The Choir Invisible | Page 4

pioneer dreamed of when he fell
asleep beside his rifle and his hunting-knife in his lonely cabin of the
wilderness. She was perhaps the first beautiful girl of aristocratic birth
ever seen in Kentucky, and the first of the famous train of those who
for a hundred years since have wrecked or saved the lives of the men.
Her pink calico dress, newly starched and ironed, had looked so pretty
to her when she had started from home, that she had not been able to
bear the thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded,
mud-stained riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting
against the saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze
morocco shoes. On her hands she had drawn white half-hand mittens of
home-knit; and on her head she wore an enormous white scoop-bonnet,
lined with pink and tied under her chin in a huge muslin bow. Her face,
hidden away under the pink-and-white shadow, showed such hints of
pearl and rose that it seemed carved from the inner surface of a

sea-shell. Her eyes were gray, almond shaped, rather wide apart, with
an expression changeful and playful, but withal rather shrewd and hard;
her light brown hair, as fine as unspun silk, was parted over her brow
and drawn simply back behind her ears; and the lips of her little mouth
curved against each other, fresh, velvet-like, smiling.
On she rode down the avenue of the primeval woods; and Nature
seemed arranged to salute her as some imperial presence; with the
waving of a hundred green boughs above on each side; with a hundred
floating odours; with the swift play of nimble forms up and down the
boles of trees; and all the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies.
Then one of those trifles happened that contain the history of our lives,
as a drop of dew draws into itself the majesty and solemnity of the
heavens.
>From the pommel of the side-saddle there dangled a heavy roll of
home-spun linen, which she was taking to town to her aunt's merchant
as barter for queen's-ware pitchers; and behind this roll of linen,
fastened to a ring under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied
up in a large blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever
she fidgeted in the saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often
did because he was clumsy and because the road was obstructed by
stumps and roots, the string by which this bundle was tied slipped a
little through the lossening knot and the bundle hung a little lower
down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into the broader public
road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the travelling began to be
really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet against the loop of a
root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle slipped noiselessly
from the saddle to the earth.
She did not see it. She indignantly gathered the reins more tightly in her
hand, pushed back her bonnet, which now hung down over her eyes
like the bill of a pelican, and applied her little switch of wild cherry to
the horse's flank with such vehemence that a fly which was about to
alight on that spot went to the other side. The old horse himself--he
bore the peaceable name of William Penn--merely gave one of the
comforting switches of his bob-tail with which he brushed away the

thought of any small annoyance, and stopped a moment to nibble at the
wayside cane mixed with purple blossoming peavine.
Out of the lengthening shadows of the woods the girl and the horse
passed on toward the little town; and far behind them in the public road
lay the lost bundle.
II
IN the open square on Cheapside in Lexington there is now a bronze
statue of John Breckinridge. Not far from where it stands the pioneers a
hundred years ago had built the first log school-house of the town.
Poor old school-house, long since become scattered ashes! Poor little
backwoods academicians, driven in about sunrise, driven out toward
dusk! Poor little tired backs with nothing to lean against! Poor little
bare feet that could never reach the floor! Poor little droop-headed
figures, so sleepy in the long summer days, so afraid to fall asleep!
Long, long since, little children of the past, your backs have become
straight enough, measured on the same cool bed; sooner or later your
feet, wherever wandering, have found their resting-places in the soft
earth; and all your drooping heads have gone to sleep on the same
dreamless pillow and there are sleeping. And the young schoolmaster,
who seemed exempt from frailty while he guarded like a sentinel that
lone outpost of the alphabet--he too has long since joined the choir