When you come to observe
faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that each has,
sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you undertake to
make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be nearly as long as a
catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.
DAVID GAUNT.
PART II.
It was late. Palmer, unhitching his horse from the fence, mounted and
rode briskly down the hill. He would lose the girl: saw the loss, faced
it. Besides the love he bore her, she had made God a truth to him. He
was jaded, defeated, as if some power outside of himself had taken him
unexpectedly at advantage to-night, and wrung this thing from him. Life
was not much to look forward to,--the stretch it had been before: study,
and the war, and hard common sense,--the theatre,--card-playing. Not
being a man, I cannot tell you how much his loss amounted to. I know,
going down the rutted wagon-road, his mild face fell slowly into a
haggard vacancy foreign to it: one or two people at the tavern where he
stopped asked him if he were ill: I think, too, that he prayed once or
twice to whatever God he had, looking up with dry eye and shut
lips,--dumb prayers, wrung out of some depth within, such as Christian
sent out of the slough, when he was like to die. But he did stop at the
tavern, and there drank some brandy to steady his nerves; and he did not
forget that there was an ambuscade of Rebels at Blue's Gap, and that he
was to share in the attack on them at daylight: he spurred his horse, as
he drew nearer Romney.
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