The perfection of the whole thing brought me back with a mild surprise
to my inheritance as an American, and made me dimly conscious of the
point to which New York has carried republicanism and the simple life.
But the telegram--read hastily in the hall, and considered at leisure
while I took a late breakfast at my favorite table in the long,
stately, oak-panelled dining-room, high above the diminished roar of
Fifth Avenue--the telegram carried me out to Eastridge, that
self-complacent overgrown village among the New York hills, where
people still lived in villas with rubber-plants in the front windows,
and had dinner in the middle of the day, and attended church sociables,
and listened to Fourth-of-July orations. It was there that I had gone,
green from college, to take the assistant-editorship of that flapping
sheet The Eastridge Banner; and there I had found Cyrus Talbert
beginning his work in the plated-ware factory--the cleanest, warmest,
biggest heart of a man that I have known yet, with a good-nature that
covered the bed-rock of his conscience like an apple orchard on a
limestone ridge. In the give-and-take of every day he was easy-going,
kindly, a lover of laughter; but when you struck down to a question of
right and wrong, or, rather, when he conceived that he heard the divine
voice of duty, he became absolutely immovable--firm, you would call it
if you agreed with him, obstinate if you differed.
Pages:
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289