Green Valley

Green Valley, by Katharine
Reynolds,

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Illustrated by Nana French Bickford
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Title: Green Valley
Author: Katharine Reynolds

Release Date: July 10, 2006 [eBook #18801]
Language: English
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GREEN VALLEY
by
KATHARINE REYNOLDS
Frontispiece by Nana French Bickford

[Frontispiece: They came to her hand in hand and said not a word.]

Grosset & Dunlap Publishers ------ New York Copyright, 1919, by
Little, Brown, and Company. All rights reserved

Dedication
TO ALL THE LITTLE ONE-HORSE TOWNS WHERE LIFE IS
SWEET AND ROOMY AND OLD-FASHIONED; WHERE THE
DAYS ARE FULL OF SUNSHINE AND RAIN AND WORK;
WHERE NEIGHBORS REALLY NEIGHBOR AND MEN AND
WOMEN ARE LIFE-SIZE

AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book was written to cure a heartache, to ease a very real and bad
case of homesickness. I wrote it just for myself when I was very nearly
ten thousand miles away from home and knew that I couldn't go back
to the U. S. A. for two long years. It is a picture of a little Yankee town,

the town I tried so hard to see over ten thousand miles of gray-green
ocean.
When I was sailing from New York for South America that sunny June
morning in 1913, about the last thing the last friend hurrying down the
gangplank said was this:
"Of course you are going to be homesick. But it's worth it."
And I laughed.
But before that long stretch of gray-green ocean was plowed under I
knew--oh, I knew--that I was going to be most woefully homesick for
the U. S. A.
A certain tall Swede from New Jersey and I discovered that fact about
the same minute Fourth of July morning. We were standing on the deck,
staring miserably back over the awful miles to where somewhere in that
lost north our town lay with flags fluttering, picnic baskets getting into
trains and everybody out on their lawns and porches.
We didn't look at each other after that first glance--that Swede and I.
And we said the sunlight hurt our eyes.
Three months later I was sitting under the velvet-soft, star-sown night
sky of the Argentine cattle country. I had seen volcano-scarred
Martinique and had watched the beautiful island of Barbados rising like
a fairy dream out of a foamy sea.
I had marveled at the endless beauties of Rio lying so picturesquely in
its immense harbor and at the foot of its great, shaggy, sun-splashed,
smoke-wreathed mountains. I had tramped through unsanitary Santos
and loved it because it looked like Chicago in spite of its mountains
and banana trees. I had witnessed a wonderful fiesta in Buenos Aires
and had churned two hundred miles up the La Plata when it was
bubbling with rain. And I had had a tooth pulled in Paysandu, the
second largest city in Uruguay.

All that in three months! And there were still a million wonders to see.
I loved and shall always love these radiant, sun-drenched uncrowded
lands. But my heart was heavy as lead. For I was homesick. My eyes
were tired of alien starshine, of alien, unfamiliar things, and my heart
cried out for the little home towns of my own country.
But I could not go back for many, many months. So I learned Spanish
and hobnobbed with wonderfully wise and delightful Spanish
grandmothers. I grew to love some darling Indian babies. I interviewed
interesting South American cowboys and discussed war and socialism
with an Argentine navy officer. I exchanged calls and true blue
friendships with soft-voiced Englishwomen. And I took tea and dinner
aboard the ships of Welsh sea captains from Cardiff.
I had a wonderful time. I filled my notebook, took pictures and
collected souvenirs. I laughed and told stories. Folks down there said I
was good company.
But oh! In the hush of a rain-splashed night, when the fire in the grate
dozed and dreamed and a boat siren somewhere out on the inky La
Plata wailed and moaned through the black night, my heart flew back
over those gray-green waves to a little town that I knew in the U. S. A.
And to ease my longing I wrote Green Valley.
KATHARINE REYNOLDS.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I
EAST AND WEST II SPRING IN GREEN VALLEY III THE