Produced by Susan L. Farley.  HTML version by Al Haines.

Project Gutenberg/Make a Difference Day Project 1999.

A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD

OUTLINED FROM MEMORY

By

LUCY LARCOM

  I dedicated this sketch
  To my girlfriends in general;
  And in particular
  To my namesake-niece,
  Lucy Larcom Spaulding.

  Happy those early days, when I
  Shined in my angel-infancy!
  --When on some gilded cloud or flower
  My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
  And in those weaker glories spy
  Some shadows of eternity:--
  Before I taught my tongue to wound
  My conscience by a sinful sound;--
  But felt through all this fleshy dress
  Bright shoots of everlastingness.

  HENRY VAUGHAN

  The thought of our past years in me doth breed
  Perpetual benediction.

  WORDSWORTH

PREFACE

THE following sketch was written for the young, at the suggestion of
friends.

My audience is understood to be composed of girls of all ages, and of
women who have not forgotten their girlhood. Such as have a friendly
appreciation of girls--and of those who write for them--are also
welcome to listen to as much of my narrative as they choose. All others
are eavesdroppers, and, of course, have no right to criticise.

To many, the word "autobiography" implies nothing but conceit and
egotism. But these are not necessarily its characteristics. If an apple
blossom or a ripe apple could tell its own story, it would be, still
more than its own, the story of the sunshine that smiled upon it, of
the winds that whispered to it, of the birds that sang around it, of
the storms that visited it, and of the motherly tree that held it and
fed it until its petals were unfolded and its form developed.

A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and
inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For
does not the whole world, seen and unseen go to the making up of every
human being? The commonest personal history has its value when it is
looked at as a part of the One Infinite Life. Our life--which is the
very best thing we have--is ours only that we may share it with Our
Father's family, at their need. If we have anything, within us worth
giving away, to withhold it is ungenerous; and we cannot look honestly
into ourselves without acknowledging with humility our debt to the
lives around us for whatever of power or beauty has been poured into
ours.

None of us can think of ourselves as entirely separate beings. Even an
autobiographer has to say "we" much oftener than "I." Indeed, there may
be more egotism in withdrawing mysteriously into one's self, than in
frankly unfolding one's life--story, for better or worse. There may be
more vanity in covering, one's face with a veil, to be wondered at and
guessed about, than in drawing it aside, and saying by that act,
"There! you see that I am nothing remarkable."

However, I do not know that I altogether approve of autobiography
myself, when the subject is a person of so little importance as in the
present instance.  Still, it may have a reason for being, even in a
case like this.

Every one whose name is before the public at all must be aware of a
common annoyance in the frequent requests which are made for personal
facts, data for biographical paragraphs, and the like. To answer such
requests and furnish the material asked for, were it desirable, would
interfere seriously with the necessary work of almost any writer. The
first impulse is to pay no attention to them, putting them aside as
mere signs of the ill-bred, idle curiosity of the age we live in about
people and their private affairs. It does not seem to be supposed
possible that authors can have any natural shrinking from publicity,
like other mortals.

But while one would not willingly encourage an intrusive custom, there
is another view of the matter. The most enjoyable thing about writing
is that the relation between writer and reader may be and often does
become that of mutual friendship; an friends naturally like to know
each other in a neighborly way.

We are all willing to gossip about ourselves, sometimes, with those who
are really interested in us. Girls especially are fond of exchanging
confidences with those whom they think they can trust; it is one of the
most charming traits of a simple, earnest-hearted girlhood, and they
are the happiest women who never lose it entirely.

I should like far better to listen to my girl-readers' thoughts about
life and themselves than to be writing out my own experiences. It is to
my disadvantage that the confidences, in this case, must all be on one
side. But I have known so many girls so well in my relation to them of
schoolmate, workmate, and teacher, I feel sure of a fair share of their
sympathy and attention.

It is hardly possible for an author to write anything sincerely without
making it something of an autobiography. Friends can always read a
personal history, or guess at it, between the lines. So I sometimes
think I have already written mine, in my verses. In them, I have found
the most natural and free expression of myself. They have seemed to set
my life to music for me, a life that has always had to be occupied with
many things besides writing. Not, however, that I claim to have written
much poetry: only perhaps some true rhymes: I do not see how there
could be any pleasure in writing insincere ones.

Whatever special interest this little narrative of mine may have is due
to the social influences under which I was reared, and particularly to
the prominent place held by both work and religion in New England half
a century ago. The period of my growing-up had peculiarities which our
future history can never repeat, although something far better is
undoubtedly already resulting thence. Those peculiarities were the
natural development of the seed sown by our sturdy Puritan ancestry.
The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a
mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in
wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the
sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began
to see a little more of the sky, than our elders; but the tree was
sound at its heart. There was life in it that can never be lost to the
world.

One thing we are at last beginning to understand, which our ancestors
evidently had not learned; that it is far more needful for theologians
to become as little children, than for little children to become
theologians. They considered it a duty that they owed to the youngest
of us, to teach us doctrines. And we believed in our instructors, if we
could not always digest their instructions. We learned to reverence
truth as they received it and lived it, and to feel that the search for
truth was one chief end of our being.

It was a pity that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard
subjects so soon, and it was also a pity that we were set to hard work
while so young. Yet these were both inevitable results of circumstances
then existing; and perhaps the two belong together. Perhaps habits of
conscientious work induce thought. Certainly, right thinking naturally
impels people to work.

We learned no theories about "the dignity of labor," but we were taught
to work almost as if it were a religion; to keep at work, expecting
nothing else. It was our inheritance, banded down from the outcasts of
Eden.  And for us, as for them, there was a blessing hidden in the
curse. I am glad that I grew up under these wholesome Puritanic
influences, as glad as I am that I was born a New Englander; and I
surely should have chosen New England for my birthplace before any
region under the sun.

Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative
need of its own, which shapes its individuality. I believe it was
Grotius who said, "Books are necessities of my life. Food and clothing
I can do without, if I must."

My "must-have" was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And,
fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in
which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me. The
children of old New England were always surrounded, it is true, with
stubborn matter of fact,--the hand to hand struggle for existence. But
that was no hindrance. Poetry must have prose to root itself in; the
homelier its earth-spot, the lovelier, by contrast, its
heaven-breathing flowers.

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the
reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday
living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue skies were poetry. God
himself was poetry. As I grew up and lived on, friendship became to me
the deepest and sweetest ideal of poetry. To live in other lives, to
take their power and beauty into our own, that is poetry experienced,
the most inspiring of all. Poetry embodied in persons, in lovely and
lofty characters, more sacredly than all in the One Divine Person who
has transfigured our human life with the glory of His sacrifice,--all
the great lyrics and epics pale before that, and it is within the reach
and comprehension of every human soul.

To care for poetry in this way does not make one a poet, but it does
make one feel blessedly rich, and quite indifferent to many things
which are usually looked upon as desirable possessions. I am sincerely
grateful that it was given to me, from childhood, to see life from this
point of view. And it seems to me that every young girl would be
happier for beginning her earthly journey with the thankful
consciousness that her life does not consist in the abundance of things
that she possesses.

The highest possible poetic conception is that of a life consecrated to
a noble ideal. It may be unable to find expression for itself except
through humble, even menial services, or through unselfish devotion
whose silent song is audible to God alone; yet such music as this might
rise to heaven from every young girl's heart and character if she would
set it free. In such ways it was meant that the world should be filled
with the true poetry of womanhood.

It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours,
that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly.
Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.
My childhood was by no means a cloudless one. It had its light and
shade, each contributing a charm which makes it wholly delightful in
the retrospect.

I can see very distinctly the child that I was, and I know how the
world looked to her, far off as she is now. She seems to me like my
little sister, at play in a garden where I can at any time return and
find her. I have enjoyed bringing her back, and letting her tell her
story, almost as if she were somebody else. I like her better than I
did when I was really a child, and I hope never to part company with
her.

I do not feel so much satisfaction in the older girl who comes between
her and me, although she, too, is enough like me to be my sister, or
even more like my young, undisciplined mother; for the girl is mother
of the woman. But I have to acknowledge her faults and mistakes as my
own, while I sometimes feel like reproving her severely for her
carelessly performed tasks, her habit of lapsing into listless
reveries, her cowardly shrinking from responsibility and vigorous
endeavor, and many other faults that I have inherited from her. Still,
she is myself, and I could not be quite happy without her comradeship.

Every phase of our life belongs to us. The moon does not, except in
appearance, lose her first thin, luminous curve, nor her silvery
crescent, in rounding to her full. The woman is still both child and
girl, in the completeness of womanly character. We have a right to our
entire selves, through all the changes of this mortal state, a claim
which we shall doubtless carry along with us into the unfolding
mysteries of our eternal being. Perhaps in this thought lies hidden the
secret of immortal youth; for a seer has said that "to grow old in
heaven is to grow young."

