Page:The Professor's House - Willa Cather.pdf/276

 tainly deserved more than one reading. He used to carry them out to the lake to read them over again. After coming out of the water he would lie on the sand, holding them in his hand, but somehow never taking his eyes off the pine-trees, appliqued against the blue water, and their ripe yellow cones, dripping with gum and clustering on the pointed tips like a mass of golden bees in swarmingtime. Usually he carried his letters home unread.

His family wrote constantly about their plans for next summer, when they were going to take him over with them. Next summer? The Professor wondered. . . . Sometimes he thought he would like to drive up in front of Notre Dame, in Paris, again, and see it standing there like the Rock of Ages, with the frail generations breaking about its base. He hadn’t seen it since the war.

But if he went anywhere next summer, he thought it would be down into Outland’s country, to watch the sunrise break on sculptured peaks and impassable mountain passes—to look off at those long, rugged, untamed vistas dear to the American heart. Dear to all hearts, probably—at least, calling to all. Else why had his grandfather’s grandfather, who had tramped so many miles across Europe into Russia with the Grande Armee, come out to the Canadian wilderness to forget the chagrin of his Emperor’s defeat?