges of fealty to humbug, the pretense
of class, the arrogance of office. They had wrested a living from
Nature, under circumstances of unabashed familiarity with the cruelty
of the savage, the obduracy of climate, and the grudging responses of
a sterile soil, and they estimated worth by the hardihood of men who
worked.
“An American essayist has pointed out the emphasis laid by the
northern, the Teutonic races, upon individual liberty. He says
something like this: The Germanic race has been distinguished at
all ages for its political capacity, and the possession of vigorous
institutions of self-government; that there grew up among the nations
of this race a well ordered system of government, based upon the right
of the individual. And why was this? Because they knew of the hardships
of living, and the fibre of liberty-loving natures were formed under
the kneading strains of perpetual conflict. James McKinnon has pointed
out the same thing in his History of Modern Liberty.
“Arbitrary and selfish rule was most quickly crushed in Central Europe.
No! we shall not return to the old follies, because we shall not be
permitted to return; because struggle with Nature will never cease.”
“Russia has been a cold country,” answered Thomsen; “and if the gauge
of liberty is coldness, we should expect to have seen the fruits of
popular government ripening, if you will permit the paradox, in its
zero atmospheres; or if wildness and natural enemies--those that
make housekeeping difficult, and a man’s skin a precious abode for
his soul--why have not the negroes of Africa won over the images of
rhetoric which have been wasted upon Greece and Rome--both, by-the-by,
hot countries?”
“Rome and Greece never knew what Liberty was in the modern sense. Both
were types of class government. Before Christianity, there could be no
ideal of freedom in its holiest meanings. As for Russia, the germs of
liberty are yet buried there, but it is understood; an accident has put
the autocracy in power, and like all beneficiaries of a system, its
members fight for their living; besides, Russia has not left off its
barbarism. But nothing under Heaven will keep her from being free. As
to the negro, he lies too far back, too near to the origins, and, in
any case, the dangers of the jungle are met by craft, rather than by
consecutive exertion and daring.”
“You regret that our new growth in the Pacific--the Australian
England--has not put on the features of a republic, instead of
preserving the heritage of the kingly and royal class institutions
under which the old England flourished. Do you think that nations can
safely try experiments, like children playing games, or chemists mixing
solutions, which, in the latter case, may at any moment blow their
heads off? I think not.”
“I think,” Leacraft slowly replied, while Agnes Ethel Tobit--she who
had become inferentially the wife of the handsome Thomsen--arose and,
walking to her husband’s side, leaned over the back of his chair,
thus looking down upon the speaker, who had turned towards Thomsen,
as if her movement was dictated by a desire to hear his friend more
distinctly; “I think that the finest, the most inspiring--yes, the
most delicate and subtle virtues flourish in a republic, such as
this Republic of the United States is. I confess, I am in love with
it; I love its people. They are superbly human, and humanly noble.
The American gentleman, and he lives on no particular and restricted
level--you find him among the firemen, the policemen, the clerks, the
fathers of families--this unique man is always gracious, delightful,
unerringly just. I believe that these traits develop most naturally
under the dispensations of equality, reasonably understood. I think the
most fruitful national life ensues, when a nation stands fundamentally,
in its government, and in its social conceptions, for common sense
standards, and an unqualified acceptance of the principles of personal
freedom. I like these Americans. To me, their ardor, their naturalness,
their hearty friendship, their generous self-forgetfulness, and a
certain deferential amusement at the foibles of less emancipated
cultures, is fascinating. Of course, there are stupid rich Americans,
dressed in most obnoxious livery of affectation and imitation, men and
women who have treacherous tendencies in their feelings and desires,
willing always to kick their own country, and willing to leave it, but
never willing to relinquish the luxuries its prosperity has enabled
them to enjoy. There are also hateful middle-class Americans, who
deteriorate the impressions made by the best aspects of the American
heart and mind; but the substance and the spirit of the American
life, however much disguised, or, from momentary and economic reasons
obscured, is to me the most palatable; it is palpably the best life
now shown on the world; it is the most energizing, the most alert, and
it carries the power of enormous assimilation, because it is built on
the essence of manhood, the respect for the rights of others. I know
what is in your thoughts and on the point of your tongue. You would
ask: How about the Chinaman, the Negro, and the Japanese, perhaps?
That is a long question, and has nothing to do with my contention, for
in a nutshell, respect for others’ rights does not involve respect
for others’ habits, and generous as the Americans are, they are not
so stupid as to wish to imperil, for an unnecessary sentiment, the
hard-gained benefits of their own national experiment. They have
already leavened the whole earth; it’s not to be expected that they
digest all of its rubbish as well. Let the rest of the world do
something for itself, and clean its own social sloughs, by a little
more admixture of freedom and sympathy.
