The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

With the white bloom of the night,
I went peaceful, pacing slow,
Captive held in arms of snow.
Happy maids! of you I learn
Heavenly maskers to discern!
So, when seeming griefs and harms
Fill life's garden with alarms,
Through its inner walks enchanted
I will ever move undaunted.
Love hath messengers that borrow
Tragic masks of fear and sorrow,
When they come to do us kindness,—
And but for our tears and blindness,
We should see, through each disguise,
Cherub cheeks and angel eyes.

CULLET

"Good morning! Is it really a rainy day?" asked Miselle, imploringly, as she seated herself at the breakfast-table, and glanced from Monsieur to the heavy sky and the vane upon the coach-house, steadily pointing west.

"Indeed, I hope not. Are you ready for Sandwich?" smilingly replied the host.

"More than ready,—eager. But the clouds."

"One learns here upon the coast to brave the clouds; we have, to be sure, a sea-turn just now, and perhaps there will be fog-showers by-and-by, but nothing that need prevent our excursion."

"Delightful!" exclaimed Optima, Miselle, and Madame, applying themselves to eggs and toast with that calm confidence in a masculine decision so sustaining to the feminine nature.

The early breakfast over, Monsieur, with a gentle hint to the ladies of haste in the matter of toilet, went to see that Gypsy and Fanny were properly harnessed, and that a due number of cushions, rugs, and water-proof wrappers were placed in the roomy carriage.

Surely, never were hats so hastily assumed, never did gloves condescend to be so easily found, never were fewer hasty returns for "something I have forgotten," and Monsieur had barely time to send two messages to the effect that all was ready, when the feminine trio descending upon him triumphantly disproved once and forever the hoary slander upon their sex of habitual unpunctuality.

With quiet self-sacrifice Optima placed herself beside Madame in the back of the carryall, leaving for Miselle the breezy seat in front, with all its facilities for seeing, hearing, smelling, breathing; and let us hope that the little banquet thus prepared for the conscience of that young woman gave her as much satisfaction as Miselle's feast of the senses did to her.

Arching their necks, tossing their manes, spattering the dewy sand with their little hoofs, Gypsy and Fanny rapidly whirled the carriage through the drowsy town, across the Pilgrim Brook, and so, by the pretty suburb of "T'other Side," (which no child of the Mayflower shall ever consent to call Wellingsley,) to the open road skirting the blue waters of the bay.

"Ah, this is fine!" cried Miselle, snatching from seaward deep breaths of the east wind laden with the wild life of ocean and the freedom of boundless space.

"Here we have it!" remarked Monsieur, somewhat irrelevantly, as he hastily unbuckled the apron and spread it over his own lap and Miselle's, just in time to catch a heavy dash of rain.

"I am afraid it is going to be stormy, after all," piteously murmured Miselle.

"I told you we should have fog-showers, you know," suggested Monsieur, with a quiet smile.

"But what must we do?—go home?"

"No, indeed!—we will go to Sandwich, let it rain twice, four times as hard as this,—unless, indeed, Madame gives orders to the contrary. What say you, Madame?"

"I say, let us go on for the present. We can turn round at any time, if it becomes necessary"; and Madame smiled benevolently at Miselle, down whose face the rain-drops streamed, but who stoutly asserted,—

"Oh, this is nothing. Only a fog-shower, you know. We shall have it fine directly."

"Not till we are out of Eel River. This valley gathers all the clouds, and they often get rain here when the sun is shining everywhere else."

"A regular vale of tears! Happy the remnant of the world that dwelleth not in Eel River!" murmured Miselle, surreptitiously pulling her water-proof cloak about her shoulders.

"Let me help you. Really, though, you are getting very wet, dear," remonstrated Optima.

"Not in the least. I enjoy it excessively. Besides, the shower is just over.—What church is that, Monsieur, with the very disproportionate steeple?" inquired Miselle, pointing to a square gray box, surmounted by a ludicrously short and obtuse spire, expressive of a certain dogged obstinacy of purpose.

"The church is an Orthodox meetinghouse, and the steeple is Orthodox too,—for the Cape. Anything else would blow down in the spring gales. Park-Street steeple, for instance, would stand a very poor chance here."

