Project Gutenberg's Through stained glass, by George Agnew Chamberlain

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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 civilizat