Flamsted Quarries
BY MARY E. WALLER
Author of "The Wood Carver of Lympus," "The Daughter of the Rich,"
"The Little Citizen," etc.
With Four Illustrations
By G. PATRICK NELSON
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Copyright, 1910,
By Mary E. Waller
Published September, 1910
Reprinted, September, 1910; November, 1910;
December, 1910
TO THOSE WHO TOIL
Flamsted Quarries
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"She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"
Contents
The Battery in Lieu of a Preface
Part First, A Child from the Vaudeville
Part Second, Home Soil
Part Third, In the Stream
Part Fourth, Oblivion
Part Fifth, Shed Number Two
The Last Word
A. L. Burt Company's Popular Copyright Fiction.
Illustrations
"She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"
"Those present loved in after years to recall this scene"
"What a picture she made leaning caressingly against the charmed and patient Bess"
"'Unworthy\u2014unworthy!' was Champney Googe's cry, as he knelt before Aileen"
FLAMSTED QUARRIES
"Abysmal deeps repose
Beneath the stout ship's keel whereon we glide;
And if a diver plunge far down within
Those depths and to the surface safe return,
His smile, if so it chance he smile again,
Outweighs in worth all gold."
The Battery in Lieu of a Preface
A few years ago, at the very tip of that narrow rocky strip of land that has been well named "the Tongue that
laps the Commerce of the World," the million-teeming Island of Manhattan, there was daily presented a scene
in the life-drama of our land that held in itself, as in solution, a great national ideal. The old heroic "Epic of
the Nations" was still visible to the naked eye, and masquerading here among us of the then nineteenth
century in the guise of the arrival of the immigrant ship.
The scenic setting is in this instance incomparably fine. As we lean on the coping of the sea wall at the end of
the green-swarded Battery, in the flush of a May sunset that, on the right, throws the Highlands of the
Navesink into dark purple relief and lights the waters of Harbor, River, and Sound into a softly swelling
roseate flood, we may fix our eyes on the approach to The Narrows and watch the incoming shipping of the
world: the fruit-laden steamer from the Bermudas, the black East Indiaman heavy with teakwood and spices,
the lumberman's barge awash behind the tow, the old three-masted schooner, low in the water, her decks
loaded with granite from the far-away quarries of Maine. We may see, if we linger, the swift approach of a
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Flamsted Quarries, by Mary E. Waller.
"She sang straight on, verse after verse without pause"
2
curiously foreshortened ocean steamship, her smokestack belching blackness, and the slower on-coming of a Norwegian bark, her sails catching the sunset light and gleaming opaline against the clear blue of the southern horizon. These last are the immigrant ships.
An hour later in old Castle Garden the North and South of Europe clasp hands on the very threshold of
America. Four thousand feet are planted on the soil of the New World. Four thousand hands are knocking at
its portals. Two thousand hearts are beating high with hope at prospect of the New, or palpitating with terror
at contact with the Strange.
A thousand tragedies, a thousand comedies are here enacted before our very eyes: hopes, fears, tears, laughter,
shrieks, groans, wailings, exultant cries, welcoming words, silent all-expressing hand-clasp, embrace,
despairing wide-eyed search, hopeless isolation, the befriended, the friendless, the home-welcomed, the
homeless\ue000all commingled.
But an official routine soon sorts, separates, pairs, locates; speaks in Norwegian, speaks in Neapolitan. An
hour passes; the dusk falls; the doors are opened; the two thousand, ticketed, labelled, are to enter upon the
new life. The confusing chatter grows less and less. A child wails, and is hushed in soft Italian\ue001a Neapolitan
lullaby\ue002by its mother as she sits on a convenient bench and for the first time gives her little one the breast in
a strange land. An old Norwegian, perhaps a lineal descendant of our Viking visitors some thousand years
ago, makes his way to the door, bent beneath a sack-load of bedding; his right hand holds his old wife's left.
They are the last to leave.
The dusk has fallen. To the sea wall again for air after the thousands of garlic-reeking breaths in old Castle Garden. The sea is dark. The heavens are deep indigo; against them flashes the Liberty beacon; within them are set the Eternal Lights. Upon the waters of the harbor the illumined cabin windows of a multitude of river craft throw quivering rays along the slow glassy swell.
For a moment on River, and Harbor, and Sound, there is silence. But behind us we hear the subdued roar and
beat of the metropolis, a sound comparable to naught else on earth or in heaven: the mighty systole and
dyastole of a city's heart, and the tramp, tramp of a million homeward bound toilers\ue003the marching tune of
Civilization's hosts, to which the feet of the newly arrived immigrants are already keeping time, for they have
crossed the threshold of old Castle Garden and entered the New World.
PART FIRST
A Child from the Vaudeville
IThe performance in itself was crude and commonplace, but the demonstration in regard to it was unusual.
Although this scene had been enacted both afternoon and evening for the past six weeks, the audience at the
Vaudeville was showing its appreciation by an intent silence.
The curtain had risen upon a street scene in the metropolis at night. Snow was falling, dimming the gas jets at the corner and half-veiling, half-disclosing the imposing entrance-porch of a marble church. The doors were closed; the edifice dark. As the eyes of the onlookers became accustomed to the half-lights, they were aware of a huddle of clothes against the iron railing that outlined the curve of the three broad entrance-steps. As vision grew keener the form of a child was discernible, a little match girl who was lighting one by one a few matches and shielding the flame with both hands from the draught. Suddenly she looked up and around. The
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