Mahindra Tractor 30 Series 6030 6530

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you don’t want to risk going East, why not visit some of the Spanish
people in Southern California?”
“I shall stay here.”
It was during the next night that Nina left her bed suddenly, flung
herself into a chair, and pressed her elbows hard upon her knees.
She had barely slept for three nights. Her nerves were in a highly
irritable state. If any one had entered she would not have been able
to control her temper. Black depression possessed her; the irritability
of her nerves alternated with the sensation of dropping through
space; and her relaxed body cried for stimulant.
She twisted her hands together, her face convulsed. “Why should I
fight?” she argued aloud. “In that, at least, I should find temporary
oblivion. And what else have I left? Down deep, ever since I got his
last letter, I have known that I should never see him again. It is my
destiny: that is the beginning and the end of it. This is the second
time I have wanted it since the baby died. I beat it out of me the
first time. I hoped—hoped—and if he were here I should win. If I
could be happy, and go away with him, it would not come again: I
know—I know. He could have got me some word by this. He is not
dead. There is only one other explanation. Men are all alike, they
say. Why should I struggle? For what? What have I to live for? I am
the most wretched woman on earth.”
But she did struggle. The dawn found her sitting there still, her
muscles almost rigid. Her love for Thorpe had undergone no change;
it took the fight into its own hands. And it seemed to her that she
could hear her soul beg for its rights; its voice rose above the
persistent clamour of her body.
She went to bed and slept for a few hours; but when she awoke the
desire in her nerves was madder than ever. Every part of her cried
out for stimulant. She had no love for the taste of liquor; the
demand came from her nerve-centres. But still she fought on,
materialising the monster, fancying that she held it by the throat,
that she cut its limbs off, its heart out; but it shook itself together
with magnificent vitality, and laughed in her face.
Days passed. The clamour in her body strove to raise itself above
the despairing cry in her soul. But still, mechanically, without hope,
she lifted her ear to the higher cry, knowing that if she fell now she
should never rise again in her earthly life, nor speak with Dudley
Thorpe, should he, perhaps, return.
She invoked the image of her baby, the glory of the few days she
had known it. But a bitter tide of resentment overwhelmed the
memory of that brief exaltation. If she was to be saved, why had not
the baby been spared? Those who shared her secret had attempted
to console her by assuring her that its death was a mercy for all
concerned. She had not answered them; but her grief was cut with
contempt for their lack of vision. The baby might have cost her her
social position, but it would have stood between her soul and
perdition. It had been taken—by One who was supposed to know
the needs of all His creatures. Therefore it was only reasonable to
assume that He wished her to be destroyed.
She thought of nothing else, but cunningly pretended to be
absorbed in her books.
There came a night when her nerves shrieked until her brain surged
with the din of them, and her hands clutched at the air, her eyes
hardened and expanded with greed, her lips were forced apart by
her panting breath. She jerked the stopper out of a bottle of cologne
and swallowed a quarter of the contents, then flung her wraps about
her, stole downstairs and out of the house, found a carriage, and
was driven to South Park.
 III
Two weeks later she sat huddled over the fire in the library. Her face
was yellow; her eyes were sunken and dull; her hands trembled. She
looked thirty-five.
In her lap lay a letter from Dudley Thorpe. He and his brother, at the
risk of their lives, had got through the lines and reached New York.
The excitement, fatigue, and exposure had nearly killed Harold, who
was in a hospital in a precarious condition. Thorpe could not leave
him. He implored her to come on to New York at once; and he had
never written a more tender and passionate letter.
Cochrane opened the door, and announced that Dr. Clough had
called.
“Tell him to come here,” she said.
Dr. Clough wore his usual jaunty air, and he made no comment on
her appearance; he had come straight from Miss Shropshire.
“Sit down,” said Nina, curtly, interrupting his demonstrations. “You
come at the right moment. I was about to send for you.”
“My dear cousin Nina! I hope there is no—”
“Let me talk, please. Do you wish to marry me?”
Clough caught his breath. He flushed, despite his nerve. “Of course I
do,” he stammered. “What a question! Certainly there never was a
woman so original. It is like you to settle matters in your own way.”
