A Kentucky Cardinal

A Kentucky Cardinal, by James
Lane Allen

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Allen
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Title: A Kentucky Cardinal
Author: James Lane Allen
Release Date: March 10, 2004 [eBook #11532]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A
KENTUCKY CARDINAL***
This eBook produced by Jared Fuller.

A KENTUCKY CARDINAL A Story
by James Lane Allen

Dedication
This to her from one who in childhood used to stand at the windows of
her room and watch for the Cardinal among the snow-buried cedars.

I
All this New-year's Day of 1850 the sun shone cloudless but wrought
no thaw. Even the landscapes of frost on the window-panes did not
melt a flower, and the little trees still keep their silvery boughs arched
high above the jeweled avenues. During the afternoon a lean hare
limped twice across the lawn, and there was not a creature stirring to
chase it. Now the night is bitter cold, with no sounds outside but the
cracking of the porches as they freeze tighter. Even the north wind
seems grown too numb to move. I had determined to convert its coarse,
big noise into something sweet--as may often be done by a little art
with the things of this life--and so stretched a horse-hair above the
opening between the window sashes; but the soul of my harp has
departed. I hear but the comfortable roar and snap of hickory logs, at
long intervals a deeper breath from the dog stretched on his side at my
feet, and the crickets under the hearth-stones. They have to thank me
for that nook. One chill afternoon I came upon a whole company of
them on the western slope of a woodland mound, so lethargic that I
thumped them repeatedly before they could so much as get their senses.
There was a branch near by, and the smell of mint in the air, so that had
they been young Kentuckians one might have had a clew to the
situation. With an ear for winter minstrelsy, I brought two home in a
handkerchief, and assigned them an elegant suite of apartments under a
loose brick.
But the finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of
the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelf of books
on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some
melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower
shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and

they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had
been made vocal and poured into the ear.
Towards dark, having seen to the comfort of a household of kind,
faithful fellow-beings, whom man in his vanity calls the lower animals,
I went last to walk under the cedars in the front yard, listening to that
music which is at once so cheery and so sad--the low chirping of birds
at dark winter twilights as they gather in from the frozen fields, from
snow-buried shrubbery and hedge-rows, and settle down for the night
in the depths of the evergreens, the only refuge from their enemies and
shelter from the blast. But this evening they made no ado about their
home-coming. To-day perhaps none had ventured forth. I am most
uneasy when the red-bird is forced by hunger to leave the covert of his
cedars, since he, on the naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the
most far-shining and beautiful mark for Death. I stepped across to the
tree in which a pair of these birds roost and shook it, to make sure they
were at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the next with
the quick startled notes they utter when aroused.
The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my
earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one
side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn,
is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature
points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander
over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that
is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle
veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest
animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose.