E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
A Village Chronicle
by
Author of Hugh Wynne, The Adventures of François, Constance
Trescot, etc., etc.
1913
There will be many people in this book; some will be important, otherswill come on the scene for a time and return no more. The life-lines ofthese persons will cross and recross, to meet once or twice and notagain, like the ruts in a much used road. To-day the stage may becrowded, to-morrow empty. The corner novels where only a half dozenpeople are concerned give no impression of the multitudinous contactswhich affect human lives. Even of the limited life of a village this istrue. It was more true of the time of my story, which lacking plot mustrely for interest on the influential relations of social groups, thenmore defined in small communities than they are to-day.
Long before the Civil War there were in the middle states, near to orremote from great centres, villages where the social division of classeswas tacitly accepted. In or near these towns one or more families werecontinuously important on account of wealth or because of historicposition, generations of social training, and constant relation to thelarger world. They came by degrees to constitute what I may describe asan indistinct caste, for a long time accepted as such by their lessfortune-favoured neighbours. They were, in fact, for many years almost asmuch a class by themselves as are the long-seated county families ofEngland and like these were looked to for helpful aid in sickness and inother of the calamities of life. The democrat time, increasing ease oftravel and the growth of large industries, gradually altered the relationbetween these small communities, and the families who in the smallermatters of life long remained singularly familiar with their poorerneighbours and in the way of closer social intimacies far apart.
It seemed to me worth while to use the life of one of these groups ofpeople as the background of a story which also deals with the influenceof politics and war on all classes.
The first Penhallow crossed the Alleghanies long before the War forIndependence and on the frontier of civilisation took up land where theaxe was needed for the forest and the rifle for the Indian. He made aclearing and lived a hard life of peril, wearily waiting for the charredstumps to rot away.
The younger men of the name in Colonial days and later left the placeearly, and for the most part took to the sea or to the army, if therewere activity in the way of war. In later years, others drifted westwardon the tide of border migration, where adventure was always to be had.This stir of enterprise in a breed tends to extinction in the male lines.Men are thinned out in their wooing of danger—the belle dame sansmerci. Thus there were but few Penhallows alive at any one time, andyet for many years they bred in old-fashioned numbers.
As time ran on, a Penhallow pr