“Don’t delude yourself for a moment that I even like you. Of all the
men I have ever known, the sort of person I take you to be has my
most unmitigated contempt. It is for that reason I marry you. I must
marry some one at once to keep myself from ruining the life of
Dudley Thorpe. I choose you, because, in the first place, I am so vile
a thing that no punishment is severe enough for me; and, in the
second, Fate has acquitted herself so brilliantly in regard to my
humble self that I feel a certain satisfaction in giving her all she
wants.”
“My dear Nina, you are morbid.” He spoke pleasantly, but he turned
away his eyes.
“Possibly; it would be somewhat remarkable if I were not. Do you
still wish to marry me?”
“Certainly. I do not take your rather uncomplimentary utterances
seriously. In your present frame of mind—”
“It is the only frame of mind I shall ever be in. You will have an
unpleasant domestic life; but you will have all the money you want.
Don’t flatter yourself for a moment that you will either control or
cure me. You will be no more in my house than a well-paid butler—
after my father has been induced to accept you, which will not be in
a hurry. Meanwhile, you will probably beat me: you are quite capable
of it; but you may save yourself the exertion.”
“I shall not beat you, Nina, dear.” He spoke softly, with an
assumption of masculine indulgence; but his small pointed teeth
moved suddenly apart.
“You will understand, of course, that this engagement must not get
to my father’s ears. He would lock me up before he would permit me
to marry you. He has all the contempt of the gentleman for the cad,
of the real man for the bundle of petty imitations: and you are his
pet aversion. On the tenth, he is obliged to go to San José to attend
an important law-suit. He will be detained not less than three days.
We shall marry on the eleventh—at Mrs. Lester’s. I shall not tell my
mother, for I will not give her the pleasure of conspiring against my
father. I suppose that I shall break my father’s heart; but I don’t
know that I care. He might have saved me, if he had been stronger,
and I am no longer capable of loving any one—”
“Suppose Mr. Thorpe should come out here after you, anyhow,
married or not.”
“He will do nothing of the sort. One reason you would be incapable
of understanding, should I attempt to explain; the other is, that he
will no longer want me after I have been the wife of a person of
your sort.”
“My word, Nina, you are rather rough on a fellow; but give me a
kiss, and I’ll overlook it.”
She lifted her face, and let him kiss her, then struck him so violent a
blow that the little man staggered.
“Now go,” she said, “and don’t let me see you again until the
eleventh. If you have anything to say, you can write it to Molly
Shropshire.”
When he had gone, she drew her hand across her lips, then looked
closely at it as if expecting to see a stain. Then she shuddered, and
huddled closer to the fire, and in a few moments threw Dudley
Thorpe’s letter on the coals.
 IV
“Well, some women are remarkable!” exclaimed Miss Shropshire to
her sister, Mrs. Lester. “The idea of her having a wedding dress,—
white satin, train, and all. She even fussed over at least twenty pairs
of slippers, and I was almost afraid to bring home that bridal veil for
fear it wouldn’t suit her.”
“I suppose she thinks that weddings, white satin ones, at least, only
come once in a lifetime.” Mrs. Lester was a tired little woman, quite
subservient to her strong-minded sister. The wedding was to take
place in her back parlour at an hour when Mr. Lester, occupied and
unsuspecting, would be away from home. She did not approve of
the plot; but her opinion, much less her consent, had not been
asked.
“I’d like to thoroughly understand Nina Randolph, just for once,” said
Miss Shropshire, meditatively. “It would be interesting, to say the
least.”
The night before the wedding she went into Nina’s room, and found
her standing before the mirror arrayed in her bridal finery,—veil,
gloves, slippers, all. She had regained her natural hues; but her eyes
were still sunken, her face pinched and hard. She was almost plain.
“Nina! Why on earth have you put on those things? Don’t you know
it’s bad luck?”
Nina laughed.
Miss Shropshire exclaimed, “Umburufen!” and rapped loudly three
times on the top of a chair. “There! I hope that will do some good. I
know what you are thinking—you are so unlucky, anyhow. But why
tempt fate?” She hesitated a moment. “It is not too late. Put it off
for six months, and then see how you feel about it. You are morbid
now. You don’t know what changes time might—”
“No earthly power can prevent me from marrying Richard Clough to-
morrow.”
