Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/37

 under a sky far more cloudless than Lonely's unhappy soul.

It was, to him, neither a moving nor an inviting sight, that first glimpse of his new home; for like many another strange town, Chamboro lay sprawling brokenly along the valley of a strange river which twined and curled and wound slumbrously down through a dark and alien country, wooded with maple and willow and sycamore. Through the limpid valley quietness of the May afternoon rose the puffing and churning of a river-tug or two, the rhythmical cling-clang of the blacksmith's anvil, the periodic hum and whine and scream of the sawmill. But the hills here seemed to stretch before him not half so green as the older and fairer hills of remembrance. The water here seemed not half so silvery as was the river at Cowansburg. The bobolinks and bluebirds could not sing so well, the very cherry-blossoms did not smell so good. To this bald new country, indeed, clung none of that golden enchantment which haloed the new boy's lost home, now forty long miles behind him. And Lonely felt so bad about it all that he wondered whether or not he was