The Messengers | Page 3

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Prepared by Don Lainson

THE MESSENGERS
When Ainsley first moved to Lone Lake Farm all of his friends asked
him the same question. They wanted to know, if the farmer who sold it
to him had abandoned it as worthless, how one of the idle rich, who
could not distinguish a plough from a harrow, hoped to make it pay?
His answer was that he had not purchased the farm as a means of
getting richer by honest toil, but as a retreat from the world and as a test
of true friendship. He argued that the people he knew accepted his
hospitality at Sherry's because, in any event, they themselves would be
dining within a taxicab fare of the same place. But if to see him they
travelled all the way to Lone Lake Farm, he might feel assured that
they were friends indeed.
Lone Lake Farm was spread over many acres of rocky ravine and forest,
at a point where Connecticut approaches New York, and between it and
the nearest railroad station stretched six miles of an execrable wood
road. In this wilderness, directly upon the lonely lake, and at a spot
equally distant from each of his boundary lines, Ainsley built himself a
red brick house. Here, in solitude, he exiled himself; ostensibly to
become a gentleman farmer; in reality to wait until Polly Kirkland had
made up her mind to marry him.
Lone Lake, which gave the farm its name, was a pond hardly larger
than a city block. It was fed by hidden springs, and fringed about with
reeds and cat-tails, stunted willows and shivering birch. From its
surface jutted points of the same rock that had made farming
unremunerative, and to these miniature promontories and islands
Ainsley, in keeping with a fancied resemblance, gave such names as the
Needles, St. Helena, the Isle of Pines. From the edge of the pond that
was farther from the house rose a high hill, heavily wooded. At its base,
oak and chestnut trees spread their branches over the water, and when
the air was still were so clearly reflected in the pond that the leaves
seemed to float upon the surface. To the smiling expanse of the farm
the lake was what the eye is to the human countenance. The oaks were
its eyebrows, the fringe of reeds its lashes, and, in changing mood, it
flashed with happiness or brooded in sombre melancholy. For Ainsley
it held a deep attraction. Through the summer evenings, as the sun set,

he would sit on the brick terrace and watch the fish leaping, and listen
to the venerable bull-frogs croaking false alarms of rain. Indeed, after
he met Polly Kirkland, staring moodily at the lake became his favorite
form of exercise. With a number of other men, Ainsley was very much
in love with Miss Kirkland, and unprejudiced friends thought that if she
were to choose any of her devotees, Ainsley