“Why should the wisdom that destroyed the one
safeguard the many?”
CHAPTER I
IT has often been said to me that rural life is not a happily chosen subject for a story: that in the country uniformity prevails in life, in customs, in everything; and that the persons of the rural drama cannot interest us because there is no variety in them. If any of my readers hold such views, I must request them to suspend judgment until the end of my story. It is, indeed, possible that the narrative will take us along unfrequented paths where the form of life is not so stirring as in the town. But yet man in essence is an exact copy of the citizen, for man is always interesting in so far as he is human; and he appreciates his good fortune just as little in the country as in the town; at the same time I do not wish to constrain my reader’s judgment.
We were still “wee scraps” when our father took us to visit grandfather. Grandfather dwelt in a house about an hour’s journey from ours. It was, then, a great event when father told us we were going there. Very wisely, he used always to tell us the week before, and though, to be sure, we were restless enough at all times, and each day tore our clothes, we were sure to be good children for the whole week if he told us where we were going the week after.
So then it was that we were to go to spend St. Lawrence’s festival with grandfather. This festival occurs at the beginning of August, when cocks begin to crow soon after midnight, and the sun still rises very early. But still earlier than those cocks did we children awake, and before the first cock had cock-a-doodled, we were already dressed; and before the first ray of sunrise had shown itself, we were already seated, smart and tidy, before the manse, on the door-step, congratulating ourselves that we were going to spend the festival at grandfather’s.
Our parents slept in the room next to ours, and we had sneaked out so quietly that they had not the least idea of our secret preparations. How mother must have started when coming to wake us she found our beds empty and not a sign of us.
