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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Greatest Works of Thomas Wolfe," readers are treated to an expansive collection of the author's most significant literary contributions, encapsulating the essence of Wolfe's evocative prose and rich narrative style. With a distinct blend of stream-of-consciousness and vivid imagery, Wolfe's work delves deeply into the human experience, exploring themes of ambition, belonging, and the tension between individuality and society. Spanning a variety of settings and characters, this anthology highlights Wolfe's profound reflections on American life in the early 20th century, making it a critical study for anyone interested in modernist literature and the Southern Renaissance. Thomas Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina, was a literary luminary whose experiences in the American South and New York City shaped his understanding of cultural identity and personal struggle. His tumultuous early life and passionate literary pursuits led him to develop a unique voice that captures the depth of human emotions and the search for meaning. Wolfe's encounters with contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway further enriched his literary landscape, pushing the boundaries of narrative form. This anthology is highly recommended for readers seeking an immersive experience into the heart of American literature. Wolfe's lyrical prose and profound insights not only serve as an artistic reflection of his time but also resonate with contemporary themes that remain relevant today. Whether you are a longtime admirer or new to his works, this collection offers a compelling journey through Wolfe's literary genius. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Greatest Works of Thomas Wolfe
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers three landmark novels by Thomas Wolfe, presenting a curated arc of his most widely recognized achievements. It is designed as a concentrated introduction to his art rather than a complete works, offering a sustained encounter with the ambition, scope, and voice that made him a singular figure in American fiction. By bringing these novels together, the volume traces the growth of a writer preoccupied with memory, home, and artistic vocation, while also mapping a portrait of the United States during a period of profound change. Readers will find here a unified vision shaped across expansive, deeply personal narratives.
The selection spans a decisive stretch of Wolfe’s career and publication history. Look Homeward, Angel appeared in 1929, establishing his reputation with a sweeping, autobiographically inflected portrait of youth and family. Of Time and the River followed in 1935, expanding his reach into new geographies and ambitions. You Can’t Go Home Again was published posthumously in 1940, assembled from manuscripts to form a resonant meditation on identity and return. Together, these novels offer a temporal journey through the interwar years, illuminating how Wolfe channeled personal experience and public life into a grand, evolving vision of self, nation, and artistic purpose.
The contents of this volume are novels, and novels alone. Wolfe’s imagination found its fullest outlet in long-form fiction, where scale, association, and pattern could accumulate with symphonic effect. The three works here are often described as semi-autobiographical narratives, including elements of the coming-of-age novel and the story of an artist’s formation. They stand as sustained works of narrative prose rather than short stories, poems, essays, letters, or diaries. Within that single genre, however, Wolfe explores a remarkable variety of moods, settings, and registers, demonstrating how the capacious novel can hold intimate memory and panoramic social observation in one frame.
Across these pages, certain concerns recur with insistent clarity: the search for belonging, the friction between familial roots and individual aspiration, the shaping power of time, and the longing to turn experience into art. Wolfe renders the drama of leaving and returning, of remembering and reimagining, and of discovering that the past is both a refuge and a force that cannot be recovered unchanged. His protagonists struggle to name their hungers and to master the flood of impressions that constitute a life. The result is fiction of initiation and expansion, attentive to how the self is made among people, places, and eras.
Stylistically, Wolfe is notable for exuberant, rhapsodic prose that can swell from close description to oratorical sweep. He favors long, rising sentences, lavish catalogues, and rhythmic cadences that translate personal feeling into a sense of national scale. The writing alternates between intimate interiority and broad, panoramic scenes of streets, seasons, and cities. Repetition and motif create structural echo and resonance, while associative transitions carry the reader across time and place. This amplitude is not merely decorative; it is how the novels enact their central subjects—motion, memory, and the restless desire to seize life whole and hold it in language.
Look Homeward, Angel introduces a young, searching figure in a Southern mountain town, charting the trials of family, education, and awakening ambition. Without disclosing outcomes, it is fair to say the novel establishes the emotional coordinates that will define Wolfe’s fiction: the push and pull of kinship, the intoxicating promise of the wider world, and the ache of remembrance. Its portrait of community is unsparing yet tender, attentive to local speech and custom, and animated by the energy of a mind discovering how to transform experience into art. It sets the stage for larger journeys of both body and spirit.
Of Time and the River carries that journey forward into new cities, institutions, and continents, confronting the exhilarations and dislocations of travel, study, and ambition. The figure at its center seeks a craft equal to his swelling sense of experience, and the novel’s title signals a sustained meditation on time’s flow. The scope broadens—trains, streets, classrooms, and ports—but the underlying drama remains the same: how to live fully and see clearly without losing one’s bearings. This volume thus captures Wolfe expanding his canvas, testing how memory, desire, and talent can cohere within the pressures of modern life.
You Can’t Go Home Again, appearing after Wolfe’s death, revisits the terrain of home and estrangement through a new protagonist, a novelist confronting the consequences of transforming life into fiction. Set amid shifting American and European scenes of the 1930s, it considers what changes when a writer’s vision encounters public response, and how both person and place are altered by time. The book’s premise allows Wolfe to reflect on the act of writing itself, the ethics of representation, and the impossibility of returning to an unchanged past. The result is a searching, mature summation of questions that animate all three novels.
