CHAPTER II

The opinion which McSnagley expressed in reference to a “change of heart” supposed to be experienced by Mliss was more forcibly described in the gulches and tunnels.  It was thought there that Mliss had “struck a good lead.”  So when there was a new grave added to the little enclosure, and at the expense of the master a little board and inscription put above it, the red mountain Banner came out quite handsomely, and did the fair thing to the memory of one of “our oldest Pioneers,” alluding gracefully to that “bane of noble intellects,” and otherwise genteelly shelving our dear brother with the past.  “He leaves an only child to mourn his loss,” says the Banner, “who is now an exemplary scholar, thanks to the efforts of the Rev. Mr. McSnagley.”  The Rev. McSnagley, in fact, made a strong point of Mliss’s conversion, and, indirectly attributing to the unfortunate child the suicide of her father, made affecting allusions in Sunday school to the beneficial effects of the “silent tomb,” and in this cheerful contemplation drove most of the children into speechless horror, and caused the pink-and-white scions of the first families to howl dismally and refuse to be comforted.

The long dry summer came.  As each fierce day burned itself out in little whiffs of pearl-gray smoke on the mountain summits, and the upspringing breeze scattered its red embers over the landscape, the green wave which in early spring upheaved above Smith’s grave grew sere and dry and hard.  In those days the master, strolling in the little churchyard of a Sabbath afternoon, was sometimes surprised to find a few wild flowers plucked from the damp pine forests scattered there, and oftener rude wreaths hung upon the little pine cross.  Most of these wreaths were formed of a sweet-scented grass, which the children loved to keep in their desks, intertwined with the plumes of the buckeye, the syringa, and the wood anemone, and here and there the master noticed the dark-blue cowl of the monkshood, or deadly aconite.  There was something in the odd association of this noxious plant with these memorials which occasioned a painful sensation to the master deeper than his esthetic sense.  One day, during a long walk, in crossing a wooded ridge he came upon Mliss in the heart of the forest, perched upon a prostrate pine on a fantastic throne formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless branches, her lap full of grasses and pine burrs, and crooning to herself one of the Negro melodies of her younger life.  Recognizing him at a distance, she made room for him on her elevated throne, and with a grave assumption of hospitality and patronage that would have been ridiculous had it not been so terribly earnest, she fed him with pine nuts and crab apples.  The master took that opportunity to point out to her the noxious and deadly qualities of the monkshood, whose dark blossoms he saw in her lap, and extorted from her a promise not to meddle with it as long as she remained his pupil.  This done—­as the master had tested her integrity before—­he rested satisfied, and the strange feeling which had overcome him on seeing them died away.