Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 2.djvu/62

 54

��MY FRIENDS AND I: MEMORIES.

��anted lards, and much well-paying bank stock. He was a man of fine personal appearance, fairly intellectual, and quite moral, as the world goes. To be sure he was somewhat wild and given to excess, but all this he would outwear with years of experience and the counter charms of wedded life ; and then he was of a very aristocratic progeniture, being in direct line of descent from Geo. Ross, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a distinguished member of the Conti- nental Congress.

Now we must not judge from this that the father of Ellen Burton was alto- gether a mean and selfish man ; there were in his nature many warm and sunny spots, and, as I have said, he loved his only child with all the tondness of a de- voted parent, and in urging the suit of this petitioner for the hand of his daugh- ter, he was not at all unmindful of her fu- ture happiness; but he. like many anoth- er that you know, fancied that the amount or degree of earthly bliss de- pended upon the extent of earthly pos- sessions, and standing in what the world is pleased to term society. He was wealthy, and consequently, he thought, happy; hence his conclusions; so we need not wonder that when Ellen de- clined to accept his views or comply with his wishes, telling him she could not give her hand where her heart, could never go, he was overcome with a mi igling of grief and offended authority ; and when later she ventured to tell him of her deep love for Will Austin, and that she pre- ferred the wealth ol his heart and noble manhood to the boasted opulence and sumptuous surroundings of this stranger, he waxed ireful, the cloud of his anger gathering fury, until an hour later, it burst woefully upon the head of the in- nocent lover.

You know already with what effect. We heard it as we stood in the starlight ot that evening, as the shadows gathered in the park ; and we heard it again from the lips of my friend as we sauntered along that valley road until the night grew old and the stars disappeared in the flush of the morning's dawn. I left him that morning, his soul op-

��pressed with sad thoughts at the pros- pect of parting with her he loved with a pure and holy affection, and who he be- lieved worshipped him as divinely.

" She will be true to me. I know," he said, in one of his moments of rapture. " The heart of the father, too, will yet relent, and I will come back in time, and then: "

Here his voice was checked with emo- tion, and pressing my hand passionately, we parted.

He left, next day, for Europe, and I heard from him casually as he flitted here and there. First a greeting from Switzerland ; then a line from that " City in the Sea," throned on her hundred isles : " I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs ; a palace and a prison on either hand." A tew weeks later another, in Will's peculiar hand and style; " At the ' Arch of Titus,' gray with centuries, and away through the deep blue skies of Rome I waft a message to thee." Then " Dreaming of home

��again, after a time ;

��twilight, from

��in this Sabbath Thebes of a hundred gates — travel- stained with dust that throbbed with life four thousand years ago ; wandering above the ruins of ancient temples, while the night sweeps down loaded with glory; gazing upon the stony face of ' Meuinon,' gloomy with ages forgotten, while the shadows steal across the plaiu and over the time-hallowed graves and city of Pharaohs. In the misty silence of the halls of Karnak, among whose gloomy ruins the dun fox and the wild hyena call, and owls and flitting bats startle the echoes and fill the imagination with vis- ions of uncanny spirits and ghosts of long-mummied Egyptians."

A month later and he was at Jerusa- lem, the holy city, realizing thus the cherished dreams of his boyhood : " Ly- ing in the starlight of Olivet, gazing with tear-dimmed eyes above the hills of Judea; breathing inspirations of glory from above the ' Mount of Ascension,' made sacred in the eyes and faith of mil- lions by the footsteps of the ' Son of Mary' ; following in imagination the ca- reer of those strange but brave men, those zealous followeis of the humble Naza-

�� �