To take life as it is sent to us, to live it faithfully, looking and
striving always towards better life, this was the lesson that came to
me from my early teachers.  It was not an easy lesson, but it was a
healthful one; and I pass it on to younger pupils, trusting that they
will learn it more thoroughly than I ever have.

Young or old, we may all win inspiration to do our best, from the needs
of a world to which the humblest life may be permitted to bring
immeasurable blessings:--

  "For no one doth know
  What he can bestow,
  What light, strength, and beauty may after him go:
  Thus onward we move,
  And, save God above,
  None guesseth how wondrous the journey will prove."

  L.L.
  BEVERLY, MASSACHUSETTS,
  October, 1889.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

    I.  UP AND DOWN THE LANE
   II.  SCHOOLROOM AND MEETING-HOUSE
  III.  THE HYMN-BOOK
   IV.  NAUGHTY CHILDREN AND FAIRY TALES
    V.  OLD NEW ENGLAND
   VI.  GLIMPSES OF POETRY
  VII.  BEGINNING TO WORK
 VIII.  BY THE RIVER
   IX.  MOUNTAIN-FRIENDS
    X.  MILL-GIRLS' MAGAZINES
   XI.  READING AND STUDYING
  XII.  FROM THE MERRIMACK TO THE MISSISSIPPI

A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD

I.

UP AND DOWN THE LANE.

IT is strange that the spot of earth where we were born should make
such a difference to us. People can live and grow anywhere, but people
as well as plants have their habitat,--the place where they belong, and
where they find their happiest, because their most natural life. If I
had opened my eyes upon this planet elsewhere than in this northeastern
corner of Massachusetts, elsewhere than on this green, rocky strip of
shore between Beverly Bridge and the Misery Islands, it seems to me as
if I must have been somebody else, and not myself. These gray ledges
hold me by the roots, as they do the bayberry bushes, the sweet-fern,
and the rock-saxifrage.

When I look from my window over the tree-tops to the sea, I could
almost fancy that from the deck of some one of those inward bound
vessels the wistful eyes of the Lady Arbella might be turned towards
this very hillside, and that mine were meeting hers in sympathy, across
the graves of two hundred and fifty years. For Winthrop's fleet, led by
the ship that bore her name, must have passed into harbor that way.
Dear and gracious spirit! The memory of her brief sojourn here has left
New England more truly consecrated ground. Sweetest of womanly
pioneers! It is as if an angel in passing on to heaven just touched
with her wings this rough coast of ours.

In those primitive years, before any town but Salem had been named,
this whole region was known as Cape Ann Side; and about ten years after
Winthrop's arrival, my first ancestor's name appears among those of
other hardy settlers of the neighborhood. No record has been found of
his coming, but emigration by that time had grown so rapid that ships'
lists were no longer carefully preserved. And then he was but a simple
yeoman, a tiller of the soil; one who must have loved the sea, however,
for he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham
woods, until the close of the seventeenth century found his
descendants--my own great-great-grandfather's family--planted in a
romantic homestead-nook on a hillside, overlooking wide gray spaces of
the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms." The situation was
beautiful, and home attachments proved tenacious, the family claim to
the farm having only been resigned within the last thirty or forty
years.

I am proud of my unlettered forefathers, who were also too humbly proud
to care whether their names would be remembered or not; for they were
God-fearing men, and had been persecuted for their faith long before
they found their way either to Old or New England.

The name is rather an unusual one, and has been traced back from Wales
and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Piedmont; a
little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in what was
probably the original spelling-La Combe. There is a family shield in
existence, showing a hill surmounted by a tree, and a bird with spread
wings above. It might symbolize flight in times of persecution, from
the mountains to the forests, and thence to heaven, or to the free
skies of this New World.

But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both indifferent
and ignorant as to questions of pedigree, and accepted with sturdy
dignity an inheritance of hard work and the privileges of poverty,
leaving the same bequest to their descendants. And poverty has its
privileges. When there is very little of the seen and temporal to
intercept spiritual vision, unseen and eternal realities are, or may
be, more clearly beheld.

To have been born of people of integrity and profound faith in God, is
better than to have inherited material wealth of any kind. And to those
serious-minded, reticent progenitors of mine, looking out from their
lonely fields across the lonelier sea, their faith must have been
everything.

My father's parents both died years before my birth. My grandmother had
been left a widow with a large family in my father's boyhood, and he,
with the rest, had to toil early for a livelihood. She was an earnest
Christian woman, of keen intelligence and unusual spiritual perception.
She was supposed by her neighbors to have the gift of "second sight";
and some remarkable stories are told of her knowledge of distant events
while they were occurring, or just before they took place. Her dignity
of presence and character must have been noticeable. A relative of
mine, who as a very little child, was taken by her mother to visit my
grandmother, told me that she had always remembered the aged woman's
solemnity of voice and bearing, and her mother's deferential attitude
towards her: and she was so profoundly impressed by it all at the time,
that when they had left the house, and were on their homeward path
through the woods, she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a
whisper, "Mother, was that God?"

I used sometimes to feel a little resentment at my fate in not having
been born at the old Beverly Farms home-place, as my father and uncles
and aunts and some of my cousins had been. But perhaps I had more of
the romantic and legendary charm of it than if I had been brought up
there, for my father, in his communicative moods, never wearied of
telling us about his childhood; and we felt that we still held a
birthright claim upon that picturesque spot through him. Besides, it
was only three or four miles away, and before the day of railroads,
that was thought nothing of as a walk, by young or old.

But, in fact, I first saw the light in the very middle of Beverly, in
full view of the town clock and the Old South steeple. (I believe there
is an "Old South" in nearly all these first-settled cities and villages
of Eastern Massachusetts.) The town wore a half-rustic air of antiquity
then, with its old-fashioned people and weather-worn houses; for I was
born while my mother-century was still in her youth, just rounding the
first quarter of her hundred years.

Primitive ways of doing things had not wholly ceased during my
childhood; they were kept up in these old towns longer than elsewhere.
We used tallow candles and oil lamps, and sat by open fireplaces. There
was always a tinder-box in some safe corner or other, and fire was
kindled by striking flint and steel upon the tinder. What magic it
seemed to me, when I was first allowed to strike that wonderful spark,
and light the kitchen fire!

The fireplace was deep, and there was a "settle" in the chimney corner,
where three of us youngest girls could sit together and toast our toes
on the andirons (two Continental soldiers in full uniform, marching one
after the other), while we looked up the chimney into a square of blue
sky, and sometimes caught a snowflake on our foreheads; or sometimes
smirched our clean aprons (high-necked and long sleeved ones, known as
"tiers"), against the swinging crane with its sooty pot-hooks and
trammels.

The coffee-pot was set for breakfast over hot coals, on a three-legged
bit of iron called a "trivet." Potatoes were roasted in the ashes, and
the Thanksgiving turkey in a "tin-kitchen," the business of turning the
spit being usually delegate to some of us, small folk, who were only
too willing to burn our faces in honor of the annual festival.

There were brick ovens in the chimney corner, where the great bakings
were done; but there was also an iron article called a "Dutch oven," in
which delicious bread could be baked over the coals at short notice.
And there was never was anything that tasted better than my mother's
"firecake,"--a short-cake spread on a smooth piece of board, and set up
with a flat-iron before the blaze, browned on one side, and then turned
over to be browned on the other. (It required some sleight of hand to
do that.) If I could only be allowed to blow the bellows--the very old
people called them "belluses"--when the fire began to get low, I was a
happy girl.

Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion, but they were clumsy affairs,
and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that
which was done by an open fire. We younger ones reveled in the warm,
beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a remembered sunset.  There
is no such home-splendor now.

When supper was finished, and the tea-kettle was pushed back on the
crane, and the backlog had been reduced to a heap of fiery embers, then
was the time for listening to sailor yarns and ghost and witch legends.
The wonder seems somehow to have faded out of those tales of eld since
the gleam of red-hot coals died away from the hearthstone. The shutting
up of the great fireplaces and the introduction of stoves marks an era;
the abdication of shaggy Romance and the enthronement of elegant
Commonplace--sometimes, alas! the opposite of elegant--at the New
England fireside.

Have we indeed a fireside any longer in the old sense? It hardly seems
as if the young people of to-day can really understand the poetry of
English domestic life, reading it, as they must, by a reflected
illumination from the past. What would "Cotter's Saturday Night" have
been, if Burns had written it by the opaque heat of a stove instead of
at his

  "Wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnilie?"

New England as it used to be was so much like Scotland in many of its
ways of doing and thinking, that it almost seems as if that tender poem
of hearth-and-home life had been written for us too. I can see the
features of my father, who died when I was a little child, whenever I
read the familiar verse:--

  "The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face
  They round the ingle form a circle wide:
  The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
  The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride."

