Diana's Short Stories

In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians, besides being as practical as the hardest fisted husbandmen in Massachusetts. We did not, it is true, spend much time in piping to our sheep, or warbling our innocent loves to the sisterhood.  But they gave us credit for imbuing the ordinary rustic occupations with a kind of religious poetry, insomuch that our very cow yards and pig sties were as delightfully fragrant as a flower garden.  

 

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“Listen to this.... I wish I could help you. Life is a queer deal. ... Shefford, I've got to trust you. Over here in the wild cañon country there's a village of Mormons' sealed wives. It's in Arizona, perhaps twenty miles from here, and near the Utah line. When the United States government began to persecute, or prosecute, the Mormons for polygamy, the Mormons over here in Stonebridge took their sealed wives and moved them out of Utah, just across the line. 

 

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“To obtain a just idea of the dog’s real worth, we must take note of the value which savage races attach to him. In Australia, women have been known to give the breast to puppies. I hasten to add that this has never been seen in France, because the women here are not savages.
“Men in general are very fond of hunting; there are some men indeed who cannot exist without it; hunting is the first instinct of the dog.

 

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“It’s ag’in the law, stranger, f’r any galoot f’m off’n a boat fer to go an’ git hisself killed on the levee in Arkansas City by a packin’-case or any other murderous weepin in the hands o’ roustabouts or anybody else. ’Pears to me you must be a stranger in these parts. Ever been into a town of any size afore?”

 

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I was born in Maryland in the year 1766. My parents were slaves. Both my father and mother were religious people, and belonged to the Methodist Society. It was my father's practice to read in the Bible aloud to his children every sabbath morning. At these seasons, when I was but five years old, I often felt the overshadowing of the Lord's Spirit, without at all understanding what it meant.

 

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He liked well enough the notion of keeping the readers of the   Echo  in mind of him; if he failed to capture New York, Midland would always be a good point to fall back upon. He expected his novel to succeed, and then he should be independent. But till then, the five dollars a week which the Hanks Brothers proposed to pay him for his letters would be very convenient, though the sum was despicable in itself. 

 

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It would be easy to expand this list into an essay on the vanity of human wishes. It would not be hard to add thereto a formidable catalogue of serious mistakes made both in England and New Zealand by those responsible for the Colony's affairs mistakes, some of which, at least, seem now to argue an almost inconceivable lack of knowledge and foresight.

 

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“Oh dear!” exclaimed Polly as she sat over in the corner by the window helping her mother pull out basting threads from a coat she had just finished, and giving an impatient twitch to the sleeve, “I do wish we could ever have any light  just as much as we want!”
“You don't need any light to see these threads,” said Mrs. Pepper, winding up hers carefully, as she spoke, on an old spool. 

 

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Then together they all skated away through the thickening windy twilight, and over the ashy gray plain of ice, towards where Katy's fire glowed like a red spark on the distant shore. It was a weary but not at all disheartened party that lounged in the open door of the tent that night, while a big fire blazed in front, and supper was cooking.

 

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I remembered having read in the Thousand and One Nights that lovers fall ill with unsatisfied longing, and that their cure depends entirely on the possession of the beloved one. Snatches of Swedish folk songs came into my mind, about young maidens who, in despair of ever being united to the object of their affections, waste away, and bid their mothers prepare their deathbeds for them. 

 

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