A Lantern of Love: a Novel in Three Parts

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... PART III MISSISSIPPI Not by running out of yourself after it comes the love which lasts a thousand years.... Remain steadfast knowing each prisoner has to endure in patience till the season of his liberation.... When the love comes which is for you it will turn the lock easily and loose your chains. Cabpenteb CHAPTER I Palmetto drove Plantation January, 1919 Palmetto Grove is like a negro who, knowing nothing of time, is left untouched by it; from whom no toll is taken in grey hairs and wrinkles. The plantation is just as it was twelve years ago, but the house somehow seems to have settled down, to have spread out, like a rambler rose fallen from its support The whole place seems infinitely more desolate, set in these unending fields of dead cottonstalks, than it used to be. As far as the eye can reach dead cotton-stalks, brown in a sea of chocolate mud. The trees are leafless, and the long grey moss that waves from every branch gives me the melancholy feeling one gets passing a house on the door of which are funeral ribbons. The mud cuts the plantation off from any communication with the outside world. I rode through twenty miles of it with the mail-rider in his springless sulky cart. The livery-stable man at Cottonport (the nearest town and railway station) steadily refused to send any sort of team or car out to pull through such glue as plantation roads are now. The mail-rider brings the mail twice a week to the Deer-Lick store three miles below Palmetto Grove. We reached the plantation, after five hours, late in the afternoon in the face of an east wind and lowering grey clouds. The tombstones in the little graveyard behind the garden were the first thing I saw as we turned into the plantation gate. Not a sound on the place, not a...