A grave, thoughtful face his was, lifted up so grandly amid that
blooming semicircle of boys and girls, all gathered silently in the
glow of the ruddy firelight! The great family Bible had the look upon
its leathern covers of a book that bad never been new, and we honored
it the more for its apparent age. Its companion was the Westminster
Assembly's and Shorter Catechism, out of which my father asked us
questions on Sabbath afternoons, when the tea-table had been cleared.
He ended the exercise with a prayer, standing up with his face turned
toward the wall. My most vivid recollection of his living face is as I
saw it reflected in a mirror while he stood thus praying. His closed
eyes, the paleness and seriousness of his countenance, awed me. I never
forgot that look. I saw it but once again, when, a child of six or
seven years, I was lifted to a footstool beside his coffin to gaze upon
his face for the last time. It wore the same expression that it did in
prayer; paler, but no longer care-worn; so peaceful, so noble! They
left me standing there a long time, and I could not take my eyes away.
I had never thought my father's face a beautiful one until then, but I
believe it must have been so, always.

I know that he was a studious man, fond of what was called "solid
reading." He delighted in problems of navigation (he was for many years
the master of a merchant-vessel sailing to various European ports), in
astronomical calculations and historical computations. A rhyming genius
in the town, who undertook to hit off the peculiarities of well-known
residents, characterized my father as

  "Philosophic Ben,
  Who, pointing to the stars, cries, Land ahead!"

His reserved, abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a fund
of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him; but my
mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his. She was chatty
and social, rosy-cheeked and dimpled, with bright blue eyes and soft,
dark, curling hair, which she kept pinned up under her white lace
cap-border. Not even the eldest child remembered her without her cap,
and when some of us asked her why she never let her pretty curls be
visible, she said,--

"Your father liked to see me in a cap. I put it on soon after we were
married, to please him; I always have worn it, and I always shall wear
it, for the same reason."

My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to
shadow, like the atmosphere of an April day. Cheerfulness held sway
with her, except occasionally, when her domestic cares grew too
overwhelming; but her spirits rebounded quickly from discouragement.

Her father was the only one of our grandparents who had survived to my
time,--of French descent, piquant, merry, exceedingly polite, and very
fond of us children, whom he was always treating to raisins and
peppermints and rules for good behavior. He had been a soldier in the
Revolutionary War,--the greatest distinction we could imagine. And he
was also the sexton of the oldest church in town,--the Old South,--and
had charge of the winding-up of the town clock, and the ringing of the
bell on week-days and Sundays, and the tolling for funerals,--into
which mysteries he sometimes allowed us youngsters a furtive glimpse. I
did not believe that there was another grandfather so delightful as
ours in all the world.

Uncles, aunts, and cousins were plentiful in the family, but they did
not live near enough for us to see them very often, excepting one aunt,
my father's sister, for whom I was named. She was fair, with large,
clear eyes that seemed to look far into one's heart, with an expression
at once penetrating and benignant. To my childish imagination she was
an embodiment of serene and lofty goodness. I wished and hoped that by
bearing her baptismal name I might become like her; and when I found
out its signification (I learned that "Lucy" means "with light"), I
wished it more earnestly still. For her beautiful character was just
such an illumination to my young life as I should most desire mine to
be to the lives of others.

My aunt, like my father, was always studying something. Some map or
book always lay open before her, when I went to visit her, in her
picturesque old house, with its sloping roof and tall well-sweep. And
she always brought out some book or picture for me from her quaint
old-fashioned chest of drawers. I still possess the "Children in the
Wood," which she gave me, as a keepsake, when I was about ten years old.

Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand
ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons
who came nearest to us in our earliest years. Those larger planets held
our little one to its orbit, and lent it their brightness. Happy indeed
is the infancy which is surrounded only by the loving and the good!

Besides those who were of my kindred, I had several aunts by courtesy,
or rather by the privilege of neighborhood, who seemed to belong to my
babyhood. Indeed, the family hearthstone came near being the scene of a
tragedy to me, through the blind fondness of one of these.

The adjective is literal. This dear old lady, almost sightless, sitting
in a low chair far in the chimney corner, where she had been placed on
her first call to see the new baby, took me upon her lap, and--so they
say--unconsciously let me slip off into the coals. I was rescued
unsinged, however, and it was one of the earliest accomplishments of my
infancy to thread my poor, half-blind Aunt Stanley's needles for her.
We were close neighbors and gossips until my fourth year. Many an hour
I sat by her side drawing a needle and thread through a bit of calico,
under the delusion that I was sewing, while she repeated all sorts of
juvenile singsongs of which her memory seemed full, for my
entertainment. There used to be a legend current among my brothers and
sisters that this aunt unwittingly taught me to use a reprehensible
word. One of her ditties began with the lines:--

  "Miss Lucy was a charming child;
  She never said, 'I won't.'"

After bearing this once or twice, the willful negative was continually
upon my lips; doubtless a symptom of what was dormant within--a will
perhaps not quite so aggressive as it was obstinate. But she meant only
to praise me and please me; and dearly I loved to stay with her in her
cozy up-stairs room across the lane, that the sun looked into nearly
all day.

Another adopted aunt lived down-stairs in the same house. This one was
a sober woman; life meant business to her, and she taught me to sew in
earnest, with a knot in the end of my thread, although it was only upon
clothing for my ragchildren--absurd creatures of my own invention,
limbless and destitute of features, except as now and then one of my
older sisters would, upon my earnest petition, outline a face for one
of them, with pen and ink. I loved them, nevertheless, far better than
I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at
home,--the fine lady that did not wish to be played with, but only to
be looked at and admired.

This latter aunt I regarded as a woman of great possessions. She owned
the land beside us and opposite us. Her well was close to our door, a
well of the coldest and clearest water I ever drank, and it abundantly
supplied the whole neighborhood.

The hill behind her house was our general playground; and I supposed
she owned that, too, since through her dooryard, and over her stone
wall, was our permitted thoroughfare thither. I imagined that those
were her buttercups that we gathered when we got over the wall, and
held under each other's chin, to see, by the reflection, who was fond
of butter; and surely the yellow toadflax (we called it "lady's
slipper") that grew in the rock-crevices was hers, for we found it
nowhere else.

The blue gill-over-the-ground unmistakably belonged to her, for it
carpeted an unused triangular corner of her garden inclosed by a
leaning fence gray and gold with sea-side lichens. Its blue was
beautiful, but its pungent earthy odor--I can smell it now--repelled us
from the damp corner where it grew. It made us think of graves and
ghosts; and I think we were forbidden to go there. We much preferred to
sit on the sunken curbstones, in the shade of the broad-leaved
burdocks, and shape their spiny balls into chairs and cradles and sofas
for our dollies, or to "play school" on the doorsteps, or to climb over
the wall, and to feel the freedom of the hill.

We were a neighborhood of large families, and most of us enjoyed the
privilege of "a little wholesome neglect." Our tether was a long one,
and when, grown a little older, we occasionally asked to have it
lengthened, a maternal "I don't care" amounted to almost unlimited
liberty.

The hill itself was well-nigh boundless in its capacities for juvenile
occupation. Besides its miniature precipices, that walled in some of
the neighbors' gardens, and its slanting slides, worn smooth by the
feet of many childish generations, there were partly quarried ledges,
which had shaped themselves into rock-stairs, carpeted with lovely
mosses, in various patterns. These were the winding ways up our
castle-towers, with breakfast-rooms and boudoirs along the landings,
where we set our tables for expected guests with bits of broken china,
and left our numerous rag-children tucked in asleep under mullein
blankets or plantain-coverlets, while we ascended to the topmost turret
to watch for our ships coming in from sea.

For leagues of ocean were visible from the tiptop of the ledge, a tiny
cleft peak that held always little rain-pool for thirsty birds that now
and then stopped as they flew over, to dip their beaks and glance shyly
at us, as if they wished to share our games. We could see the steeples
and smokes of Salem in the distance, and the bill, as it descended,
lost itself in mowing fields that slid again into the river. Beyond
that was Rial Side and Folly Hill, and they looked so very far off!

They called it "over to Green's" across the river. I thought it was
because of the thick growth of dark green junipers, that covered the
cliff-side down to the water's edge; but they were only giving the name
of the farmer who owned the land, Whenever there was an unusual barking
of dogs in the distance, they said it was "over to Green's." That
barking of dogs made the place seem very mysterious to me.

Our lane ran parallel with the hill and the mowing fields, and down our
lane we were always free to go. It was a genuine lane, all ups and
downs, and too narrow for a street, although at last they have leveled
it and widened it, and made a commonplace thoroughfare of it. I am glad
that my baby life knew it in all its queer, original irregularities,
for it seemed to have a character of its own, like many of its
inhabitants, all the more charming because it was unlike anything but
itself. The hill, too, is lost now, buried under houses.

