The Threefold Destiny

A Fairy Legend

I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far
as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents, in
which the spirit and mechanism of the fairy legend should be combined
with the characters and manners of familiar life. In the little tale
which follows, a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown
over a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped,
without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature. Rather than a
story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered as an
allegory, such as the writers of the last century would have expressed
in the shape of an Eastern tale, but to which I have endeavored to
give a more life-like warmth than could be infused into those fanciful
productions.

In the twilight of a summer eve, a tall, dark figure, over which long
and remote travel had thrown an outlandish aspect, was entering a
village, not in "Fairy Londe," but within our own familiar boundaries.
The staff, on which this traveller leaned, had been his companion from
the spot where it grew, in the jungles of Hindostan; the hat, that
overshadowed his sombre brow, had shielded him from the suns of Spain;
but his cheek had been blackened by the red-hot wind of an Arabian
desert, and had felt the frozen breath of an Arctic region. Long
sojourning amid wild and dangerous men, he still wore beneath his vest
the ataghan which he had once struck into the throat of a Turkish
robber. In every foreign clime he had lost something of his New
England characteristics; and, perhaps, from every people he had
unconsciously borrowed a new peculiarity; so that when the world-
wanderer again trod the street of his native village, it is no wonder
that he passed unrecognized, though exciting the gaze and curiosity of
all. Yet, as his arm casually touched that of a young woman, who was
wending her way to an evening lecture, she started, and almost uttered
a cry.

"Ralph Cranfield!" was the name that she half articulated.

"Can that be my old playmate, Faith Egerton?" thought the traveller,
looking round at her figure, but without pausing.

Ralph Cranfield, from his youth upward, had felt himself marked out
for a high destiny. He had imbibed the idea--we say not whether it
were revealed to him by witchcraft, or in a dream of prophecy, or that
his brooding fancy had palmed its own dictates upon him as the oracles
of a Sibyl--but he had imbibed the idea, and held it firmest among his
articles of faith, that three marvellous events of his life were to be
confirmed to him by three signs.

The first of these three fatalities, and perhaps the one on which his
youthful imagination had dwelt