“Very well, I shall stand by you, of course. That goes without saying.
But I believe you are making a terrible mistake. I would rather you
married almost any one else. There are several gentlemen that
would be ready and willing.”
“I don’t wish to marry a gentleman.”

The next afternoon Nina, Mrs. Lester, and Miss Shropshire were in
the back parlour awaiting the arrival of Clough, his best man, and
the clergyman, when there was a sudden furious pull at the bell of
the front door. Nina sprang to her feet. For the first time in many
weeks animation sprang to her eyes.
“It is my father!” she said. “Close the folding-doors. Molly, I rely on
you! Do you understand? Send him away, and as quickly as possible.
Tell a servant to watch outside, and take the others round the back
way.”
Before she had finished speaking, Mr. Randolph’s voice was heard in
the hall, demanding his daughter. The servants had been given
orders to deny the fact of Miss Randolph’s presence in the house to
any one but Dr. Clough. Nevertheless, Mr. Randolph brushed past the
woman that opened the door, and entered the front parlour. Miss
Shropshire joined him at once. Every word of the duologue that
followed could be heard on the other side of the folding-doors.
“Why, Mr. Randolph!” exclaimed Miss Shropshire, easily. “Why this
unexpected honour? I thought you were in San José.”
“Is my daughter here?” He was evidently much excited, and
endeavouring to control himself.
“Nina? No. Why? Is she not at Redwoods? She was to go down
yesterday.”
“She is not at Redwoods. I have received private and reliable
information that she is to marry Richard Clough this afternoon, and I
have reason to think that she is in this house.”
“What? Nina going to marry that horrid little man? I don’t believe it!”
Miss Shropshire was a woman of thorough and uncompromising
methods.
“Is Nina in this house or not?”
“Mr. Randolph! Of course she is not. I would have nothing to do with
such an affair.”
Mr. Randolph swallowed a curse, and strode up and down the room
several times. Then he paused and confronted her once more.
“Molly,” he said, “I appeal to you as a woman. If you have any
friendship for Nina, give her up to me and save her from ruin, or tell
me where she is. It is not yet too late. I will risk everything and take
her abroad. She is ruining her own life and Thorpe’s and mine by a
mistaken sense of duty to him, and contempt for herself: I know her
so well that I feel sure that is the reason for this act she
contemplates to-day. I will take her to Thorpe. He could reclaim her.
Clough—you can perhaps imagine how Clough will treat her! Picture
the life she must lead with that man, and give her up to me. And, if
you have any heart, keep my own from breaking. She is all that I
have. You know what my home is; I have lived in hell for twenty-four
years for this girl’s sake. I have kept a monster in my house that
Nina should have no family scandal to reproach me with. And all to
what purpose if she marries a cad and a brute? I would have
endured the torments of the past twenty-five years, multiplied
tenfold, to have secured her happiness. If she marries Richard
Clough, it will kill me.”
“She is not here,” replied Miss Shropshire.
Mr. Randolph trembled from head to foot. “My God!” he cried, “have
you women no heart? Are all women, I wonder, like those I have
known? My wife, a demon who nursed her baby on brandy! My
daughter, repaying the devotion of years with blackest ingratitude!
And you—” He fell, rather than dropped to his knees, and caught her
dress in his hands.
“Molly,” he prayed, “give her to me. Save her from becoming one of
the outcast of the earth. For that is what this marriage will mean to
her.”
Miss Shropshire set her teeth. “Nina is not here,” she said.
Mr. Randolph stumbled to his feet, and rushed from the house. He
walked rapidly down the hill toward Old Trinity in Pine Street, the
church Nina attended, his dislocated mind endeavouring to suggest
that he wait for her there. His agitation was so marked that several
people turned and looked after him in surprise. He reached the
church. A carriage approached, passed. Its occupants were Richard
Clough, a well-known gambler named Bell, and a man who carried
the unmistakable cut of a parson.
Mr. Randolph rushed to the middle of the street, ordering the driver
to stop. The window of the carriage was open. He caught Clough by
the shoulder.
“Are you on your way to marry my daughter?” he demanded.
