Whatever naughtiness I was guilty of afterwards, I never again wanted to take what belonged to another, whether in the family or out of it. I hated the sight of the little sugar horseback rider from that day, and was thankful enough when some other child had bought him and left his place in the window vacant.

About this time I used to lie awake nights a good deal, wondering what became of infants who were wicked. I had heard it said that all who died in infancy went to heaven, but it was also said that those who sinned could not possibly go to heaven. I understood, from talks I had listened to among older people, that infancy lasted until children were about twelve years of age. Yet here was I, an infant of less than six years, who had committed a sin. I did not know what to do with my own case. I doubted whether it would do any good for me to pray to be forgiven, but I did pray, because I could not help it, though not aloud. I believe I preferred thinking my prayers to saying them, almost always.

Inwardly, I objected to the idea of being an infant; it seemed to me like being nothing in particular—neither a child nor a little girl, neither a baby nor a woman. Having discovered that I was capable of being wicked, I thought it would be better if I could grow up at once, and assume my own responsibilities. It quite demoralized me when people talked in my presence about "innocent little children."

There was much questioning in those days as to whether fictitious reading was good for children. To "tell a story" was one equivalent expression for lying. But those who came nearest to my child-life recognized the value of truth as impressed through the imagination, and left me in delightful freedom among my fairy-tale books. I think I saw a difference, from the first, between the old poetic legends and a modern lie, especially if this latter was the invention of a fancy as youthful as my own.

I supposed that the beings of those imaginative tales had lived some time, somewhere; perhaps they still existed in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit our matter-of-fact neighborhood. I had never heard that any fairies or elves came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower. But a little red-haired playmate with whom I became intimate used to take me off with her into the fields, where, sitting, on the edge of a disused cartway fringed with pussy-clover, she poured into my ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made with people who lived under the ground close by us, in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me; I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the last century did Defoe's account of "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal."

She said that these subterranean people kept house, and that they invited her down to play with their children on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons; also that they sometimes left a plate of cakes and tarts for her at their door: she offered to show me the very spot where it was,—under a great apple-tree which my brothers called "the luncheon-tree," because we used to rest and refresh ourselves there, when we helped my father weed his vegetable-garden. But she guarded herself by informing me that it would be impossible for us to open the door ourselves; that it could only be unfastened from the inside. She told me these people's names—a "Mr. Pelican," and a "Mr. Apple-tree Manasseh," who had a very large family of little "Manassehs." She said that there was a still larger family, some of them probably living just under the spot where we sat, whose surname was "Hokes." (If either of us had been familiar with another word pronounced in the same way, though spelled differently, I should since have thought that she was all the time laughing in her sleeve at my easy belief.) These "Hokeses" were not good-natured people, she added, whispering to me that we must not speak about them aloud, as they had sharp ears, and might overhear us, and do us mischief.

I think she was hoaxing herself as well as me; it was her way of being a heroine in her own eyes and mine, and she had always the manner of being entirely in earnest.

But she became more and more romantic in her inventions. A distant aristocratic-looking mansion, which we could see half-hidden by trees, across the river, she assured me was a haunted house, and that she had passed many a night there, seeing unaccountable sights, and hearing mysterious sounds. She further announced that she was to be married, some time, to a young man who lived over there. I inferred that the marriage was to take place whenever the ghostly tenants of the house would give their consent. She revealed to me, under promise of strict secrecy, the young man's name. It was "Alonzo."

Not long after I picked up a book which one of my sisters had borrowed, called "Alonzo and Melissa," and I discovered that she had been telling me page after page of "Melissa's" adventures, as if they were her own. The fading memory I have of the book is that it was a very silly one; and when I discovered that the rest of the romantic occurrences she had related, not in that volume, were to be found in "The Children of the Abbey," I left off listening to her. I do not think I regarded her stories as lies; I only lost my interest in them after I knew that they were all of her own clumsy second-hand making-up, out of the most commonplace material.

My two brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother Ben pointed up to the gilded weather-cock on the Old South steeple, and said to me with a very grave face,—

"Did you know that whenever that cock crows every rooster in town crows too?" I listened out at the window, and asked,—

"But when will he begin to crow?"

"Oh, roosters crow in the night, sometimes, when you are asleep."

Then my younger brother would break in with a shout of delight at my stupidity:—

"I'll tell you when, goosie!—

'The next day after never; When the dead ducks fly over the river.'"

But this must have been when I was very small; for I remember thinking that "the next day after never" would come some time, in millions of years, perhaps. And how queer it would be to see dead ducks flying through the air!

Witches were seldom spoken of in the presence of us children. We sometimes overheard a snatch of a witch-story, told in whispers, by the flickering firelight, just as we were being sent off to bed. But, to the older people, those legends were too much like realities, and they preferred not to repeat them. Indeed, it was over our town that the last black shadow of the dreadful witchcraft delusion had rested. Mistress Hale's house was just across the burying-ground, and Gallows Hill was only two miles away, beyond the bridge. Yet I never really knew what the "Salem Witchcraft" was until Goodrich's "History of the United States" was put into my hands as a schoolbook, and I read about it there.

Elves and gnomes and air-sprites and genii were no strangers to us, for my sister Emilie—she who heard me say my hymns, and taught me to write—was mistress of an almost limitless fund of imaginative lore. She was a very Scheherezade of story-tellers, so her younger sisters thought, who listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight, evening after evening, with fascinated wakefulness.

Besides the tales that the child-world of all ages is familiar with,—Red Riding-Hood, the Giant-Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the "Sleeping Beauty," and the rest,—she had picked up somewhere most of the folk-stories of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of Germany, which latter were not then made into the compact volumes known among juvenile readers of to-day as Grimm's "Household Tales."

Her choice was usually judicious; she omitted the ghosts and goblins that would have haunted our dreams; although I was now and then visited by a nightmare-consciousness of being a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task, such as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold, one by one, or else lose my head. But she blended the humorous with the romantic in her selections, so that we usually dropped to sleep in good spirits, if not with a laugh.

That old story of the fisherman who had done the "Man of the Sea" a favor, and was to be rewarded by having his wish granted, she told in so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it might all have happened on one of the islands out in Massachusetts Bay. The fisherman was foolish enough, it seemed, to let his wife do all his wishing for him; and she, unsatisfied still, though she had been made first an immensely rich woman, and then a great queen, at last sent her husband to ask that they two might be made rulers over the sun, moon, and stars.

As my sister went on with the story, I could see the waves grow black, and could hear the wind mutter and growl, while the fisherman called for the first, second, and then reluctantly, for the third time:—

"O Man of the Sea, Come listen to me! For Alice my wife, The plague of my life, Has sent me to beg a boon of thee!"

As his call died away on the sullen wind, the mysterious "Man of the Sea" rose in his wrath out of the billows, and said,—

"Go back to your old mud hut, and stay there with your wife Alice, and never come to trouble me again."

I sympathized with the "Man of the Sea" in his righteous indignation at the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman; and the moral of the story remained with me, as the story itself did. I think I understood dimly, even then, that mean avarice and self-seeking ambition always find their true level in muddy earth, never among the stars.

So it proved that my dear mother-sister was preparing me for life when she did not know it, when she thought she was only amusing me.

This sister, though only just entering her teens, was toughening herself by all sorts of unnecessary hardships for whatever might await her womanhood. She used frequently to sleep in the garret on a hard wooden sea-chest instead of in a bed. And she would get up before daylight and run over into the burying-ground, barefooted and white-robed (we lived for two or three years in another house than our own, where the oldest graveyard in town was only separated from us by our garden fence), "to see if there were any ghosts there," she told us. Returning noiselessly,—herself a smiling phantom, with long, golden-brown hair rippling over her shoulders,—she would drop a trophy upon her little sisters' pillow, in the shape of a big, yellow apple that had dropped from "the Colonel's" "pumpkin sweeting" tree into the graveyard, close to our fence.

