Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/104

 84 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

Major Stark looks down upon us beside his wife, dead yet living. A person rather above the middle height, of a slight but muscular frame, with the short waistcoat, the high collar, and the close, narrow shoulders of the gentlemen's costume of 1830. The carriage of the head is noble, and the strong features, the deep-set keen blue eyes, the prominent forehead, speak of high courage, large intelligence, perseverance, and cool self-possession. He much resembled his father in person and appearance. A person went to obtain the likeness of Gen. Stark immediately after his decease. Major Stark was present, and the artist, in completing his work, frequently looked from the face of the dead to the living resemblance. By those who remember both, this portrait of Major Stark, by Prof. S. F. B. Morse, is said to resemble the general more than any of his own portraits extant.

Such were the appearance of the master and mistress of Stark place. Let us now glance at the mansion which they inhabited, and around which so many memories linger. The May breezes are blowing blandly down from the hills, the maples are tossing their branches laden with the tender springing green leaves of a renewed life, and the sunshine shines warmly upon the highway, and the green fields and the forests just bloom with beauty as we drive up before the door. It had been a dehghtful ride along the spring roadsides that balmy morning. What company we had had ! — frogs croaking contentedly in the pools of the marsh, cat birds and orioles singing from the hedges, and thrushes pour- ing forth sweet melody from the highest limbs of majestic elms. From many a barnyard arose the shrill clarion of chanticleer. All around, in the forest, on the hillsides, from the meadow, came the sounds, the sweet, glad sounds of springtime. Our eyes had seen many a lovely thing. The cowslip lifted its golden chalice in the meadow. Fringing the highway was the delicate bloom of the violet and the snowy saxafrage. In cottage gardens anemones and crocuses were budding in yellow and purple glory, while on the hillsides, skirt- ing the fences, and girdling great farm buildings, were apple and pear orchards that were in luxuriant bloom.

Other sights and scenes had flitted before us. We had passed through country villages, hushed almost to Sabbath quietness in the beauty of that spring morning. We had looked upon groups of boisterous, romping school children. In the back doorway of one farm house had stood the farmer's wife working butter, sleeves rolled to her elbow, and a jaunty white cap over her head. In another, sat the sun-browned, toil-hardened son of labor, smoking. Ah ! how fragrant was the odor of that clay pipe. No cigar, not even your boasted Havana, can rival its aroma. Two pretty girls, with breeze-tossed curls, digging dandelions, looked up smiling as we passed. Hills, streams, and valleys varied the landscape continually. But the mountain, — grim, towering, historic Kearsarge, — ever looked at us like a sentinel. Look where we would, there it stood ever visible. Escape its ken we could not any more than Bunyan's Christian could the threatening, overhanging cliff of Mount Sinai. Only the mountain was not terrible, it seem to nod to us kindly, to watch us with friendly guise. The sight of its bald, benevolent head, gave us cheer. Our home seemed not so distant, so long as that gray peak was in view.

But we are at our journey's end at last. We catch a glance of dormer win- dows shining through the trees, of tall chimneys upward rising ; they mark the place that we seek. Surrounded by its outhouses, its barns, its mills, and an elegant little Gothic chapel locally denominated "the Church of St. John's in the wilderness," and which was built by the munificence of one of the family, the Stark mansion rears its tall, antique front amid the shade of its ancestral trees, a not unworthy imitation of an English manor house. We know the place at once, its air is unmistakable. These are all the signs that attest its royalty.

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