THE ARGONAUTS OF NORTH LIBERTY


By Bret Harte




PART I




CHAPTER I


The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just ceased
ringing. North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town,
was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath
sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from
the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and
the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at last
settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment. On this chilly
March evening of the year 1850, that stare had kindled into an offended
sunset and an angry night that furiously spat sleet and hail in the
faces of the worshippers, and made them fight their way to the church,
step by step, with bent heads and fiercely compressed lips, until they
seemed to be carrying its forbidding portals at the point of their
umbrellas.