“All this may seem to you intensely disagreeable, perhaps a little
disloyal, but you wrong me. If I might answer your question without
more evasion. I would peremptorily declare that I hoped that the new
England in Australia would put on the lineaments, nay, incorporate the
very breath and body of this land. I know it has not; possibly it could
not; possibly pernicious and selfish instrumentalities have made it
impossible. Pardon my intractable enthusiasm, but do not mistrust my
heart. It is always England’s. The night is too calm, too beautiful,
to disgrace it with wrangling. Let us tell the story of the last years
to each other. Mine is a short one, and can come last; but yours? Ah!
well I know some of it,” and Leacraft, without constraint or any show
of vacillating envy, smiled up in the face of the pretty woman who
looked down at him, and deeply that woman’s heart honored him for his
magnanimous courage.
There was a pause for an instant, and then Thomsen began. He rose from
his chair, and walking to the railing of the piazza, sat on it, half
turned to the paling East, half towards Leacraft, and told the story of
the transplanted English nation.
That story can be told in more exacting phraseology than the colloquial
method permits, and until his narrative becomes more personal, let
us authentically review the events he rehearsed, which form a unique
historic episode.
With the departure of the King from the shores of England, the actual
evacuation of the island began, and the means and ways of transferring
the people previously thought out, were carefully applied.
The moment the King and Parliament arrived in Australia, a predicament
arose. The King was recognized as king, functional in Australia and in
England, functional anywhere the English control was established; but
the Parliament of England, as the highest law-giving legislature of
the realm, did it supersede the regional legislation of Australia? Was
the autonomic power of the provinces of Australia obliterated with the
arrival of the supreme legislative body of the British Empire? There
was one broad, obvious proposition. The remedy to all doubt, collision,
and ambiguity was to resume in Australia the exact conditions which
had vanished in England, and now naturally sought a restatement and
erection in the land the King and Parliament had reached. And this was
generally accepted. There was a cordial and almost precipitate display
of adhesion to the new plan. It destroyed the independent existence
of the various sections of Australia, and made the continental island
a unit under the control of the Parliament, just as England had been.
The enthusiasm which greeted this solution was adequate and convincing.
It gave renewed hope to the patriotic and loyal souls who prayed and
worked for the re-production of the England they had left. The King
himself responded to this burst of practical allegiance with a wise
and fervent expression of affection and thankfulness. It was a gem of
deliberate composition, and was well received. Meetings of endorsement
and proclamations of ratification were made everywhere, and in the
tumult of acclamation it escaped notice that a formidable opposition
had become organized for a forcible resistance to the whole scheme.
This was over-awed or suppressed, not without a show of force, in
which Thomsen had been himself engaged, and which brought about some
adventures around the region at Mount Harwick, in New South Wales.
Thomsen, after the conclusion had been reached that his own and
Miss Tobit’s families should follow the stream of people going to
Australia, rather, than was at first intended, to coincide with
Leacraft’s wishes for them all to visit America, had sought employment
in the Government’s service, among those to whom had been entrusted
the regulation of this colossal emigration. He was therefore well
acquainted with its various phases and results.
When the King and the Parliament left England, over two millions had
preceded them, being naturally, those who accepted the situation,
and who, besides, were not specifically limited for their support to
investments at home. They went everywhere, many to the continent, many
to India, perhaps half to America, which grew more and more, before
the eyes of the people, as the most natural, most desirable, the
most friendly home. A large number strayed to Africa, and yet others
sought the expanding possibilities of South America. Englishmen had
acquired such extended interests, drew so largely upon the resources
of the entire world for their support, that now in a way they found
natural business refuges all over its varied surface. It was a happy
consequence of the constraining littleness of their own island.
The financial question was the real difficulty, apart from the harsh
bereavement and hardship of the divorce from all their previous living
and associations. It was solved, at least partially, by the Government
issuing paper money, similar to the greenbacks, which carried the
United States through the Civil War. These were furnished to applicants
upon deposit of sworn, approved and examined statements of their
property of all kinds in England. Twenty-five per cent of the amount
thus appearing was given, or rather loaned, to the applicant, and
with this he was enabled to make a start in the new quarters he had
selected. The plan involved the assumption of an enormous burden by the
Government, and an unqualified confidence in it by the people.
Of course, England was not in any sense to become a depopulated island.
