Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/370

 made. Whole chapters have gone out entire, though the omitted chapters will be preserved and altered and put into shape in short story form. I have not destroyed anything.

This frugality might indicate that he was a little repentant, after all, for the burning of Wallulah.

He was still working on it when he returned ill to Hood River in March, 1891, and was discussing with his family plans for even further revision when he died.

Two funeral processions climbed the steeply ascending road, one in the January cold in 1886, bearing a girl of 18; the other in the gladness of June in 1891, bearing a young man not quite 30, who nevertheless had given to American literature one of its greatest romances in a book and one of its saddest in life. The graves of Genevra Whitcomb and Frederic Homer Balch are only a few yards apart in the Lyle cemetery, perhaps the most beautifully and suitably located burial ground in the Pacific Northwest, high on the hills and hemmed in as it is by three great emblems of eternity—far below, the perpetual waters of the broad Columbia; just around the bend, Memaloose Island where for centuries those of another race have awaited resurrection; and to the southwest, Mt. Hood, lofty and clear, with the pure whiteness of the New Jerusalem.

On pages 137, 138 and 139 has been printed a selection from The Bridge of the Gods.