She was fond of giving me surprises, of watching my wonder at seeing anything beautiful or strange for the first time. Once, when I was very little, she made me supremely happy by rousing me before four o'clock in the morning, dressing me hurriedly, and taking me out with her for a walk across the graveyard and through the dewy fields. The birds were singing, and the sun was just rising, and we were walking toward the east, hand in hand, when suddenly there appeared before us what looked to me like an immense blue wall, stretching right and left as far as I could see.

"Oh, what is it the wall of?" I cried.

It was a revelation she had meant for me. "So you did not know it was the sea, little girl!" she said.

It was a wonderful illusion to My unaccustomed eyes, and I took in at that moment for the first time something of the real grandeur of the ocean. Not a sail was in sight, and the blue expanse was scarcely disturbed by a ripple, for it was the high-tide calm. That morning's freshness, that vision of the sea, I know I can never lose.

From our garret window—and the garret was my usual retreat when I wanted to get away by myself with my books or my dreams—we had the distant horizon-line of the bay, across a quarter of a mile of trees and mowing fields. We could see the white breakers dashing against the long narrow island just outside of the harbor, which I, with my childish misconstruction of names, called "Breakers' Island"; supposing that the grown people had made a mistake when they spoke of it as "Baker's." But that far-off, shining band of silver and blue seemed so different from the whole great sea, stretching out as if into eternity from the feet of the baby on the shore!

The marvel was not lessened when I began to study geography, and comprehended that the world is round. Could it really be that we had that endless "Atlantic Ocean" to look at from our window, to dance along the edge of, to wade into or bathe in, if we chose? The map of the world became more interesting to me than any of the story-books. In my fanciful explorations I out-traveled Captain Cook, the only voyager around the world with whose name my childhood was familiar.

The field-paths were safe, and I was allowed to wander off alone through them. I greatly enjoyed the freedom of a solitary explorer among the seashells and wild flowers.

There were wonders everywhere. One day I picked up a star-fish on the beach (we called it a "five-finger"), and hung him on a tree to dry, not thinking of him as a living creature. When I went some time after to take him down he had clasped with two or three of his fingers the bough where I laid him, so that he could not be removed without breaking his hardened shell. My conscience smote me when I saw what an unhappy looking skeleton I had made of him.

I overtook the horse-shoe crab on the sands, but I did not like to turn him over and make him "say his prayers," as some of the children did. I thought it must be wicked. And then he looked so uncomfortable, imploringly wriggling his claws while he lay upon his back! I believe I did, however, make a small collection of the shells of stranded horseshoe crabs deserted by their tenants.

There were also pretty canary-colored cockle-shells and tiny purple mussels washed up by the tide. I gathered them into my apron, and carried them home, and only learned that they too held living inhabitants by seeing a dead snail protruding from every shell after they had been left to themselves for a day or two. This made me careful to pick up only the empty ones, and there were plenty of them. One we called a "butterboat"; it had something shaped like a seat across the end of it on the inside. And the curious sea-urchin, that looked as if he was made only for ornament, when he had once got rid of his spines, and the transparent jelly-fish, that seemed to have no more right to be alive than a ladleful of mucilage,—and the razor-shells, and the barnacles, and the knotted kelp, and the flabby green sea-aprons,—there was no end to the interesting things I found when I was trusted to go down to the edge of the tide alone.

The tide itself was the greatest marvel, slipping away so noiselessly, and creeping back so softly over the flats, whispering as it reached the sands, and laughing aloud "I am coming!" as, dashing against the rocks, it drove me back to where the sea-lovage and purple beach-peas had dared to root themselves. I listened, and felt through all my little being that great, surging word of power, but had no guess of its meaning. I can think of it now as the eternal voice of Law, ever returning to the green, blossoming, beautiful verge of Gospel truth, to confirm its later revelation, and to say that Law and Gospel belong together. "The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands formed the dry land."

And the dry land, the very dust of the earth, every day revealed to me some new miracle of a flower. Coming home from school one warm noon, I chanced to look down, and saw for the first time the dry roadside all starred with lavender-tinted flowers, scarcely larger than a pin-head; fairy-flowers, indeed; prettier than anything that grew in gardens. It was the red sand-wort; but why a purple flower should be called red, I do not know. I remember holding these little amethystine blossoms like jewels in the palm of my hand, and wondering whether people who walked along that road knew what beautiful things they were treading upon. I never found the flower open except at noonday, when the sun was hottest. The rest of the time it was nothing but an insignificant, dusty-leaved weed,—a weed that was transformed into a flower only for an hour or two every day. It seemed like magic.

The busy people at home could tell me very little about the wild flowers, and when I found a new one I thought I was its discoverer. I can see myself now leaning in ecstasy over a small, rough-leaved purple aster in a lonely spot on the hill, and thinking that nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such a flower before, because I never had. I did not know then, that the flower-generations are older than the human race.

The commonest blossoms were, after all, the dearest, because they were so familiar. Very few of us lived upon carpeted floors, but soft green grass stretched away from our door-steps, all golden with dandelions in spring. Those dandelion fields were like another heaven dropped down upon the earth, where our feet wandered at will among the stars. What need had we of luxurious upholstery, when we could step out into such splendor, from the humblest door?

The dandelions could tell us secrets, too. We blew the fuzz off their gray beads, and made them answer our question, "Does my mother want me to come home?" Or we sat down together in the velvety grass, and wove chains for our necks and wrists of the dandelion-sterns, and "made believe" we were brides, or queens, or empresses.

Then there was the white rock-saxifrage, that filled the crevices of the ledges with soft, tufty bloom like lingering snow-drifts, our May-flower, that brought us the first message of spring. There was an elusive sweetness in its almost imperceptible breath, which one could only get by smelling it in close bunches. Its companion was the tiny four-cleft innocence-flower, that drifted pale sky-tints across the chilly fields. Both came to us in crowds, and looked out with us, as they do with the small girls and boys of to-day, from the windy crest of Powder House Hill,—the one playground of my childhood which is left to the children and the cows just as it was then. We loved these little democratic blossoms, that gathered around us in mobs at our May Day rejoicings. It is doubtful whether we should have loved the trailing arbutus any better, had it strayed, as it never did, into our woods.

Violets and anemones played at hide-and-seek with us in shady places. The gay columbine rooted herself among the bleak rocks, and laughed and nodded in the face of the east wind, coquettishly wasting the show of her finery on the frowning air. Bluebirds twittered over the dandelions in spring. In midsummer, goldfinches warbled among the thistle-tops; and, high above the bird-congregations, the song-sparrow sent forth her clear, warm, penetrating trill,—sunshine translated into music.

We were not surfeited, in those days, with what is called pleasure; but we grew up happy and healthy, learning unconsciously the useful lesson of doing without. The birds and blossoms hardly won a gladder or more wholesome life from the air of our homely New England than we did.

"Out of the strong came forth sweetness." The Beatitudes are the natural flowering-forth of the Ten Commandments. And the happiness of our lives was rooted in the stern, vigorous virtues of the people we lived among, drawing thence its bloom and song, and fragrance. There was granite in their character and beliefs, but it was granite that could smile in the sunshine and clothe itself with flowers. We little ones felt the firm rock beneath us, and were lifted up on it, to emulate their goodness, and to share their aspirations.



V.

OLD NEW ENGLAND.

WHEN I first opened my eyes upon my native town, it was already nearly two hundred years old, counting from the time when it was part of the original Salem settlement,—old enough to have gained a character and an individuality of its own, as it certainly had. We children felt at once that we belonged to the town, as we did to our father or our mother.

