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Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I have gazed on sun-flashed water where coral-growths iridesced from profounds of turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety of mirrored lagoons where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-fronded beaches of sea-pounded coral rock; and I have striven on forgotten battlefields of the elder days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease and that continued through the night-hours with the stars shining down and with a cool night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed to chill the sweat of battle; and again, I have been little Darrell Standing, bare-footed in the dew-lush grass of spring on the Minnesota farm, chilblained when of frosty mornings I fed the cattle in their breath-steaming stalls, sobered to fear and awe of the splendour and terror of God when I sat on Sundays under the rant and preachment of the New Jerusalem and the agonies of hell-fire.
From the same cause, the captain himself and several of his people had their fingers and toes chilblained. For some days afterward, the cold considerably abated; but still it could not be said that there was summer weather, according to our commander's ideas of summer in the northern hemisphere, as far as sixty degrees of latitude, which was nearly as far as he had then been.
The foolish, kindly old face belonged to his boyhood to the time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again?
He showed palms calloused, split, swollen lumps of chilblained flesh worn down and stiffened. "I bin seaman, not goddam navvy." Lund turned to the hunters. "You in on this?" he asked. Deming and Beale moved off. Two of the others joined them. "Neutral?" sneered Lund. "I'll remember that." Hansen and the two remaining came over beside Lund and Rainey. "Five of us," said Lund.
Who air you next?" nursing his musket across his knees, baby-fashion. Ben measured him with one eye, polished the quid in his greasy hand, and looked at it. "Pris'ner o' war," he mumbled, finally, contemptuously; for Dave's trousers were in rags like his own, and his chilblained toes stuck through the shoe-tops. Cheap white trash, clearly.
Could he go about in a long cloak and a slouch hat, curl up in doorways out of the blast, and be content in a feeling of his own picturesqueness? Could he sit all day on the stone pavement and hold out his chilblained hand for soldi?
After her mother and the three big brothers had returned to the table, the little girl, whom the barking had called from a bowl of grits and skimmed milk and a wash-pan of kerosene in which her chilblained feet were soaking, struggled to the top of the rain-barrel at the corner of the house and anxiously eyed the rising smoke.
Miss Milton did not look up, but continued to knit one of her horrible stockings. "Good-morning, Miss Milton. Mother has sent back these books. They were not quite what she wanted." "I'm sorry for that." Miss Milton took the books into her chilblained protection. "It's a little difficult, I must say, to know what Mrs. Brandon prefers." "Well, there's Sentimental Tommy," began Joan.
The hardy girls declared that it was "ripping," and laughed at the shivery subjects who hobbled about on chilblained feet, and showed faces mottled blue and red, like the imitation marble in lodging-house-parlours; the shivery girls huddled in corners, and wished they could go to bed and hug hot bottles until May came back and it was fit for human creatures to go about again!
She had felt the cruel blasts of the winter winds upon her chilblained feet, for she had never known the luxury of shoes. She had also seen the dying and understood what it meant to turn a longing face toward heaven, with a burning desire to know what was beyond. Such a voice as Tessibel's had never been heard upon Cayuga lake.
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