“My dear Uncle James,” replied the young man, airily, “you are all
wrong. I am on my way to marry—it is true; but the unfortunate
lady is Miss McCullum.”
Mr. Randolph turned to the gambler, and implored him, as a man of
honour, to tell him the truth.
Bell replied: “As a man of honour, I dare not.”
Mr. Randolph appealed to the clergyman, but met only a solemn
scowl, and mechanically dropped back, with the sensation of having
lost the good-will of all men. A moment later the carriage was
rattling up the street at double speed, and he cursed his stupidity in
not forcing an entrance, or hanging on behind. There was no other
carriage in sight.
 V
The days were very long to Dudley Thorpe. The invalid recovered
slowly, and demanded much of his time. Before an answer to his
letter could be expected, Harold was sufficiently mended to be
removed to the house of a friend on Long Island. He declared his
intention of sailing for California as soon as he could obtain the
doctor’s permission to travel. The lady to whom he was betrothed
came over from England and married him; and Thorpe had little to
do but to think.
He bitterly reproached himself that he had asked Nina to come to
New York, instead of trusting to his brother’s recuperative powers,
and starting at once for California. He dared not go now, lest he
pass her. But he was beset by doubts, and some of them were
nightmares. She would come if her child had lived, and she had
weathered her year. If she had not! He knew what she had suffered
during that year, would have guessed without the aid of the few
letters she had written after letters from him had ceased to reach
California. Exposure and shame might have come to her since. If he
could have been sure that she believed in him, he would have feared
little; but it was not to be expected that she had received a letter he
had sent her from the West Indies. The telegraph has averted many
a tragedy, but there was none across the United States. With all his
will and health and wealth and love, he had been as powerless to
help her in the time of her great trouble, was as powerless to help
her now, as if he were in the bottom of a Haytian swamp. All that
was fine in him, and there was much, was thoroughly roused. He not
only longed for her and for his child, but he vowed to devote the
rest of his life to her happiness. It seemed to him incredible that he
could have committed such a series of mistakes; that no man who
loved a woman with the passion of his life had ever so consistently
done the wrong thing. But mistakes are not isolated acts, to be
plucked out of life and viewed as an art student views his first
model, in which he finds only a few bald lines; even when the
pressure of many details is not overwhelming it often clouds the
mental vision. Years after, Thorpe accepted the fact that the great
links in that year’s chain of events were connected by hundreds of
tiny links as true of form; but not then.
One day a budget of mail got through the lines, and in it was a letter
for him. It was from Nina, and was dated shortly after the last he
had found awaiting him when he arrived from Cuba.
I don’t know where you are, if you will ever get this; but I must
write to you. The baby is dead. It was a little girl. It is buried in the
forest.
Nina.
The steamer by which he expected her arrived a few days later. It
brought him the following letter:
I was married yesterday. My name is Mrs. Richard Clough. My
husband is the son of a Haworth cobbler. I received your letter.
Nina Randolph Clough.
 VI
Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thorpe sailed on the next steamer for California.
Dudley Thorpe worked his way South, offered his services to the
Confederacy, fought bitterly and brilliantly, when he was not in
hospital with a bullet in him, rose to the rank of colonel, and made a
name for himself which travelled to California and to England. At the
close of the war, he returned home and entered Parliament. He
became known as a hard worker, a member of almost bitter honesty,
and a forcible and magnetic speaker. Socially he was, first, a lion,
afterward, a steady favourite. Altogether he was regarded as a
success by his fellow-men.
It was some years before he heard from his brother. Harold was
delighted with the infinite variety of California; his health was
remarkably good; and he had settled for life. Only his first letter
contained a reference to Nina Randolph. She had lived in Napa for a
time, then gone to Redwoods. She never came to San Francisco;
therefore he had been unable to call, had never even seen her. All
Thorpe’s other friends had been very kind to himself and his wife.
Thorpe long before this had understood. The rage and disgust of the
first months had worn themselves out, given place to his intimate
knowledge of her. Had he returned to California it would have been
too late to do her any good, and would have destroyed the dear
memory of her he now possessed. He still loved her. For many
months the pain of it had been unbearable. It was unbearable no
longer, but he doubted if he should ever love another woman. The
very soul of him had gone out to her, and if it had returned he was
not conscious of it. As the years passed, there were long stretches
when she did not enter his thought, when memory folded itself
thickly about her and slept. Time deals kindly with the wounds of
men. And he was a man of active life, keenly interested in the
welfare of his country. But he married no other woman.