The sea was its nearest neighbor, and penetrated to every fireside, claiming close intimacy with every home and heart. The farmers up and down the shore were as much fishermen as farmers; they were as familiar with the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as they were with their own potato-fields. Every third man you met in the street, you might safely hail as "Shipmate," or "Skipper," or "Captain." My father's early seafaring experience gave him the latter title to the end of his life.

It was hard to keep the boys from going off to sea before they were grown. No inland occupation attracted them. "Land-lubber" was one of the most contemptuous epithets heard from boyish lips. The spirit of adventure developed in them a rough, breezy type of manliness, now almost extinct.

Men talked about a voyage to Calcutta, or Hong-Kong, or "up the Straits,"—meaning Gibraltar and the Mediterranean,—as if it were not much more than going to the next village. It seemed as if our nearest neighbors lived over there across the water; we breathed the air of foreign countries, curiously interblended with our own.

The women of well-to-do families had Canton crape shawls and Smyrna silks and Turk satins, for Sabbath-day wear, which somebody had brought home for them. Mantel-pieces were adorned with nautilus and conch-shells, and with branches and fans of coral; and children had foreign curiosities and treasures of the sea for playthings. There was one imported shell that we did not value much, it was so abundant—the freckled univalve they called a "prop." Yet it had a mysterious interest for us little ones. We held it to our ears, and listened for the sound of the waves, which we were told that, it still kept, and always would keep. I remember the time when I thought that the ocean was really imprisoned somewhere within that narrow aperture.

We were accustomed to seeing barrels full of cocoa-nuts rolled about; and there were jars of preserved tropical fruits, tamarinds, ginger-root, and other spicy appetizers, almost as common as barberries and cranberries, in the cupboards of most housekeepers.

I wonder what has become of those many, many little red "guinea-peas" we had to play with! It never seemed as if they really belonged to the vegetable world, notwithstanding their name.

We had foreign coins mixed in with our large copper cents,—all kinds, from the Russian "kopeck" to the "half-penny token" of Great Britain. Those were the days when we had half cents in circulation to make change with. For part of our currency was the old-fashioned "ninepence,"—twelve and a half cents, and the "four pence ha'penny,"—six cents and a quarter. There was a good deal of Old England about us still.

And we had also many living reminders of strange lands across the sea. Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the thimbleberry hedges that bordered the cornfields, as much at home out of doors as within. Java sparrows and canaries and other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny windows into the street, delighting the ears of passing school children long before the robins came. Now and then somebody's pet monkey would escape along the stone walls and shed-roofs, and try to hide from his boy-persecutors by dodging behind a chimney, or by slipping through an open scuttle, to the terror and delight of juveniles whose premises he invaded.

And there were wanderers from foreign countries domesticated in many families, whose swarthy complexions and un-Caucasian features became familiar in our streets,—Mongolians, Africans, and waifs from the Pacific islands, who always were known to us by distinguished names,—Hector and Scipio, and Julius Caesar and Christopher Columbus. Families of black people were scattered about the place, relics of a time when even New England had not freed her slaves. Some of them had belonged in my great-grandfather's family, and they hung about the old homestead at "The Farms" long after they were at liberty to go anywhere they pleased. There was a "Rose" and a "Phillis" among them, who came often to our house to bring luscious high blackberries from the Farms woods, or to do the household washing. They seemed pathetically out of place, although they lived among us on equal terms, respectable and respected.

The pathos of the sea haunted the town, made audible to every ear when a coming northeaster brought the rote of the waves in from the islands across the harbor-bar, with a moaning like that we heard when we listened for it in the shell. Almost every house had its sea-tragedy. Somebody belonging to it had been shipwrecked, or had sailed away one day, and never returned.

Our own part of the bay was so sheltered by its islands that there were seldom any disasters heard of near home, although the names of the two nearest—Great and Little Misery—are said to have originated with a shipwreck so far back in the history of the region that it was never recorded.

But one such calamity happened in my infancy, spoken of always by those who knew its victims in subdued tones;—the wreck of the "Persia." The vessel was returning from the Mediterranean, and in a blinding snow-storm on a wild March night her captain probably mistook one of the Cape Ann light-houses for that on Baker's Island, and steered straight upon the rocks in a lonely cove just outside the cape. In the morning the bodies of her dead crew were found tossing about with her cargo of paper-manufacturers' rags, among the breakers. Her captain and mate were Beverly men, and their funeral from the meeting-house the next Sabbath was an event which long left its solemnity hanging over the town.

We were rather a young nation at this time. The History of the United States could only tell the story of the American Revolution, of the War of 1812, and of the administration of about half a dozen presidents.

Our republicanism was fresh and wide-awake. The edge of George Washington's little hatchet had not yet been worn down to its latter-day dullness; it flashed keenly on our young eyes and ears in the reading books, and through Fourth of July speeches. The Father of his Country had been dead only a little more than a quarter of a century, and General Lafayette was still alive; he had, indeed, passed through our town but a few years before, and had been publicly welcomed under our own elms and lindens. Even babies echoed the names of our two heroes in their prattle.

We had great "training days," when drum and fife took our ears by storm; When the militia and the Light Infantry mustered and marched through the streets to the Common with boys and girls at their heels,—such girls as could get their mother's consent, or the courage to run off without it.(We never could.)But we always managed to get a good look at the show in one way or another.

"Old Election," "'Lection Day" we called it, a lost holiday now, was a general training day, and it came at our most delightful season, the last of May. Lilacs and tulips were in bloom, then; and it was a picturesque fashion of the time for little girls whose parents had no flower-gardens to go around begging a bunch of lilacs, or a tulip or two. My mother always made "'Lection cake" for us on that day. It was nothing but a kind of sweetened bread with a shine of egg-and-molasses on top; but we thought it delicious.

The Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day were the only other holidays that we made much account of, and the former was a far more well behaved festival than it is in modern times. The bells rang without stint, and at morning and noon cannon were fired off. But torpedoes and fire-crackers did not make the highways dangerous;—perhaps they were thought too expensive an amusement. Somebody delivered an oration; there was a good deal said about "this universal Yankee nation"; some rockets went up from Salem in the evening; we watched them from the hill, and then went to bed, feeling that we had been good patriots.

There was always a Fast Day, which I am afraid most of us younger ones regarded merely as a day when we were to eat unlimited quantities of molasses-gingerbread, instead of sitting down to our regular meals.

When I read about Christmas in the English story-books, I wished we could have that beautiful holiday. But our Puritan fathers shook their heads at Christmas.

Our Sabbath-school library books were nearly all English reprints, and many of the story-books were very interesting. I think that most of my favorites were by Mrs. Sherwood. Some of them were about life in India,—"Little Henry and his Bearer," and "Ayah and Lady." Then there were "The Hedge of Thorns;" "Theophilus and Sophia;" "Anna Ross," and a whole series of little English books that I took great delight in.

I had begun to be rather introspective and somewhat unhealthily self-critical, contrasting myself meanwhile with my sister Lida, just a little older, who was my usual playmate, and whom I admired very much for what I could not help seeing,—her unusual sweetness of disposition. I read Mrs. Sherwood's "Infant's Progress," and I made a personal application of it, picturing myself as the naughty, willful "Playful," and my sister Lida as the saintly little "Peace."

This book gave me a morbid, unhappy feeling, while yet it had something of the fascination of the "Pilgrim's Progress," of which it is an imitation. I fancied myself followed about by a fiend-like boy who haunted its pages, called "Inbred-Sin;" and the story implied that there was no such thing as getting rid of him. I began to dislike all boys on his account. There was one who tormented my sister and me—we only knew him by name—by jumping out at us from behind doorways or fences on our way to school, making horrid faces at us. "Inbred-Sin," I was certain, looked just like him; and the two, strangely blended in one hideous presence, were the worst nightmare of my dreams. There was too much reality about that "Inbreed-Sin." I felt that I was acquainted with him. He was the hateful hero of the little allegory, as Satan is of "Paradise Lost."