Read together, these works reveal a coherent architecture of imagery and idea. Home, angel, and river are not merely titles; they form a triad of emblematic terms—place and belonging, aspiration and wonder, time and motion. Wolfe organizes experience through recurring scenes of departure and return, seasonal cycles, and charged objects that gather meaning as the narrative unfolds. He shifts from microcosm to macrocosm with a distinctive rhythm, using accumulated detail to lift the particular into emblem. The novels share a tonal register that oscillates between longing and affirmation, making their large scale feel intimate and their intimacy, expansive.
The continuing significance of these novels lies in their ambition to capture an American life in the round—regional and national, private and public, rooted and itinerant. Wolfe gives voice to the restlessness of a country in motion and to the complexities of becoming an artist within it. His books enlarge the sense of what a novel might contain: not only plot and character, but the weather of memory, the pressure of history, and the breadth of landscape and language. They endure because they take seriously the human desire to reconcile past and present, home and horizon, self and world.
This volume invites both new readers and returning admirers to consider Wolfe’s development across a sequence. Approached in publication order, the novels offer a vivid experience of growth—of characters, craft, and perspective—while each also stands on its own terms. The first two trace an evolving artist through youth and expansion, and the third reframes similar concerns through another figure’s vantage. Reading them together clarifies continuities of theme and method, and also highlights changes in tone and scope. However one proceeds, the compilation provides a generous yet focused path into an oeuvre notable for breadth, intensity, and imaginative reach.
The purpose of this collection is to honor the power of three extraordinary novels by presenting them in dialogue, where their shared preoccupations and singular textures can be most clearly felt. They dramatize the making of a self and the making of a nation’s literature, attentive to time’s current and the complicated claims of home. The pages ahead promise discovery rather than foregone conclusions: a life unfolding, a voice amplifying, a vision widening. To enter them is to meet a writer determined to render experience whole, and to encounter the lasting questions that make these works genuinely great.
Author Biography
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was a towering American novelist of the early twentieth century, celebrated for his rhapsodic prose and vast, autobiographical canvases. Emerging amid high modernism, he sought not fragmentation but amplitude, striving to capture the sweep of American life through memory, sensation, and restless ambition. His major novels—Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River—along with substantial posthumous books, secured his reputation as a prodigy of excess and lyric power. Though his methods divided critics, he influenced generations of writers who admired his musical sentences and emotional candor. Wolfe’s career was brief yet incandescent, leaving an outsized mark on U.S. literary culture.
Raised in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe’s early environment of a bustling Southern mountain town fostered the sense of place that saturates his fiction. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1910s, where he wrote and staged plays and gained experience in student journalism and theater. In the early 1920s he continued at Harvard, working in George Pierce Baker’s famed 47 Workshop, which trained him in dramaturgy, revision, and the practicalities of production. Although he initially pursued a career as a dramatist, the expansiveness of his material nudged him toward prose narratives capable of holding his sprawling vision.
After Harvard, Wolfe moved to New York City and taught English at New York University while continuing to write. He traveled in Europe periodically, absorbing cosmopolitan influences and refining his voice. A pivotal professional alliance came when editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons helped shape Wolfe’s massive manuscripts into publishable form. The result, Look Homeward, Angel, appeared in the late 1920s to both acclaim and controversy. Its thinly veiled portrait of his hometown and its unguarded emotional intensity electrified readers and offended some local acquaintances, while establishing Wolfe as a singular new novelist whose subject was nothing less than the making of an American self.
In the mid-1930s Wolfe consolidated his fame with Of Time and the River, a sweeping sequel that extended his protagonist’s journey through education, travel, and artistic aspiration. He also published the short-story collection From Death to Morning and a reflective craft manifesto, The Story of a Novel, in which he described his methods of composition and the crucial role of editing. Critics alternately praised his incantatory style and lamented its diffuseness, yet many recognized the audacity of his attempt to render consciousness at scale. Wolfe’s long, rolling sentences, catalogues, and rhetorical crescendos linked him to romantic and modernist traditions without fully belonging to either.
Professional tensions over editing and scope led Wolfe to seek a new publishing arrangement in the late 1930s. He left Scribner’s and moved to Harper & Brothers, where he delivered an enormous, unfinished manuscript. Frequent European travels in the early 1930s, including time in Germany, sharpened his sense of history; he publicly condemned authoritarianism in essays such as I Have a Thing to Tell You. The work-in-progress drew together themes of home and exile, the metropolis, and the costs of art. Even as Wolfe strove for greater structural control, he remained committed to the sheer amplitude that had become his signature.
Wolfe’s life was cut short in the late 1930s after a sudden, grave illness; he died at thirty-seven. Editor Edward Aswell at Harper & Brothers organized and shaped the vast pages he left behind into major posthumous works: The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and the collection The Hills Beyond. These volumes sparked debate about the extent of editorial intervention while nevertheless bringing readers significant portions of Wolfe’s late vision. They also broadened his portrait of America during a time of upheaval, securing his posthumous reputation and ensuring that his voice continued to circulate well beyond his lifetime.
