196 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[May, 
The End of the World. 
A LOVE STORY.* 
BY EDWARD EGGLESTON. 
It would be of lio 
■ salt-rising" bread 
Reason enough. 
CHAPTER I. 
In Love with a Dutchman*. 
"I don't believe that you'd care a cent if she did marry 
a Dutchman 1 She might as well as to marry some while 
folks I know. 1 ' 
Samuel Anderson made no reply 
use to reply. Shrews are tamed 
only by silence. Anderson had 
long since learned that the little 
shred of influence which remained 
to him in his own house would 
disappear whenever his teeth 
■were no longer able to shut his 
tongue securely in. So now. when 
his wife poured out this hot lava 
of argument/an ad J/o?ni»ein, he 
closed the teeth down in a dead- 
lock way over the tongue, and 
compressed the lips tightly over 
the teeth, and shut his finger-nails 
into his work-hardened palms. 
And then, distrusting all these 
precautions, fearing lest he should 
be unable to hold on to his temper 
even with this grip, the little man 
strode out of the house with his 
wife's shrill voice in his ears. 
Mrs. Anderson had good reason 
to fear that her daughter was in 
love with a "Dutchman," as she 
phrased it in her contempt. The 
few Germans who had penetrated 
to the West at that time were 
looked upon with hardly more 
favor than the Californians feel 
for the almond-eyed Chinaman. 
They were foreigners, who would 
talk gibberish instead of the plain 
English which everybody could 
understand, and they were not yet 
civilized enough to like the 
yellow saleratus-hiscuit and the 
of which their neighbors were so fond. 
to hate them ! 
Only half an hour before this outburst of Mrs. Ander- 
son's, she had set a trap for her daughter Julia, and had 
fairly caught her. 
u Julc ! Jnle ! O Jul-y-c-ee ! " she had called. 
And Julia, who was down in the garden hoeing a bed 
in which she meant to plant some '- Johnny-jump-ups," 
came quickly toward the house, though she knew it would 
be of no use to come 
quickly. Let her come 
quickly, or let her come 
slowly, the rebuke was 
suce to greet her all 
the same. 
"Why don't you 
come, when you're call- 
ed, Td like to know! 
You're never in reach 
when you're wanted, 
and you're good-for- 
nothing when you are 
here ! " 
Julia Anderson's 
earliest lesson from her 
mother's lips had been 
that she was good for 
nothing. And every 
day and almost eveiy 
hour since had brought 
her repeated assurances 
that she was good for 
nothing. If she had not 
been good for a great 
deal, she would long 
since have been good 
for nothing as the re- 
sult of such teaching. 
But though this was 
not the first, nor the 
thousandth, nor the ten 
thousandth time that 
she bad been told that 
she was good for nothing, the accustomed iusidt seemed 
to sting her now more than ever. Was it that, being almost 
* Entered, according to Aa of Congress, in the year 1872, by uhanck 
.U'dd & Co., in the Office of thu Librarian of Conpresf , at Washington. 
eighteen, she was beginning to feel the woman blossom- 
ing in her nature? Or, was it that the tender words of 
August Wehle had made her sure that she was good for 
something, that now her heart felt her mother's insult to 
be a stale, selfish, ill-natured lie? 
"Take this cup of tea over to Mrs. Malcolm's, and tell 
her that it a'u't quite as good as what Iborried of her last 
week. And telf her that they'll be a new-fangled preacher 
at the school-house a Sunday, a Millcrite. or soniethin", 
a preachin' about the end of the world." 
Julia did not say u Yes, ma'am," in her usually meek 
style. She smarted a little yet from the harsh words, 
and so went away in silence. 
Why did she walk fast ? Had she noticed that AugUBt 
Wehle, who was " breaking up" her father's north field, 
TAKING AN OBSERVATION. 
was just plowing down the west side of his land ? If she 
hastened, she might reach the cross-fence as he came 
round to it. and while he was yet hidden from the sight 
of the house by the turn of the hill. And would not a few 
words from August Wehle be pleasant to her ears after 
her mother's sharp depreciation? It is at least safe to 
conjecture that some such feeling made her hurry through 
the long, waving timothy of the meadow, and made her i 
cross the log that spanned the brook without ever so much 
as stopping to look at the minnows glancing about in the ' 
A TALK "WITH A PLOWMAN. 
water flecked with the sunlight that struggled through the 
boughs of the water-willows. For, in her thorough lone- 
liness, Julia Anderson had come to love the birds, the 
squirrels, and the fishes as companions, and in all her 
life she had never before crossed the meadow brook 
without stooping to look at the minnows. 