I liked lessons that came to me through fables and fairy tales, although, in reading Aesop, I invariably skipped the "moral" pinned on at the end, and made one for myself, or else did without.

Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's story of "The Immortal Fountain," in the "Girl's Own Book,"—which it was the joy of my heart to read, although it preached a searching sermon to me,—I applied in the same way that I did the "Infant's Progress." I thought of Lida as the gentle, unselfish Rose, and myself as the ugly Marion. She was patient and obliging, and I felt that I was the reverse. She was considered pretty, and I knew that I was the reverse of that, too. I wondered if Lida really had bathed in the Immortal Fountain, and oh, how I wished I could find the way there! But I feared that trying to do so would be of no use; the fairies would cross their wands to keep me back, and their wings would darken at my approach.

The book that I loved first and best, and lived upon in my childhood, was "Pilgrim's Progress." It was as a story that I cared for it, although I knew that it meant something more,—something that was already going on in my own heart and life. Oh, how I used to wish that I too could start off on a pilgrimage! It would be so much easier than the continual, discouraging struggle to be good!

The lot I most envied was that of the contented Shepherd Boy in the Valley of Humiliation, singing his cheerful songs, and wearing "the herb called Heart's Ease in his bosom"; but all the glorious ups and downs of the "Progress" I would gladly have shared with Christiana and her children, never desiring to turn aside into any "By-Path Meadow" while Mr. Great-Heart led the way, and the Shining Ones came down to meet us along the road. It was one of the necessities of my nature, as a child, to have some one being, real or ideal, man or woman, before whom I inwardly bowed down and worshiped. Mr. Great-Heart was the perfect hero of my imagination. Nobody, in books or out of them, compared with him. I wondered if there were really any Mr. Great-Hearts to be met with among living men.

I remember reading this beloved book once in a snow-storm, and looking up from it out among the white, wandering flakes, with a feeling that they had come down from heaven as its interpreters; that they were trying to tell me, in their airy up-and-down-flight, the story of innumerable souls. I tried to fix my eye on one particular flake, and to follow its course until it touched the earth. But I found that I could not. A little breeze was stirring an the flake seemed to go and return, to descend and then ascend again, as if hastening homeward to the sky, losing itself at last in the airy, infinite throng, and leaving me filled with thoughts of that "great multitude, which no man could number, clothed with white robes," crowding so gloriously into the closing pages of the Bible.

Oh, if I could only be sure that I should some time be one of that invisible company! But the heavens were already beginning to look a great way off. I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,—

"Who are these in bright array?"

and that seemed to bring them nearer again.

The history of the early martyrs, the persecutions of the Waldenses and of the Scotch Covenanters, I read and re-read with longing emulation! Why could not I be a martyr, too? It would be so beautiful to die for the truth as they did, as Jesus did! I did not understand then that He lived and died to show us what life really means, and to give us true life, like His,—the life of love to God with all our hearts, of love to all His human children for His sake;—and that to live this life faithfully is greater even than to die a martyr's death.

It puzzled me to know what some of the talk I heard about being a Christian could mean. I saw that it was something which only men and women could comprehend. And yet they taught me to say those dear words of the Master, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me!" Surely He meant what He said. He did not tell the children that they must receive the kingdom of God like grown people; He said that everybody must enter into it "as a little child."

But our fathers were stalwart men, with many foes to encounter. If anybody ever needed a grown-up religion, they surely did; and it became them well.

Most of our every-day reading also came to us over the sea. Miss Edgworth's juvenile stories were in general circulation, and we knew "Harry and Lucy" and "Rosamond" almost as well as we did our own playmates. But we did not think those English children had so good a time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and run wild; some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only.

Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant story-books of ours, and we went a-Maying there, with our transatlantic playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our baskets, expecting to find those English flowers in our own fields. How should children be wiser than to look for every beautiful thing they have heard of, on home ground?

And, indeed, our commonest field-flowers were, many of them, importations from the mother-country—clover, and dandelions, and ox-eye daisies. I was delighted when my mother told me one day that a yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip, for I thought she meant that it was the genuine English cowslip, which I had read about. I was disappointed to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh-marigold.

My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself a great deal: "Paul and Virginia;" "Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia;" "Nina: an Icelandic Tale;" with the "Vicar of Wakefield;" the "Tour to the Hebrides;" "Gulliver's Travels;" the "Arabian Nights;" and some odd volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels.

I read the "Scottish Chiefs"—my first novel when I was about five years old. So absorbed was I in the sorrows of Lady Helen Mar and Sir William Wallace, that I crept into a corner where nobody would notice me, and read on through sunset into moonlight, with eyes blurred with tears. I did not feel that I was doing anything wrong, for I had heard my father say he was willing his daughters should read that one novel. He probably did not intend the remark for the ears of his youngest, however.

My appetite for reading was omnivorous, and I devoured a great many romances. My sisters took them from a circulating library, many more, perhaps, than came to my parents' knowledge; but it was not often that one escaped me, wherever it was hidden. I did not understand what I was reading, to be sure; and that was one of the best and worst things about it. The sentimentalism of some of those romances was altogether unchildlike; but I did not take much of it in. It was the habit of running over pages and pages to get to the end of a story, the habit of reading without caring what I read, that I know to have been bad for my mind. To use a nautical expression, my brain was in danger of getting "water-logged." There are so many more books of fiction written nowadays, I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth of them have any brains left for every-day use.

One result of my infantile novel-reading was that I did not like to look at my own face in a mirror, because it was so unlike that of heroines, always pictured with "high white foreheads" and "cheeks of a perfect oval." Mine was round, ruddy, and laughing with health; and, though I practiced at the glass a good deal, I could not lengthen it by puckering down my lips. I quite envied the little girls who were pale and pensive-looking, as that was the only ladyfied standard in the romances. Of course, the chief pleasure of reading them was that of identifying myself with every new heroine. They began to call me a "bookworm" at home. I did not at all relish the title.

It was fortunate for me that I liked to be out of doors a great deal, and that I had a brother, John, who was willing to have me for an occasional companion. Sometimes he would take me with him when he went huckleberrying, up the rural Montserrat Road, through Cat Swamp, to the edge of Burnt Hills and Beaver Pond. He had a boy's pride in explaining these localities to me, making me understand that I had a guide who was familiar with every inch of the way. Then, charging me not to move until he came back, he would leave me sitting alone on a great craggy rock, while he went off and filled his basket out of sight among the bushes. Indeed, I did not want to move, it was all so new and fascinating. The tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the sky-openings above me, the graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy-cups, as if the elves had just spread their table for tea, the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air, all wove a web of enchantment about me, from which I had no wish to disentangle myself. The silent spell of the woods held me with a power stronger even than that of the solemn-voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother would get permission to take me on a longer excursion,—to visit the old homestead at "The Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a healthy child of five years; and that road, in the old time, led through a rural Paradise, beautiful at every season,—whether it were the time of song-sparrows and violets, of wild roses, of coral-hung barberry-bushes, or of fallen leaves and snow-drifts. The wildness of the road, now exchanged for elegant modern cultivation, was its great charm to us. We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the cat-birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel in the sudden surprise of the open sea, and to listen to the chant of the waves, always stronger and grander there than anywhere along the shore. We passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest woodpath to us in all the world, the path to the ancestral farmhouse.