It was something under ten years since he had left California, when
he received a letter from his sister-in-law stating that his brother was
dead, and begging him to come out and settle her affairs, and take
her home. She had neither father nor brother; and he went at once,
although he had no desire to see California again.
There were rails between New York and San Francisco by this time,
and he found the latter a large flourishing and hideous city. The
changes were so great, the few acquaintances he met during the
first days of his visit looked so much older, that his experience of ten
years before became suddenly blurred of outline. He was not quite
forty; but he felt like an old man groping in his memory for an
episode of early youth. The eidolon of Nina Randolph haunted him,
but with ever-evading lineaments. He did not know whether to feel
thankful or disappointed.
He devoted himself to his sister-in-law’s affairs for a week, then,
finding a Sunday afternoon on his hands, started, almost reluctantly,
to call on Mrs. McLane.
South Park was unchanged.
He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown
around and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the
ugliest varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately,
dark, solemn, had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint.
His eyes moved swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were
closed. The dust of summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully
five minutes staring at it, regardless of curious eyes. Something
awoke and hungered within him.
“My vanished youth, I suppose,” he thought sadly. “I certainly have
no wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet.”
He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at
Mrs. McLane’s door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief
that the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from
the parlour. The man lifted a portière, and Mrs. McLane, with an
exclamation of delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched.
Her face was unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It
was white.
“Thorpe!” she exclaimed. “It is not possible? How long have you
been here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I
suppose I am fortunate to be remembered at all.”
Thorpe assured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour
of his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of
business before venturing into her distracting presence.
“I don’t forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will
that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention
itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may
speak to your other old friends.”
Two of the “Macs” were there; the other was dead, he was told later.
Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of
Paris. Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still
flashing eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was
unmarried and had grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.
They all received him with flattering warmth, “treated him much
better than he deserved,” Mrs. McLane remarked, “considering he
had never written one of them a line;” and he felt the past growing
sharp of outline. There were several very smart young ladies
present, two of whom he remembered as awkward little girls. The
very names of the others were unknown to him. They knew of him,
however, and one of them affected to disapprove of him sharply
because he had “fought against the flag.” Mrs. McLane took up the
cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.
Nina Randolph’s name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were
dead. Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most
momentous episode of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he
had once been somewhat attentive to her. But his memory was
breaking in the middle and marshalling its forces at the farther end;
the events of the intervening ten years were now a confused mass
of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican love-song, and he turned the
leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe Hathaway that he was glad
to find her unchanged, she replied:—
“I am fat, and you know it. And as I don’t mind in the least, you
need not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but
you’ve worn better than our men, who are burnt out with trade
winds and money grubbing.”
He remained an hour. When he left the house, he walked rapidly out
of the Park, casting but one hasty glance to the right, crossed the
city and went straight to the house of Molly Shropshire’s sister. It
also was unchanged, a square ugly brown house on a corner over-
looking the blue bay and the wild bright hills beyond. The houses
that had sprung up about it were cheap and fresh, and bulging with
bow-windows.
“Yes,” the maid told him, “Miss Shropshire still lived there, and was
at home.” The room into which she showed him was dark, and had
the musty smell of the unpopular front parlour. A white marble slab
on the centre table gleamed with funereal significance. Thorpe drew
up the blinds, and let in the sun. He was unable to decide if the
room had been refurnished since the one occasion upon which he
had entered it before; but it had an old-fashioned and dingy
appearance.
He heard a woman’s gown rustle down the stair, and his nerves
shook. When Miss Shropshire entered, she did not detect his effort
at composure. She had accepted the flesh of time, and her hair was
beginning to turn; but she shook hands in her old hearty decided
fashion.
“I heard yesterday that you were here,” she said. “Take that
armchair. I rather hoped you’d come. We used to quarrel; but, after
all, you are an Englishman, and I can never forget that I was born
over there, although I don’t remember so much as the climate.”
