Unsuspectingly I
fronted a future so wildly improbable that no power could have made me
credit it had it then been foretold by the most rarely endowed gypsy.
It is always now with a sort of terror that I look back to those last
moments before my destiny had unfolded far enough to be actually
alarming. I was as one floating in fancied security down the calm
river above their famous Niagara Falls--to be presently dashed without
warning over the horrible verge. I mean to say, I never suspected.
Our last day of travel arrived. We were now in a roughened and most
untidy welter of mountain and jungle and glen, with violent tarns and
bleak bits of moorland that had all too evidently never known the
calming touch of the landscape gardener; a region, moreover, peopled
by a much more lawless appearing peasantry than I had observed back in
the Chicago counties, people for the most part quite wretchedly gotten
up and distinctly of the lower or working classes.
Late in the afternoon our train wound out of a narrow cutting and into
a valley that broadened away on every hand to distant mountains.
Beyond doubt this prospect could, in a loose way of speaking, be
called scenery, but of too violent a character it was for cultivated
tastes. Then, as my eye caught the vague outlines of a settlement or
village in the midst of this valley, Cousin Egbert, who also looked
from, the coach window, amazed me by crying out:
"There she is--little old Red Gap! The fastest growing town in the
State, if any one should ask you.
Pages:
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154