The fountains of the great deep opened. A new heaven, a new earth.
Georgiana has broken her engagement with her cousin. Mrs. Cobb let
it out in the strictest confidence to Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Walters,
with stricter confidence still, has told me only.
The West-Pointer had been writing for some months in regard to
the wild behavior of his cousin. This grew worse, and the crisis
came. Georgiana snapped her thread and put up her needle. He
travelled all the way down her to implore. I met him at the gate
as he left the house--a fine, straight, manly, handsome young
fellow, with his face pale with pain, and his eyes flashing with
anger--and bade him a long, affectionate, inward God-speed as he
hurried away. It was her father's influence. He had always wished
for this union. Ah, the evils that come to the living from the
wrongful wishes of the dead! Georgiana is so happy now, since she
has been forced to free herself, that spring in this part of the
United States seems to have advanced about half a month.
"What on earth will she do with all those clothes?" inquired Mrs.
Walters the other night, eying me with curious impressiveness.
"They ought to be hanged," I said, promptly.
There is a young scapegrace who passes my house morning and evening
with his cows. He has the predatory instincts of that being
who loves to call himself the image of his Maker, and more than
once has given annoyance, especially last year, when he robbed a
damson-tree of a brood of Baltimore orioles. This winter and spring
his friendly interest in my birds has increased, and several times
I have caught him skulking among the pines. Last night what should
I stumble on but a trap, baited and sprung, under the cedar-tree in
which the cardinal roosts. I was up before daybreak this morning.
Awhile after the waking of the birds here comes my young bird-thief,
creeping rapidly to his trap. As he stooped I had him by the
collar, and within the next five minutes I must have set up in his
nervous system a negative disposition to the caging of red-birds
that will descend as a positive tendency to all the generations of
his offspring.
All day this meditated outrage has kept my blood up. Think of this
beautiful cardinal beating his heart out against maddening bars, or
caged for life in some dark city street, lonely, sick, and silent,
bidden to sing joyously of that high world of light and liberty where
once he sported! Think of the exquisite refinement of cruelty in
wishing to take him on the eve of May!
It is hardly a fancy that something as loyal as friendship has
sprung up between this bird and me. I accept his original shyness
as a mark of his finer instincts; but, like the nobler natures,
when once he found it possible to give his confidence, how frankly
and fearlessly has it been given. The other day, brilliant, warm,
windless, I was tramping across the fields a mile from home, when I
heard him on the summit of a dead sycamore, cleaving the air with
stroke after stroke of his long melodious whistle, as with the swing
of a silken lash. When I drew near he dropped down from bough to
bough till he reached the lowest, a few feet from where I stood,
and showed by every movement how glad he was to see me. We really
have reached the understanding that the immemorial persecution
of his race by mine is ended; and now more than ever my fondness
settles about him, since I have found his happiness plotted against,
and have perhaps saved his very life. It would be easy to trap
him. His eye should be made to distrust every well-arranged pile
of sticks under which lurks a morsel.
To=night I called upon Georgiana and sketched the arrested tragedy
of the morning. She watched me curiously, and then dashed into a
little treatise on the celebrated friendships of man for the lower
creatures, in fact and fiction, from camels down to white mice.
Her father must have been a remarkably learned man. I didn't
like this. It made me somehow feel as though I were one of Asp's
Fables, or were being translated into English as that old school-room
horror of Androclus and the Lion. In the bottom of my soul I don't
believe that Georgiana cares for birds, or knows the difference
between a blackbird and a crow. I am going to send her a little
story, "The Passion of the Desert." Mrs. Walters is now confident
that Georgiana regrets having broken off her engagement. But then
Mrs. Walters can be a great fool when she puts her whole mind to
it.