We found children enough to play with there,—as numerous a family as our own. We were sometimes, I fancy, the added drop too much of already overflowing juvenility. Farther down the road, where the cousins were all grown-up men and women, Aunt Betsey's cordial, old-fashioned hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two. We watched the milking, and fed the chickens, and fared gloriously. Aunt Betsey could not have done more to entertain us, had we been the President's children.

I have always cherished the memory of a certain pair of large-bowed spectacles that she wore, and of the green calash, held by a ribbon bridle, that sheltered her head, when she walked up from the shore to see us, as she often did. They announced to us the approach of inexhaustible kindliness and good cheer. We took in a home-feeling with the words "Aunt Betsey" then and always. She had just the husband that belonged to her in my Uncle David, an upright man, frank-faced, large-hearted, and spiritually minded. He was my father's favorite brother, and to our branch of the family "The Farms" meant "Uncle David and Aunt Betsey."

My brother John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize entirely with my own ideas. He had an inventive mind, and wanted me to share his boyish sports. But I did not like to ride in a wheelbarrow, nor to walk on stilts, nor even to coast down the hill on his sled and I always got a tumble, if I tried, for I was rather a clumsy child; besides, I much preferred girls' quieter games.

We were seldom permitted to play with any boys except our brothers. I drew the inference that our boys must be a great deal better than "the other boys." My brother John had some fine play-fellows, but he seemed to consider me in the way when they were his guests. Occasionally we would forget that the neighbor-boys were not girls, and would find ourselves all playing together in delightful unconsciousness; although possibly a thought, like that of the "Ettrick Shepherd," may now and then have flitted through the mind of some masculine juvenile:—

"Why the boys should drive away Little sweet maidens from the play, Or love to banter and fight so well,— That Is the thing I never could tell."

One day I thoughtlessly accepted an invitation to get through a gap in the garden-fence, to where the doctor's two boys were preparing to take an imaginary sleigh-ride in midsummer. The sleigh was stranded among tall weeds an cornstalks, but I was politely handed in by the elder boy, who sat down by my side and tucked his little brother in front at our feet, informing me that we were father and mother and little son, going to take a ride to Newburyport. He had found an old pair of reins and tied them to a saw-horse, that he switched and "Gee-up"-ed vigorously. The journey was as brief as delightful. I ran home feeling like the heroine of an elopement, asking myself meanwhile, "What would my brother John say if he knew I had been playing with boys?" He was very particular about his sisters' behavior. But I incautiously said to one sister in whom I did not usually confide, that I thought James was the nicest boy in the lane, and that I liked his little brother Charles, too. She laughed at me so unmercifully for making the remark, that I never dared look towards the gap in the fence again, beyond which I could hear the boys' voices around the old sleigh where they were playing, entirely forgetful of their former traveling companion. Still, I continued to think that my courteous cavalier, James, was the nicest boy in the lane.

My brother's vigilant care of his two youngest sisters was once the occasion to them of a serious fright. My grandfather—the sexton—sometimes trusted him to toll the bell for a funeral. In those days the bell was tolled for everybody who died. John was social, and did not like to go up into the belfry and stay an hour or so alone, and as my grandfather positively forbade him to take any other boy up there, he one day got permission for us two little girls to go with him, for company. We had to climb up a great many stairs, and the last flight was inclosed by a rough door with a lock inside, which he was charged to fasten, so that no mischievous boys should follow.

It was strange to be standing up there in the air, gazing over the balcony-railing down into the street, where the men and women looked so small, and across to the water and the ships in the east, and the clouds and hills in the west! But when he struck the tongue against the great bell, close to our ears, it was more than we were prepared for. The little sister, scarcely three years old, screamed and shrieked,—

"I shall be stunned-ded! I shall be stunned-ded!" I do not know where she had picked up that final syllable, but it made her terror much more emphatic. Still the great waves of solemn sound went eddying on, over the hills and over the sea, and we had to hear it all, though we stopped our ears with our fingers. It was an immense relief to us when the last stroke of the passing-bell was struck, and John said we could go down.

He took the key from his pocket and was fitting it into the lock, when it slipped, beyond our reach. Now the little sister cried again, and would not be pacified; and when I looked up and caught John's blank, dismayed look, I began to feel like crying, too. The question went swiftly through my mind,—How many days can we stay up here without starving to death?—for I really thought we should never get down out of our prison in the air: never see our mother's face again.

But my brother's wits returned to him. He led us back to the balcony, and shouted over the railing to a boy in the street, making him understand that he must go and inform my father that we were locked into the belfry. It was not long before we saw both him and my grandfather on their way to the church. They came up to the little door, and told us to push with our united strength against it. The rusty lock soon yielded, and how good it was to look into those two beloved human faces once more! But we little girls were not invited to join my brother again when he tolled the bell: if we had been, I think we should have promptly declined the invitation.

Many of my childish misadventures came to me in connection with my little sister, who, having been much indulged, too it for granted that she could always have what she wanted.

One day we two were allowed to take a walk together; I, as the older, being supposed to take care of her. Although we were going towards the Cove, over a secluded road, she insisted upon wearing a brand-new pair of red morocco boots. All went well until we came to a bog by the roadside, where sweet-flag and cat-tails grew. Out in the middle of the bog, where no venturesome boy had ever attempted their seizure, there were many tall, fine-looking brown cat-tails growing. She caught sight of them, and before I saw what she was doing, she had shot from my side like an arrow from the bow, and was far out on the black, quaking surface, that at first upheld her light weight. I stood petrified with horror. I knew all about that dangerous place. I had been told that nobody had ever found out how deep that mud was. I was uttered just one imploring "Come back!" when she turned to me with a shriek, throwing up her arms towards me. She was sinking! There was nobody in sight, and there was no time to think. I ran, or rather flew, across the bog, with just one thought in my mind, "I have got to get her out!" Some angel must have prevented me from making a misstep, and sinking with her. I felt the power of a giant suddenly taking possession of my small frame. Quicker than I could tell of it, I had given one tremendous pull (she had already sunk above her boot-tops), and had dragged her back to the road. It is a marvel to me now how I—a child of scarcely six years—succeeded in rescuing her. It did not seem to me as if I were doing it myself, but as if some unseen Power had taken possession of me for a moment, and made me do it. And I suppose that when we act from a sudden impulse to help another out of trouble, it never is ourself that does the good deed. The Highest Strength just takes us and uses us. I certainly felt equal to going straight through the earth to China after my little sister, if she had stink out of sight.

We were two miserable looking children when we reached home, the sticky ooze having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps of mud, with which my own clothes also were soiled. I had to drag or carry her all the way, for she could not or would not walk a step. And alas for the morocco boots! They were never again red. I also received a scolding for not taking better care of my little sister, and I was not very soon allowed again to have her company in my rambles.

We usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out-of-door amusement near home. And our sports, as well as our books, had a spice of Merry Old England. They were full of kings and queens, and made sharp contrasts, as well as odd mixtures, with the homeliness of our everyday life.

One of them, a sort of rhymed dialogue, began with the couplet:—

"Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sits in the sun, As fair as a lady, as white as a nun."

If "Queen Anne" did not give a right guess as to which hand of the messenger held the king's letter to her, she was contemptuously informed that she was

"as brown as a bun."

In another name, four little girls joined hands across, in couples, chanting:—

"I wish my father were a king, I wish my mother were a queen, And I a little companion!"

concluding with a close embrace in a dizzying whirl, breathlessly shouting all together,—

"A bundle of fagots! A bundle of fagots!"

In a third, which may have begun with a juvenile reacting of the Colonial struggle for liberty, we ranged ourselves under two leaders, who made an archway over our heads of their lifted hands and arms, saying, as we passed beneath,—

"Lift up the gates as high as the sky, And let King George and his army pass by!"

