Title:  Through stained glass

Author:  George Agnew Chamberlain

Release Date:  November 14, 2004 [EBook #14039]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THROUGH STAINED GLASS

A novel by

GEORGE AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN

Author of “Home”

New York Grosset & Dunlap Publishers

Copyright, 1915, by

GEORGE AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN

Published March, 1915

CHAPTER I

In 1866 the American minister at Rio de Janeiro turned from the reality of a few incongruous and trouble-breeding Kentucky colonels, slouched-hatted and frock-coated, wandering through the unfamiliar streets of the great South American capital, and saw a nightmare.  There is a touch of panic in the despatch which he sent to Mr. Seward at a time when both secretary and public were held too closely in the throes of reconstruction to take alarm at so distant a chimera.  Agents of the Southern States, wrote the minister, claimed that not thousands of families, but a hundred thousand families, would come to Brazil.

As a matter of fact, this exodus, when it took place, was so small that it failed to raise a ripple on the social pool of the Western Hemisphere.  But to the self-chosen few who suffered shipwreck and privation, financial loss from their already depleted store, disaster to their Utopian dreams, and a great void in their hearts where once had been love of country, it became a tragedy—­the tragedy of existence.

The ardor that led a small band of irreconcilables to gather their households and their household goods about them and flee from a personal oppression, as had their ancestors before them, was destined to be short lived.  From the first, fate frowned upon their enterprise.  They looked for calm seas and favorable winds, but they found storms and shipwreck.  Their scanty resources were calculated to meet the needs of only the crudest life, but upon the threshold of their goal they fell into the red-tape trammels of a civilization older than their own.  Where they looked for a free country, a wilderness flowing with milk and honey, which in their ignorance they imagined unpeopled, they found the squatter had been intrenched since the Jesuit fathers and their following explored the continent four centuries before.  Finally, they believed themselves to be the vanguard of a horde, but, once in the breach, they found there was no following host.