The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862

'Your son is a fine lad,' he said, 'and Hannah is fit to be queen anywhere; and if you don't give her a fitting out when he's well enough to marry her, hang me if I won't! I owe the boy something for the ill trick I played him in my hot-headedness, and he shall have it, too! Say, now, that they shall be man and wife!'

Deacon Fletcher astonished the hot-hearted man beyond measure by quietly telling him that, God willing, his dear son should marry Hannah as soon as the visitation that now kept him on a bed of raving illness was taken away. He added meekly that he hoped God would forgive him if he had abused the trust placed in him, and, misled by a vanity of holiness, had done his son great wrong, these many years.

'Give us your hand, Deacon,' cried the delighted pleader; 'you are a good man, if you are a Deacon, and that's more'n I'd have said a week ago! You have hurt that boy, and no mistake! You've either beaten the spirit all out of him, or you have shut up a devil in him that'll break out one o' these days, worse'n them that went into the pigs that we read about! But 'tain't too late to mend, an' if a stitch in time does save nine, it's better to take the nine stitches than to wait till they are ninety times nine. You've got to be a thousand times kinder to the boy than you would if you hadn't been so hard on him all his life.'

It was agreed that while the fever held its course nothing should be said to poor Hannah, and so the two men parted—warm friends for the first time in their lives.

And poor Hannah Lee went droopingly and patiently about her duties, asking quietly from day to day as to the health of Jason, and telling no soul how her heart seemed breaking within her, and how all the future looked to her like a dreary waste.

Mrs. Hopkins threw out gentle hints that the Deacon might relent, and that if he did the wish that was ever in Hannah's heart might be realized. But the poor child paid little heed to her suggestions, a foreshadowing of some direful calamity constantly enfolding and saddening her. Still she kept bravely and quietly about her duties, and it was only when she was alone in her chamber at night that she gave way to the terrible wofulness that oppressed her, and prayed, and wept, and wrestled with her sorrow.

And this sweet and lovely creature was the same pious and patient soul who was afterwards taunted by rude village boys, and pointed at as one who had sold herself to Satan.

One night she had cried herself asleep, and lay in an unquiet and fitful slumber. As she thought of him alway by day, so now in her dreams the image of Jason Fletcher was fantastically and singularly busy. It seemed to her that she stood upon an eminence overlooking a peaceful valley of that charming sort only to be seen in dreams. Afar off, and still, in some strange way, very near, she beheld the youth of her love, who reclined upon a bank beside a quiet stream. Everything was at rest. The soft moonbeams—for, in her dream, evening rested on the valley—bathed all the prospect in a cool effulgence. There was no sound, save only that sweet music of never-sleeping nature which is forever heard within all her broad domain. Still the dreamer felt that there was something direful and most to be dreaded that threatened to invade and mar the heavenly peacefulness. She felt it coming, and fearfully awaited its approach. And she had not long to wait. For presently there appeared, flying between the calm moonlight and the figure, and casting a doleful shadow over his form, a scaly and dreadful dragon, like those we read of that devastated whole countries in the old, old times. This hideous beast breathed fire and smoke from its horrid nostrils as it flew, and it flapped its fearful way downwards to scorch and destroy the figure recumbent by the stream.

Just when it was stooping upon its unconscious victim, a heavy scale, beaten from its side by the bat-like wings, fell upon the night-mare stricken sleeper's breast, and she awoke.

The moon was shining peacefully into the room, and she found upon the bed a black cat that had leaped in through the low window. It was a gentle and loving animal, that had made friends with her upon her first arrival, and it had already coiled itself up on the bed with a gentle purring.

Everything was most quiet and calm as she lay gazing out through the window; still the dreadful memory of her dream weighed upon and oppressed her. She arose and leaned out into the cool night air. So leaning, she could see Deacon Fletcher's house, standing bare and brown in the moonlight only a few rods distant. She could gaze, with what pleasure or sorrow she might, at the windows of the room where poor Jason lay tossing with the fever.

She gazes earnestly thitherward, and her breath comes thick and short, while her heart seems rising into her throat. For she sees, gathered thick and dun above the house, a dense, undulating and ever-increasing shadow, that threatens to obscure the low-floating moon! There is no wind, and it rises slowly but steadily! Deacon Fletcher's house is on fire!

