Alone the sturdy hunter beat the woods all day, on the track of
panthers, bears, and deer; alone, all day, his pretty daughter kept the
house against perils without and despondency within,--the gun and the
broom alike familiar to her hand.
Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow
of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with
inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing
of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of
heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines
of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all
the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts
from birds. Nature's officers, the elements, had bestowed on her each
his appropriate gift,--the Air its crispness, the Earth its variety, the
Sun its brightness and its ruddy glow, the very Water from the well its
freshness and its fluent forms; the stars repeated their friendliness in
her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown
hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all
about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her
cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and Night her soul.
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