The Miller of Old Church | Page 2

an amiable
body--peaceably disposed to every living creature, with the exception
of William--she had hastened to the door to reprimand him for some
trivial neglect of the grey mule, when her glance lighted upon the
stranger, who had come a few minutes earlier by the Applegate road.
As he was a fine looking man of full habit and some thirty years, her
eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to
her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor with a bucket of
soapsuds.
"Thar's nobody on earth out thar but young Mr. Jonathan Gay come
back to Jordan's Journey," she said. "I declar I'd know a Gay by his
eyes if I war to meet him in so unlikely a place as Kingdom Come. He's
talkin' to old Adam Doolittle now," she added, for the information of
the maid, who, being of a curious habit of mind, had raised herself on
her knees and was craning her neck toward the door, "I can see his lips
movin', but he speaks so low I can't make out what he says."
"Lemme git dar a minute, Miss Betsey, I'se got moughty sharp years, I
is."
"They're no sharper than mine, I reckon, and I couldn't hear if I stood
an' listened forever. It's about the road most likely, for I see old Adam
a-pintin'."

For a minute after dismounting the stranger looked dubiously at the
mottled face of the tavern. On his head the sunlight shone through the
boughs of a giant mulberry tree near the well, and beyond this the
Virginian forest, brilliant with its autumnal colours of red and copper,
stretched to the village of Applegate, some ten or twelve miles to the
north.
Starting southward from the cross-roads, the character of the country
underwent so sudden a transformation that it looked as if man, having
contended here unsuccessfully with nature, had signed an ignominious
truce beneath the crumbling gateposts of the turnpike. Passing beyond
them a few steps out of the forest, one found a low hill, on which the
reaped corn stood in stacks like weapons of a vanished army, while
across the sunken road, the abandoned fields, overgrown with
broomsedge and life-everlasting, spread for several miles between
"worm fences" which were half buried in brushwood. To the eyes of
the stranger, fresh from the trim landscapes of England, there was an
aspect of desolation in the neglected roads, in the deserted fields, and in
the dim grey marshes that showed beyond the low banks of the river.
In the effort to shake off the depression this loneliness had brought on
his spirits, he turned to an ancient countryman, wearing overalls of blue
jeans, who dozed comfortably on the circular bench beneath the
mulberry tree.
"Is there a nearer way to Jordan's Journey, or must I follow the
turnpike?" he asked.
"Hey? Young Adam, are you thar, suh?"
Young Adam, a dejected looking youth of fifty years, with a pair of
short-sighted eyes that glanced over his shoulder as if in fear of pursuit,
shuffled round the trough of the well, and sat down on the bench at his
parent's side.
"He wants to know, pa, if thar's a short cut from the ornary over to
Jordan's Journey," he repeated.

Old Adam, who had sucked patiently at the stem of his pipe during the
explanation, withdrew it at the end, and thrust out his lower lip as a
child does that has stopped crying before it intended to.
"You can take a turn to the right at the blazed pine a half a mile on," he
replied, "but thar's the bars to be pulled down an' put up agin."
"I jest come along thar, an' the bars was down," said young Adam.
"Well, they hadn't ought to have been," retorted old Adam, indignantly.
"Bars is bars whether they be public or private, an' the man that pulls
'em down without puttin' 'em up agin, is a man that you'll find to be
loose moraled in other matters."
"It's the truth as sure as you speak it, Mr. Doolittle," said a wiry,
knocked-kneed farmer, with a hatchet-shaped face, who had sidled up
to the group. "It warn't no longer than yesterday that I was sayin' the
same words to the new minister, or rector as he tries to get us to call
him, about false doctrine an' evil practice. 'The difference between
sprinklin' and immersion ain't jest the difference between a few drips
on the head an' goin' all under, Mr. Mullen,' I said, 'but 'tis the whole
difference between the natur that's bent moral an' the natur that ain't.' It
follows as clear an' logical as night follows day--now, I ax you, don't it,
Mr. Doolittle--that a man that's gone wrong on immersion