Her shrill cries, uttered in wild and rapid succession, aroused the household of Peter Hopkins to the fact that there was fire somewhere—fire, that most terrible fiend to awake before in the dead of night. As for Hannah, it was but an instant's work for her to throw on a little clothing and spring from the low window into the yard. Then she ran, with what trembling speed she might, towards the burning house.

The smoke still rose sombre and heavy from the roof, and about one of the chimneys little tongues of flame leaped up as she approached. She could hear a fierce crackling, too, of that spiteful sort made by the burning of dry wood. The house was all of wood, and old, and it was evidently thoroughly afire within.

She realized this as she hurried up to it. In the brief seconds of her crossing the field and leaping a small stream that ran near the house, she thought of Jason, so noble, so self-denying, so persecuted, so beautiful, lying there in his little upper room, powerless from the fever, and doomed to die a dreadful death. She thought of him, weak and helpless, with no strength even to shrink from the flames that should lap over him and lick him to death with their fiery tongues. All this as she sped across the field and leaped the stream.

Reaching the house, she glanced upward, and could perceive the light of the flames already showing itself through the upper front windows, next the room where slept the Deacon and his wife. Fortunately Jason's room was in the rear. Then she remembered that an old nurse from the village watched with him, and she called fiercely on her name, but with no response.

As she had approached the house, the nearest outer door was that facing the road, immediately over which the fire was evidently about to break out, and this door she tried, finding it fast. Then she remembered a side entrance, through an old wood-shed, that was seldom locked, and she immediately made her way to it.

Meanwhile the fire was busy with the dry wood-work of the house, and though there was no wind, it spread with fearful rapidity. Already the flames had burst out through the roof in two or three places, and in the front of the house they were cruelly curling and creeping about the eaves. They seemed confined, however, to the upper portion of the building, and therein she had hope.

As she had anticipated, she found the side door unfastened, and she made her way rapidly to the foot of the back stairway. When she opened the door to ascend, a thick, black smoke rushed down, almost overpowering her. The opening of the door seemed to aid the fire, too, and there was a sort of explosive eagerness in the new start it took as it now crackled and roared above her. Then she recognized in the sickening smoke a smell of burning feathers, and she felt faint and weak as she thought that it might be his bed that was on fire.

This was only for an instant. Staggering backward before the cloud of smoke, with outstretched, groping hands, like one suddenly struck blind, an 'instinct,' or what you please to call it, struck her, and she tore off her flannel petticoat, wrapping it about her head and shoulders. Then, holding her hands over mouth and nose, she rushed desperately up the stairs.

No one, unless he has been through such a smoke, can conceive of the trials she had to undergo in mounting those stairs. No one can fancy, except from the recollection of such an experience, how the fierce heat beat her back when she reached the upper hall. The walls were not yet fully on fire, but great tongues of flame curled along the ceiling, and hot blasts swept across her path.

She knew his room. It was but a step to it, and the door opened easily. The nurse was fast asleep, so fast that poor Hannah's warning cry, as she stumbled in, hardly aroused her. On the bed lay Jason, so thin, so white, so corpse-like, she would hardly have known him. In the fierce strength of her despair it was no task to lift that emaciated body, but, ah! how to get out of the house with it? For when she turned she saw that the hall was now wholly on fire.

But she did not hesitate. Wrapping him quickly and tenderly in a blanket taken from the bed, she rushed out into the flames.

Meanwhile Peter Hopkins and his 'hired man' had been aroused by Hannah's first screams, and had hurriedly scrambled on a portion of their clothing and rushed out. They had been in time—running quickly across the field—to see Hannah disappear behind the house. Neither of them supposed for an instant that she had entered it.

Trying the front door, and finding it fast, Peter uplifted his stout foot and kicked it crashing in, but he found it impossible to enter by the breach he had made. The front stairway was all in flames, and the fierce heat drove him hopelessly back. Then they ran around to the rear. By this time the entire upper portion of the building seemed to be one mass of fire and smote, and now they could hear shrill and terrible shrieks, evidently proceeding from the suddenly awakened inmates. They ran to the kitchen door and burst it in.

