Adventure Magazine Cover — page 82: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

EX’TS By the Author of ‘Ulysses” UR cemetery lay in a fold of the hills; there were pools of shadow among old stones, raw earth heaped up across the new and narrow grave. Iwas sixteen, and we were burying my mother. We were Anglicans. But our clergyman was absent, as was the ritual we knew. In their place a minister who talked and talked, garbling texts. Eyes downcast, I saw but trodden grass, each bruised blade bent to pattern, and heard but fragments of the good man’s talk. “To this must we all come—verily we shall pass by and shall see her no more—”’ And I thought: ‘All her life she has lived here, within the boundaries of her narrow, narrow world. Now she has gone, she who might have seen so much, might have journeyed so far. And my young memory went back over the brief years. There was nothing of my mother in me. Rather I resembled my father, a tall man who wandered about the world at will, who 80 L. Paul came at long intervals to our New Bruns- wick farm, bringing happiness to none but me, his son, and great trouble and fear to these others, my relations. It was my father whom I resembled, or hoped to re- semble. ‘There was in me some spark that burned. And my mother it was who sensed this. I could remember how her stubborn eyes probed me as if to seek this spark out, that it might be quenched. And now she was gone. And now I was afraid, afraid that, fanned no more by her silent, relentless enmity, that spark would die. I was afraid of Uncle Abner—tight, shiny boots, thick-soled, on my right. I was afraid of Aunt Emily, his sister—elastic congress shoes to my left. I was afraid of my grandfather—bright cane ferrule and over- long, baggy trousers across the grave; most of all did I fear him, for, being blind, he, perhaps, saw more of those unseeable things, my soul and my ambition. And the minister’s voice droned out— “Let us lift our eyes to the hills, whence cometh our aid.” And I looked up. And black against the setting sun, walking with great strides, came my father down the slope. f ‘ DOO) 2 CO (©