Wolfe’s legacy lies in his ambition to write the total book of a life and a nation, a quest that inspired later stylists who prized ecstatic, large-scale narration. Writers from the mid-century onward, including figures of the Beat and postwar generations, drew energy from his cadences; the very phrase you can’t go home again entered common speech. His boyhood home in Asheville is preserved as a literary museum, and his work remains a touchstone in discussions of autobiographical fiction, editorial collaboration, and American regional writing. Today, readers approach him for the music of his prose and his fervent exploration of belonging.
Historical Context
Thomas Wolfe’s career unfolded across a period of American transformation, from his birth in 1900 to his death in 1938 and the publication of major posthumous work in 1940. The United States moved from Progressive Era optimism through World War I disillusionment, the 1920s boom, the 1929 crash, and New Deal reconstruction. Mass culture expanded through radio, movies, and national magazines, while a modern, urban sensibility contended with regional identities and remembered pasts. Wolfe’s large-scale, memory-saturated narratives resonate with this historical sweep, recording migrations from small towns to cities and from America to Europe, even as they chart personal quests in a nation defining itself amid acceleration and upheaval.
Wolfe’s native ground in Asheville, North Carolina, situated in the southern Appalachians, embodied the promises and strains of the New South. Railroads and hotels brought tourists and capital to mountain towns in the early twentieth century, while boosterism coexisted with poverty and the rigidities of Jim Crow segregation. The texture of such places—boardinghouses, stonecutting shops, courthouse squares, and railroad depots—gave specificity to a broader regional story of modernization and loss. The South’s coexistence of intimacy and conflict proved fertile for a writer intent on tracing the contours of family, class, and ambition, and on recording the psychic distances that opened as America professionalized and urbanized.
Education and the arts shaped Wolfe’s voice during years when American universities fostered new cultural energies. He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1916 as a precocious teenager, worked with the Carolina Playmakers under Frederick H. Koch, and graduated in 1920. At Harvard University he earned an A.M. in 1922 and joined George Pierce Baker’s celebrated 47 Workshop, where young dramatists explored modern theatrical technique. This training in performance, scene-building, and ensemble effects helped give his prose its panoramic reach. The academy’s push toward professionalism, coupled with student journalism and campus theatricals, offered a crucible for experiments that would later burst the bounds of conventional fiction.
The American Little Theatre movement and the interwar stage extended a national conversation about modernity that reached from Chapel Hill and Cambridge to New York. By the early 1920s, avant-garde techniques and socially probing plays circulated among regional companies and civic playhouses, fostering a democratized playwriting culture. Wolfe’s early dramas—workshopped at Harvard—belonged to this milieu. Even as he turned to fiction, his chapters often functioned like stage sequences, with spotlighted scenes, choral effects, and shifts in point of view analogous to theatrical blocking. That cross-pollination between page and stage placed him within a broader generation trying to enlarge narrative form to match the amplitude of American life.
New York City in the 1920s provided the nation’s most intense laboratory of cosmopolitan experience. Wolfe moved to Greenwich Village, taught at Washington Square College of New York University (mid-1920s), and entered professional circles that tied publishing, theater, and the visual arts together. He met editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons and maintained a turbulent yet defining editorial partnership through the mid-1930s. The Village, the Theatre Guild, and the intersection of immigrant neighborhoods, jazz clubs, and bohemian cafés sharpened his sense of America’s polyglot energies. The city’s density—of ambition, class encounter, and the crush of sensation—became both subject and structural pressure, pressing his narratives toward epic scale.
World War I ended with the Armistice of November 11, 1918, but its aftermath colored the education and early adulthood of Wolfe’s cohort. Even students too young to fight absorbed the era’s grief, veterans’ trauma, and the instability felt during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, which touched families across the South and beyond. Wolfe’s own family suffered acute loss in those years, deepening his preoccupation with time and mourning. Across the nation, returning soldiers met the anxieties of reintegration, and a restless search for meaning animated writers who would be labeled the Lost Generation. The interplay of exuberance and elegy common to the 1920s reverberates through Wolfe’s capacious, memory-driven work.
Prohibition (1920–1933) intersected with the urban exuberance of the Jazz Age, giving American life its contradictory mix of constraint and indulgence. Speakeasies, dance halls, vaudeville palaces, and the new movie theaters offered the spectacle of a mass culture increasingly mediated by technology. Radio networks took shape—NBC in 1926 and CBS in 1927—while tabloid journalism and photo magazines standardized celebrity and scandal. For ambitious young Americans streaming into cities, the era promised reinvention even as it intensified social stratification. Wolfe’s characters move through this architecture of bright signs and alienating crowds, registering the pull of the metropolis as both liberating and bruising, a place where voices multiply and solitude deepens.
The crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression reframed the nation’s horizons. Publishers faced bankruptcies and consolidation, yet books also offered an inexpensive refuge and a public square for argument. The New Deal’s cultural climate, with its documentary ethos and attention to ordinary lives, encouraged large narratives of national experience. Book-of-the-Month Club selections could propel literary careers, and lecture tours reached readers in small towns and regional cities. Wolfe’s long manuscripts, appearing before and during the Depression, met audiences hungry for stories that matched their own sense of displacement. The economic crisis turned mobility into necessity, the railroad into a lifeline, and time itself into a contested measure of hope.
Transatlantic travel fed American self-scrutiny in the 1920s and 1930s. Writers sailed from New York to Southampton, Cherbourg, or Le Havre, circulating through London cafes and Paris salons, and comparing the United States’ youth with Europe’s layered histories. Wolfe crossed often, lingering in England and France, visiting Italy and Switzerland, and measuring American provincial restlessness against old-world pageantry and decay. Steamships were floating cities, and the port of New York a theater of departures and returns. The very recurrence of the voyage—its rituals of embarkation and the shock of reentry—became a structural motif, binding personal ambition to hemispheric geography and making the Atlantic an axis of artistic self-definition.
By the mid-1930s, the lure of Europe darkened. Wolfe visited Germany in 1936 and 1937 as National Socialism consolidated power, witnessing surveillance, propaganda, and the intimidation of Jews and dissenters. He broke publicly with the regime in a 1937 essay, “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” and was afterward unwelcome there. The spectacle of torchlit rallies, book burnings, and the Nuremberg Laws stood as a grim mirror to American inequities and nativism. This comparative lens—seeing America through Europe and Europe through America—sharpened Wolfe’s sense of cultural crisis and exile. Political violence abroad intensified his exploration of belonging, estrangement, and the fragile promise of democratic ideals at home.
Wolfe wrote amid the Southern Renaissance, a flowering that included William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and others, who interrogated memory, violence, and regional myth. The Nashville Agrarians’ I’ll Take My Stand (1930) argued for a traditional South against industrial modernity, even as cities like Atlanta and Charlotte accelerated their growth. Wolfe, less programmatic than the Agrarians, shared the moment’s preoccupations: the tension between local loyalties and national ambition, between rootedness and flight. His capacious panoramas joined a broader revision of American regionalism, insisting that the provincial contained the universal. Literary debates about form—modernist concision versus expansive romanticism—became, in his case, a contest over how much life a book could hold.
Race, class, and migration formed the American background hum of Wolfe’s era. The Great Migration, accelerating from 1916 onward, reconfigured northern and southern cities; textile mills and railroad yards in North Carolina drew white mountaineers and displaced farmers into new wage economies. Jim Crow’s humiliations remained acute in the Carolinas he knew, while the Harlem Renaissance gave Black artistry a national platform. In New York, Jewish theaters, immigrant shops, and union halls animated the streets; anti-Semitism, on both sides of the Atlantic, grew ominously in the 1930s. Wolfe’s social canvases absorb these crossings and exclusions, staging encounters in boardinghouses, train cars, and sidewalks where American aspiration collided with entrenched hierarchies.
Technological modernity pressed inward on daily life. Railroads made possible sudden departures; intercity buses extended cheap mobility; highways stitched together new itineraries. Telephones collapsed distance, electric signs refashioned nighttime, and newspapers and magazines synchronized the morning’s talk from Asheville to Manhattan. The gramophone and radio made voices portable; motion pictures standardized dream-life. Wolfe’s narratives, crowded with timetables, platforms, and waiting rooms, reflect the choreography of transit that governed American work and desire. Mobility promised escape but underscored impermanence, turning home into a moving target. The very grammar of his sentences—elastic, cumulative, cadenced like trains—echoes the modern machine-rhythms that governed how Americans met, parted, and remembered.
The publishing history of Wolfe’s work illuminates broader patterns in American literary production. At Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins—who also edited F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—helped shepherd the sprawling manuscripts into print, making heavy cuts while defending their exuberance. After critical storms and professional frictions, Wolfe left Scribner’s in 1937 for Harper & Brothers. There, Edward C. Aswell became the pivotal posthumous editor, assembling massive drafts into coherent volumes after Wolfe’s death. These editorial interventions, negotiations over length, and the economics of clothbound bestsellers exemplify the industrial conditions of authorship between the wars, when the sheer scale of American experience seemed to demand equally capacious books, yet the market imposed form.
The friction between art and community was not abstract. The publication of a major early novel in 1929 angered many in Wolfe’s hometown, who recognized themselves under fictional names and threatened legal action. Small-city America, with its tight networks and reputational economies, reacted sharply to metropolitan frankness about sex, money, and family conflict. The episode echoed nationwide disputes over literary candor in the 1920s and ’30s, when novels were seized for obscenity and authors were sued for libel. Wolfe avoided Asheville for years, returning in 1937 to a more conciliatory reception, a reconciliation that dramatized the recurrent American question of whether home is sanctuary, trap, fiction, or fate.