We were told to whisper "Oranges" or "Lemons" for a pass-word; and "Oranges" always won the larger enlistment, whether British or American.

And then there was "Grandmother Gray," and the

"Old woman from Newfoundland, With all her children in her hand;"

and the

"Knight from Spain Inquiring for your daughter Jane,"

and numberless others, nearly all of them bearing a distinct Old World flavor. One of our play-places was an unoccupied end of the burying-ground, overhung by the Colonel's apple-trees and close under his wall, so that we should not be too near the grave-stones.

I do not think that death was at all a real thing to me or to my brothers and sisters at this time. We lived so near the graveyard that it seemed merely the extension of our garden. We wandered there at will, trying to decipher the moss-grown inscriptions, and wondering at the homely carvings of cross-bones and cherubs and willow-trees on the gray slate-stones. I did not associate those long green mounds with people who had once lived, though we were careful, having been so instructed, not to step on the graves. To ramble about there and puzzle ourselves with the names and dates, was like turning over the pages of a curious old book. We had not the least feeling of irreverence in taking the edge of the grave-yard for our playground. It was known as "the old burying-ground"; and we children regarded it with a sort of affectionate freedom, as we would a grandmother, because it was old.

That, indeed, was one peculiar attraction of the town itself; it was old, and it seemed old, much older than it does now. There was only one main street, said to have been the first settlers' cowpath to Wenham, which might account for its zigzag picturesqueness. All the rest were courts or lanes.

The town used to wear a delightful air of drowsiness, as if she had stretched herself out for an afternoon nap, with her head towards her old mother, Salem, and her whole length reclining towards the sea, till she felt at her feet, through her green robes, the clip of the deep water at the Farms. All her elder children recognized in her quiet steady-going ways a maternal unity and strength of character, as of a town that understood her own plans, and had settled down to peaceful, permanent habits. Her spirit was that of most of our Massachusetts coast-towns. They were transplanted shoots of Old England. And it was the voice of a mother-country more ancient than their own, that little children heard crooning across the sea in their cradle-hymns and nursery-songs.



VI.

GLIMPSES OF POETRY.

OUR close relationship to Old England was sometimes a little misleading to us juveniles. The conditions of our life were entirely different, but we read her descriptive stories and sang her songs as if they were true for us, too. One of the first things I learned to repeat—I think it was in the spelling-book—began with the verse:—

"I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth has smiled, And made me, in these latter days, A happy English child."

And some lines of a very familiar hymn by Dr. Watts ran thus:—

"Whene'er I take my walks abroad, How many poor I see. . . . . . . . . . . . . "How many children in the street Half naked I behold; While I am clothed from head to feet, And sheltered from the cold."

Now a ragged, half-clothed child, or one that could really be called poor, in the extreme sense of the word, was the rarest of all sights in a thrifty New England town fifty years ago. I used to look sharply for those children, but I never could see one. And a beggar! Oh, if a real beggar would come along, like the one described in

"Pity the sorrows of a poor old man,"

what a wonderful event that would be! I believe I had more curiosity about a beggar, and more ignorance, too, than about a king. The poem read:—

"A pampered menial drove me from the door."

What sort of creature could a "pampered menial" be? Nothing that had ever come under our observation corresponded to the words. Nor was it easy for us to attach any meaning to the word "servant." There were women who came in occasionally to do the washing, or to help about extra work. But they were decently clothed, and had homes of their own, more or less comfortable, and their quaint talk and free-and-easy ways were often as much of a lift to the household as the actual assistance they rendered.

I settled down upon the conclusion that "rich" and "poor" were book-words only, describing something far off, and having nothing to do with our every-day experience. My mental definition of "rich people," from home observation, was something like this: People who live in three-story houses, and keep their green blinds closed, and hardly ever come out and talk with the folks in the street. There were a few such houses in Beverly, and a great many in Salem, where my mother sometimes took me for a shopping walk. But I did not suppose that any of the people who lived near us were very rich, like those in books.

Everybody about us worked, and we expected to take hold of our part while young. I think we were rather eager to begin, for we believed that work would make men and women of us.

I, however, was not naturally an industrious child, but quite the reverse. When my father sent us down to weed his vegetable-garden at the foot of the lane, I, the youngest of his weeders, liked to go with the rest, but not for the sake of the work or the pay. I generally gave it up before I had weeded half a bed. It made me so warm! and my back did ache so! I stole off into the shade of the great apple-trees, and let the west wind fan my hot cheeks, and looked up into the boughs, and listened to the many, many birds that seemed chattering to each other in a language of their own. What was it they were saying? and why could not I understand it? Perhaps I should, sometime. I had read of people who did, in fairy tales.

When the others started homeward, I followed. I did not mind their calling me lazy, nor that my father gave me only one tarnished copper cent, while Lida received two or three bright ones. I had had what I wanted most. I would rather sit under the apple-trees and hear the birds sing than have a whole handful of bright copper pennies. It was well for my father and his garden that his other children were not like me.

The work which I was born to, but had not begun to do, was sometimes a serious weight upon my small, forecasting brain.

One of my hymns ended with the lines,—

"With books, and work, and healthful play, May my first years be passed, That I may give, for every day, Some good account at last."

I knew all about the books and the play; but the work,—how should I ever learn to do it?

My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all his children, girls as well as boys, should have some independent means of self-support by the labor of their hands; that every one should, as was the general custom, "learn a trade." Tailor's work—the finishing of men's outside garments—was the trade learned most frequently by women in those days, and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind.

This thought came over me with a sudden dread one Sabbath morning when I was a toddling thing, led along by my sister, behind my father and mother. As they walked arm in arm before me, I lifted my eyes from my father's heels to his head, and mused: "How tall he is! and how long his coat looks! and how many thousand, thousand stitches there must be in his coat and pantaloons! And I suppose I have got to grow up and have a husband, and put all those little stitches into his coats and pantaloons. Oh, I never, never can do it!" A shiver of utter discouragement went through me. With that task before me, it hardly seemed to me as if life were worth living. I went on to meeting, and I suppose I forgot my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it was real. It was not the only time in my life that I have tired myself out with crossing bridges to which I never came.

Another trial confronted me in the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best to begin mine early.

So I collected a few squares of calico, and undertook to put them together in my usual independent way, without asking direction. I liked assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons who wore them. One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me. It was a delicate pink and brown sea-moss pattern, on a white ground, a piece of a dress belonging to my married sister, who was to me bride and angel in One. I always saw her face before me when I unfolded this scrap,—a face with an expression truly heavenly in its loveliness. Heaven claimed her before my childhood was ended. Her beautiful form was laid to rest in mid-ocean, too deep to be pillowed among the soft sea-mosses. But she lived long enough to make a heaven of my childhood whenever she came home.

One of the sweetest of our familiar hymns I always think of as belonging to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her spirit and mine. She had come back to us for a brief visit, soon after her marriage, with some deep, new experience of spiritual realities which I, a child of four or five years, felt in the very tones of her voice, and in the expression of her eyes.

My mother told her of my fondness for the hymn-book, and she turned to me with a smile and said, "Won't you learn one hymn for me—one hymn that I love very much?"

Would I not? She could not guess how happy she made me by wishing me to do anything for her sake. The hymn was,—

"Whilst Thee I seek, protecting Power."

In a few minutes I repeated the whole to her and its own beauty, pervaded with the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at once indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it to her again, deepened with a lifetime's meaning, beyond the sea, and beyond the stars.

I could dream over my patchwork, but I could not bring it into conventional shape. My sisters, whose fingers had been educated, called my sewing "gobblings." I grew disgusted with it myself, and gave away all my pieces except the pretty sea-moss pattern, which I was not willing to see patched up with common calico. It was evident that I should never conquer fate with my needle.

