Summer | Page 2

Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.
The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and
North Dormer shrank to its real size. As she looked up and down it,
from lawyer Royall's faded red house at one end to the white church at

the other, she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a weather-beaten
sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway,
trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern
communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no "business
block"; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state
of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been
bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed
on the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always been told that she
ought to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North
Dormer. She knew that, compared to the place she had come from,
North Dormer represented all the blessings of the most refined
civilization. Everyone in the village had told her so ever since she had
been brought there as a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to her,
on a terrible occasion in her life: "My child, you must never cease to
remember that it was Mr. Royall who brought you down from the
Mountain."
She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from the scarred cliff
that lifted its sullen wall above the lesser slopes of Eagle Range,
making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley. The
Mountain was a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptly from
the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow over North
Dormer. And it was like a great magnet drawing the clouds and
scattering them in storm across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer
sky, there trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, it drifted to the
Mountain as a ship drifts to a whirlpool, and was caught among the
rocks, torn up and multiplied, to sweep back over the village in rain and
darkness.
Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a
bad place, and a shame to have come from, and that, whatever befell
her in North Dormer, she ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded
her, to remember that she had been brought down from there, and hold
her tongue and be thankful. She looked up at the Mountain, thinking of
these things, and tried as usual to be thankful. But the sight of the
young man turning in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the
vision of the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she felt ashamed of her

old sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer, and jealously aware of Annabel
Balch of Springfield, opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on
glories greater than the glories of Nettleton.
"How I hate everything!" she said again.
Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hinged gate. Passing
through it, she walked down a brick path to a queer little brick temple
with white wooden columns supporting a pediment on which was
inscribed in tarnished gold letters: "The Honorius Hatchard Memorial
Library, 1832."
Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though
she would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as
her only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For
Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had
enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of the
library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked
literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle
Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and
Fitz-Greene Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever
contracted in Italy. Such had been the sole link between North Dormer
and literature, a link piously commemorated by the erection of the
monument where Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday
afternoon, sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of the
deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than
she did in his library.
Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took off her hat, hung
it on a plaster bust of Minerva, opened the shutters, leaned out to see if
there were any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the windows,
and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a roll of cotton
lace and a steel crochet hook. She was not an expert workwoman, and it
had taken her many weeks to make the half-yard of narrow lace which
she kept wound about the