Thoreau--is--at home."
L'ANGE
She stood in the doorway of a log cabin that was overgrown with woodvine
and mellow with the dull red glow of the climbing bakneesh, with the
warmth of the late summer sun falling upon her bare head. Cummins' shout
had brought her to the door when we were still half a rifle shot down the
river; a second shout, close to shore, brought her running down toward
me. In that first view that I had of her, I called her beautiful. It was
chiefly, I believe, because of her splendid hair. John Cummins' shout of
homecoming had caught her with it undone, and she greeted us with the
dark and lustrous masses of it sweeping about her shoulders and down to
her hips. That is, she greeted Cummins, for he had been gone for nearly a
month. I busied myself with the canoe for that first half minute or so.
Then it was that I received my introduction and for the first time
touched the hand of Melisse Cummins, the Florence Nightingale of several
thousand square miles of northern wilderness. I saw, then, that what I
had at first taken for our own hothouse variety of beauty was a different
thing entirely, a type that would have disappointed many because of its
strength and firmness. Her hair was a glory, brown and soft. No woman
could have criticized its loveliness. But the flush that I had seen in
her face, flower-like at a short distance, was a tan that was almost a
man's tan.
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