The Gunpowder Plot
by
THE STORY OF A FOURTH OF JULY.
Whenever one writes with photographic exactness of frontier life he is accused of inventing improbable things.
“Old Davy Lindsley” lived in a queer cabin on the Pomme de Terre River. If you should ever ride over the new Northern Pacific when it shall be completed, or over that branch of it which crosses the Pomme de Terre, you can get out at a station which will, no doubt, be called for an old settler, Gager’s Station; and if you would like to see some beautiful scenery, take a canoe and float down the Pomme de Terre River. You will have to make some portages, and you will have a good appetite for supper when you reach the old Lindsley house, ten miles from Gager’s, but its present owner is hospitable.
A queer old chap was Lindsley the last time I saw him. I remember how he took me all over his claim and showed me the beauties of Lindsleyville, as he called it. His long iron-gray hair fluttered in the wind, and his face seemed like a wizard’s, penetrating but unearthly. That was long before the great tide of immigrants had begun to find their way into this paradise through the highway of the Sauk Valley. Lindsleyville was a hundred and fifty miles out of the world at that time. Its population numbered two–Lindsley and his daughter. The old man had tried to make a fortune in many ways. There was no sort of useless invention that he had not attempted, and you will find in the Patent Office models without number of beehives and cannons, steam cut-offs and baby jumpers, lightning churns and flying machines on which he had taken out patents, assured of making a fortune from each one. He had raised fancy chickens, figured himself rich on two swarms of bees, traveled with a magic lantern, written a philosophic novel, and started a newspaper. There was but one purpose in which he was fixed–which was, to guard his daughter jealously. To do this, and to make the experiment of building a Utopian city, he had traveled to the summit of this knoll on the right bank of the Pomme de Terre. There never was a more beautiful landscape than that which Lindsleyville commanded. But the town did not grow, chiefly because it was so far beyond the border, though the conditions in his deeds intended to secure the character of the city from deterioration were so many that nobody would have been willing to buy the lots.
At the time I speak of David Lindsley had dwelt on the Pomme de Terre for five years. He had removed suddenly from the Connecticut village in which he had been living because he discovered that his daughter had, in spite of his watchfulness, formed an attachment for a young man who had the effrontery to disclose the whole thing to him by politely asking his consent to their marriage.
“Marry my daughter!” choked the old man. “Why, Mr. Brown, you are crazy! I have educated her upon the combined principles of Rousseau, of Pestalozzi, of Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And you–you only graduated at Yale, an old fogy mediaeval institution! No, sir! not till I meet a philosopher whose mind has been symmetrically developed can I consent for my Emilia to marry.”
And the old man became so frantic, that, to save him from the madhouse, Emilia wrote a letter, at his dictation, to young Brown, peremptorily breaking off all relations; and he, a sensitive, romantic man, was heartbroken, and left the village. He only sent a farewell to his friends the day before he was to sail from New Bedford on a whaling voyage. He carried with him the impression that an unaccountable change of mind in Emilia had left no hope for him.
To prevent a recurrence of such an untoward accident as this, and, as he expressed it, “to bring his daughter’s mind into intimate relations with nature,” the fanatical philosopher established the town of Lindsleyville, determined that no family in which there was a young man should settle on his town plot, unless, indeed, the young man should prove to be the paragon he was looking for.