Wolfe’s last year compressed an American itinerary into tragedy. Falling ill on the Pacific Coast in the summer of 1938, he was taken first to Seattle and then to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where neurosurgeon Walter Dandy operated; he died on September 15, 1938, at age thirty-seven. His notebooks and vast, unfinished manuscripts passed to Harper & Brothers, where Edward Aswell shaped them into books published in 1939 and 1940. The posthumous arc itself is historical: it testifies to the collaborative nature of modern authorship, to the Depression-era hunger for large narratives, and to the enduring curiosity about how a nation’s story might be told through one restless life.
Reception and legacy positioned Wolfe as both exemplar and outlier of interwar American letters. Critics debated his amplitude—Bernard DeVoto famously scolded his “splurge”—even as readers embraced the emotional voltage of his lyric realism. Abroad, his travel-inflected scenes connected American restlessness to European crises; at home, later adaptation underscored his popular reach, notably Ketti Frings’s stage version of one early novel, awarded the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. By then, the trilogy of youth, journey, and return had become part of a national mythos. His work endures as a chronicle of time and place—Southern and urban, American and transatlantic—made in the heat of a swiftly changing world.
Synopsis (Selection)
Look Homeward, Angel
A bildungsroman tracing Eugene Gant’s youth in the fictional mountain town of Altamont, charting his turbulent family life, awakening intellect, and growing desire to leave home for a larger world. Wolfe presents a sprawling portrait of small-town America and the formative forces that shape an artist.
Of Time and the River
Continuing Eugene’s story into early adulthood, the novel follows his departure from the South to university and the wider world as he wrestles with ambition, memory, and the making of a writer. It spans cities and continents to capture the rhythms of modern America and the pull of home.
You Can’t Go Home Again
Through the story of novelist George Webber, whose book estranges him from his hometown, the novel explores fame, exile, and the fraught idea of ‘home’ in Depression-era America and Europe. It traces a restless search for belonging amid social upheaval and the recognition that the past cannot be reclaimed.
The Greatest Works of Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
To the Reader
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical — that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than “Gulliver’s Travels” cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.
Part One
... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
1
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
This is a moment:
An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gant (a concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore from Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let the profits of a public house which he had purchased roll down his improvident gullet. He wandered westward into Pennsylvania, eking out a dangerous living by matching fighting cocks against the champions of country barnyards, and often escaping after a night spent in a village jail, with his champion dead on the field of battle, without the clink of a coin in his pocket, and sometimes with the print of a farmer’s big knuckles on his reckless face. But he always escaped, and coming at length among the Dutch at harvest time he was so touched by the plenty of their land that he cast out his anchors there. Within a year he married a rugged young widow with a tidy farm who like all the other Dutch had been charmed by his air of travel, and his grandiose speech, particularly when he did Hamlet in the manner of the great Edmund Kean. Every one said he should have been an actor.
The Englishman begot children — a daughter and four sons — lived easily and carelessly, and bore patiently the weight of his wife’s harsh but honest tongue. The years passed, his bright somewhat staring eyes grew dull and bagged, the tall Englishman walked with a gouty shuffle: one morning when she came to nag him out of sleep she found him dead of an apoplexy. He left five children, a mortgage and — in his strange dark eyes which now stared bright and open — something that had not died: a passionate and obscure hunger for voyages.
So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman and are concerned hereafter with the heir to whom he bequeathed it, his second son, a boy named Oliver. How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother’s farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg, how his cold eyes darkened when he heard the great name of Virginia, and how the year the war had ended, when he was still fifteen, he had walked along a street in Baltimore, and seen within a little shop smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold phthisic feet, with a smile of soft stone idiocy — this is a longer tale. But I know that his cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure and passionate hunger that had lived in a dead man’s eyes, and that had led from Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia. As the boy looked at the big angel with the carved stipe of lilystalk, a cold and nameless excitement possessed him. The long fingers of his big hands closed. He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the world, to carve delicately with a chisel. He wanted to wreak something dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone. He wanted to carve an angel’s head.
Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded man with a wooden mallet for a job. He became the stone cutter’s apprentice. He worked in that dusty yard five years. He became a stone cutter. When his apprenticeship was over he had become a man.
He never found it. He never learned to carve an angel’s head. The dove, the lamb, the smooth joined marble hands of death, and letters fair and fine — but not the angel. And of all the years of waste and loss — the riotous years in Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and the theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who memorized each accent of the noble rant, and strode muttering through the streets, with rapid gestures of the enormous talking hands — these are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?
He never found it, and he reeled down across the continent into the Reconstruction South — a strange wild form of six feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of rhetoric, a preposterous and comic invective, as formalized as classical epithet, which he used seriously, but with a faint uneasy grin around the corners of his thin wailing mouth.
He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city of one of the middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously under the attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and hostility, and finally, his good name founded and admission won, he married a gaunt tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with a nest egg and an unshakable will to matrimony. Within eighteen months he was a howling maniac again, his little business went smash while his foot stayed on the polished rail, and Cynthia, his wife — whose life, the natives said, he had not helped to prolong — died suddenly one night after a hemorrhage.
