The Quickening | Page 6

and hands for a
chin-rest, looking down on a removed world mapping itself in softened
outlines near and far.
Men spoke of Paradise as "the valley," though it was rather a sheltered
cove with Mount Lebanon for its background and a semicircular range
of oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise ran the
white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full
quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for
the Dabney manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a
ribbon of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's as
Turkey Creek, but loved best by him under its almost forgotten Indian
name of Chiawassee.
Beyond the valley and its inclosing hills rose the "other mountain,"
blue in the sunlight and royal purple in the shadows--the Cumberland:

source and birthplace of the cooling west wind that was whispering
softly to the cedars on high Lebanon. Thomas Jefferson called the
loftiest of the purple distances Pisgah, picturing it as the mountain from
which Moses had looked over into the Promised Land. Sometime he
would go and climb it and feast his eyes on the sight of the Canaan
beyond; yea, he might even go down and possess the good land, if so
the Lord should not hold him back as He had held Moses.
That was a high thought, quite in keeping with the sense of
overlordship bred of the upper stillnesses. To company with it, the
home valley straightway began to idealize itself from the uplifted point
of view on the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were
delicately-outlined squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the
warm red brown of the upturned earth in the fallow places. The old
negro quarters on the Dabney grounds, many years gone to the ruin of
disuse, were vine-grown and invisible save as a spot of summer verdure;
and the manor-house itself, gray, grim and forbidding to a small boy
scurrying past it in the deepening twilight, was now no more than a
great square roof with the cheerful sunlight playing on it.
Farther down the valley, near the place where the white pike twisted
itself between two of the rampart hills to escape into the great valley of
the Tennessee, the split-shingled roof under which Thomas Jefferson
had eaten and slept since the earliest beginning of memories became
also a part of the high-mountain harmony; and the ragged, red iron-ore
beds on the slope above the furnace were softened into a blur of joyous
color.
The iron-furnace, with its alternating smoke puff and dull red flare,
struck the one jarring note in a symphony blown otherwise on great
nature's organ-pipes; but to Thomas Jefferson the furnace was as much
a part of the immutable scheme as the hills or the forests or the creek
which furnished the motive power for its air-blast. More, it stood for
him as the summary of the world's industry, as the white pike was the
world's great highway, and Major Dabney its chief citizen.
He was knocking his bare heels together and thinking idly of Major
Dabney and certain disquieting rumors lately come to Paradise, when

the tinkling drip of the spring into the pool at the foot of his perch was
interrupted by a sudden splash.
By shifting a little to the right he could see the spring. A girl of about
his own age, barefooted, and with only her tangled mat of dark hair for
a head covering, was filling her bucket in the pool. He broke a dry twig
from the nearest cedar and dropped it on her.
"You better quit that, Tom-Jeff Gordon. I taken sight o' you up there,"
said the girl, ignoring him otherwise.
"That's my spring, Nan Bryerson," he warned her dictatorially.
The girl looked up and scoffed. Hers was a face made for scoffing: oval
and finely lined, with a laughing mouth and dark eyes that had both the
fear and the fierceness of wild things in them.
"Shucks! it ain't your spring any more'n it's mine!" she retorted. "Hit's
on Maje' Dabney's land."
"Well, don't you muddy it none," said Thomas Jefferson, with
threatening emphasis.
For answer to this she put one brown foot deep into the pool and
wriggled her toes in the sandy bottom. Things began to turn red for
Thomas Jefferson, and a high, buzzing note, like the tocsin of the bees,
sang in his ears.
"Take your foot out o' that spring! Don't you mad me, Nan Bryerson!"
he cried.
She laughed up at him and flung him a taunt. "You don't darst to get
mad, Tommy-Jeffy; _you've got religion_."
It is a terrible thing to be angry in shackles. There are similes--pent
volcanoes, overcharged boilers and the like--but they are all