THE PLACE BEYOND THE WINDS ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[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"
