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The Deliverance: A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

Pages
about 487
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
8.9 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 5 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the June sunshine.

"So this is my way, is it?" he asked, with a jerk of his thumb toward a cloud of blue-and-yellow butterflies drifting over a shining puddle--"five miles as the crow flies, and through a bog?"

For a moment he hung suspended above the encrusted axle, peering with blinking pale-gray eyes over a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. In his appearance there was the hint of a scholarly intention unfulfilled, and his dress, despite its general carelessness, bespoke a different standard of taste from that of the isolated dwellers in the surrounding fields. A casual observer might have classified him as one of the Virginian landowners impoverished by the war; in reality, he was a successful lawyer in a neighbouring town, who, amid the overthrow of the slaveholding gentry some twenty years before, had risen into a provincial prominence.

His humour met with a slow response from the driver, who sat playfully flicking at a horsefly on the flank of a tall, raw-boned sorrel. "Wall, thar's been a sight of rain lately," he observed, with goodnatured acquiescence, "but I don't reckon the mud's more'n waist deep, an' if you do happen to git clean down, thar's Sol Peterkin along to pull you out. Whar're you hidin', Sol? Why, bless my boots, if he ain't gone fast asleep!"

At this a lean and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one corner of the long seat.

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