As they did so there rushed towards them from the foot of the kitchen stairs some horrible, blazing, and unnatural shape, that came stumbling but swiftly forward. With it came smoke and flame and a horrible sound of stifled moans.

At the approach of this strange and unsightly object they sprang back amazed, and it passed them headlong into the open air; passed them and dropped apart, as it were, into the stream before the door.

For many years thereafter the slumbers of Farmer Hopkins were disturbed by visions of what he saw when the two two parts of that terrible apparition were taken from the water.

There lay Hannah Lee, no longer beautiful and fresh as the morning, but blackened, crisped, scorched and shrunken, with all her wealth of silken hair burned to ashes, with all her clear loveliness of complexion gone forever. And there lay Jason Fletcher, unburned,—so carefully had she covered him as she fled,—but senseless, and to all appearance a corpse.

Thus Hannah Lee went through fire and water, even unto worse than death, for the sake of him she loved. And verily she had her reward.

When the sun rose, there only remained a black and ugly pit to mark the place where Deacon Fletcher's house had stood.

And of all its inmates, only Jason—carefully watched and tended at the house of Peter Hopkins—was left to tell the tale of that night's tragedy. And he, poor fellow, had no tale to tell, the delirium of fever having been upon him all the night. It was very doubtful if he would recover,—more than doubtful. Not one in a thousand could do so, with such an exposure at the critical period of his sickness.

Even more tenderly, with even more anxiety, did all in the country round minister to poor Hannah Lee. The story of her love, of her bravery, of her heroic self-abnegation, spread throughout all those parts, and there was no end to what was done for her by neighbors and friends. So widely did her fame spread, that people from thirty, forty, and even fifty miles away came to see her, or sent messages, or money, or delicacies to comfort her.

What could be done for them was done, and they both lived.

When Jason Fletcher arose from his sick bed, he arose another man than the Jason Fletcher who was thrown down in the arbor by Farmer Hopkins. He went sick, a dependent, simple, good-hearted, though impatient boy, worn out by the constraints of twenty years, but capable of future cultivation and improvement; he arose from his sickness a moody, cross-grained, dogged and impatient man, whose only memories were tinged red with wrong, and made bitter by thought of what he had endured. It was little matter to him that all his father's broad acres were now his own—the thought of the horrible death his parents had died only suggested a question in his mind, whether it were not a 'judgment' on them: they having lived to persecute him too long already. Through all the vista of his past life he saw only gloom and shadows, and no ray of brightness cheered the retrospective glance.

No ray? Yes, there was one. He saw a fair young girl, loving and innocent, whose sweet face scarce ever left his thoughts. She reigned where father and mother held no sway; and she made, with the sunshine of her love, a clear heaven for him even in the purgatory of the past. So he lay, slowly gathering strength, dreaming about her. And presently they told him—gently as might be—how she had saved him. And they nearly killed him in the telling.

When he was well enough to be about, it was strange that they would not allow him to see her. She was still very ill, they said, and the doctor, a reasonable man enough usually, utterly refused him admission to her chamber. He fretted at this, and as he gained strength he 'went wrong.'

Mingled with the memory of his old privations was a full assurance of his present liberty. He was of age, and he owned, by right, all the extensive property the Deacon, his father, had so laboriously amassed. During all his boyhood he had never had a shilling, at any one time, that he could call his own; now hundreds of pounds stood ready at his bidding, and he proceeded very speedily to spend them. During all his boyhood he had been cut off from the amusements common to the youth of that day; now he launched out into the most extravagant pleasures his money could procure. Money was nothing, for he had it in plenty; character was nothing, for he had none to lose; only love remained to him of all the good things he might have held, and love lay bleeding while he was denied access to Hannah. Love lay bleeding, and he turned for comfort to the wine-cup, and raised Bacchus to the place Cupid should have occupied. Alas for Jason Fletcher!

Weeks rolled on and passed into months, and still he was refused speech with, or right of, Hannah. And he chafed at the denial. Had she not risked everything to save his life? And he could not even thank her!

