A Man and a Woman | Page 2

Stanley Waterloo
when once satisfied.
One who never, intentionally, injured a human being, save for equity's
sake. One who, of course, wandered in looking for what was, to him,
the right, but who, having once determined, was ever steadfast. A man
who had seen and known and fed and felt and risked, but who seemed
to me always as if his religion were: "What shall I do? Nature says
so-and-so, and the Power beyond rules nature." Laws of organization
for political purposes, begun before Romulus and Remus, and varied by
the dale-grouped Angles or the Northmen's Thing, did not seem to
much impress him. He recognized their utility, wanted to improve them,
made that his work, and eventually observed most of them. This, it
seemed to me, was his honest make-up--a Berseker, a bare-sark
descendant of the Vikings, in a dress-coat. He had passions, and
gratified them sometimes. He had ambitions, and worked for them. He
had a conscience, and was guided by it.
It was always interesting to me to look at him in youthful fray, more so,
years afterward, in club or in convention, or anywhere, and try to
imagine him the country small boy. Keen, hard, alert in all the ways of
a great city, it was difficult to conceive him in his early youth, well as I
knew it; difficult to reflect that his dreams at night were not of the
varying results of some late scheme, nor of white shoulders at the opera,
nor the mood of the Ninth Ward, nor of the drift of business, but of
some farm-house's front yard in mid-summer with a boy aiming a long
shot-gun at a red-winged poacher in a cherry tree, or that he saw, in
sleep, the worn jambs beside the old-fashioned fireplace where, winter
mornings, he kicked on his frozen boots, and the living-room where,
later in the morning, he ate so largely of buckwheat cakes. He was a
figure, wicked some said, a schemer many said, a rock of refuge for his
friends said more. This was the man, no uncommon type in the great
cities of the great republic.
As for the woman, I write with greater hesitation. I can tell of her in
this place but in vague outline. She was slender, not tall, brown-haired
and with eyes like those of the deer or Jersey heifer, save that they had

the accompanying expression of thought or mood or fancy which
mobile human features with them give. She was a woman of the city,
with all that gentle craft which is a woman's heritage. She was good.
She was unlike all others in the world to one man--no, to two.
I have but tried to tell what these two people appeared to me. I can see
them as they were, but cannot tell it as I should. I have not succeeded
well in expressing myself in words. Even were I cleverer, I should fail.
We can picture characters but approximately.

CHAPTER II.
CLOSE TO NATURE.
The great forest belt, oak, ash, beech and maple, sweeps southwestward
from New England through New York and trends westward and even to
the north again till one sees the same landscape very nearly reproduced
in Wisconsin wilds. Not far from where its continuity is broken by the
southern reach of Lake Huron was a clearing cut in the wood. The land
was rolling, and through the clearing ran a vigorous creek, already
alder-fringed--for the alder follows the chopper swiftly--and glittering
with countless minnows. In the spring great pickerel came up, too, from
the deep waters, miles away, to spawn and, sometimes, to be speared.
From either side of the creek the ground ascended somewhat, and on
one bank stood a little house. It was a house pretentious for the time,
since it was framed and boarded instead of being made of logs, but it
contained only three rooms: one, the general living-room with the brick
fireplace on one side, and the others, smaller, for sleeping apartments.
So close to the edge of the forest was the house that the sweep of the
wind through the tree-tops made constant music, and the odd, squalling
bark of the black squirrel, the chatter of the red one, the drumming of
the ruffed grouse, the pipe of the quail and the morning gobble of the
wild turkey were familiar sounds. There were deer and bear in the
depths of the green ocean, and an occasional wolverine. Sometimes at
night a red fox would circle about the clearing and bark querulously,
the cry contrasting oddly with the notes of whippoorwills and the calls

of loons. The trees were largely oak and beech and ash and birch, and
in the spring there were great splashes of white where the Juneberry
trees had burst into bloom. In
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