Its real estate values, though shrunk to slender fractions of their
former worth, would yet have some value, and whereas, in the case of a
manufacturer, the Government made the loan upon his attested resources
in machinery and certified correspondence, the risk was reduced
sensibly within discoverable limits. Loss, agitation, dislocations, in
many cases ruin, resulted, but the transfer of the manufacturing plants
was made most skilfully, and before the factories in England were
closed, the same products were being produced in Australia. The menace
of the emergency had startled Englishmen into a really reasonable
and adequate show of sense, quickness and resource; usually poor
business men, torpid and conservative, shackled with a kind of mild and
traditional laziness, they became, under the stimulation of the danger
of extinction, active and wary, and intensive.
In the meanwhile the climatic changes continued, and the face of the
United Kingdom more and more altered under the infliction of the long
and tempestuous winters, the cool, shortened summers, and the ice
blockade about its coasts. For it had early become apparent that in
some inexplicable way, the Arctic currents streamed down from the polar
regions with reinforced volume and velocity, bringing with them the
discharged masses of ice projected from their usual course westward,
by the irruption into the Arctic Ocean through Behring Straits of the
united oceanic rivers of the Gulf Stream and the currents from the
Yellow Sea. Throughout the spring, the beleaguered coasts were deeply
fringed with ice-floes and icebergs, whose chilling emanations created
fogs, and wrapt the islands in cheerless cold. Each passing year had
made more clear the surpassing wisdom of the evacuation. But a large
population found that they could support themselves on the island, made
up of the hardy, enduring types, the sailors, fishermen, and the boreal
agriculturists--the farmer who entertains life successfully where the
earth reluctantly yields her products, and the scant nature furnishes
but few of the products of the soil. For now a most extraordinary thing
happened. The refrigeration of Northern Europe had driven down towards
the south the northern denizens. They eagerly seized the deserted land
of the southerners, less accustomed to the niggardly responses of the
field, and met the attacks of the climate with the accustomed patience
and resistance to which they had become innured in their northern home.
In this way the population of Iceland almost bodily left the bleak
and ice-bound coasts of the Arctic island, that no longer offered the
meagre semblance even of subsistence, which previously maintained its
stubbornly hardy occupants. Nothing could have been more fortunate,
as it retarded in some measure the shocking decline in the values of
the land, and gave to all establishments that might otherwise have
been turned into homes for owls and foxes a partial usefulness. Not
indeed that the manufacturing interests would be considerably revived,
but warehouses and buildings connected with manufacturing or shipping
business would be made into storehouses, and the castles and large
manor houses were converted into curious communal colonies, where
those boreal people most joyfully repaired and developed profitable
communities.
Large numbers of the very poor found in the exodus of the well paid or
employed classes above them, a grand chance to renew their own luck.
They became keepers of the deserted buildings; they fraternized with
the newcomers, and freed from the incubus of a superimposed social
repression, became happy and industrious.
To all the brands and grades of the surviving or deserted inhabitants
came increasing numbers of Scandinavians; important fractions of the
Scotch settled on the coasts of England, and even immigrants from
Newfoundland and Canada were tempted to seize the strange opportunity
to occupy vast and abandoned cities, which furnished them in many
instances with palatial shelters, but which later became repellant
and unpleasant abodes, from which they too willingly withdrew to the
smaller settlements.
The tragedy of the big cities was complete. They were melancholy
wastes, their empty streets seemed baleful and dismal. They gave
ghostly thrills of terror, even in the noon-day, to the passers
by--silent graves of past memories--the speechless, vacant, staring
windows in the unlit rooms were like the open but expressionless
eyes of corpses, and the awful fall of silence through the labyrinth
of ways, roads, lanes, places, squares, alleys, descended upon the
wanderer, caught by some malign trick of adventure within their
voiceless, motionless depths, with the benumbing touch of the grave.
He hastened his steps; he ran to escape the deadly stupor, the
inexpressible gloom of loneliness, where every aspect betokened life.
The solitude of nature inspires, draws to the lips an involuntary
prayer, or places in the heart the movements of hope, but this hideous
contradiction of signs and effect weighed like lead upon the spirit,
and forced from the shrinking heart the ejaculations of despair.
Never on earth was there such a picture of dejected grandeur, as this
emptied metropolis of the world presented; never before had a great
city become its own tomb, through the flight of its inhabitants; never
in any record of disaster, whether by earthquake, pestilence, flood or
vulcanism, was there such obliteration as followed the withdrawal of
the citizens of London from their own capital.
The thick blanket of the snow was thrown over it in winter, and its
emergent domes, pinnacles, obelisks and needles offered a fantastic
similitude to mortuary monuments, or else beneath the yellow moon its
piercing whiteness, like a titanic face of someone killed, smote the
blue black skies above it with remorse.
