文档介绍：THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
THE HOUSE BEHIND
THE CEDARS
BY CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
1
THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
I
A STRANGER FROM SOUTH CAROLINA
Time touches all things with destroying hand; and if he seem now
and then to bestow the bloom of youth, the sap of spring, it is but a brief
mockery, to be surely and swiftly followed by the wrinkles of old age, the
dry leaves and bare branches of winter. And yet there are places where
Time seems to linger lovingly long after youth has departed, and to which
he seems loath to bring the evil day. Who has not known some even-
tempered old man or woman who seemed to have drunk of the fountain of
youth? Who has not seen somewhere an old town that, having long since
ceased to grow, yet held its own without perceptible decline?
Some such trite reflection--as apposite to the subject as most random
reflections are--passed through the mind of a young man who came out of
the front door of the Patesville Hotel about nine o'clock one fine morning
in spring, a few years after the Civil War, and started down Front Street
toward the market-house. Arriving at the town late the previous evening,
he had been driven up from the steamboat in a carriage, from which he
had been able to distinguish only the shadowy outlines of the houses along
the street; so that this morning walk was his first opportunity to see the
town by daylight. He was dressed in a suit of linen duck--the day was
warm--a panama straw hat, and patent leather shoes. In appearance he
was tall, dark, with straight, black, lustrous hair, and very clean-cut, high-
bred features. When he paused by the clerk's desk on his way out, to
light his cigar, the day clerk, who had e on duty, glanced at the
register and read the last entry:--
"`JOHN WARWICK, CLARENCE, SOUTH CAROLINA.'
"One of the South Ca'lina bigbugs, I reckon --probably in cotton, or
turpentine." The gentleman from South Carolina, walking down the
street, glanced about him with an e