Flamsted quarries   By: Mary E. (Mary Ella) Waller (1855-1938)

BY MARY E. WALLER

Author of "The Wood Carver of Lympus," "The Daughter of the Rich," "The Little Citizen," etc.

WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY G. PATRICK NELSON

A. L. BURT COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Copyright, 1910 , BY MARY E. WALLER Published September, 1910

Reprinted, September, 1910; November, 1910; December, 1910

TO THOSE WHO TOIL

[Illustration: "She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"]

Contents

THE BATTERY IN LIEU OF A PREFACE

PART FIRST, A CHILD FROM THE VAUDEVILLE

PART SECOND, HOME SOIL

PART THIRD, IN THE STREAM

PART FOURTH, OBLIVION

PART FIFTH, SHED NUMBER TWO

THE LAST WORD

Illustrations

"She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"

"Those present loved in after years to recall this scene"

"What a picture she made leaning caressingly against the charmed and patient Bess"

"'Unworthy unworthy!' was Champney Googe's cry, as he knelt before Aileen"

FLAMSTED QUARRIES

" Abysmal deeps repose Beneath the stout ship's keel whereon we glide; And if a diver plunge far down within Those depths and to the surface safe return, His smile, if so it chance he smile again, Outweighs in worth all gold. "

The Battery in Lieu of a Preface

A few years ago, at the very tip of that narrow rocky strip of land that has been well named "the Tongue that laps the Commerce of the World," the million teeming Island of Manhattan, there was daily presented a scene in the life drama of our land that held in itself, as in solution, a great national ideal. The old heroic "Epic of the Nations" was still visible to the naked eye, and masquerading here among us of the then nineteenth century in the guise of the arrival of the immigrant ship.

The scenic setting is in this instance incomparably fine. As we lean on the coping of the sea wall at the end of the green swarded Battery, in the flush of a May sunset that, on the right, throws the Highlands of the Navesink into dark purple relief and lights the waters of Harbor, River, and Sound into a softly swelling roseate flood, we may fix our eyes on the approach to The Narrows and watch the incoming shipping of the world: the fruit laden steamer from the Bermudas, the black East Indiaman heavy with teakwood and spices, the lumberman's barge awash behind the tow, the old three masted schooner, low in the water, her decks loaded with granite from the far away quarries of Maine. We may see, if we linger, the swift approach of a curiously foreshortened ocean steamship, her smokestack belching blackness, and the slower on coming of a Norwegian bark, her sails catching the sunset light and gleaming opaline against the clear blue of the southern horizon. These last are the immigrant ships.

An hour later in old Castle Garden the North and South of Europe clasp hands on the very threshold of America. Four thousand feet are planted on the soil of the New World. Four thousand hands are knocking at its portals. Two thousand hearts are beating high with hope at prospect of the New, or palpitating with terror at contact with the Strange.

A thousand tragedies, a thousand comedies are here enacted before our very eyes: hopes, fears, tears, laughter, shrieks, groans, wailings, exultant cries, welcoming words, silent all expressing hand clasp, embrace, despairing wide eyed search, hopeless isolation, the befriended, the friendless, the home welcomed, the homeless all commingled.