- end_line
- 12262
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 12203
- text
- I.
Pierre had been induced to take chambers at the Apostles', by one of the
Apostles themselves, an old acquaintance of his, and a native of Saddle
Meadows.
Millthorpe was the son of a very respectable farmer--now dead--of more
than common intelligence, and whose bowed shoulders and homely garb had
still been surmounted by a head fit for a Greek philosopher, and
features so fine and regular that they would have well graced an opulent
gentleman. The political and social levelings and confoundings of all
manner of human elements in America, produce many striking individual
anomalies unknown in other lands. Pierre well remembered old farmer
Millthorpe:--the handsome, melancholy, calm-tempered, mute, old man; in
whose countenance--refinedly ennobled by nature, and yet coarsely tanned
and attenuated by many a prolonged day's work in the harvest--rusticity
and classicalness were strangely united. The delicate profile of his
face, bespoke the loftiest aristocracy; his knobbed and bony hands
resembled a beggar's.
Though for several generations the Millthorpes had lived on the
Glendinning lands, they loosely and unostentatiously traced their origin
to an emigrating English Knight, who had crossed the sea in the time of
the elder Charles. But that indigence which had prompted the knight to
forsake his courtly country for the howling wilderness, was the only
remaining hereditament left to his bedwindled descendants in the fourth
and fifth remove. At the time that Pierre first recollected this
interesting man, he had, a year or two previous, abandoned an ample farm
on account of absolute inability to meet the manorial rent, and was
become the occupant of a very poor and contracted little place, on which
was a small and half-ruinous house. There, he then harbored with his
wife,--a very gentle and retiring person,--his three little daughters,
and his only son, a lad of Pierre's own age. The hereditary beauty and
youthful bloom of this boy; his sweetness of temper, and something of
natural refinement as contrasted with the unrelieved rudeness, and
oftentimes sordidness, of his neighbors; these things had early
attracted the sympathetic, spontaneous friendliness of Pierre. They were
often wont to take their boyish rambles together; and even the severely
critical Mrs. Glendinning, always fastidiously cautious as to the
companions of Pierre, had never objected to his intimacy with so
prepossessing and handsome a rustic as Charles.
Boys are often very swiftly acute in forming a judgment on character.
The lads had not long companioned, ere Pierre concluded, that however
fine his face, and sweet his temper, young Millthorpe was but little
vigorous in mind; besides possessing a certain constitutional,
sophomorean presumption and egotism; which, however, having nothing to
feed on but his father's meal and potatoes, and his own essentially
timid and humane disposition, merely presented an amusing and harmless,
though incurable, anomalous feature in his character, not at all
impairing the good-will and companionableness of Pierre; for even in his
boyhood, Pierre possessed a sterling charity, which could cheerfully
overlook all minor blemishes in his inferiors, whether in fortune or
mind; content and glad to embrace the good whenever presented, or with
whatever conjoined. So, in youth, do we unconsciously act upon those
peculiar principles, which in conscious and verbalized maxims shall
systematically regulate our maturer lives;--a fact, which forcibly
illustrates the necessitarian dependence of our lives, and their
subordination, not to ourselves, but to Fate.
- title
- Chunk 1