Among other domestic traditions of the old times was the saying that every girl must have a pillow-case full of stockings of her own knitting before she was married. Here was another mountain before me, for I took it for granted that marrying was inevitable—one of the things that everybody must do, like learning to read, or going to meeting.

I began to knit my own stockings when I ways six or seven years old, and kept on, until home-made stockings went out of fashion. The pillow-case full, however, was never attempted, any more than the patchwork quilt. I heard somebody say one day that there must always be one "old maid" in every family of girls, and I accepted the prophecy of some of my elders, that I was to be that one. I was rather glad to know that freedom of choice in the matter was possible.

One day, when we younger ones were hanging about my golden-haired and golden-hearted sister Emilie, teasing her with wondering questions about our future, she announced to us (she had reached the mature age of fifteen years) that she intended to be an old maid, and that we might all come and live with her. Some one listening reproved her, but she said, "Why, if they fit themselves to be good, helpful, cheerful old maids, they will certainly be better wives, if they ever are married," and that maxim I laid by in my memory for future contingencies, for I believed in every word she ever uttered. She herself, however, did not carry out her girlish intention. "Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also; and he praiseth her." But the little sisters she used to fondle as her "babies" have never allowed their own years nor her changed relations to cancel their claim upon her motherly sympathies.

I regard it as a great privilege to have been one of a large family, and nearly the youngest. We had strong family resemblances, and yet no two seemed at all alike. It was like rehearsing in a small world each our own part in the great one awaiting us. If we little ones occasionally had some severe snubbing mixed with the petting and praising and loving, that was wholesome for us, and not at all to be regretted.

Almost every one of my sisters had some distinctive aptitude with her fingers. One worked exquisite lace-embroidery; another had a knack at cutting and fitting her doll's clothing so perfectly that the wooden lady was always a typical specimen of the genteel doll-world; and another was an expert at fine stitching, so delicately done that it was a pleasure to see or to wear anything her needle had touched. I had none of these gifts. I looked on and admired, and sometimes tried to imitate, but my efforts usually ended in defeat and mortification.

I did like to knit, however, and I could shape a stocking tolerably well. My fondness for this kind of work was chiefly because it did not require much thought. Except when there was "widening" or "narrowing" to be done, I did not need to keep my eyes upon it at all. So I took a book upon my lap and read, and read, while the needles clicked on, comforting me with the reminder that I was not absolutely unemployed, while yet I was having a good time reading.

I began to know that I liked poetry, and to think a good deal about it at my childish work. Outside of the hymn-book, the first rhymes I committed to memory were in the "Old Farmer's Almanac," files of which hung in the chimney corner, and were an inexhaustible source of entertainment to us younger ones.

My father kept his newspapers also carefully filed away in the garret, but we made sad havoc among the "Palladiums" and other journals that we ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures. We valued the anecdote column and the poet's corner only; these we clipped unsparingly for our scrap-books.

A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versification which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.

I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old. My brother John proposed "writing poetry" as a rainy-day amusement, one afternoon when we two were sent up into the garret to entertain ourselves without disturbing the family. He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts, but I produced two stanzas, the first of which read thus:—

"One summer day, said little Jane, We were walking down a shady lane, When suddenly the wind blew high, And the red lightning flashed in the sky.

The second stanza descended in a dreadfully abrupt anti-climax; but I was blissfully ignorant of rhetoricians' rules, and supposed that the rhyme was the only important thing. It may amuse my child-readers if I give them this verse too:

"The peals of thunder, how they rolled! And I felt myself a little cooled; For I before had been quite warm; But now around me was a storm."

My brother was surprised at my success, and I believe I thought my verses quite fine, too. But I was rather sorry that I had written them, for I had to say them over to the family, and then they sounded silly. The habit was formed, however, and I went on writing little books of ballads, which I illustrated with colors from my toy paintbox, and then squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor, for fear that somebody would find them.

My fame crept out among the neighbors, nevertheless. I was even invited to write some verses in young lady's album; and Aunt Hannah asked me to repeat my verses to her. I considered myself greatly honored by both requests.

My fondness for books began very early. At the age of four I had formed the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp, paper-covered picture-books, such as people give to babies; no! I wanted books with stiff covers, that could stand up side by side on a shelf, and maintain their own character as books. But I did not know how to make a beginning, for mine were all of the kind manufactured for infancy, and I thought they deserved no better fate than to be tossed about among my rag-babies and playthings.

One day, however, I found among some rubbish in a corner a volume, with one good stiff cover; the other was missing. It did not look so very old, nor as if it had been much read; neither did it look very inviting to me as I turned its leaves. On its title-page I read "The Life of John Calvin." I did not know who he was, but a book was a book to me, and this would do as well as any to begin my library with. I looked upon it as a treasure, and to make sure of my claim, I took it down to my mother and timidly asked if I might have it for my own. She gave me in reply a rather amused "Yes," and I ran back happy, and began my library by setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the garret eaves, my "make-believe" book-case shelf.

I was proud of my literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy with a row of books, every one of which should have two stiff covers. But I found no more neglected volumes that I could adopt. John Calvin was left to a lonely fate, and am afraid that at last the mice devoured him. Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or not.

This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called Spenserian. It was Byron's "Vision of Judgment," and Southey's also was bound up with it.

Southey's hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron's lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence, took it for a sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale.

There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem an explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with the words,—

"St. Peter sat at the celestial gate, And nodded o'er his keys."

I invented a pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house reciting grandly,—

"St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate, And nodded o'er his keys."

That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its mock-magnificence.

John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the foundation of an infant's library; but I was not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other in their refusal to wear limp covers.

It is amusing to recall the rapid succession of contrasts in one child's tastes. I felt no incongruity between Dr. Watts and Mother Goose. I supplemented "Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" and

"Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day,"

with "Yankee Doodle" and the "Diverting History of John Gilpin;" and with the glamour of some fairy tale I had just read still haunting me, I would run out of doors eating a big piece of bread and butter,—sweeter than any has tasted since,—and would jump up towards the crows cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half wishing I too were a crow to make the sky ring with my glee.

After Dr. Watts's hymns the first poetry I took great delight in greeted me upon the pages of the "American First Class Book," handed down from older pupils in the little private school which my sisters and I attended when Aunt Hannah had done all she could for us. That book was a collection of excellent literary extracts, made by one who was himself an author and a poet. It deserved to be called "first-class" in another sense than that which was understood by its title. I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon it much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare's plays, among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little Prince Arthur, whose appeal to have his eyes spared, brought many a tear to my own. Bryant's "Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" were there also; and Neal's,—

"There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak,"

that the boys loved so dearly to "declaim;" and another poem by this last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's movement:—

"Slowly it came in its mountain wrath, And the forests vanished before its path; And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,— And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead."

In reading this, "Swiss Minstrel's Lament over the Ruins of Goldau," I first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains—a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,—for something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly love them,—was Coleridge's "Mont Blanc before Sunrise," in this same "First Class Book." I believe that poetry really first took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry. The child of eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many games and pastimes.

But with this ideal picture of mountain scenery there came to me a revelation of poetry as the one unattainable something which I must reach out after, because I could not live without it. The thought of it was to me like the thought of God and of truth. To leave out poetry would be to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this very blindly and vaguely, no doubt; but the feeling was deep. It was as if Mont Blanc stood visibly before me, while I murmured to myself in lonely places—

"Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?"

And then the

"Pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound"

gave glorious answer, with the streams and torrents, and my child-heart in its trance echoed the poet's invocation,—

"Rise, like a cloud of incense from the earth! And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on GOD!"

I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely saw the Alps, with Coleridge, in my childhood. And although I never stood face to face with mountains until I was a mature woman, always, after this vision of them, they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure and lofty in human possibilities,—like a white ideal beckoning me on.

