The Imperialist Read Online Free PDF Page A

eldest son of Mr. John Murchison, of this town, has passed at the capital of the Province his final examination in Law, distinguishing himself by coming out at the top of the list. It will be remembered that Mr. Murchison, upon enteringthe Law Schools, also carried off a valuable scholarship. We are glad to be able to announce that Mr. Murchison, junior, will embark upon his profession in his native town, where he will enter the well-known firm of Fulke and Warner.”
    The editor, Mr. Horace Williams, had gone to dinner, and Rawlins was out, so Dr. Drummond had to leave it with the press foreman. Mr. Williams read it appreciatively on his return, and sent it down with the following addition –
    “This is doing it as well as it can be done. Elgin congratulates Mr. L. Murchison upon having produced these results, and herself upon having produced Mr. L. Murchison.”

THREE
    F rom the day she stepped into it Mrs. Murchison knew that the Plummer Place was going to be the bane of her existence. This may have been partly because Mr. Murchison had bought it, since a circumstance welded like that into one’s life is very apt to assume the character of a bane, unless one’s temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs. Murchison’s didn’t. But there were other reasons more difficult to traverse; it was plainly true that the place did require a tremendous amount of “looking after,” as such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking after than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They could never have afforded, in the beginning, to possess it, had it not been sold, under mortgage, at a dramatic sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair, built of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs compassing the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had only to turn his hand to the forest. It stood on the very edge of the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and cornstacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army. The plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road, or, if you were so inclined, theriver, into which you could throw a stone from the orchard of the Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs. Murchison was wont to say that a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs. Murchison often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money to live up to them. The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a succession of “girls” left on account of the milking, and the lane was useful as an approach to the back yard by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter. It was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances which she simply could not control, but Mrs. Murchison often declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there. It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs. Murchison in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received the Lieutenant Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece. She had an ice-house and wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not one of them was in order. She had far too much, as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling