In his bright little study at Lakeside, Lothrop Audouin had just laid down a parchment-bound volume of Carlyle\'s \'French Revolution\' and turned to look out of the pretty bay-window, embowered in clematis and Virginia creeper, that opened on to the placid tawny creek and the blue expanse of more distant Ontario. \'How unawares the summer has crept upon us,\' he murmured to himself, half-audibly, as was his fashion. \'When I first got back from Rome in early May, the trees were all but leafless; and now July is far gone, and before many weeks we shall be beginning to think of the melting tints of our golden autumn. That\'s the difference, really, between revolution and evolution. The most truly important events make no stir on their first taking place; they grow, surely but silently. The changes to which all things conspire, and for which they have prepared the way beforehand, produce no explosion, because they are gradual, and the universe consents to them. A birth takes place in silence, and sums up the result of endless generations; but a murder, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately. What a fracas over Camille at the Café Foy! and yet, with a whiff of grapeshot, the whole fabric of liberty disappears bodily. What a slow growth the democratic constitution of Massachusetts! and yet, when a convulsion seizes on the entire continent, and north and south tear one another to pieces for a grand idea, the democratic constitutions float unhurt upon the sea of commotion, and come out intact in the fulness of time with redoubled splendour! A good idea! I\'ll enter it in my diary, elaborated a little into better English.\' For Audouin was a writer by instinct, and though he had never yet perpetrated a printed book, he kept a dainty little journal in his desk, in which he jotted down side by side his pretty thoughts, as they occurred to him, and his observations, half-scientific, half-fanciful, on the progress of nature all around him. This diary he regarded as his chief literary testament; and he meant to leave it in his will to Hiram Winthrop, with strict injunctions that it should be published after his death, for private circulation only, among the select few who were competent to understand it. Surely a good man and true may be permitted, in the byways and background of his inner nature, to indulge in his harmless little foibles and affectations.
He had risen to take out the diary, full of his little poetical conceit, when the maid (Audouin wasn\'t such a recluse that he didn\'t like to keep his hermitage well-appointed) brought in a note for him on a quaintly chased Japanese salver. He took the note and glanced at it casually. It hadn\'t come by post, but by hand—a rare event in the isolation of Lakeside, where neighbours were none, and visitors few and distant. He broke open the envelope, and read the few pencilled lines within hastily:—
\'Deacon Winthrop would be obliged if you would come over at once to see him, as I am seriously ill, and the Lord is calling me. For Deacon Winthrop, faithfully, Keziah H. Hoptree.\'
Audouin put on his hat at once, and went to the porch, with its clambering roses, to see the bearer, who sat in a high buggy, flipping the flies off his horse\'s ear with his long whipcord.
\'Wal,\' the man said, \'I guess, Mr. Audouin, you\'d better look alive if you want to see the deacon comfortably afore the Lord\'s taken him.\'
\'All right,\' Audouin answered, with Yankee irreverence, jumping up hastily into the tall buggy. \'Drive right away, sir, and we\'ll run a race to see which gets there first, ourselves, or Death, the Great Deliverer.\'
The man drove along the rough unmade roads as only an American farmer can drive in a life-and-death hurry.
Geauga County hadn\'t altered greatly to the naked eye since the days long, long ago, when Hiram Winthrop used to sulk and hide in the blackberry bottom. The long straight road still stretched as of yore evenly between its two limits, in a manner calculated to satisfy all the strictest requirements of a definition in Euclid; and the parallel lines of snake fence on either hand still ran along at equal distances till they seemed to meet on the vanishing point of the horizon, somewhere a good deal on the hither side of mathematical infinity. The farms were still all bare, gaunt, dusty, and unlovable; the trees were somewhat fewer even than of old (for this was now acknowledged to be an unusually fine agricultural section), and the charred and blackened stumps that once diversified the weedy meadows had long for the most part been pulled up and demolished by the strenuous labours of men and horses. But otherwise Audouin could notice little difference between the Muddy Creek of fifteen years ago, and the Muddy Creek of that present moment. Fifteen more crops of fall and spring wheat had been reaped and garnered off the flat expanses; fifteen more generations of pigs (no, hogs) had been duly converted into prime American pork, and thence by proper rotation into human fat, bone, and muscle; fifteen winters had buried with their innocent sheet of white the blank desolation of fifteen ugly and utilitarian summers; but the farmers and farmhouses, though richer and easier than before, had not yet wakened one whit the more than of old to a rudimentary perception of the fact that the life of man may possibly consist of some other elements than corn, and pork, and the rigorous Calvinistic theology of Franklin P. Hopkins. Beauty was still crying in the streets of Muddy Creek, and no man regarded her.
At last the long dreary drive was over—a drive, Audouin thought to himself with a sigh, which couldn\'t be equalled anywhere in the world for naked ugliness, outside this great, free, enlightened, and absolutely materialised republic—and the buggy drew up at the gate of Deacon Zephaniah Winthrop\'s homestead, in the exact central spot of that wide and barren desert of utter fruitfulness. Audouin leaped from the buggy hastily, and went on through the weedy front yard to the door of the bare white farmhouse.
\'Wal, I\'m glad you\'ve kem, anyhow,\' the hired help (presumably Keziah H. Hoptree) exclaimed in her shrill loud voice as she opened the door to him; \'for deacon\'s jest tearin\' mad tew see you afore the Lord takes him; he says he wants tew give you a message fur Hiram, an\' he can\'t die in peace until he\'s given it.\'
\'Is he very ill?\' Audouin asked.
\'Not so sick tew talk to,\' the girl answered, harshly; \'but Dr. Eselman, he says he ain\'t goin\' to live a week longer. He\'s bin doctoring himself, that\'s whar it is, with Chief Tecumseh\'s Paregoric Elixir; an\' now he\'s gone so fur that Dr. Eselman reckons he can\'t never git that thar Elixir out of his con-stitooshun nohow. Jest you step right in here, judge, an\' see him.\'
Audouin followed her into the sick room, where the old deacon, thinner, bonier, and more sallow than ever, lay vacantly on his propped-up pillows.
\'You set you down thar, mister,\' he began feebly, as soon as he was aware of Audouin\'s presence, \'an\' make yourself right comfortable. I wanted to see you, you may calkilate, to give you a message for Hiram.\' He paused a little between each sentence, as if he spoke with difficulty; and Audouin waited patiently to hear what it might be, with some misgiving.
\'You tell him,\' the deacon went on in his slow jerky manner, \'when you see him or correspond to him, that I forgive him.\'
It was with some effort that Audouin managed to answer seriously, \'I will, Mr. Winthrop, you may rely upon it.\............