The Choir Invisible | Page 7

of the time and place. A parson, who had been the
calmest of Indian fighters, had lost all self-control as he contended out
in the road with another parson for the use of Dr. Watts' hymns instead
of the Psalms of David. Near by, listening to them, and with a
wondering eye on all he saw in the street, stood a French priest of
Bordeaux, an exile from the fury of the avenging jacobins. There were
brown flatboatmen, in weather-beaten felt hats, just returned by the
long overland trip from New Orleans and discussing with tobacco
merchants the open navigation of the Mississippi; and as they talked,
up to them hurried the inventor Edward West, who said with
excitement that if they would but step across the common to the town
branch, he would demonstrate by his own model that some day
navigation would be by steam: whereat they all laughed kindly at him

for a dreamer, and went to laugh at the action of his mimic boat,
moving hither and thither over the dammed water of the stream. Sitting
on a stump apart from every one, his dog at his feet, his rifle across his
lap, an aged backwoodsman surveyed in sorrow the civilization that
had already destroyed his hunting and that was about sending him
farther west to the depths of Missouri--along with the buffalo. His
glance fell with disgust upon two old gentlemen in knee-breeches who
met and offered each other their snuff-boxes, with a deep bow. He
looked much more kindly at a crave, proud Chickasaw hunter, who
strode by with inward grief and shame, wounded by the robbery of his
people. Puritans from New England; cavaliers from Virginia;
Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania; mild-eyed trappers and bargemen from
the French hamlets of Kaskaskia and Cahokia; wood-choppers; scouts;
surveyors; swaggering adventurers; land-lawyers; colonial
burgesses,--all these mingled and jostled, plotted and bartered, in the
shops, in the streets, under the trees.
And everywhere soldiers and officers of the Revolution--come West
with their families to search for homes, or to take possession of the
grants made them by the Government. In the course of a short walk
John Gray passed men who had been wounded in the battle of Point
Pleasant; men who had waded behind Clark through the freezing
marshes of the Illinois to the storming of Vincennes; men who had
charged through flame and smoke up the side of King's Mountain
against Ferguson's Carolina loyalists; men who with chilled ardour had
let themselves be led into the massacre of the Wabash by blundering St.
Clair; men who with wild thrilling pulses had rushed to victory behind
mad Antony Wayne.
And the women! Some--the terrible lioness-mothers of the Western
jungles who had been used like men to fight with rifle, knife, and
axe--now sat silent in the doorways of their rough cabins, wrinkled,
scarred, fierce, silent, scornful of all advancing luxury and refinement.
Flitting gaily past them, on their way to the dry goods stores--supplied
by trains of pack-horses from over the Alleghanies, or by pack-horse
and boat down the Ohio--hurried the wives of the officers, daintily
choosing satins and ribands for a coming ball. All this and more he

noted as he passed lingeringly on. The deep vibrations of history swept
through him, arousing him as the marshalling storm cloud, the rush of
winds, and sunlight flickering into gloom kindle the sense of the high,
the mighty, the sublime.
As he was crossing the common, a number of young fellows stripped
and girt for racing--for speed greater than an Indian's saved many a life
in those days, and running was part of the regular training of the
young--bounded up to him like deer, giving a challenge: he too was
very swift. But he named another day, impatient of the many
interruptions that had already delayed him, and with long, rapid strides
he had soon passed beyond the last fields and ranges of the town. Then
he slackened his pace. Before him, a living wall, rose the edge of the
wilderness. Noting the position of the sun and searching for a point of
least resistance, he plunged in.
Soon he had to make his way through a thicket of cane some twelve
feet high; then through a jungle of wild rye, buffalo grass and briars;
beyond which he struck a narrow deertrace and followed that in its
westward winding through thinner undergrowth under the dark trees.
He was unarmed. He did not even wear a knife. But the thought rose in
his mind of how rapidly the forest also was changing its character. The
Indians were gone. Two years had passed since they had for the last
time flecked the tender green with tender blood. And the deadly wild
creatures--the native people of earth and tree--they likewise had fled
from the