All this haste Mrs. Anderson noticed. Having often 
scolded Julia for " talking to the fishes like a fool," she 
noticed the omission. And now she only waited until 
Julia was over tlic hill to take the path round the fence 
under shelter of the blackberry thicket, until she came to 
the clump of elders, from the midst of which she could 
plainly see if any conversation should take place between 
her Julia and the comely young Dutchman. 
In fact, Julia need not have hurried so much. For 
August Wehle had kept one eye on his horses and the 
other on the house all that day. It was the quick look 
of intelligence between the two at dinner that bad aroused 
the mother's suspicious. And Wehle had noticed the 
work on the garden bed, the call to the house, and the 
starting of Julia on the path toward Mrs. Malcolm's. His 
face had grown hot, and his hand had trembled. For 
once lie had failed to see the stone in his way, until 
the plow was thrown clean from the furrow. And when 
he came to the shade of the butternut-tree by which she 
must pass, it had seemed to him imperative that the 
horses -should rest. Besides, the hames-string wanted 
tightening on the bay, and old Dick's throat-latch must 
need a little fixing. He was not sure that the clevis-pin 
had not been loosened by the collision with the stone 
just now. And so, upon one pretext and another, he man- 
aged to delay starting his plow until Julia came hy, and 
then, though his heart had counted all her steps from the 
door-stone to the tree, then he looked up surprised. 
Nothing could be so astonishing to him as to see her 
there! For love is needlessly crafty, it has always an 
instinct of concealment, of disguise, of indirection about 
it. The boy, and especially the girl, who will tell the 
truth in regard to a love affair is a miracleof veracity. 
But there are such, and they arc to be reverenced — with 
the reverence paid to martyrs. 
On her part, Julia Anderson had walked on as though 
she meant to pass the youug plowman by, until he spoke, 
and then she started, and blushed, and stopped, and ner- 
vously broke off the top of a last year's iron-weed, and 
began to break it into bits while she talked, looking 
down most of the time, but lifting her eyes to his now 
and then. And to the sun-browned but delicate-faced 
young German it seemed a vision of Paradise — every 
glimpse of that fresh girl's face in the deep shade of the 
sun-bonnet. For girls* faces can never look so sweet in 
this generation as they did to the boys who caught sight 
of them, hidden away, precious things, in the obscurity 
of a tunnel of pasteboard and calico ! 
This was not their first love-talk. Were they engaged? 
Yes. a ud no. By all the speech their eyes were capable 
of in school, and Of late bywords, they were engaged in 
loving one another, and in telling one another of it. But 
they were young, and separated by circumstances, and 
they had hardly begun to think of marriage yet. It 
was enough for the present to love and be loved. It 
IS the most delightful stage of a love-affair when the pres- 
ent is sufficient, and there is no past or fnture. And so 
August hung his elbow around the top of the bay horse's 
haracs, and talked to 
Julia. It is the high- 
est praise of the Ger- 
man heart that it 
oves flowers and little 
children ; and like a 
German and like a lover 
that he was. August be- 
gan to speak of the 
anemones and the vio- 
lets that were already 
blooming in the corners 
of the fence. Girls in 
love are not apt to say 
anything very fresh. 
And Julia only said she 
thought the flowers 
seemed happy in the 
sunlight, In answer to 
this speech, which 
seemed to the lover a 
bit of inspiration, he 
quoted from Schiller 
the lines: 
"Yet weep, soft chil- 
dren of the spring ; 
The feelings Love 
alone can bring 
Have been denied to 
youl " 
With the quick and 
crafty modesty of her 
sex, Julia evaded this 
very pleasant shaft by saying : " How much you know, 
August ! How do you learn it?" 
And Angnst was pleased, partly because of the com- 
pliment, but chiefly because in saying it Julia had 