So, all was gone again — Cynthia, the shop, the hard-bought praise of soberness, the angel’s head — he walked through the streets at dark, yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and all their indolence; but sick with fear and loss and penitence, he wilted under the town’s reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the flesh wasted on his own gaunt frame, that Cynthia’s scourge was doing vengeance now on him.
He was only past thirty, but he looked much older. His face was yellow and sunken; the waxen blade of his nose looked like a beak. He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully.
His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his health. He was thin as a rail and had a cough. He thought of Cynthia now, in the lonely and hostile town, and he became afraid. He thought he had tuberculosis and that he was going to die.
So, alone and lost again, having found neither order nor establishment in the world, and with the earth cut away from his feet, Oliver resumed his aimless drift along the continent. He turned westward toward the great fortress of the hills, knowing that behind them his evil fame would not be known, and hoping that he might find in them isolation, a new life, and recovered health.
The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as they had in his youth.
All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver rode westward across the mighty state. As he stared mournfully out the window at the great raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and occasional little farms, which seemed to have made only little grubbing patches in the wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in him. He thought of the great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of golden grain, the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the people. And he thought of how he had set out to get order and position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the blot and blur of years, and the red waste of his youth.
By God! he thought. I’m getting old! Why here?
The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain. Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channelled by a series of accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the sound of a bugle on the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly white face of an angel in a dusty shop, a slut’s pert wiggle of her hams as she passed by. He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow unworked earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red clay roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations — a lean farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby — the strangeness of destiny stabbed him with fear. How came he here from the clean Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?
The train rattled on over the reeking earth. Rain fell steadily. A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. High empty laughter shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats. The bell tolled mournfully above the clacking wheels. There was a droning interminable wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills. Then the train moved on again across the vast rolling earth.
Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow labor. As darkness came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old Stockade where the rails ended. The last great wall of the hills lay stark above him. As he left the dreary little station and stared into the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die.
The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. His destination was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the rim of the great outer wall of the hills. As the horses strained slowly up the mountain road Oliver’s spirit lifted a little. It was a gray-golden day in late October, bright and windy. There was a sharp bite and sparkle in the mountain air: the range soared above him, close, immense, clean, and barren. The trees rose gaunt and stark: they were almost leafless. The sky was full of windy white rags of cloud; a thick blade of mist washed slowly around the rampart of a mountain.
Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky bed, and he could see little dots of men laying the track that would coil across the hill toward Altamont. Then the sweating team lipped the gulch of the mountain, and, among soaring and lordly ranges that melted away in purple mist, they began the slow descent toward the high plateau on which the town of Altamont was built.
In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their enormous cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of four thousand people.
There were new lands. His heart lifted.
This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary War. It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattledrovers and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South Carolina. And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South. When Oliver first came to it it had begun to get some reputation not only as a summer resort, but as a sanitarium for tuberculars. Several rich men from the North had established hunting lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain land and, with an army of imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the greatest country estate in America — something in limestone, with pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms. It was modelled on the chateau at Blois. There was also a vast new hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit of a commanding hill.
But most of the population was still native, recruited from the hill and country people in the surrounding districts. They were Scotch–Irish mountaineers, rugged, provincial, intelligent, and industrious.
Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from the wreckage of Cynthia’s estate. During the winter he rented a little shack at one edge of the town’s public square, acquired a small stock of marbles, and set up business. But he had little to do at first save to think of the prospect of his death. During the bitter and lonely winter, while he thought he was dying, the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped muttering through the streets became an object of familiar gossip to the townspeople. All the people at his boarding-house knew that at night he walked his room with great caged strides, and that a long low moan that seemed wrung from his bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips. But he spoke to no one about it.
And then the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief spurting winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts of balsam. The great wound in Oliver began to heal. His voice was heard in the land once more, there were purple flashes of the old rhetoric, the ghost of the old eagerness.
One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he stood before his shop, watching the flurry of life in the square, Oliver heard behind him the voice of a man who was passing. And that voice, flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden light a picture that had lain dead in him for twenty years.
“Hit’s a comin’! Accordin’ to my figgers hit’s due June 11, 1886.”
Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive figure of the prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to Gettysburg and Armageddon.
“Who is that?” he asked a man.
The man looked and grinned.
“That’s Bacchus Pentland,” he said. “He’s quite a character. There are a lot of his folks around here.”
Oliver wet his great thumb briefly. Then, with a grin, he said:
“Has Armageddon come yet?”
“He’s expecting it any day now,” said the man.
Then Oliver met Eliza. He lay one afternoon in Spring upon the smooth leather sofa of his little office, listening to the bright piping noises in the Square. A restoring peace brooded over his great extended body. He thought of the loamy black earth with its sudden young light of flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of the plumtree’s dropping blossoms. Then he heard the brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among the marbles, and he got hastily to his feet. He was drawing on his well brushed coat of heavy black just as she entered.
“I tell you what,” said Eliza, pursing her lips in reproachful banter, “I wish I was a man and had nothing to do but lie around all day on a good easy sofa.”