Our lane came to an end at some bars that let us into another lane,--or
rather a footpath or cowpath, bordered with cornfields and orchards. We
were still on home ground, for my father's vegetable garden and orchard
were here. After a long straight stretch, the path suddenly took an
abrupt turn, widening into a cart road, then to a tumble-down wharf,
and there was the river!

An "arm of the sea" I was told that our river was, and it did seem to
reach around the town and hold it in a liquid embrace. Twice a day the
tide came in and filled its muddy bed with a sparkling flood. So it was
a river only half the time, but at high tide it was a river indeed; all
that a child could wish, with its boats and its sloops, and now and
then that most available craft for a crew of children--a gundalow. We
easily transformed the spelling into "gondola," and in fancy were
afloat on Venetian waters, under some overhanging balcony, perhaps at
the very Palace of the Doges,--willingly blind to the reality of a
mudscow leaning against some rickety wharf posts, covered with
barnacles.

Sometimes a neighbor boy who was the fortunate owner of a boat would
row us down the river a fearful, because a forbidden, joy. The widening
waters made us tremble with dread and longing for what might be beyond;
for when we had passed under the piers of the bridge, the estuary
broadened into the harbor and the open sea. Then somebody on board
would tell a story of children who had drifted away beyond the
harbor-bar and the light-house, and were drowned; and our boyish
helmsman would begin to look grave and anxious, and would turn his boat
and row us back swiftly to the safe gundalow and tumbledown wharf.

The cars rush into the station now, right over our riverside
playground. I can often hear the mirthful shout of boys and girls under
the shriek of the steam whistle. No dream of a railroad had then come
to the quiet old town, but it was a wild train of children that ran
homeward in the twilight up the narrow lane, with wind-shod feet, and
hair flying like the manes of young colts, and light hearts bounding to
their own footsteps. How good and dear our plain, two-story
dwelling-house looked to us as we came in sight of it, and what sweet
odors stole out to meet us from the white-fenced inclosure of our small
garden,--from peach-trees and lilac-bushes in bloom, from bergamot and
balm and beds of camomile!

Sometimes we would find the pathetic figure of white-haired Larkin
Moore, the insane preacher, his two canes lain aside, waiting, in our
dooryard for any audience that he could gather: boys and girls were as
welcome as anybody. He would seat us in a row on the green slope, and
give us a half hour or so of incoherent exhortation, to which we
attended respectfully, if not reverently; for his whole manner showed
that, though demented, he was deeply in earnest. He seemed there in the
twilight like a dazed angel who had lost his way, and had half
forgotten his errand, which yet he must try to tell to anybody who
would listen.

I have heard my mother say that sometimes he would ask if he might take
her baby in his arms and sing to it; and that though she was half
afraid herself, the baby--I like to fancy I was that baby--seemed to
enjoy it, and played gleefully with the old man's flowing gray locks.

Good Larkin Moore was well known through the two neighboring counties,
Essex and Middlesex. We saw him afterward on the banks of the
Merrimack. He always wore a loose calico tunic over his trousers; and,
when the mood came upon him, he started off with two canes,--seeming to
think he could travel faster as a quadruped than as a biped. He was
entirely harmless; his only wish was to preach or to sing.

A characteristic anecdote used to be told of him: that once, as a
stage-coach containing, only a few passengers passed him on the road,
he asked the favor of a seat on the top, and was refused. There were
many miles between him and his destination. But he did not upbraid the
ungracious driver; he only swung his two canes a little more briskly,
and kept breast of the horses all the way, entering the town side by
side with the inhospitable vehicles--a running reproach to the churl on
the box.

There was another wanderer, a blind woman, whom my mother treated with
great respect on her annual pilgrimages. She brought with her some
printed rhymes to sell, purporting to be composed by herself, and
beginning with the verse:--

  "I, Nancy Welsh, was born and bred
  In Essex County, Marblehead.
  And when I was an infant quite
  The Lord deprived me of my sight."

I labored under the delusion that blindness was a sort of insanity, and
I used to run away when this pilgrim came, for she was not talkative
like Larkin Moore. I fancied she disliked children, and so I shrank
from her.

There were other odd estrays going about, who were either well known,
or could account for them selves. The one human phenomenon that filled
us little ones with mortal terror was an unknown "man with a pack on
his back." I do not know what we thought he would do with us, but the
sight of one always sent us breathless with fright to the shelter of
the maternal wing. I did not at all like the picture of Christian on
his way to the wicket-gate, in "Pilgrim's Progress," before I had read
the book, because he had "a pack on his back." But there was really
nothing to be afraid of in those simple, honest old times. I suppose we
children would not have known how happy and safe we were, in our
secluded lane, if we had not conjured up a few imaginary fears.

Long as it is since the rural features of our lane were entirely
obliterated, my feet often go back and press, in memory, its
grass-grown borders, and in delight and liberty I am a child again. Its
narrow limits were once my whole known world. Even then it seemed to me
as if it might lead everywhere; and it was indeed but the beginning of
a road which must lengthen and widen beneath my feet forever.

II.

SCHOOLROOM AND MEETING-HOUSE.

THERE were only two or three houses between ours and the main street,
and then our lane came out directly opposite the finest house in town,
a three-story edifice of brick, painted white, the "Colonel's"
residence. There was a spacious garden behind it, from which we caught
glimpses and perfumes of unknown flowers. Over its high walls hung
boughs of splendid great yellow sweet apples, which, when they fell on
the outside, we children considered as our perquisites. When I first
read about the apples of the Hesperides, my idea of them was that they
were like the Colonel's "pumpkin-sweetings."

Beyond the garden were wide green fields which reached eastward down to
the beach. It was one of those large old estates which used to give to
the very heart of our New England coast towns a delightful breeziness
and roominess.

A coach-and-pair was one of the appurtenances of this estate, with a
coachman on the box; and when he took the family out for an airing we
small children thought it was a sort of Cinderella spectacle, prepared
expressly for us.

It was not, however, quite so interesting as the Boston stage-coach,
that rolled regularly every day past the head of our lane into and out
of its headquarters, a big, unpainted stable close at hand. This
stage-coach, in our minds, meant the city,--twenty miles off; an
immeasurable distance to us then. Even our elders did not go there very
often.

In those early days, towns used to give each other nicknames, like
schoolboys. Ours was called "Bean-town" not because it was especially
devoted to the cultivation of this leguminous edible, but probably
because it adhered a long time to the Puritanic custom of saving
Sunday-work by baking beans on Saturday evening, leaving them in the
oven over night. After a while, as families left off heating their
ovens, the bean-pots were taken by the village baker on Saturday
afternoon, who returned them to each house early on Sunday morning with
the pan of brown bread that went with them. The jingling of the baker's
bells made the matter a public one.

The towns through which our stage-coach passed sometimes called it the
"bean-pot." The Jehn who drove it was something of a wag. Once, coming
through Charlestown, while waiting in the street for a resident
passenger, he was hailed by another resident who thought him
obstructing the passage, with the shout,--

"Halloo there! Get your old bean-pot out of the way!"

"I will, when I have got my pork in," was the ready reply. What the
sobriquet of Charlestown was, need not be explained.

We had a good opportunity to watch both coaches, as my father's shop
was just at the head of the lane, and we went to school upstairs in the
same building. After he left off going to sea,--before my birth,--my
father took a store for the sale of what used to be called "West India
goods," and various other domestic commodities.

The school was kept by a neighbor whom everybody called "Aunt Hannah."
It took in all the little ones about us, no matter how young they were,
provided they could walk and talk, and were considered capable of
learning their letters.

A ladder-like flight of stairs on the outside of the house led up to
the schoolroom, and another flight, also outside, took us down into a
bit of a garden, where grew tansy and spearmint and southernwood and
wormwood, and, among other old-fashioned flowers, an abundance of
many-tinted four o'clocks, whose regular afternoon-opening just at the
close of school, was a daily wonder to us babies. From the schoolroom
window we could watch the slow hands of the town clock and get a peep
at what was going on in the street, although there was seldom anybody
in sight except the Colonel's gardener or coachman, going into or out
of the driveway directly opposite. It was a very still street; the
front windows of the houses were generally closed, and a few
military-looking Lombardy poplars stood like sentinels on guard before
them.

Another shop--a very small one--joined my father's, where three
shoemakers, all of the same name--the name our lane went by--sat at
their benches and plied their "waxed ends." One of them, an elderly
man, tall and erect, used to come out regularly every day, and stand
for a long time at the corner, motionless as a post, with his nose and
chin pointing skyward, usually to the northeast. I watched his face
with wonder, for it was said that "Uncle John" was "weatherwise," and
knew all the secrets of the heavens.