“Will you tell me the whole story? I did not intend to come to see
you, to mention her name. But it has come back, and I must know
all that there is to know—from the very date of my leaving up to
now. Of course, she wrote me that you were in her confidence.”
She told the story of a year which had been as big with import for
one woman as for a nation. “Mr. Randolph died six months after the
wedding,” she concluded, wondering if some men were made of
stone. “It killed him. He did not see her again until he was on his
death-bed. Then he forgave her. Any one would, poor thing. He left
his money in trust, so that she has a large income, and is in no
danger of losing it. She lives with her mother at Redwoods. Clough
died some years ago—of drink. It was in his blood, I suppose, for
almost from the day he set foot in Redwoods he was a sot.”
“And Nina?”
“Don’t try to see her,” said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. “You would only
be horrified,—you wouldn’t recognise her if you met her on the
street. She is breaking, fortunately. I saw her the other day, for the
first time in two years, and she told me she was very ill.”
“Have you deserted her?”
“Don’t put it that way! I shall always love Nina Randolph, and I am
often sick with pity. But she never comes here, and one cannot go to
Redwoods. It is said that the orgies there beggar description. Even
the Hathaways, who are their nearest neighbours, never enter the
gates. It is terrible! And if your letter had come six days earlier, it
would all have been different. But she was born to bad luck.”
Thorpe rose. “Thank you,” he said. “Are your sisters well? I shall be
here only a few days longer, but I shall try to call again.”
She laid her hand on his arm. She had a sudden access of vision.
“Don’t try to see Nina,” she said, impressively.
“God forbid!” he said.
 VII
He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of
poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on
the blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when
Death rose with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and
love rose with the vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the
love was for a woman who no longer existed, whose sodden brain
doubtless held no memory of him, or remembered only to curse him.
He strove to imagine her as she must be. She rose before him in
successive images of what she had been: from the night he had met
her to the morning of their last interview on the mountain,—a series
of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then his imagination
created her as she must have been during the months of her
solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her
letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of
herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad
with love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to
him in the torments of that night that he realised for the first time
what he had lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness
might have been his during the past ten years. Instead, he had had
excitement, honours, and mental activity; he had not been happy for
an hour. And the possibility of such happiness, of union with the one
woman whom he was capable of passionately loving with soul and
mind and body, was as dead as his youth, buried with the soul of a
woman whose face he would not recognise. She was above ground,
this woman, and a different being! He repeated the fact aloud; but it
was the one fact his imagination would not grasp and present to his
mental vision. It realised her suffering, her morbid despair, her
attitude to herself, to the world, and to him, when she had decided
to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of body and spirit
was outside its limitations.
In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave
California at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-
moving little person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented
to make ready. Her business affairs—which consisted of several
unsold ranches—could be left in the hands of an agent; there was
little more that her brother-in-law could do.
Harold’s remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault
on Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the
afternoon to make the final arrangements for removing them to
England.
Lone Mountain can be seen from any part of San Francisco; scarcely
a house but has a window from which one may receive his daily hint
that even Californians are mortal. Here is none of the illusion of the
cemetery of the flat, with its thickly planted trees and shrubbery,
where the children are taken to walk when they are good, and to
wonder at the glimpses of pretty little white houses and big white
slates with black letters. The shining tombs and vaults and
monuments, tier above tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in
one’s face the remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter,
the paths are running brooks; one imagines that the very dead are
soaked. In summer, the dusty trees and shrubs accentuate the
marble pride of dead and living men. Behind, higher still, rises a
bare brown mountain with a cross on its summit,—Calvary it is
called; and on stormy nights, or on days when the fog is writhing in
from the ocean, blurring even that high sharp peak, one fancies the
trembling outlines of a figure on the cross.
To-day the tombs were scarcely visible within the fine white mist
which had been creeping in from the Pacific since morning and had
made a beautiful ghost-land of the entire city. The cross on Calvary
looked huge and misshapen, the marbles like the phantoms of those
below. The mist dripped heavily from the trees, the walks were wet.
It is doubtful if there is so gloomy, so disturbing, so fascinating a
burying-ground on earth as the Lone Mountain of San Francisco.