But in Australia the English strength revived and broadened; it
promised to make a gigantic social revolution; it worked strangely
enough in unison with the newly awakened hopes of the King to restore
an accustomed prestige to the Crown. This political phenomenon
attracted the attention of the civilized world. The King in a most
adroit proclamation to the people had peculiarly enlisted their
sympathy by his veiled complaint of the habitual loss of power, and
the encroachments upon the kingly prerogatives of the self-constituted
Cabinet of Ministers. The King’s action was always tacitly prescribed
and anticipated. He was a puppet, dressed in regalia, with no shadow
of power, real and personal. And this he resented, but his language
was the sentences of diplomacy, and lost the individual note entirely
in a concerned and measured argument, restrained by every possible
regard for the present custom, urging a greater confidence in the
King’s wishes, and a larger precinct of action for his judgment. This
momentous promulgation was contemptuously referred to by its critics
as “the Ourselves” letter, but it met a favorable reception and it
enlisted the cordial endorsement of the House of Lords, nor was it
altogether resented by the House of Commons. The achievement of this
success led the King into a further step of interference, in the
appointments and in the personnel of the Cabinet, and he succeeded
further in impressing his wishes upon a number of important bills
passing through the Parliament. In short, by a persistent pressure,
seconded by friends among the people, and a growing following in the
legislature, he had inserted his views, and extorted from the grudging
concessions of the Commons’ recognition of the royal prerogatives.
He had shown himself unusually active in resource, in suggestions,
and in intercourse with the people. His examples had been followed
with enthusiasm by the nobility, who, so to speak, spread themselves
before the observation of the nation, and exerted an unaccustomed
generosity and ubiquitous energy in practically assisting the work of
rehabilitation. At a general election, many candidates were discussed
and elected upon this issue, viz.: the restoration to the King of
kingly power.
“And so, you see,” Thomsen concluded, “the unexpected happens, as it
always does. We moved to an ultra-democratic _milieu_, a veritable
nest of fads and socialistic temerities and experiments, and lo! the
reaction sets in, and in Australia the King may recover the power, lost
with the Stuarts, and the monarchial principle gets a shove ahead,
which, with prosperity, and in England, no impulse short of the fiat
of the Almighty, could have secured for it. A prophet who would have
foretold that, would have scored a poor success in 1900 as a state
maker.”
Before he had finished speaking, Leacraft had left his chair, and was
walking to and fro near the speaker--and then he advanced to the edge
of the few steps that led from the piazza to the open swards beneath
them, which were fringed by an emergent crown of trees growing thickly
in some lower crease or hollow of the ground, beyond which again the
eye fell to the foot swells, and the undulations of land far off, in
the flats, just beginning to twinkle with lights.
Leacraft spoke slowly, his eyes still fixed upon the distance, as if in
revery, but his measured words came clearly to his two friends, carried
by a voice which, always melodious and cultured, now gained a sort of
passionate yearning, and then again was approved as disinterestedly
clean and judicial: “All this is an episode. Nothing more. The future
of the races of the world means the widening scope of the Republican
idea. There can be no other. Education forbids its extinction. Yes,
and Authority endorses it. This sudden foolishness in Australia will
only invoke a perilous reaction. There can be to-day in governmental
systems only varied applications of the one thought; the rule of the
people through an appeal to the people’s choice of rulers. It is
fundamentally common sense in an era of enlightenment, to begin with;
but since the United States have eclipsed all nations, and raised the
standards of individual action beyond all previous estimates, this
conclusion has coercively been accepted, that through the influences
propagated under this popular freedom of control, the finest, the
richest, the sweetest, the most magnanimous types of character are also
engendered and completed. A kind of psychological logic is involved.
A vast psychic power of selection sets in, and irrevocably the most
noble, the most disenthralled natures slowly appear. In comparison
with their best results, the representatives of other cultures appear
dwindling and abortive. And why? Because in the least limited field of
opportunity the unrestrained power of nature to make character must
of necessity evolve consummate and supreme examples. Nothing is more
demonstrable. It must be conceded, I grant, that at first the crop of
temperaments is marked more by rash hardihood, strident vulgarities,
and climbing audacity, but these very qualities, which in the naming
seem so distasteful, mature naturally, in later generations, into
devoted courage, æsthetic spontaneity; juices of the fruit when green
form the basis of its later richness.
“I know the tiresome and hackneyed nonsense, and the mean-spirited
sneers of the European at the American, for his lack of culture,
his defect in polish, his money-getting haste. And it’s all a lie!”
