In the month of June, 1872, Mr. Edward Lynde, the
assistant cashier and bookkeeper of the Nautilus Bank
at Rivermouth, found himself in a position to execute
a plan which he had long meditated in secret.
A statement like this at the present time, when integrity
in a place of trust has become almost an anomaly,
immediately suggests a defalcation; but Mr. Lynde’s
plan involved nothing more criminal than a horseback
excursion through the northern part of the State of
New Hampshire. A leave of absence of three weeks,
which had been accorded him in recognition of several
years’ conscientious service, offered young Lynde
the opportunity he had desired. These three weeks,
as already hinted, fell in the month of June, when
Nature in New Hampshire is in her most ravishing toilet;
she has put away her winter ermine, which sometimes
serves her quite into spring; she has thrown a green
mantle over her brown shoulders, and is not above
the coquetry of wearing a great variety of wild flowers
on her bosom. With her sassafras and her sweet-brier
she is in her best mood, as a woman in a fresh and
becoming costume is apt to be, and almost any one
might mistake her laugh for the music of falling water,
and the agreeable rustle of her garments for the wind
blowing through the pine forests.
As Edward Lynde rode out of Rivermouth one morning,
an hour or two before anybody worth mention was moving,
he was very well contented with this world, though
he had his grievances, too, if he had chosen to think
of them.
Masses of dark cloud still crowded the zenith, but
along the eastern horizon, against the increasing
blue, lay a city of golden spires and mosques and
minarets—an Oriental city, indeed, such
as is inhabited by poets and dreamers and other speculative
persons fond of investing their small capital in such
unreal estate. Young Lynde, in spite of his prosaic
profession of bookkeeper, had an opulent though as
yet unworked vein of romance running through his composition,
and he said to himself as he gave a slight twitch
to the reins, “I’ll put up there to-night
at the sign of the Golden Fleece, or may be I’ll
quarter myself on one of those rich old merchants
who used to do business with the bank in the colonial
days.” Before he had finished speaking the
city was destroyed by a general conflagration; the
round red sun rose slowly above the pearl-gray ruins,
and it was morning.
In his three years’ residence at Rivermouth,
Edward Lynde had never chanced to see the town at
so early an hour. The cobble-paved street through
which he was riding was a commercial street; but now
the shops had their wooden eyelids shut tight, and
were snoozing away as comfortably and innocently as
if they were not at all alive to a sharp stroke of
business in their wakeful hours. There was a charm
to Lynde in this novel phase of a thoroughfare so
familiar to him, and then the morning was perfect.
