Alas! To-day I would give everything
To see a friend's face, or hear voice
That had the slightest tone of comfort in it.--Longfellow.
About two miles from the town of Belden, N. H., stands an irregular farm
house that looks more like two dwellings forced to pass as one. One part
of it is all gables, and tile, and chimney corners, and antiquity, and
the other is square, slated, and of the newest cut, outside and in.
The farm is the property of Squire Amasa Bartlett, a good type of the big
man of the small place. He was a contented and would have been a happy
man--or at least thought he would have been--if the dearest wish of his
life could have been realized. It was that his son, Dave, and his wife's
niece, Kate, should marry. Kate was an orphan and the Squire's ward.
She owned the adjoining land, that was farmed with the Squire's as one.
So that Cupid would not have come to them empty handed; but the young
people appeared to have little interest in each other apart from that
cousinly affection which young people who are brought together would in
all probability feel for each other.
Dave was a handsome, dark-eyed young man, whose silence passed with some
for sulkiness; but he was not sulky--only deep and thoughtful, and
perhaps a little more devoid of levity than becomes a young man of
twenty-five. He had great force of character--you might have seen that
from his grave brow, and felt it in his simple speech and manner, that
was absolutely free from affectation.
Dave was his mother's idol, but his utter lack of worldliness, his
inability to drive a shrewd bargain sometimes annoyed his father, who was
a just, but an undeniably hard man, who demanded a hundred cents for his
dollar every day in the year.
Kate, whom the family circle hoped would one day be David's wife, was all
blonde hair, blue eyes and high spirits, so that the little blind god,
aided by the Squire's strategy, propinquity and the universal law of the
attraction of opposites, should have had no difficulty in making these
young people fall in love--but Destiny, apparently, decided to make them
exceptions to all rules.
Kate was fond of going to Boston to visit a schoolmate, and the Squire,
who looked with small favor on these visits, was disposed to attribute
them to Dave's lack of ardor.
"Confound it, Looizy," he would say to his wife, "if Dave made it more
lively for Kate she would not be fer flying off to Boston every time she
got a chance."