The End of the World | Page 4

of the hill. And would not a few words from August
Wehle be pleasant to her ears after her mother's sharp depreciation? It
is at least safe to conjecture that some such feeling made her hurry
through the long, waving timothy of the meadow, and made her cross
the log that spanned the brook without ever so much as stopping to
look at the minnows glancing about in the water flecked with the
sunlight that struggled through the boughs of the water-willows. For, in
her thorough loneliness, Julia Anderson had come to love the birds, the
squirrels, and the fishes as companions, and in all her life she had never
before crossed the meadow brook without stooping to look at the
minnows.
All this haste Mrs. Anderson noticed. Having often scolded
[Illustration: TAKING AN OBSERVATION.]
Julia for "talking to the fishes like a fool," she noticed the omission.
And now she only waited until Julia was over the hill to take the path
round the fence under shelter of the blackberry thicket until she came to
the clump of alders, from the midst of which she could plainly see if
any conversation should take place between her Julia and the comely
young Dutchman.

In fact, Julia need not have hurried so much. For August Wehle had
kept one eye on his horses and the other on the house all that day. It
was the quick look of intelligence between the two at dinner that had
aroused the mother's suspicions. And Wehle had noticed the work on
the garden-bed, the call to the house, and the starting of Julia on the
path toward Mrs. Malcolm's. His face had grown hot, and his hand had
trembled. For once he had failed to see the stone in his way, until the
plow was thrown clean from the furrow. And when he came to the
shade of the butternut-tree by which she must pass, it had seemed to
him imperative that the horses should rest. Besides, the hames-string
wanted tightening on the bay, and old Dick's throat-latch must need a
little fixing. He was not sure that the clevis-pin had not been loosened
by the collision with the stone just now. And so, upon one pretext and
another, he managed to delay starting his plow until Julia came by, and
then, though his heart had counted all her steps from the door-stone to
the tree, then he looked up surprised. Nothing could be so astonishing
to him as to see her there! For love is needlessly crafty, it has always an
instinct of concealment, of indirection about it. The boy, and especially
the girl, who will tell the truth frankly in regard to a love affair is a
miracle of veracity. But there are such, and they are to be
reverenced--with the reverence paid to martyrs.
On her part, Julia Anderson had walked on as though she meant to pass
the young plowman by, until he spoke, and then she started, and
blushed, and stopped, and nervously broke off the top of a last year's
iron-weed and began to break it into bits while he talked, looking down
most of the time, but lifting her eyes to his now and then. And to the
sun-browned but delicate-faced young German it seemed, a vision of
Paradise--every glimpse of that fresh girl's face in the deep shade of the
sun-bonnet. For girls' faces can never look so sweet in this generation
as they did to the boys who caught sight of them, hidden away,
precious things, in the obscurity of a tunnel of pasteboard and calico!
This was not their first love-talk. Were they engaged? Yes, and no. By
all the speech their eyes were capable of in school, and of late by words,
they were engaged in loving one another, and in telling one another of
it. But they were young, and separated by circumstances, and they had

hardly begun to think of marriage yet. It was enough for the present to
love and be loved. The most delightful stage of a love affair is that in
which the present is sufficient and there is no past or future. And so
August hung his elbow around the top of the bay horse's hames, and
talked to Julia.
It is the highest praise of the German heart that it loves flowers and
little children; and like a German and like a lover that he was, August
began to speak of the anemones and the violets that were already
blooming in the corners of the fence. Girls in love are not apt to say any
thing very fresh. And Julia only said she thought the flowers seemed
happy in the sunlight In answer to this speech, which seemed to the
lover a bit of inspiration, he quoted from Schiller