He hated the life he led. He hated the noisy
Tartar women that surrounded him,--aquatic and disgusting as
crawfish,--brown, stupid, and leering. He hated the feline yawling of
their music. He hated the yellow water, swarming with boats, and settled
with junks. He hated their pagodas, and their hideous effigies of their
ancestors, looking like dumb idols. Their bejewelled Buddhas, their
incense-lamps, their night and day, were alike odious to him.
Stretched on a bamboo chair, in an interval of labor, and when the
intense heat brought comparative stillness, before his closed eyes came
often up his home among the New-Hampshire hills. He thought of his dead
mother in the burying-ground, and the slate stones standing in the
desolate grass. Then his thoughts ran eagerly back to the Fox farm,
and the sweet, lonely figure that stood watching his return under the
pear-tree,--the warm kiss of happy meeting, life opening fair, and a
long vista through which the sunlight peeped all the more brightly for
the shadowing trees.
Then over the farm, broad and bountiful, scanning every detail of the
large red house, the great barns and sheds, the flocks of turkeys,
and the geese, kept for feathers, and not dreamed of for eating. (Our
Puritan fathers held neither to Christmas nor Christmas goose.) Through
the path up by the well-sweep, where the moss-covered bucket hangs
dripping with the purest of water.
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