At length, being unable to find further excuse wherewith to put him off, they one day told him he could see his love. They endeavored to prepare him by hints and suggestions as to the probable consequences of the trial she had passed through, but all that they could say or he imagine had not prepared him for the fearful sight.

Poor Hannah Lee! This scarred, deformed and helpless body, without proper hands—oh! white hands, how well he remembered them!—without comeliness of form or feature, was all that was left of the once glorious creature, whose heaven-given beauty had ensnared his fresh and untutored heart! Poor Hannah Lee!

The rough youth, loving her yet, but repelled by the horrible aspect she presented, fell sobbing upon his knees and buried his face in the bed-clothing. He spoke no word, but the tumultuous throes of his agony shook the room as he knelt beside her. And from the bed arose a wail more terrible in its utter, eternal sorrowfulness than had ever fallen upon the ears of those present. It was the wail of a soul recognizing for the first time that the loveliness of life had passed away forever.

They mingled their cries thus for a little time, and then Jason arose and staggered from the room. He would have spoken, but the dreadful sorrow rose up and choked him. All the memories of the past were linked with youth and beauty. He could not speak to the blight before him, as to his love and his life, and so, with blind and lumbering footsteps, he toiled heavily from the house.

The fires of the Revolution had broken forth and swept over New England, burning out like stubble the little loyalty to the crown left in men's hearts.

At the battle of Bunker Hill Jason Fletcher fought like a tiger. Last among the latest, he clubbed his musket, and was driven slowly backward from the slight redoubt.

He was heard of at White Plains, at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, and always with marvelous mention of courage and prowess. Then he was promoted from the ranks, and was mentioned as 'Lieutenant Fletcher.' Then there were rumors of some dishonor that had sullied the brightness of his fame; and then it came to be hinted about that in all the rank and file of the patriot army there was no one so utterly dissolute and drunken as he. And then came news of his ignominiously quitting the service, and a cloud dropped down about him, and no word, good or bad, came home from the castaway any more.

Meanwhile poor Hannah Lee languished upon her bed of suffering, but did not die. And finally, when spring after spring had spread new verdure over the rough hills among which she dwelt, she got, by little and little, to venturing out into the village streets. And when they saw her bowed form and her ugly, misshapen hands, the village children, knowing her history, forbore to sneer at or taunt her. All the village loved the unfortunate creature, and all the village strove together to do her kindness.

One man in the town—a cousin of Jason the wanderer—was supposed to hold communication with him. This man notified Hannah one day that a safe life annuity had been purchased for her, and thereafter she lived at the house of Farmer Hopkins, not as a loved dependent, but as a cherished and faithful friend. Thus freed from the bitter sting of helpless poverty, Hannah sank resignedly into a quiet and honorable life.

At length, one warm summer day, when Jason Fletcher should have been about forty years of age, there strayed into the village a blind mendicant, with a dog for guide, and a wooden leg rudely fastened to one stiff stump. This stranger, white-headed and with the care-lines of many years on his sadly furrowed face, sought out poor Hannah Lee, and told her that he had, by the grace of God, come back, at last, to die. Leading him with gentle counsels to that Mercy Seat where none ever seek in vain, poor Hannah saw him bend with contrite and humble spirit, and seek the forgiveness needed to atone for many years of sin. Patient and penitent he passed a few quiet years, and then she followed to the tomb the earthly remains of him for whom she had sacrificed a life.

And this being done, she removed to a distant town, where Martha Hopkins, now kind Mrs. Marjoram, dwelt.

And many years afterwards Mrs. Marjoram told her story, as a lesson that men should never judge a living soul by its outward habiliments.

FREEDOM'S STARS

From Everglades to Dismal Swamp  Rose on the hot and trembling airCloud after cloud, in dark array,  Enfolding from their serpent lairThe starry flag that guards the free:—  One after one its stars grew dun,Heaven given to shine on Liberty.But swifter than the lightning's gleam  Flashed out the spears of Northern-light,And with the north wind's saving wings,  The cloud-host, vanquished, took to flight.Then in her white-winged radiance there  The angel Freedom conquering came,Relit once more her brilliant stars,  To burn with an eternal flame.