Aunt Hannah's schoolroom and "our shop" are a blended memory to me. As
I was only a baby when I began to go to school, I was often sent
down-stairs for a half hour's recreation not permitted to the older
ones. I think I looked upon both school and shop entirely as places of
entertainment for little children.

The front shop-window was especially interesting to us children, for
there were in it a few glass jars containing sticks of striped
barley-candy, and red and white peppermint-drops, and that delectable
achievement of the ancient confectioner's art, the "Salem gibraltar."
One of my first recollections of my father is connected with that
window. He had taken me into the shop with him after dinner,--I was
perhaps two years old,--and I was playing beside him on the counter
when one of his old sea-comrades came in, whom we knew as "Captain
Cross." The Captain tried to make friends with me, and, to seal the
bond, asked my father to take down from its place of exhibition a strip
of red peppermints dropped on white paper, in a style I particularly
admired, which he twisted around my neck, saying, "Now I've bought you!
Now you are my girl. Come, go home with me!"

His words sounded as if he meant them. I took it all in earnest, and
ran, scared and screaming, to my father, dashing down the sugar-plums I
wanted so much, and refusing even to bestow a glance upon my amused
purchaser. My father pacified me by taking me on his shoulders and
carrying me "pickaback" up and down the shop, and I clung to him in the
happy consciousness that I belonged to him, and that he would not let
anybody else have me; though I did not feel quite easy until Captain
Cross disappeared. I suppose that this little incident has always
remained in my memory because it then for the first time became a fact
in my consciousness that my father really loved me as I loved him. He
was not at all a demonstrative man, and any petting that he gave us
children could not fail to make a permanent impression.

I think that must have been also the last special attention I received
from him, for a little sister appeared soon after, whose coming was
announced to me with the accompaniment of certain mysterious hints
about my nose being out of joint. I examined that feature carefully in
the looking glass, but could not discover anything usual about it. It
was quite beyond me to imagine that our innocent little baby could have
anything to do with the possible disfigurement of my face, but she did
absorb the fondness of the whole family, myself included, and she
became my father's playmate and darling, the very apple of his eye. I
used sometimes to wish I were a baby too, so that he would notice me,
but gradually I accepted the situation.

Aunt Hannah used her kitchen or her sitting room for a schoolroom, as
best suited her convenience. We were delighted observers of her
culinary operations and other employments. If a baby's head nodded, a
little bed was made for it on a soft "comforter" in the corner, where
it had its nap out undisturbed. But this did not often happen; there
were so many interesting things going on that we seldom became sleepy.

Aunt Hannah was very kind and motherly, but she kept us in fear of her
ferule, which indicated to us a possibility of smarting palms. This
ferule was shaped much like the stick with which she stirred her hasty
pudding for dinner,--I thought it was the same,--and I found myself
caught in a whirlwind of family laughter by reporting at home that
"Aunt Hannah punished the scholars with the pudding-stick."

There was one colored boy in school, who did not sit on a bench, like
the rest, but on a block of wood that looked like a backlog turned
endwise. Aunt Hannah often called him a "blockhead," and I supposed it
was because he sat on that block. Sometimes, in his absence, a boy was
made to sit in his place for punishment, for being a "blockhead" too,
as I imagined. I hoped I should never be put there. Stupid little girls
received a different treatment,--an occasional rap on the head with the
teacher's thimble; accompanied with a half-whispered, impatient
ejaculation, which sounded very much like "Numskull!" I think this was
a rare occurrence, however, for she was a good-natured, much-enduring
woman.

One of our greatest school pleasures was to watch Aunt Hannah spinning
on her flax-wheel, wetting her thumb and forefinger at her lips to
twist the thread, keeping time, meanwhile, to some quaint old tune with
her foot upon the treadle.

A verse of one of her hymns, which I never heard anybody else sing,
resounds in the farthest corner of my memory yet:"--

  "Whither goest thou, pilgrim stranger,
  Wandering through this lowly vale?
  Knowest thou not 't is full of danger?
  And will not thy courage fail?"

Then a little pause, and the refrain of the answer broke in with a
change, quick and jubilant, the treadle moving more rapidly, also:--

  "No, I'm bound for the kingdom!
  Will you go to glory with me?
  Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!"

I began to go to school when I was about two years old, as other
children about us did. The mothers of those large families had to
resort to some means of keeping their little ones out of mischief,
while they attended to their domestic duties. Not much more than that
sort of temporary guardianship was expected of the good dame who had us
in charge.

But I learned my letters in a few days, standing at Aunt Hannah's knee
while she pointed them out in the spelling-book with a pin, skipping
over the "a b abs" into words of one and two syllables, thence taking a
flying leap into the New Testament, in which there is concurrent family
testimony that I was reading at the age of two years and a half.
Certain it is that a few passages in the Bible, whenever I read them
now, do not fail to bring before me a vision of Aunt Hannah's somewhat
sternly smiling lips, with her spectacles just above them, far down on
her nose, encouraging me to pronounce the hard words. I think she tried
to choose for me the least difficult verses, or perhaps those of which
she was herself especially fond. Those which I distinctly recall are
the Beatitudes, the Twenty-third Psalm, parts of the first and
fourteenth chapters of the Gospel of St. John, and the thirteenth
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

I liked to say over the "Blesseds,"--the shortest ones best,--about the
meek and the pure in heart; and the two "In the beginnings," both in
Genesis and John. Every child's earliest and proudest Scriptural
conquest in school was, almost as a matter of course, the first verse
in the Bible.

But the passage which I learned first, and most delighted to repeat
after Aunt Hannah,--I think it must have been her favorite too,--was,
"Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father's house are many
mansions."

The Voice in the Book seemed so tender! Somebody was speaking who had a
heart, and who knew that even a little child's heart was sometimes
troubled. And it was a Voice that called us somewhere; to the Father's
house, with its many mansions, so sunshiny and so large.

It was a beautiful vision that came to me with the words,--I could see
it best with my eyes shut,-a great, dim Door standing ajar, opening out
of rosy morning mists, overhung with swaying vines and arching boughs
that were full of birds; and from beyond the Door, the ripple of
running waters, and the sound of many happy voices, and above them all
the One Voice that was saying, "I go to prepare a place for you." The
vision gave me a sense of freedom, fearless and infinite. What was
there to be afraid of anywhere? Even we little children could see the
open door of our Father's house. We were playing around its threshold
now, and we need never wander out of sight of it. The feeling was a
vague one, but it was like a remembrance. The spacious mansions were
not far away. They were my home. I had known them, and should return to
them again.

This dim half-memory, which perhaps comes to all children, I had felt
when younger still, almost before I could walk. Sitting on the floor in
a square of sunshine made by an open window, the leaf-shadows from
great boughs outside dancing and wavering around me, I seemed to be
talking to them and they to me in unknown tongues, that left within me
an ecstasy yet unforgotten. These shadows had brought a message to me
from an unseen Somewhere, which my baby heart was to keep forever. The
wonder of that moment often returns. Shadow-traceries of bough and leaf
still seem to me like the hieroglyphics of a lost language.

The stars brought me the same feeling. I remember the surprise they
were to me, seen for the first time. One evening, just before I was put
to bed, I was taken in somebody's arms--my sister's, I think--outside
the door, and lifted up under the dark, still, clear sky, splendid with
stars, thicker and nearer earth than they have ever seemed since. All
my little being shaped itself into a subdued delighted "Oh!" And then
the exultant thought flitted through the mind of the reluctant child,
as she was carried in, "Why, that is the roof of the house I live in."
After that I always went to sleep happier for the feeling that the
stars were outside there in the dark, though I could not see them.

I did firmly believe that I came from some other country to this; I had
a vague notion that we were all here on a journey,--that this was not
the place where we really belonged. Some of the family have told me
that before I could talk plainly, I used to run about humming the
sentence--

  "My father and mother
  Shall come unto the land,"

sometimes varying it with,

  "My brothers and sisters
  Shall come unto the land;"

Nobody knew where I had caught the words, but I chanted them so
constantly that my brother wrote them down, with chalk, on the under
side of a table, where they remained for years. My thought about that
other land may have been only a baby's dream; but the dream was very
real to me. I used to talk, in sober earnest, about what happened
"before I was a little girl, and came here to live"; and it did seem to
me as if I remembered.

But I was hearty and robust, full of frolicsome health, and very fond
of the matter-of-fact world I lived in. My sturdy little feet felt the
solid earth beneath them. I grew with the sprouting grass, and enjoyed
my life as the buds and birds seemed to enjoy theirs. It was only as if
the bud and the bird and the dear warm earth knew, in the same dumb way
that I did, that all their joy and sweetness came to them out of the
sky.

