My Terminal Moraine | Page 2

grounds, very forcibly assured me that
if I should make my appearance there again, or if he discovered any
attempt on my part to communicate with his daughter in any way, he
would send her from home. He concluded the very brief interview by
stating that if I had any real regard for his daughter's happiness I would
cease attentions which would meet with the most decided
disapprobation from her only surviving parent and which would result
in exiling her from home, I begged for one more interview with Miss
Havelot, and if it had been granted I should have assured her of the
state of my affections, no matter if there were reasons to suppose that I
would never see her again; but her father very sternly forbade anything
of the kind, and I went away crushed.
It was a very hard case, for if I played the part of a bold lover and tried

to see Agnes without regard to the wicked orders of her father, I should
certainly be discovered; and then it would be not only myself, but the
poor girl, who would suffer. So I determined that I would submit to the
Havelot decree. No matter if I never saw her again, never heard the
sound of her voice, it would be better to have her near me, to have her
breathe the same air, cast up her eyes at the same sky, listen to the same
birds, that I breathed, looked at and listened to, than to have her far
away, probably in Kentucky, where I knew she had relatives, and
where the grass was blue and the sky probably green, or at any rate
would appear so to her if in the least degree she felt as I did in regard to
the ties of home and the affinities between the sexes.
I now found myself in a most doleful and even desperate condition of
mind. There was nothing in the world which I could have for which I
cared. Hunting, fishing, and the rambles through woods and fields that
had once been so delightful to me now became tasks which I seldom
undertook. The only occupation in which I felt the slightest interest was
that of sitting in a tower of my house with a telescope, endeavoring to
see my Agnes on some portion of her father's grounds; but, although I
diligently directed my glass at the slightest stretch of lawn or bit of path
which I could discern through openings in the foliage, I never caught
sight of her. I knew, however, by means of daily questions addressed to
my cook, whose daughter was a servant in the Havelot house, that
Agnes was yet at home. For that reason I remained at home. Otherwise,
I should have become a wanderer.
About a month after I had fallen into this most unhappy state an old
friend came to see me. We had been school-fellows, but he differed
from me in almost every respect. He was full of ambition and energy,
and, although he was but a few years older than myself, he had already
made a name in the world. He was a geologist, earnest and enthusiastic
in his studies and his investigations. He told me frankly that the object
of his visit was twofold. In the first place, he wanted to see me, and,
secondly, he wanted to make some geological examinations on my
grounds, which were situated, as he informed me, upon a terminal
moraine, a formation which he had not yet had an opportunity of
practically investigating.

I had not known that I lived on a moraine, and now that I knew it, I did
not care. But Tom Burton glowed with high spirits and lively zeal as he
told me how the great bluff on which my house stood, together with the
other hills and wooded terraces which stretched away from it along the
side of the valley, had been formed by the minute fragments of rock
and soil, which, during ages and ages, had been gradually pushed down
from the mountains by a great glacier which once occupied the country
to the northeast of my house. "Why, Walter, my boy," he cried, "if I
had not read it all in the books I should have known for myself, as soon
as I came here, that there had once been a glacier up there, and as it
gradually moved to the southwest it had made this country what it is.
Have you a stream down there in that dell which I see lies at right
angles with the valley and opens into it?"
"No," said I; "I wish there were one. The only stream we have flows
along the valley and not on my property."
Without waiting for me Tom