24
DALLAS GALBRA ITH.
doun. “ Let him keep his hut for a work-shop. But Dallas shall live with me.” To which George assented eagerly. Elizabeth never pleased him so much as when she gave a little evidence of Irish extravagance or hospitality. The doors of his own house and heart were open as a market-place ; the more that tramped through them. the better; but the key of Lizzy’s was turned ; and when anybody asked for a place at her table or in her friendship. she scanned them as cau tiously from behind her bars as if it were a quiet convent into which they wanted to enter. So all the village heard of the reserved room for Galbraith with surprise, and said, with Father Kimball, that the boy had made his best friend now. “ Lizzy be a queer one ; she be differ ent from Laddoun. Her likings and dislikings come to be a part of herself, like clams on a rock,” old Graah said. Everybody knew of the room but Dal las himself; it had been the talk of the village that day that she was going to surprise him with it, and they all, for
their own purposes, kept the secret. He fancied, however, as he went by the farm houses on his way, that there was a pe culiar twinkle in the women’s faces as they called to him, an unusual fun and
cheerfulness, and that their voices never had sounded so hearty and kind. The men at Nixon’s, too, as he passed, joking about his clothes, did it with an under
current of meaning in their lazy talk that touched him, he did not know why. There was not one of them to whom he had not tried to be useful in his small way, in their thronged fishing-times, or in the sickness last year, when one or two were down in every house. So, when they
UANUARY.
Now the truth of the matter was this: and it was, to make no mystery of the
thing, the secret of Nixon‘s whisper to Father Kimball. Manasquan people might, as George Laddoun asserted, be
over-boastful, and rate their village too highly, but they were clannish, swore by each other to the exclusion of the world, and were fond, too, in a simple, generous
way, of humoring their favorites, of little fétes, processions and the like. So when it was noised about that Lizzy had set apart a room for Galbraith, and meant to give a home to the lad, it was quite in keeping with their habits that there should be a general contribution in order to make the room comfortable and snug,
and that they should make a little glori fication of the matter by keeping it quiet until Lizzy should break it to him. So they all watched the tall, lank boy, in his holiday suit, making his way through the woods, with a genial, inward satis faction. A deserving. good creature, whom the world had abused until Mana squan was shrewd enough to find out his merit. The air was sun-lit and sweet-scented. as we said; the woods through which he walked were silent and motionless as
though they had stood in it unmoved for centuries. It was the edge of a great and almost unbroken wilderness that he skirted, gigantic pines, with bare, hoary trunks, rising into a thick sheet of foliage above. There had been times (when the world turned a harsher face on Dallas than to-day) when he had thought this forest one of the places where Death him self hid, so monstrous were the elfish
growths that matted every limb, of un natural mosses, and lichens of diseased and feverish hues. The more dead the wished him good luck, and threw an old bough was, the more vivid and strong shoe after him. he thought they had, per was the parasite that fed on it. But to-day his unwholesome fancy was haps. been talking of him, and found how forgotten, and Galbraith suddenly stopped much they all were his friends. “And so they are.” said Dallas, shying his crunching step over the crisp needles stones vehemently into the pond, with a of the pines, and drew his breath with choking in his throat. “There’s not a quick surprise and wonder at the infinite man or woman in Manasquan that isn’t beauty over which the sunshine flickered my friend. I think some one must always ‘ through the green, arching dome over have managed my luck for me,” his face ~ head. The delicate Southern moss hung I in trailing webs of palest grayish green grave, but not daring to look up.