These recollections, that so distinctly belong the baby Myself, before
she could speak her thoughts, though clear and vivid, are difficult to
put into shape. But other grown-up children, in looking back, will
doubtless see many a trailing cloud of glory, that lighted their
unconscious infancy from within and from beyond.

I was quite as literal as I was visionary in my mental renderings of
the New Testament, read at Aunt Hannah's knee. I was much taken with
the sound of words, without any thought of their meaning--a habit not
always outgrown with childhood. The "sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals," for instance, in the Epistle to the Corinthians, seemed to me
things to be greatly desired. "Charity" was an abstract idea. I did not
know what it meant. But "tinkling cymbals" one could make music with. I
wished I could get hold of them. It never occurred to me that the
Apostle meant to speak of their melody slightingly.

At meeting, where I began to go also at two years of age, I made my own
private interpretations of the Bible readings. They were absurd enough,
but after getting laughed at a few times at home for making them
public, I escaped mortification by forming a habit of great reserve as
to my Sabbath-day thoughts.

When the minister read, "Cut it down: why cumbereth it the ground?"? I
thought he meant to say "cu-cumbereth." These vegetables grew on the
ground, and I had heard that they were not very good for people to eat.
I honestly supposed that the New Testament forbade the cultivation of
cucumbers.

And "Galilee" I understood as a mispronunciation of "gallery." "Going
up into Galilee" I interpreted into clattering up the uncarpeted stairs
in the meeting-house porch, as the boys did, with their squeaking
brogans, looking as restless as imprisoned monkeys after they had got
into those conspicuous seats, where they behaved as if they thought
nobody could see their pranks. I did not think it could be at all nice
to "go up into Galilee."

I had an "Aunt Nancy," an uncle's wife, to whom I was sometimes sent
for safe-keeping when house-cleaning or anything unusual was going on
at home. She was a large-featured woman, with a very deep masculine
voice, and she conducted family worship herself, kneeling at prayer,
which was not the Orthodox custom.

She always began by saying,--

"Oh Lord, Thou knowest that we are all groveling worms of the dust." I
thought she meant that we all looked like wriggling red earthworms, and
tried to make out the resemblance in my mind, but could not. I
unburdened my difficulty at home, telling the family that "Aunt Nancy
got down on the floor and said we were all grubbelin' worms," begging
to know whether everybody did sometimes have to crawl about in the dust.

A little later, I was much puzzled as to whether I was a Jew or
Gentile. The Bible seemed to divide people into these two classes only.
The Gentiles were not well spoken of: I did not want to be one of them.
The talked about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the rest, away back to
Adam, as if they were our forefathers (there was a time when I thought
that Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were our four fathers); and yet I
was very sure that I was not a Jew. When I ventured to ask, I was told
that we were all Christians or heathen now. That did not help me for I
thought that only grown-up persons could be Christians, from which it
followed that all children must be heathen. Must I think of Myself as a
heathen, then, until I should be old enough to be a Christian? It was a
shocking conclusion, but I could see no other answer to my question,
and I felt ashamed to ask again. My self-invented theory about the
human race was that Adam and Eve were very tall people, taller than the
tallest trees in the Garden of Eden, before they were sent out of it;
but that they then began to dwindle; that their children had ever since
been getting smaller and smaller, and that by and by the inhabitants of
the world would be no bigger than babies. I was afraid I should stop
growing while I was a child, and I used to stand on the footstool in
the pew, and try to stretch myself up to my mother's height, to imagine
how it would seem to be a woman. I hoped I should be a tall one. I did
not wish to be a diminishing specimen of the race;--an anxiety which
proved to be entirely groundless.

The Sabbath mornings in those old times had a peculiar charm. They
seemed so much cleaner than other mornings! The roads and the grassy
footpaths seemed fresher, and the air itself purer and more wholesome
than on week-days. Saturday afternoon and evening were regarded as part
of the Sabbath (we were taught that it was heathenish to call the day
Sunday); work and playthings were laid aside, and every body, as well
as every thing, was subjected to a rigid renovation. Sabbath morning
would not have seemed like itself without a clean house, a clean skin,
and tidy and spotless clothing.

The Saturday's baking was a great event, the brick oven being heated to
receive the flour bread, the flour-and-Indian, and the rye-and-Indian
bread, the traditional pot of beans, the Indian pudding, and the pies;
for no further cooking was to be done until Monday. We smaller girls
thought it a great privilege to be allowed to watch the oven till the
roof of it should be "white-hot," so that the coals could be shoveled
out.

Then it was so still, both out of doors and within! We were not allowed
to walk anywhere except in the yard or garden. I remember wondering
whether it was never Sabbath-day over the fence, in the next field;
whether the field was not a kind of heathen field, since we could only
go into it on week-days. The wild flowers over there were perhaps
Gentile blossoms. Only the flowers in the garden were well-behaved
Christians. It was Sabbath in the house, and possibly even on the
doorstep; but not much farther. The town itself was so quiet that it
scarcely seemed to breathe. The sound of wheels was seldom heard in the
streets on that day; if we heard it, we expected some unusual
explanation.

I liked to go to meeting,--not wholly oblivious to the fact that going
there sometimes implied wearing a new bonnet and my best white dress
and muslin "vandyke," of which adornments, if very new, I vainly
supposed the whole congregation to be as admiringly aware as I was
myself.

But my Sabbath-day enjoyment was not wholly without drawbacks. It was
so hard, sometimes, to stand up through the "long prayer," and to sit
still through the "ninthlies," and "tenthlies," and "finallys" of the
sermon! It was impressed upon me that good children were never restless
in meeting, and never laughed or smiled, however their big brothers
tempted them with winks or grimaces. And I did want to be good.

I was not tall enough to see very far over the top of the pew. I think
there were only three persons that came within range of my eyes. One
was a dark man with black curly hair brushed down in "bangs" over his
eyebrows, who sat behind a green baize curtain near the outside door,
peeping out at me, as I thought. I had an impression that he was the
"tidy-man," though that personage had become mythical long before my
day. He had a dragonish look, to me; and I tried never to meet his
glance.

But I did sometimes gaze more earnestly than was polite at a dear,
demure little lady who sat in the corner of the pew next ours, her
downcast eyes shaded by a green calash, and her hidden right hand
gently swaying a long-handled Chinese fan. She was the deacon's wife,
and I felt greatly interested in her movements and in the expression of
her face, because I thought she represented the people they called
"saints," who were, as I supposed, about the same as first cousins to
the angels.

The third figure in sight was the minister.  I did not think he ever
saw me; he was talking to the older people,--usually telling them how
wicked they were. He often said to them that there was not one good
person among them; but I supposed he excepted himself. He seemed to me
so very good that I was very much afraid of him. I was a little afraid
of my father, but then he sometimes played with us children: and
besides, my father was only a man. I thought the minister belonged to
some different order of beings. Up there in the pulpit he seemed to me
so far off--oh! a great deal farther off than God did. His distance
made my reverence for him take the form of idolatry. The pulpit was his
pedestal. If any one had told me that the minister ever did or thought
anything that was wrong, I should have felt as if the foundations of
the earth under me were shaken. I wondered if he ever did laugh.
Perhaps it was wicked for a minister even to smile.

One day, when I was very little, I met the minister in the street; and
he, probably recognizing me as the child of one of his parishioners,
actually bowed to me! His bows were always ministerially profound, and
I was so overwhelmed with surprise and awe that I forgot to make the
proper response of a "curtsey," but ran home as fast as I could go to
proclaim the wonder. It would not have astonished me any more, if one
of the tall Lombardy poplars that stood along the sidewalk had laid
itself down at my feet.

I do not remember anything that the preacher ever said, except some
words which I thought sounded well,--such as "dispensations,"
"decrees," "ordinances," "covenants,"--although I attached no meaning
to them. He seemed to be trying to explain the Bible by putting it into
long words. I did not understand them at all. It was from Aunt Hannah
that I received my first real glimpses of the beautiful New Testament
revelation. In her unconscious wisdom she chose for me passages and
chapters that were like openings into heaven. They contained the great,
deep truths which are simple because they are great. It was not
explanations of those grand words that I required, or that anybody
requires. In reading them we are all children together, and need only
to be led to the banks of the river of God, which is full of water,
that we may look down into its pellucid depths for ourselves.