Leacraft wheeled round as if on a pivot, and even in the pale light the
Thomsens could see that his face flushed, and the stern decision of his
voice betrayed the fires of resentment. “Who is it that these precious
pretenders of Europe look to when they have famine and disaster; who
has taught the lessons of sympathy, of open-hearted helpfulness, and
unswerving generosity, or made them recognize in their own natures the
almost exterminated seeds of kindness? As to culture, let me tell you
in all seriousness that the idle glamour of a scholar’s diction does
not weigh a barleycorn as against the flashing splendor of an honest
and sincere spirit; as to polish, who made the European regard Woman as
something better than the helpless ally of his lust, and the chained
companion to his exultant vanity? Woman has gained a new empire of
dignity in these new lands; she for once triumphs in the unquenched
assertion of her rights. As to money-making greed, where under the
canopy will you find a more meanly mercenary race than these same
Europeans, inert panderers to pleasure for money, fortune hunters, and
silent spectators of atrocities, if the risk of money loss stops their
way to succor. I know the dolts and traitors on the American soil,
the men and women who sell their birthright for the mess of pottage
contained in a gilded name in Europe, or the hollow mockery of a
coat-of-arms. These are the tattooed children of humbug--careless and
ungrateful, indolent and self-seeking, lured by that strange beauty
which Europe, for some inscrutable reason, seems to keep, and of which
even I, an Englishman, feel jealous, for the sake of a country which
may not be so good-looking, but which becomes every day more sublimely
the appointed pattern of the future state. Well! my friends, you must
pardon these ‘wild and whirling words.’ They may strike you as an
unseemly tirade, but if you knew this land as well as I do, you, too,
might trespass beyond the limits of moderation in its defense. But
other matters have for you a less doubtful interest. The great physical
revolution which has left its mark no less in the political world
than in the material, has become consolidated and solidified into a
permanent feature of the earth. The broad engulfment of the land at the
isthmus has established an open way to the Pacific from the Atlantic,
and the initial formation of the barrier northward from the Caribbean
Sea by the erection of a ridge from Cuba to Yucatan, and partially from
Jamaica to Honduras, this latter connexion the singular sequel to the
disturbance which overwhelmed Kingston in 1907, has advanced far enough
to effectually assist the momentous deflection of the Gulf Stream from
the Atlantic. And another transformation has thereby been achieved.
The alien mass of hot water pouring into the Pacific at the isthmus,
when no longer propelled by the easterly winds, resumes its original
impetus of rotary direction, and streams, sweeping northward, along the
coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, bringing in its further
extension warmth to British America and Alaska. By this amelioration
of its climate, Alaska has specially profited. Its numerous mineral
resources have been more exhaustively explored, and the wealth of its
boundless areas promises returns beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.
“The convulsions which were so dismally foretold, in the social and
political fabric of this country, never occurred. They were quite
lost sight of in the wonderful happenings of the world, and the trite
aphorism that the spirit of discontent is best overcome by an appeal
to the spirit of curiosity, obtained an almost ludicrous illustration
in the subsidence of every murmur of schism and contention, as the
amazement grew over the upset of the temporalities of the world, as
the earth readjusted its members for another, let us hope, long and
uneventful slumber.
“For myself, perhaps I should deprecate your censure by an apology.
It is true, I did not follow the fortunes of my country, though with
my mind I ardently canvassed and considered them. The very interests
which brought me to this land were English, and my superintendence
and success with them, has in a few ways made the survival of not
a few Englishmen possible at this crisis. Really, my best place of
helpfulness was here. Jim has been with me, and has proved invaluable,
and that poor woman, whom I told you about meeting in Victoria Park,
the night before we saw the great procession of evacuation, was found
by me, and now Jim is her husband. There’s nothing shocking about it.
Her first husband died of consumption. It was a foregone conclusion.
Jim showed himself a big-hearted friend, and the girl learned to think
the world of him. And when she was alone, what could have been better
from any point of view than that she should have married him?
“And for me, Mrs. Thomsen, there is peace, too.” Leacraft moved to the
doorway of the broad hall that divided the spacious house. He pushed
it open, and as the light from the interior fell upon his face, the
visitors saw the smile of an abiding happiness upon the thoughtful
countenance, and Agnes Ethel Thomsen utter a prayer of thankfulness
that _he_ had found contentment.
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book.
Many, but by no means all, simple typographical errors were corrected.
Unpaired quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious,
and otherwise left unpaired.
Page 5: Transcriber removed redundant book title.
Page 257: “with central and periphera, agitation,” was printed that way.
Page 282: “ear shattering dim” was printed that way.