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Oliver with a flourishing bow. “Yes,” he said, as a faint sly grin bent the corners of his thin mouth, “I reckon you’ve caught me taking my constitutional. As a matter of fact I very rarely lie down in the daytime, but I’ve been in bad health for the last year now, and I’m not able to do the work I used to.”
He was silent a moment; his face drooped in an expression of hangdog dejection. “Ah, Lord! I don’t know what’s to become of me!”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza briskly and contemptuously. “There’s nothing wrong with you in my opinion. You’re a big strapping fellow, in the prime of life. Half of it’s only imagination. Most of the time we think we’re sick it’s all in the mind. I remember three years ago I was teaching school in Hominy Township when I was taken down with pneumonia. Nobody ever expected to see me come out of it alive but I got through it somehow; I well remember one day I was sitting down — as the fellow says, I reckon I was convalescin’; the reason I remember is Old Doctor Fletcher had just been and when he went out I saw him shake his head at my cousin Sally. ‘Why Eliza, what on earth,’ she said, just as soon as he had gone, ‘he tells me you’re spitting up blood every time you cough; you’ve got consumption as sure as you live.’ ‘Pshaw,’ I said. I remember I laughed just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of it all; I just thought to myself, I’m not going to give into it, I’ll fool them all yet; ‘I don’t believe a word of it’ (I said),” she nodded her head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, “‘and besides, Sally’ (I said) ‘we’ve all got to go some time, and there’s no use worrying about what’s going to happen. It may come tomorrow, or it may come later, but it’s bound to come to all in the end’.”
“Ah Lord!” said Oliver, shaking his head sadly. “You bit the nail on the head that time. A truer word was never spoken.”
Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner grin. How long is this to keep up? But she’s a pippin as sure as you’re born. He looked appreciatively at her trim erect figure, noting her milky white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child’s stare, and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from her high white forehead. She had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with egocentric delight. Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking abruptly, put her neat gloved hand to her chin, and stared off with a thoughtful pursed mouth.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “if you’re getting your health back and spend a good part of your time lying around you ought to have something to occupy your mind.” She opened a leather portmanteau she was carrying and produced a visiting card and two fat volumes. “My name,” she said portentously, with slow emphasis, “is Eliza Pentland, and I represent the Larkin Publishing Company.”
She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto. Merciful God! A book agent! thought Gant.
“We are offering,” said Eliza, opening a huge yellow book with a fancy design of spears and flags and laurel wreaths, “a book of poems called Gems of Verse for Hearth and Fireside as well as Larkin’s Domestic Doctor and Book of Household Remedies, giving directions for the cure and prevention of over five hundred diseases.”
“Well,” said Gant, with a faint grin, wetting his big thumb briefly, “I ought to find one that I’ve got out of that.”
“Why, yes,” said Eliza, nodding smartly, “as the fellow says, you can read poetry for the good of your soul and Larkin for the good of your body.”
“I like poetry,” said Gant, thumbing over the pages, and pausing with interest at the section marked Songs of the Spur and Sabre. “In my boyhood I could recite it by the hour.”
He bought the books. Eliza packed her samples, and stood up looking sharply and curiously about the dusty little shop.
“Doing any business?” she said.
“Very little,” said Oliver sadly. “Hardly enough to keep body and soul together. I’m a stranger in a strange land.”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza cheerfully. “You ought to get out and meet more people. You need something to take your mind off yourself. If I were you, I’d pitch right in and take an interest in the town’s progress. We’ve got everything here it takes to make a big town — scenery, climate, and natural resources, and we all ought to work together. If I had a few thousand dollars I know what I’d do,”— she winked smartly at him, and began to speak with a curiously masculine gesture of the hand — forefinger extended, fist loosely clenched. “Do you see this corner here — the one you’re on? It’ll double in value in the next few years. Now, here!” she gestured before her with the loose masculine gesture. “They’re going to run a street through there some day as sure as you live. And when they do —” she pursed her lips reflectively, “that property is going to be worth money.”
She continued to talk about property with a strange meditative hunger. The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint to her: her head was stuffed uncannily with figures and estimates — who owned a lot, who sold it, the sale-price, the real value, the future value, first and second mortgages, and so on. When she had finished, Oliver said with the emphasis of strong aversion, thinking of Sydney:
“I hope I never own another piece of property as long as I live — save a house to live in. It is nothing but a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets it all in the end.”
Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if he had uttered a damnable heresy.
“Why, say! That’s no way to talk!” she said. “You want to lay something by for a rainy day, don’t you?”
“I’m having my rainy day now,” he said gloomily. “All the property I need is eight feet of earth to be buried in.”
Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety. Then he turned back among his marbles again with a stirring in him of a joy he thought he had lost forever.
The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was one of the strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills. It had no clear title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch–Englishman of that name, who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present head of the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution, looking for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting several children by one of the pioneer women. When he disappeared the woman took for herself and her children the name of Pentland.