Our minister was not unlike other ministers of the time, and his
seeming distance from his congregation was doubtless owing to the deep
reverence in which the ministerial office was universally held among
our predecessors. My own graven-image worship of him was only a
childish exaggeration of the general feeling of grown people around me.
He seemed to us an inhabitant of a Sabbath-day sphere, while we
belonged to the every-day world. I distinctly remember the day of my
christening, when I was between three and four years old. My parents
did not make a public profession of their faith until after the birth
of all their children, eight of whom--I being my father's ninth child
and seventh daughter--were baptized at one time. My two half-sisters
were then grown-up young women. My mother had told us that the minister
would be speaking directly to us, and that we must pay close attention
to what he said. I felt that it was an important event, and I wished to
do exactly what the minister desired of me. I listened eagerly while he
read the chapter and the hymn. The latter was one of my favorites:--

  "See Israel's gentle Shepherd stands;"

and the chapter was the third of St. Matthew, containing the story of
our Lord's baptism. I could not make out any special message for us,
until he came to the words, "Whose fan is in his hand."

That must be it! I looked anxiously at my sisters, to see if they had
brought their fans. It was warm weather, and I had taken a little one
of my own to meeting. Believing that I was following a direct
instruction, I clasped my fan to my bosom and held it there as we
walked up the aisle, and during the ceremony, wondering why the others
did not do so, too. The baby in my mother's arms--Octavia, the eighth
daughter--shocked me by crying a little, but I tried to behave the
better on that account.

It all seemed very solemn and mysterious to me. I knew from my father's
and mother's absorbed manner then, and when we returned from church,
that it was something exceedingly important to Them--something that
they wished us neither to talk about nor to forget.

I never did forget it. There remained within me a sweet, haunting
feeling of having come near the "gentle Shepherd" of the hymn, who was
calling the lambs to his side.  The chapter had ended with the echo of
a voice from heaven, and with the glimpse of a descending Dove. And the
water-drops on my forehead, were they not from that "pure river of
water of life, clear as crystal," that made music through those lovely
verses in the last chapter of the good Book?

I am glad that I have always remembered that day of family
consecration. As I look back, it seems as if the horizons of heaven and
earth met and were blended then. And who can tell whether the fragrance
of that day's atmosphere may not enter into the freshness of some new
childhood in the life which is to come?

III.

THE HYMN-BOOK.

ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns.
Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing. I followed
my mother about with the hymn-book ("Watts' and Select"), reading or
repeating them to her, while she was busy with her baking or ironing,
and she was always a willing listener. She was fond of devotional
reading, but had little time for it, and it pleased her to know that so
small a child as I really cared for the hymns she loved.

I learned most of them at meeting. I was told to listen to the
minister; but as I did not understand a word he was saying, I gave it
up, and took refuge in the hymn-book, with the conscientious purpose of
trying to sit still. I turned the leaves over as noiselessly as
possible, to avoid the dreaded reproof of my mother's keen blue eyes;
and sometimes I learned two or three hymns in a forenoon or an
afternoon. Finding it so easy, I thought I would begin at the
beginning, and learn the whole. There were about a thousand of them
included in the Psalms, the First, Second, and Third Books, and the
Select Hymns. But I had learned to read before I had any knowledge of
counting up numbers, and so was blissfully ignorant of the magnitude of
my undertaking. I did not, I think, change my resolution because there
were so many, but because, little as I was, I discovered that there
were hymns and hymns. Some of them were so prosy that the words would
not stay in my memory at all, so I concluded that I would learn only
those I liked.

I had various reasons for my preferences. With some, I was caught by a
melodious echo, or a sonorous ring; with others by the hint of a
picture, or a story, or by some sacred suggestion that attracted me, I
knew not why. Of some I was fond just because I misunderstood them; and
of these I made a free version in my mind, as I murmured them over. One
of my first favorites was certainly rather a singular choice for a
child of three or four years. I had no idea of its meaning, but made up
a little story out of it, with myself as the heroine. It began with the
words--

  "Come, humble sinner, in whose breast
  A thousand thoughts revolve."

The second stanza read thus:--

  "I'll go to Jesus, though my sin
  Hath like a mountain rose."

I did not know that this last line was bad grammar, but thought that
the sin in question was something pretty, that looked "like a mountain
rose." Mountains I had never seen; they were a glorious dream to me.
And a rose that grew on a mountain must surely be prettier than any of
our red wild roses on the hill, sweet as they were. I would pluck that
rose, and carry it up the mountain-side into the temple where the King
sat, and would give it to Him; and then He would touch me with his
sceptre, and let me through into a garden full of flowers. There was no
garden in the hymn; I suppose the "rose" made me invent one. But it did
read--

  "I know his courts; I'll enter in,
  Whatever may oppose;"

and so I fancied there would be lions in the way, as there were in the
Pilgrim's, at the "House Beautiful"; but I should not be afraid of
them; they would no doubt be chained. The last verse began with the
lines,--

  "I can but perish if I go:
  I am resolved to try:"

and my heart beat a brave echo to the words, as I started off in fancy
on a "Pilgrim's Progress" of my own, a happy little dreamer, telling
nobody the secret of my imaginary journey, taken in sermon-time.

Usually, the hymns for which I cared most suggested Nature in some
way,--flowers, trees, skies, and stars. When I repeated,--

  "There everlasting spring abides,
  And never-withering flowers,"--

I thought of the faintly flushed anemones and white and blue violets,
the dear little short-lived children of our shivering spring. They also
would surely be found in that heavenly land, blooming on through the
cloudless, endless year. And I seemed to smell the spiciness of bay
berry and sweet-fern and wild roses and meadow-sweet that grew in
fragrant jungles up and down the hillside back of the meeting-house, in
another verse which I dearly loved:--

  "The hill of Zion yields
  A thousand sacred sweet,
  Before we reach the heavenly fields,
  Or walk the golden streets."

We were allowed to take a little nosegay to meeting sometimes: a pink
or two (pinks were pink then, not red, nor white, nor even double) and
a sprig of camomile; and their blended perfume still seems to be a part
of the June Sabbath mornings long passed away.

  When the choir sang of
  "Seas of heavenly rest,"

a breath of salt wind came in with the words through the open door,
from the sheltered waters of the bay, so softly blue and so lovely, I
always wondered how a world could be beautiful where "there was no more
sea." I concluded that the hymn and the text could not really
contradict other; that there must be something like the sea in heaven,
after all. One stanza that I used to croon over, gave me the feeling of
being rocked in a boat on a strange and beautiful ocean, from whose
far-off shores the sunrise beckoned:--

  "At anchor laid, remote from home,
  Toiling I cry, Sweet Spirit, come!
  Celestial breeze, no longer stay!
  But spread my sails, and speed my way!"

Some of the chosen hymns of my infancy the world recognizes among its
noblest treasures of sacred song. That one of Doddridge's, beginning
with

  "Ye golden lamps of heaven, farewell!"

made me feel as if I had just been gazing in at some window of the
"many mansions" above:--

  "Ye stars are but the shining dust
  Of my divine abode-"

Had I not known that, ever since I was a baby? But the light does not
stream down even into a baby's soul with equal brightness all the time.
Earth draws her dark curtains too soon over the windows of heaven, and
the little children fall asleep in her dim rooms, and forget their
visions.

That majestic hymn of Cowper's,--

  "God moves in a mysterious way,"

was one of my first and dearest. It reminded me of the rolling of
thunder through the sky; and, understood as little as the thunder
itself, which my mother told me was God's voice, so that I bent my ear
and listened, expecting to hear it shaped into words, it still did give
me an idea of the presence of One Infinite Being, that thrilled me with
reverent awe. And this was one of the best lessons taught in the
Puritan school,--the lesson of reverence, the certainty that life meant
looking up to something, to Some One greater than ourselves, to a Life
far above us, which yet enfolded ours.

The thought of God, when He was first spoken of to me, seemed as
natural as the thought of my father and mother. That He should be
invisible did not seem strange, for I could not with my eyes see
through the sky, beyond which I supposed he lived. But it was easy to
believe that He could look down and see me, and that He knew all about
me. We were taught very early to say "Thou, God, seest me"; and it was
one of my favorite texts. Heaven seemed nearer, because somebody I
loved was up there looking at me. A baby is not afraid of its father's
eyes.

The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one
told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost
tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I
should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden
orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud. Yet I was sure that I
loved my father and mother, even when I was naughty, Was He harder to
please than they?

Then I heard of a dreadful dark Somewhere, the horror of which was that
it was away from Him. What if I should wake some morning, and find
myself there? Sometimes I did not dare to go to sleep for that dread.
And the thought was too awful to speak of to anybody. Baby that I was,
I shut my lips in a sort of reckless despair, and thought that if I
could not be good, I might as well be naughty, and enjoy it. But
somehow I could not enjoy it. I felt sorry and ashamed and degraded
whenever I knew that I had been cross or selfish.

I heard them talk about Jesus as if He were a dead man, one who died a
great while ago, whose death made a great difference to us, I could not
understand how. It seemed like a lovely story, the loveliest in the
world, but it sounded as if it were only a story, even to those who
repeated it to me; something that had happened far away in the past.