ON THE PLAINS

The plains is the current designation of the region stretching westward from Missouri—or rather from the western settlements of Kansas and Nebraska—to the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. Part of it is included under the vague designation of 'the Great American Desert;' but that title is applicable to a far larger area westward than eastward of the Rocky Mountains. The Great Basin, whereof Salt Lake is the lowest point, and the Valley of the Colorado, which skirts it on the east, are mainly sterile from drouth or other causes—not one acre in each hundred of their surface being arable without irrigation, and not one in ten capable of being made productive by irrigation. Arid, naked, or thinly shrub-covered mountains traverse and chequer those deep yet elevated valleys, wherein few savages or even wild animals of any size or value were ever able to find subsistence. Probably that of the Colorado is, as a whole, the most sterile and forbidding of any valley of equal size on earth, unless it be that of one of the usually frozen rivers in or near the Arctic circle. Even Mormon energy, industry, frugality and subservience to sacerdotal despotism, barely suffice to wrench a rude, coarse living from those narrow belts and patches of less niggard soil which skirt those infrequent lakes and scanty streams of the Great Basin which are susceptible of irrigation; mines alone (and they must be rich ones) can ever render populous the extensive country which is interposed between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.

The Plains differ radically from their western counterpoise. They have no mountains, and very few considerable hills; they are not rocky: in fact, they are rendered all but worthless by their destitution of rock. In Kansas, a few ridges, mainly (I believe) of lime, rise to the surface; beyond these, and near the west line of the new State, stretches a thin-soiled, rolling sandstone district, perhaps forty miles wide; then comes the Buffalo range, formerly covering the entire valley of the Mississippi, and even stretching fitfully beyond the Rocky Mountains, but now shrunk to a strip hardly more than one hundred and fifty miles in width, but extending north and south from Texas into the British territory which embosoms the Red River of the North. Better soil than that of the Buffalo region west of Kansas is rarely found, though the scarcity of wood, and the unfitness of the little that skirts the longer and more abiding streams for any use but that of fuel, must be a great drawback to settlement and cultivation. The coarse, short, hearty grass that carpets most of this region, and which is allowed to attain its full growth only in the valleys of the Chugwater and a few other streams which have their course mainly within or very near the Rocky Mountains, and which the Buffalo no longer visit, seems worthy at least of trial by the farmers and shepherds of our older States. Its ability to resist drouth and overcropping and hard usage generally must be great, and I judge that many lawns and pastures would be improved by it. That it has merely held its ground for ages, in defiance of the crushing tread and close feeding of the enormous herds of the Plains, proves it a plant of signal hardihood and tenacity of life; while the favor with which it is regarded by passing teams and herds combines with its evident abundance of nutriment to render its intrinsic value unquestionable.

The green traveler or emigrant in early summer has traversed, since he crossed the Missouri, five hundred miles of almost uniformly arable soil, most of it richly grassed, with belts of timber skirting its moderately copious and not unfrequent water-courses, and he very naturally concludes 'the American Desert' a misnomer, or at best a gross exaggeration. But, from the moment of leaving the Buffaloes behind him, the country begins to shoal, as a sailor might say, growing rapidly sterile, treeless, and all but grassless. The scanty forage that is still visible is confined to the immediate banks or often submerged intervales of streams, though a little sometimes lingers in hollows or ravines where the drifted snows of winter evidently lay melting slowly till late in the spring. By-and-by the streams disappear, or are plainly on the point of vanishing; of living wood there is none, and only experienced plainsmen know where to look for the fragments of dead trees which still linger on the banks of a few slender or dried-up brooks, whence sweeping fires or other destructive agencies long since eradicated all growing timber. The last living, or, indeed, standing tree you passed was a stunted, shabby specimen of the unlovely Cotton-wood, rooted in naked sand beside a water-course, and shielded from prairie-fires by the high, precipitous bank; for, scanty as is the herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet, especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) through its dead, tinder-like remains. How far human improvidence and recklessness—especially that of our own destructive Caucasian race—has contributed to denude the Plains of the little wood that thinly dotted their surface at a period not very remote, I can not pretend to decide; but it is very evident that there are far fewer trees now standing than there were even one century ago.