Since I am writing these recollections for the young, I may say here that I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine.

Hard work, however, has its own illumination—if done as duty which worldliness has not; and worldliness seems to be the greatest temptation and danger Of young people in this generation. Poetry is one of the angels whose presence will drive out this sordid demon, if anything less than the Power of the Highest can. But poetry is of the Highest. It is the Divine Voice, always, that we recognize through the poet's, whenever he most deeply moves our souls.

Reason and observation, as well as my own experience, assure me also that it is great—poetry even the greatest—which the youngest crave, and upon which they may be fed, because it is the simplest. Nature does not write down her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her oceans in some smaller style, to suit the comprehension of little children; they do not need any such dilution. So I go back to the "American First Class Book," and affirm it to have been one of the best of reading-books, because it gave us children a taste of the finest poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue, by British and by American authors. Among the pieces which left a permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt's description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of the sightless speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believe that the first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those contained in the grand, brief sentence,—"Socrates died like a philosopher; but Jesus Christ—like a God!"

Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began—"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"—to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I read—

"How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich—at least in Scotland!"

For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque. After my father's death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to "the wolf at the door": and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread. Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed dreams of what it might soon mean for me to "earn my own living."



VII.

BEGINNING TO WORK.

A CHILD does not easily comprehend even the plain fact of death. Though I had looked upon my father's still, pale face in his coffin, the impression it left upon me was of sleep; more peaceful and sacred than common slumber, yet only sleep. My dreams of him were for a long time so vivid that I would say to myself, "He was here yesterday; he will be here again to-morrow," with a feeling that amounted to expectation.

We missed him, we children large and small who made up the yet untrained home crew, as a ship misses the man at the helm. His grave, clear perception of what was best for us, his brief words that decided, once for all, the course we were to take, had been far more to us than we knew.

It was hardest of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to depend entirely upon him. Left with her eight children, the eldest a boy of eighteen years, and with no property except the roof that sheltered us and a small strip of land, her situation was full of perplexities which we little ones could not at all understand. To be fed like the ravens and clothed like the grass of the field seemed to me, for one, a perfectly natural thing, and I often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious.

I knew that she believed in God, and in the promises of the Bible, and yet she seemed sometimes to forget everything but her troubles and her helplessness. I felt almost like preaching to her, but I was too small a child to do that, I well knew; so I did the next best thing I could think of—I sang hymns as if singing to myself, while I meant them for her. Sitting at the window with my book and my knitting, while she was preparing dinner or supper with a depressed air because she missed the abundant provision to which she held been accustomed, I would go from hymn to hymn, selecting those which I thought would be most comforting to her, out of the many that my memory-book contained, and taking care to pronounce the words distinctly.

I was glad to observe that she listened to

"Come, ye disconsolate,"

and

"How firm a foundation;"

and that she grew more cheerful; though I did not feel sure that my singing cheered her so much as some happier thought that had come to her out of her own heart. Nobody but my mother, indeed, would have called my chirping singing. But as she did not seem displeased, I went on, a little more confidently, with some hymns that I loved for their starry suggestions,—

"When marshaled on the nightly plain,"

and

"Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,"

and

"Watchman, tell us of the night?"

The most beautiful picture in the Bible to me, certainly the loveliest in the Old Testament, had always been that one painted by prophecy, of the time when wild and tame creatures should live together in peace, and children should be their fearless playmates. Even the savage wolf Poverty would be pleasant and neighborly then, no doubt! A Little Child among them, leading them, stood looking wistfully down through the soft sunrise of that approaching day, into the cold and darkness of the world. Oh, it would be so much better than the garden of Eden!

Yes, and it would be a great deal better, I thought, to live in the millennium, than even to die and go to heaven, although so many people around me talked as if that were the most desirable thing of all. But I could never understand why, if God sent us here, we should be in haste to get away, even to go to a pleasanter place.

I was perplexed by a good many matters besides. I had learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself, but I did venture to ask about the Ressurrection—how it was that those who had died and gone straight to heaven, and had been singing there for thousands of years, could have any use for the dust to which their bodies had returned. Were they not already as alive as they could be? I found that there were different ideas of the resurrection among "orthodox" people, even then. I was told however, that this was too deep a matter for me, and so I ceased asking questions. But I pondered the matter of death; what did it mean? The Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than any of the ministers did. And, as usual, a poem helped me. It was Pope's Ode, beginning with,—

"Vital spark of heavenly flame,"—

which I learned out of a reading-book. To die was to "languish into life." That was the meaning of it! and I loved to repeat to myself the words,—

"Hark! they whisper: angels say, 'Sister spirit, come away!'"

"The world recedes; it disappears! Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears With sounds seraphic ring."

A hymn that I learned a little later expressed to me the same satisfying thought:

"For strangers into life we come, And dying is but going home."

The Apostle's words, with which the song of "The Dying Christian to his Soul" ends, left the whole cloudy question lit up with sunshine, to my childish thoughts:—

"O grave, where is thy 'victory? O death, where is thy sting?"

My father was dead; but that only meant that he had gone to a better home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we should go home, too.

Meanwhile the millennium was coming, and some people thought it was very near. And what was the millennium? Why, the time when everybody on earth would live just as they do in heaven. Nobody would be selfish, nobody would be unkind; no! not so much as in a single thought. What a delightful world this would be to live in then! Heaven itself could scarcely be much better! Perhaps people would not die at all, but, when the right time came, would slip quietly away into heaven, just as Enoch did.

My father had believed in the near millennium. His very last writing, in his sick-room, was a penciled computation, from the prophets, of the time when it would begin. The first minister who preached in our church, long before I was born, had studied the subject much, and had written books upon this, his favorite theme. The thought of it was continually breaking out, like bloom and sunshine, from the stern doctrines of the period.

One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal. Were people going to be made good in spite of themselves, whether they wanted to or not? And what would be done with the bad ones, if there were any left? I did not like to think of their being killed off, and yet everybody must be good, or it would not be a true millennium.

It certainly would not matter much who was rich, and who was poor, if goodness, and not money, was the thing everybody cared for. Oh, if the millennium would only begin now! I felt as if it were hardly fair to me that I should not be here during those happy thousand years, when I wanted to so much. But I had not lived even my short life in the world without leading something of my own faults and perversities; and when I saw that there was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart I had to conclude that it might be a great way off, after all. Yet the very thought of it brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day and by night. It was coming, some time! And the people who were in heaven would be as glad of it as those who remained on earth.

That it was a hard world for my mother and her children to live in at present I could not help seeing. The older members of the family found occupations by which the domestic burdens were lifted a little; but, with only the three youngest to clothe and to keep at school, there was still much more outgo than income, and my mother's discouragement every day increased.

My eldest brother had gone to sea with a relative who was master of a merchant vessel in the South American trade. His inclination led him that way; it seemed to open before him a prospect of profitable business, and my mother looked upon him as her future stay and support.

One day she came in among us children looking strangely excited. I heard her tell some one afterwards that she had just been to hear Father Taylor preach, the sailors minister, whose coming to our town must have been a rare occurrence. His words had touched her personally, for he had spoken to mothers whose first-born had left them to venture upon strange seas and to seek unknown lands. He had even given to the wanderer he described the name of her own absent son—"Benjamin." As she left the church she met a neighbor who informed her that the brig "Mexican" had arrived at Salem, in trouble. It was the vessel in which my brother had sailed only a short time before, expecting to be absent for months. "Pirates" was the only word we children caught, as she hastened away from the house, not knowing whether her son was alive or not. Fortunately, the news hardly reached the town before my brother himself did. She met him in the street, and brought him home with her, forgetting all her anxieties in her joy at his safety.