"Yes," said Miselle, vaguely, and she felt in her heart how this great ocean that dwarfs or prostrates the works of man replaces them by a temple builded in his own soul of proportions so lofty that God Himself may dwell visibly therein.

And now, having traversed the tearful valley, the road wound up the Delectable Mountains beyond, and so into the pine forest, through whose clashing needles glints of sunshine began to creep, while overhead the gray shaded softly into pearl and dazzling white and palest blue.

"There are deer in these Sandwich woods. See if we cannot find a pair of great brown eyes peering out at us from some of the thickets," suggested Madame.

"Charming! If only we might see one! How young this nation is, after all, when aboriginal deer roam the woods within fifty miles of Boston!"

"But without game-laws they will soon be exterminated. A great many are shot every winter, and the farmers complain bitterly of those that remain. Some of their crops are quite ruined by the deer, they say," remarked Monsieur.

"Never mind. There are plenty of crops, and but very few deer. I pronounce for the game-laws," recklessly declared Miselle.

But the impending battle of political economy was averted by Madame's exclamation of,—

"See, here is Sacrifice Rock. Let us stop and look at it a moment."

Gypsy and Fanny, wild with the sparkling upland air, were with difficulty persuaded to halt opposite a great flat granite boulder, sloping from the skirt of the forest toward the road, and nearly covered with pebbles and bits of decayed wood.

"It is Sacrifice Rock," explained Monsieur. "From the days of the Pilgrims to our own, no Indian passes this way without laying some offering upon it. It would have been buried long ago, but that the spring and autumn winds sweep away all the lighter deposits. You would find the hollow at its back half filled with them. Once there may have been human sacrifices,—tradition says so, at least; but now there is seldom anything more precious than what you see."

"But to what deity were the offerings made?"

"Some savage Manitou, no doubt, but no one can say with certainty anything about it. The degenerate half-breeds who live in this vicinity only keep up the custom from tradition. They are called Christians now, you know, and are quite above such idolatrous practices."

"At any rate, I will add my contribution to this altar of an unknown God. Besides, there are some blackberries that I must have," exclaimed Optima, releasing her active limbs from the carriage in a very summary fashion.

Tossing a little stick upon the rock, she hastened to gather the abundant fruit, a little for herself, a good deal for Madame and Miselle, until Gypsy and Fanny stamped and neighed with impatience, and Monsieur cried cheerily,—

"Come, young woman, come! We are not half-way to Sandwich, and the horses will be devoured by these flies as surely as Bishop Hatto was by mice."

And so on through miles of merry woodland, by fields and orchards, whose every crop is a fresh conquest of man over Nature in this one of her most niggardly phases, by desolate cabins and lonely farms, until at a sudden turn the broad, beautiful sea swept up to glorify the scene. And while Miselle with flushed cheeks and tearful eyes drank in the ever-new delight of its presence, Monsieur began a story of how a man, almost a stranger to him, had come one winter evening and begged him for God's love to go and help him search for the body of his brother, reported by a wandering madwoman to be lying on this beach, and how he begged so piteously that the listener could not choose but go.

And as Monsieur vividly pictured that long, lonely drive through the midnight woods, the desolate monotony of the beach, along whose margin curled the foam-wreaths of the rising tide, while beyond phosphorescent lights played over a world of weltering black waters,—as he told how, after hours of patient search, they found the poor sodden corpse and tenderly cared for it,—as Monsieur quietly told his tale and never knew that he was a hero, Miselle turned shuddering from sea and beach and the mocking play of the crested waves, as they leaped in the sunshine and then sank back to sport hideously with other corpses hidden beneath their smiling surface.

Presently the sea was again shut off by woodland, and the scattered houses closed into a village, nay, a town, the town of Sandwich; and swinging through it at an easy rate, the carriage halted before an odd-looking building, consisting of a quaint old inn, porched and gambrel-roofed, joined in most unholy union to a big, square, staring box, of true Yankee architecture.

Descending with reluctance, even after three hours of immobility, from her breezy seat, Miselle followed Madame into the quiet house, whose landlord, like many another man, makes moan for "the good old times" when summer tourists and commercial travellers filled his rooms and the long dining-table, now unoccupied, save by our travellers and two young men connected with the glass-manufactories.