The Place Beyond the Winds

The Place Beyond the Winds

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Title: The Place Beyond the Winds
Author: Harriet T. Comstock
Illustrator: Harry Spafford Potter
Release Date: June 2, 2006 [EBook #18488]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: "It was a beautiful thing, that dance, grotesque, pagan and
yet divine"]

THE PLACE BEYOND THE WINDS
BY HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
Illustrated by HARRY SPAFFORD POTTER
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1914

FOREWORD
The In-Place cannot be found; you must happen upon it! Hidden behind
its rugged red rocks and hemlock-covered hills, it lies waiting for
something to happen. It has its Trading Station, to and from which the
Canadian Indians paddle their canoes--sometimes a dugout--bearing
rare, luscious blue berries invitingly packed in small baskets with their
own green leaves. And to the Station, also, go the hardy natives--good
English, Scotch, or "Mixed"--with their splendid loads of fish.
"White fish go: pickerel come"--but always there is fish through
summer days and winter's ice.
There is a lovely village Green, around which the modest homes cluster
sociably. Poor, plain places they may be, but never dirty nor untidy.
And the children and dogs! Such lovely babies; such human animals.
They play and work together quite naturally and are the truest friends.
A little church, with a queer pointed spire and a beautiful altar, stands
with open doors like a kindly welcome to all. Back of this, and
apologetically placed behind its stockade fence, is the jail.
To have a jail and never need it! What more can be said of a
community? But you are told--if you insist upon it--that the building is
preserved as a warning, and if any one should by chance be forced to
occupy it, "he will have the best the place affords"--for justice is
seasoned with mercy in the In-Place.

If you would know the aristocracy of the hamlet you must leave the
friendly Green and the pleasant water of the Channel, climb the red
rocks, tread the grassy road between the hemlocks and the pines, and
find the farms. For, be it understood, by one's ability to wrench a living
from the soil instead of the water is he known and estimated. To fish is
to gamble; to plant and reap is conservative business.
Dreamer's Rock and One Tree Island, Far Hill Place and Lonely Farm,
safely sheltered they lie, and from them, in obedience to the "Lure of
the States," comes now and again an adventurous soul to make his way,
if so he may; and never was there a braver, truer wanderer than Priscilla
of Lonely Farm. Equipped with a great faith, a straight method of
thinking, and an ideal that never faded from her sight, she, by the help
of the Poor Property Man, found her place and her work awaiting her.
Love, she found, too--love that had to be tested by a man's sense of
honour and a woman's determination, but it survived and found its
fulfilment before the Shrine in the woods beyond Lonely Farm, where,
as a little child, Priscilla had set up her Strange God and given homage
to it.
Harriet T. Comstock.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"It was a beautiful thing, that dance, grotesque, pagan and yet divine"
Frontispiece
"'And now,' she cried, 'I'll keep my word to you. Here! here! here!' The
bottles went whirling and crashing on the rocks near the roadway"
"'You mean, by this device you will make me marry you! You'll
blacken my name, bar my father's house to me, and then you will be
generous and--marry me?'"
"In one of those marvellous flashes of regained consciousness, the man
upon the bed opened his eyes and looked, first at Travers, then at
Priscilla"

"'It's past the Dreamer's Rock for us, my sweet, and out to the open
sea'"

The Place Beyond the Winds
CHAPTER I
Priscilla Glenn stood on the little slope leading down from the
farmhouse to the spring at the bottom of the garden, and lifted her head
as a young deer does when it senses something new or dangerous.
Suddenly, and entirely subconsciously, she felt her kinship with life,
her relation to the lovely May day which was more like June than
May--and a rare thing for Kenmore--whose seasons lapsed into each
other as calmly and sluggishly as did