文档介绍：THE MESSENGERS
THE MESSENGERS
By Richard Harding Davis
1
THE MESSENGERS
When Ainsley first moved to Lone Lake Farm all of his friends asked
him the same question. They wanted to know, if the farmer who sold it
to him had abandoned it as worthless, how one of the idle rich, who could
not distinguish a plough from a harrow, hoped to make it pay? His
answer was that he had not purchased the farm as a means of getting richer
by honest toil, but as a retreat from the world and as a test of true
friendship. He argued that the people he knew accepted his hospitality at
Sherry's because, in any event, they themselves would be dining within a
taxicab fare of the same place. But if to see him they travelled all the
way to Lone Lake Farm, he might feel assured that they were friends
indeed.
Lone Lake Farm was spread over many acres of rocky ravine and
forest, at a point where Connecticut approaches New York, and between it
and the nearest railroad station stretched six miles of an execrable wood
road. In this wilderness, directly upon the lonely lake, and at a spot
equally distant from each of his boundary lines, Ainsley built himself a red
brick house. Here, in solitude, he exiled himself; ostensibly to e a
gentleman farmer; in reality to wait until Polly Kirkland had made up her
mind to marry him.
Lone Lake, which gave the farm its name, was a pond hardly larger
than a city block. It was fed by hidden springs, and fringed about with
reeds and cat-tails, stunted willows and shivering birch. From its surface
jutted points of the same rock that had made farming unremunerative, and
to these miniature promontories and islands Ainsley, in keeping with a
fancied resemblance, gave such names as the Needles, St. Helena, the Isle
of Pines. From the edge of the pond that was farther from the house rose
a high hill, heavily wooded. At its base, oak and chestnut trees spread
their branches over the water, and when the air was still were so clearly
re