This eBook produced by Jared Fuller.
A KENTUCKY CARDINAL A Story
by James Lane Allen
Dedication
This to her from one who in childhood used to stand at the windowsof her room and watch for the Cardinal among the snow-buried cedars.
All this New-year's Day of 1850 the sun shone cloudless but wroughtno thaw. Even the landscapes of frost on the window-panes did notmelt a flower, and the little trees still keep their silvery boughsarched high above the jeweled avenues. During the afternoon a leanhare limped twice across the lawn, and there was not a creaturestirring to chase it. Now the night is bitter cold, with no soundsoutside but the cracking of the porches as they freeze tighter.Even the north wind seems grown too numb to move. I had determinedto convert its coarse, big noise into something sweet—as mayoften be done by a little art with the things of this life—and sostretched a horse-hair above the opening between the window sashes;but the soul of my harp has departed. I hear but the comfortableroar and snap of hickory logs, at long intervals a deeper breathfrom the dog stretched on his side at my feet, and the cricketsunder the hearth-stones. They have to thank me for that nook. Onechill afternoon I came upon a whole company of them on the westernslope of a woodland mound, so lethargic that I thumped them repeatedlybefore they could so much as get their senses. There was a branchnear by, and the smell of mint in the air, so that had they beenyoung Kentuckians one might have had a clew to the situation. Withan ear for winter minstrelsy, I brought two home in a handkerchief,and assigned them an elegant suite of apartments under a loosebrick.
But the finest music in the room is that which streams out to theear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelfof books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrumentwhich some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music,as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light.Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-softleaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.
Towards dark, having seen to the comfort of a household of kind,faithful fellow-beings, whom man in his vanity calls the loweranimals, I went last to walk under the cedars in the front yard,listening to that music which is at once so cheery and so sad—thelow chirping of birds at dark winter twilights as they gather infrom the frozen fields, from snow-buried shrubbery and hedge-rows,and settle down for the night in the depths of the evergreens, theonly refuge from their enemies and shelter from the blast. But thisevening they made no ado about their home-coming. To-day perhapsnone had ventured forth. I am most uneasy when the red-bird isforced by hunger to leave the covert of his cedars, since he, onthe naked or white landscapes of winter, offers the most far-shiningand beautiful mark for Death. I stepped across to the tree inwhich a pair of these birds roost and shook it, to make sure theywere at home, and felt relieved when they fluttered into the nextwith the quick startled notes they utter when aroused.
The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitchedmy earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping iton one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other.Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At timesthe needle of my nature points towards the country. On that sideeverything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and throughme runs a glad