Milly: At Love's Extremes, A Romance of the Southland

A man stood on the jutting shoulder of a mountain overlooking a long, narrow valley, whose scattering houses and irregular farm-plats, seen through the clear air of that high region, appeared scarcely a gun-shot distant, when in fact they were miles away. It was early morning; the sun had barely cleared the highest peaks in the east, and the landscape, albeit a mid-winter one, was wonderfully rich in colors. On the oak trees the leaves still clung in heavy brown, green and russet masses; the hickory forests, though leafless, made bits of tender gray along the lower valley-slopes, whilst high up toward the mountain tops, the billowy wilderness of pines, cedars and chestnut trees added their variegated patch-work that gradually rose and shaded off into the blue of distance. In some places where storms, or the needs of man, had removed the oak woods, a dense, frondous mass of young pines had leaped up with a greenness full of a soft yellow glow. The sunshine and the wind of the South were flowing over this scene, and there were fragrant odors and balsamic pungency in every wave. The man, a tall, shapely fellow, was a young Englishman who had lately come to the iron and coal region of Alabama to take charge of extensive manufacturing and mining interests belonging to his family. Just at present, with a true English faith in the value of outdoor sports, he was hunting wild turkeys, or, for that matter, whatever other wild game might chance to let him get within gun-shot of it. He had left his hotel at Birmingham with the first hint of dawn, and had steadily tramped over hills and mountain spurs and through wild ravines and beautiful glades, without a sight of fur or feather. Now he stood on this airy height, flushed with his healthful exercise, a little disappointed and annoyed. But the mountain air of the South has in it a tenderly exhilarating influence which affects the imagination and lulls one into pleasant, though often rather vague dreams. No matter if Edward Moreton was an intensely practical-minded man of affairs, the kind of Englishman who is willing to come to America and superintend iron works and coal mines, he was, nevertheless, not wholly impervious to the poetrythe lulling magnetism of the climate and the scene. For a while he leaned on his gun, a long, heavy double-barreled piece; then he took from his pocket a cigarette and match, seated himself on an old gray stone and began smoking. In the midst of the valley below, ran a rivulet, winding through the woods with a silvery shimmer, and out across the farms and past one little mill, on into a deep gorge of the stony hills. Moreton had not found his surroundings in Birmingham quite satisfactory, notwithstanding the fact that he had fallen in love, after the old time fervid fashion, with a fair young Northern girl living there. The little mining town, cramped between the hills, full of rough folk, raw and new, could not be very attractive to a man who, no matter how practical and matter of fact in his disposition, had studied art and who still nursed the artist's dreams. As he sat there with his blue-gray eyes slowly sweeping the valley, he was not as blithe-looking as a model sportsman should be. His dog, a small brown spaniel, sat down at his feet and eyed him lazily. No sound, save the rustle of the wind in the trees and a dull distant tapping of a woodpecker, was disturbing the broad silence of the forest. The sky was intensely blue. Suddenly a short puff of dampness came from the southwest, followed by a growl of thunder, a thing not usual in winter, even in that latitude. Moreton arose and saw a heavy line of black cloud overhanging some conical peaks far away on the southwestern horizon.

Dettagli