Project Gutenberg's The Portion of Labor, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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Title: The Portion of Labor

Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Release Date: March 18, 2006 [EBook #18011]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PORTION OF LABOR ***

Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly

The Portion of Labor

By
Mary E. Wilkins

Author of
"Jerome" "A New England Nun" Etc.

Illustrated

Harper & Brothers
Publishers New York
And London MDCCCCI

To Henry Mills Alden

[Illustration: What did such a good little girl as you be run away from
father and mother for?]

Chapter I

On the west side of Ellen's father's house was a file of Norway
spruce-trees, standing with a sharp pointing of dark boughs towards
the north, which gave them an air of expectancy of progress.

Every morning Ellen, whose bedroom faced that way, looked out with a
firm belief that she would see them on the other side of the stone
wall, advanced several paces towards their native land. She had no
doubt of their ability to do so; their roots, projecting in fibrous
sprawls from their trunks, were their feet, and she pictured them
advancing with wide trailings, and rustlings as of green draperies,
and a loudening of that dreamy cry of theirs which was to her
imagination a cry of homesickness reminiscent of their old life in
the White north. When Ellen had first heard the name Norway spruce,
'way back in her childhood--so far back, though she was only seven
and a half now, that it seemed to her like a memory from another
life--she had asked her mother to show her Norway on the map, and
her strange convictions concerning the trees had seized her. When
her mother said that they had come from that northernmost land of
Europe, Ellen, to whose childhood all truth was naked and literal,
immediately conceived to herself those veritable trees advancing
over the frozen seas around the pole, and down through the vast
regions which were painted blue on her map, straight to her father's
west yard. There they stood and sang the songs of their own country,
with a melancholy sweetness of absence and longing, and were forev