The old woman turned very pale and for the first time looked again at the portrait.  An electric thrill seemed to pass through her as her eyes encountered the bold, evil ones fixed on her.  She stood erect with a rigid face, and “Immortality!” she said, under her breath.

Falleres moved away to make his adieux to the president, and the little group of his satellites straggled after him to the other end of the room.  For a moment there no one near the old woman to see the crutch furiously upraised, hammer-like, or to stop her sudden passionate rush upon the picture.

At the sound of cracking cloth, they turned back, horrified.  They saw her, with an insane violence, thrust her hands into the gaping hole that had been the portrait’s face and, tearing the canvas from end to end, fall upon the shreds with teeth and talon.

All but Falleres flung themselves toward her, dragging her away.  With a movement as instinctive he rushed for the picture, and it was to him, as he stood aghast before the ruined canvas, that the old woman’s shrill treble was directed, above the loud shocked voices of those about her:  “There ain’t anything immortal but souls!” she cried.

FLINT AND FIRE

My husband’s cousin had come up from the city, slightly more fagged and sardonic than usual, and as he stretched himself out in the big porch-chair he was even more caustic than was his wont about the bareness and emotional sterility of the lives of our country people.

“Perhaps they had, a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritan hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all emotions but the pettiest sorts—­”

I pushed the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont.  The flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame.  The strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the spring air like a challenge.  The plants vibrated with vigorous life.

In the field beyond them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful practitioner of an art.  The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on ’Niram’s head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain stream beyond him leaped and shouted.  His powerful body answered every call made on it with the precision of a splendid machine.  But there was no elation in the grimly set face as ’Niram wrenched the plow around a big stone, or as, in a more favorable furrow, the gleaming share sped steadily along before the plowman, turning over a long, unbroken brown ribbon of earth.