Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read this ebook for free! No credit card needed, absolutely nothing to pay.
Words: 9532 in 4 pages
This is an ebook sharing website. You can read the uploaded ebooks for free here. No credit cards needed, nothing to pay. If you want to own a digital copy of the ebook, or want to read offline with your favorite ebook-reader, then you can choose to buy and download the ebook.
DESERTED
"What a glorious, all-satisfying country this Nevada desert would be, if one were only all eyes, and had no need of food, drink, and shelter! Would n't it, Miss Dwyer? Do you know, I 've no doubt that this is the true location of heaven. You see, the lack of water and vegetation would be no inconvenience to spirits, while the magnificent scenery and the cloudless sky would be just the thing to make them thrive."
"But what I can't get over," responded the young lady addressed, "is that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers, or what awfully dull people, they must have been whose descriptions have so misled the public! It is perfectly unaccountable. Here I expected to doze all the way across the desert, while in fact I 've grudged my eyes time enough to wink ever since I left my berth this morning."
"The trouble is," replied her companion, "that persons in search of the picturesque, or with much eye for it, are rare travelers along this route. The people responsible for the descriptions you complain of are thrifty businessmen, with no idea that there can be any possible attraction in a country where crops can't be raised, timber cut, or ore dug up. For my part, I thank the Lord for the beautiful barrenness that has consecrated this great region to loneliness. Here there will always be a chance to get out of sight and sound of the swarming millions who have already left scarcely standing-room for a man in the East. I wouldn't give much for a country where there are no wildernesses left."
"But I really think it is rather hard to say in just what the beauty of the desert consists," said Miss Dwyer. "It is so simple. I scribbled two pages of description in my note-book this morning, but when I read them over, and then looked out of the window, I tore them up. I think the wonderfully fine, clear, brilliant air transfigures the landscape and makes it something that must be seen and can't be told. After seeing how this air makes the ugly sagebrush and the patches of alkali and brown earth a feast to the eye, one can understand how the light of heaven may make the ugliest faces beautiful."
With a profound sigh, summing up both her admiration and that despair of attaining the perfect insight and sympathy imagined and longed for which is always a part of intense appreciation of natural beauty, Miss Dwyer threw herself back in her seat, and fixed her eyes on the car-ceiling with an expression as if she were looking at something at least as far away as the moon.
"I 'm going to make a statue when I get home," she said,--"a statue which will personify Nevada, and represent the tameless, desolate, changeless, magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of the desert. I can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the finest statue in the world."
"If you 'd as lief put your ideal into a painting, I will give you a suggestion that will be original if nothing else," he observed.
"What's that?"
"Why, having in view these white alkali-patches that chiefly characterize Nevada, paint her as a leper."
"That's horrid! You need n't talk to me any more," she exclaimed emphatically.
With this sort of chatter they had beguiled the time since leaving San Francisco the morning of the day before. Acquaintances are indeed made as rapidly on an overland train as on an ocean steamship, but theirs had dated from the preceding winter, during which they had often met in San Francisco. When Mr. Lombard heard that Miss Dwyer and Mrs. Eustis, her invalid sister, were going East in April, he discovered that he would have business to attend to in New York at about that time; and oddly enough,--that is, if you choose to take that view of it,--when the ladies came to go, it turned out that Lombard had taken his ticket for the selfsame train and identical sleeping-car. The result of which was that he had the privilege of handing Miss Dwyer in and out at the eating-stations, of bringing Mrs. Eustis her cup of tea in the car, and of sharing Miss Dwyer's seat and monopolizing her conversation when he had a mind to, which was most of the time. A bright and congenial companion has this advantage over a book, that he or she is an author whom you can make discourse on any subject you please, instead of being obliged to follow an arbitrary selection by another, as when you commune with the printed page.
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
(0)More posts by @FreeBooks
