The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Argonauts of North Liberty, by Bret Harte

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Title: The Argonauts of North Liberty

Author: Bret Harte

Release Date: May 25, 2006 [EBook #2703]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARGONAUTS OF NORTH LIBERTY ***

Produced by Donald Lainson

THE ARGONAUTS OF NORTH LIBERTY

By Bret Harte

PART I

CHAPTER I

The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just ceased
ringing. North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town,
was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath
sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from
the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and
the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at last
settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment. On this chilly
March evening of the year 1850, that stare had kindled into an offended
sunset and an angry night that furiously spat sleet and hail in the
faces of the worshippers, and made them fight their way to the church,
step by step, with bent heads and fiercely compressed lips, until they
seemed to be carrying its forbidding portals at the point of their
umbrellas.

Within that sacred but graceless edifice, the rigors of the hour and
occasion reached their climax. The shivering gas-jets lit up the austere
pallor of the bare walls, and the hollow, shell-like sweep of colorless
vacuity behind the cold communion table. The chill of despair and
hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from
the sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm
exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the
presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary
apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless,
neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only
to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few
children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back
benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture, were
lab