The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza’s father, the brother of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. Another brother had been killed during the Seven Days. Major Pentland’s military title was honestly if inconspicuously earned. While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank of Corporal, was blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the native hills. This stronghold was never threatened until the closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment of Sherman’s stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defense of their attendant wives and children.
The Pentland family was as old as any in the community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to gentility. By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, of some insanity, and a modicum of idiocy. But because of its obvious superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain people it held a position of solid respect among them.
The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking. Like most rich personalities in strange families their powerful group-stamp became more impressive because of their differences. They had broad powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings, sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness, which in the process of thinking they convolved with astonishing flexibility, broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a trifle hollowed. The men were generally ruddy of face, and their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height, although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.
Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous family of which Eliza was the only surviving girl. A younger sister had died a few years before of a disease which the family identified sorrowfully as “poor Jane’s scrofula.” There were six boys: Henry, the oldest, was now thirty, Will was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen, and eleven. Eliza was twenty-four.
The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and Jim, had passed their childhood in the years following the war. The poverty and privation of these years had been so terrible that none of them ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared into their hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.
The effect of these years upon the oldest children was to develop in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of property, and a desire to escape from the Major’s household as quickly as possible.
“Father,” Eliza had said with ladylike dignity, as she led Oliver for the first time into the sitting-room of the cottage, “I want you to meet Mr. Gant.”
Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the fire, folded a large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on the mantel. Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and Will, glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual, greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink. The men amused themselves constantly with pocket knives.
Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant. He was a stocky fleshy man in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a patriarchal beard, and the thick complacent features of his tribe.
“It’s W. O. Gant, isn’t it?” he asked in a drawling unctuous voice.
“Yes,” said Oliver, “that’s right.”
“From what Eliza’s been telling me about you,” said the Major, giving the signal to his audience, “I was going to say it ought to be L. E. Gant.”
The room sounded with the fat pleased laughter of the Pentlands.
“Whew!” cried Eliza, putting her hand to the wing of her broad nose. “I’ll vow, father! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.
The miserable old scoundrel, he thought. He’s had that one bottled up for a week.
“You’ve met Will before,” said Eliza.
“Both before and aft,” said Will with a smart wink.
When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: “And this — as the fellow says — is Uncle Bacchus.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bacchus beaming, “as large as life an’ twice as sassy.”
“They call him Back-us everywhere else,” said Will, including them all in a brisk wink, “but here in the family we call him Behind-us.”
“I suppose,” said Major Pentland deliberately, “that you’ve served on a great many juries?”
“No,” said Oliver, determined to endure the worst now with a frozen grin. “Why?”
“Because,” said the Major looking around again, “I thought you were a fellow who’d done a lot of COURTIN’.”
Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and several of the others came in-Eliza’s mother, a plain worn Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father’s beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye, bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed. He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and untaught.
And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs clashed. And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth. And as their talk wore on, and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss and darkness, and his soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for he saw that he must die a stranger — that all, all but these triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death — must die.
And like a man who is perishing in the polar night, he thought of the rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree, and ripe grain. Why here? O lost!
2
Oliver married Eliza in May. After their wedding trip to Philadelphia, they returned to the house he had built for her on Woodson Street. With his great hands he had laid the foundations, burrowed out deep musty cellars in the earth, and sheeted the tall sides over with smooth trowellings of warm brown plaster. He had very little money, but his strange house grew to the rich modelling of his fantasy: when he had finished he had something which leaned to the slope of his narrow uphill yard, something with a high embracing porch in front, and warm rooms where one stepped up and down to the tackings of his whim. He built his house close to the quiet hilly street; he bedded the loamy soil with flowers; he laid the short walk to the high veranda steps with great square sheets of colored marble; he put a fence of spiked iron between his house and the world.
Then, in the cool long glade of yard that stretched four hundred feet behind the house he planted trees and grape vines. And whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into golden life: as the years passed, the fruit trees — the peach, the plum, the cherry, the apple — grew great and bent beneath their clusters. His grape vines thickened into brawny ropes of brown and coiled down the high wire fences of his lot, and hung in a dense fabric, upon his trellises, roping his domain twice around. They climbed the porch end of the house and framed the upper windows in thick bowers. And the flowers grew in rioting glory in his yard — the velvet-leaved nasturtium, slashed with a hundred tawny dyes, the rose, the snowball, the redcupped tulip, and the lily. The honeysuckle drooped its heavy mass upon the fence; wherever his great hands touched the earth it grew fruitful for him.
For him the house was the picture of his soul, the garment of his will. But for Eliza it was a piece of property, whose value she shrewdly appraised, a beginning for her hoard. Like all the older children of Major Pentland she had, since her twentieth year, begun the slow accretion of land: from the savings of her small wage as teacher and book-agent, she had already purchased one or two pieces of earth. On one of these, a small lot at the edge of the public square, she persuaded him to build a shop. This he did with his own hands, and the labor of two negro men: it was a two-story shack of brick, with wide wooden steps, leading down to the square from a marble porch. Upon this porch, flanking the wooden doors, he placed some marbles; by the door, he put the heavy simpering figure of an angel.
