Unsolicited Writings

He hurried up the stairs to open the front doors, but Deacon Bradley was before
him. Youre late, Jehiel, he said severely, and the church was cold. Still,
those years with his sister, filled with labor beyond his age as they were, had
been the happiest of his life. In an almost complete isolation the two had toiled
together five years, the most impressionable of his life; and all his affection
centred on the silent, loving, always comprehending sister. His own father and
mother grew to seem far away and alien, and his sister came to be like a part of
himself. To her alone of all living souls had he spoken freely of his passion for
adventuring far from home, of the lust for wandering which devoured his boy-soul.
He was sixteen when her husband finally came back from the war, and he had no
secrets from the young matron of twenty-six, who listened with such wide tender
eyes of sympat!
hy to his half-frantic outpourings of longing to escape from the dark, narrow
valley where his fathers had lived their dark, narrow lives. And always the pine
tree had grown, insolent in the pride of a creature set in the right surroundings.
The imprisoned man had felt himself dwarfed by its height. But now, he looked up at
it again, and laughed aloud. It had come late, but it had come. He was fifty-seven
years old, almost three-score, but all his life was still to be lived. He said to
himself that some folks lived their lives while they did their work, but he had
done all his tasks first, and now he could live. The unexpected arrival of the
timber merchant and the sale of that piece of land hed never thought would bring
him a cent -- was not that an evident sign that Providence was with him? He was too
old and broken now to work his way about as he had planned at first, but here had
come this six hundred dollars like rain from the sky. He would start as soon as he
could!