But one day a strange minister came into the Sabbath-school in our
little chapel, and spoke to us children about Him, oh! so differently!

"Children," he said, "Jesus is not dead. He is alive: He loves you, and
wants you to love Him! He is your best Friend, and He will show you how
to be good."

My heart beat fast. I could hardly keep back the tears. The New
Testament, then, did really mean what it said! Jesus said He would come
back again, and would always be with those who loved Him.

"He is alive! He loves me! He will tell me how to be good!" I said it
over to myself, but not to anybody else. I was sure that I loved Him.
It was like a beautiful secret between us two. I felt Him so alive and
so near! He wanted me to be good, and I could be, I would be, for his
sake.

That stranger never knew how his loving word had touched a child's
heart. The doors of the Father's house were opened wide again, by the
only hand that holds the key. The world was all bright and fresh once
more. It was as if the May sun had suddenly wakened the flowers in an
overshadowed wayside nook.

I tried long afterward, thinking that it was my duty, to build up a
wall of difficult doctrines over my spring blossoms, as if they needed
protection. But the sweet light was never wholly stifled out, though I
did not always keep my face turned towards it: and I know now, that
just to let his lifegiving smile shine into the soul is better than any
of the theories we can invent about Him; and that only so can young or
old receive the kingdom of God as a little child.

I believe that one great reason for a child's love of hymns, such as
mine was, is that they are either addressed to a Person, to the Divine
Person,--or they bring Him before the mind in some distinct way,
instead of being written upon a subject, like a sermon. To make Him
real is the only way to make our own spirits real to ourselves.

I think more gratefully now of the verses I learned from the Bible and
the Hymn-Book than of almost anything that came to me in that time of
beginnings. The whole Hymn-Book was not for me then, any more than the
whole Bible. I took from both only what really belonged to me. To be
among those who found in the true sources of faith and adoration, was
like breathing in my native air, though I could not tell anything about
the land from which I had come. Much that was put in the way of us
children to climb by, we could only stumble over; but around and above
the roughnesses of the road, the pure atmosphere of worship was felt
everywhere, the healthiest atmosphere for a child's soul to breathe in.

I had learned a great many hymns before the family took any notice of
it. When it came to the knowledge of my most motherly sister Emilie,--I
like to call her that, for she was as fond of early rising as Chaucer's
heroine:--

  "Up rose the sun, and up rose Emilie;"

and it is her own name, with a very slight change,--she undertook to
see how many my small memory would contain. She promised me a new book,
when I should have learned fifty; and that when I could repeat any one
of a hundred hymns, she would teach me to write. I earned the book when
I was about four years old. I think it was a collection of some of Jane
Taylor's verses. "For Infant Minds," was part of the title. I did not
care for it, however, nearly so much as I did for the old, thumb-worn
"Watts' and Select Hymns." Before I was five I bad gone beyond the
stipulated hundred.

A proud and happy child I was, when I was permitted to dip a goose
quill into an inkstand, and make written letters, instead of printing
them with a pencil on a slate.

My sister prepared a neat little writing-book for me, and told me not
to make a mark in it except when she was near to tell me what to do. In
my self-sufficient impatience to get out of "pothooks and trammels"
into real letters and words I disobeyed her injunction, and disfigured
the pages with numerous tell-tale blots. Then I hid the book away under
the garret eaves, and refused to bring it to light again. I was not
allowed to resume my studies in penmanship for some months, in
consequence. But when I did learn to write, Emilie was my teacher, and
she made me take great pains with my p's and q's.

It is always a mistake to cram a juvenile mind. A precocious child is
certainly as far as possible from being an interesting one. Children
ought to be children, and nothing else. But I am not sorry that I
learned to read when so young, because there were years of my childhood
that came after, when I had very little time for reading anything.

To learn hymns was not only a pastime, but a pleasure which it would
have been almost cruel to deprive me of. It did not seem to me as if I
learned them, but as if they just gave themselves to me while I read
them over; as if they, and the unseen things they sang about, became a
part of me.

Some of the old hymns did seem to lend us wings, so full were they of
aspiration and hope and courage. To a little child, reading them or
hearing them sung was like being caught up in a strong man's arms, to
gaze upon some wonderful landscape. These climbing and flying
hymns,--how well I remember them, although they were among the first I
learned! They are of the kind that can never wear out. We all know them
by their first lines,--

  "Awake, our souls! away, our fears!"

  "Up to the hills I lift mine eyes."

  "There is a land of pure delight."

  "Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
  Thy better portion trace!"

How the meeting-house rafters used to ring to that last hymn, sung to
the tune of "Amsterdam!" Sometimes it seemed as if the very roof was
lifted off,--nay, the roof of the sky itself--as if the music had burst
an entrance for our souls into the heaven of heavens.

I loved to learn the glad hymns, and there were scores of them. They
come flocking back through the years, like birds that are full of the
music of an immortal spring!

  "Come, let us join our cheerful songs
  With angels round the throne."

  "Love divine, all love excelling;
  Joy of heaven, to earth come down."

  "Joy to the world! the Lord is come!"

  "Hark! the song of jubilee,
  Loud as mighty thunders' roar,
  Or the fullness of the sea
  When it breaks upon the shore!

  "Hallelujah! for the Lord
  God Omnipotent shall reign!
  Hallelujah! let the word
  Echo round the earth and main."

Ah, that word "Hallelujah!" It seemed to express all the joy of spring
mornings and clear sunshine and bursting blossoms, blended with all
that I guessed of the songs of angels, and with all that I had heard
and believed, in my fledgling soul, of the glorious One who was born in
a manger and died on a cross, that He might reign in human hearts as a
king. I wondered why the people did not sing "Hallelujah" more. It
seemed like a word sent straight down to us out of heaven.

I did not like to learn the sorrowful hymns, though I did it when they
were given to me as a task, such as--

  "Hark, from the tombs," and

  "Lord, what a wretched land is this,
  That yields us no supply."

I suppose that these mournful strains had their place, but sometimes
the transition was too sudden, from the outside of the meeting-house to
the inside; from the sunshine and bobolinks and buttercups of the merry
May-day world, to the sad strains that chanted of "this barren land,"
this "vale of tears," this "wilderness" of distress and woe. It let us
light-hearted children too quickly down from the higher key of mirth to
which our careless thoughts were pitched. We knew that we were happy,
and sorrow to us was unreal. But somehow we did often get the
impression that it was our duty to try to be sorrowful; and that we
could not be entirely good, without being rather miserable.

And I am afraid that in my critical little mind I looked upon it as an
affectation on the part of the older people to speak of life in this
doleful way. I thought that they really knew better. It seemed to me
that it must be delightful to grow up, and learn things, and do things,
and be very good indeed,--better than children could possibly know how
to be. I knew afterwards that my elders were sometimes, at least,
sincere in their sadness; for with many of them life must have been a
hard struggle. But when they shook their heads and said,--"Child, you
will not be so happy by and by; you are seeing your best days now," I
still doubted. I was born with the blessing of a cheerful temperament;
and while that is not enough to sustain any of us through the
inevitable sorrows that all must share, it would have been most
unnatural and ungrateful in me to think of earth as a dismal place,
when everything without and within was trying to tell me that this good
and beautiful world belongs to God.

I took exception to some verses in many of the hymns that I loved the
most. I had my own mental reservations with regard even to that
glorious chant of the ages,--

  "Jerusalem, my happy home,
  Name ever dear to me."

I always wanted to skip one half of the third stanza, as it stood in
our Hymn-Book:

  "Where congregations ne'er break up,
  And Sabbaths have no end."

I did not want it to be Sabbath-day always. I was conscious of a
pleasure in the thought of games and frolics and coming week-day
delights that would flit across my mind even when I was studying my
hymns, or trying to listen to the minister. And I did want the
congregation to break up some time. Indeed, in those bright spring
days, the last hymn in the afternoon always sounded best, because with
it came the opening of doors into the outside air, and the pouring in
of a mingled scent of sea winds and apple blossoms, like an invitation
out into the freedom of the beach, the hillsides, the fields and
gardens and orchards. In all this I felt as if I were very wicked. I
was afraid that I loved earth better than I did heaven.

Nevertheless I always did welcome that last hymn, announced to be sung
"with the Doxology," usually in "long metre," to the tune of "Old
Hundred." There were certain mysterious preliminaries,--the rustling of
singing-book leaves, the sliding of the short screen-curtains before
the singers along by their clinking rings, and now and then a
premonitory groan or squeak from bass-viol or violin, as if the
instruments were clearing their throats; and finally the sudden
uprising of that long row of heads in the "singing-seats."

My tallest and prettiest grown-up sister, Louise, stood there among
them, and of all those girlish, blooming faces I thought hers the very
handsomest. But she did not open her lips wide enough to satisfy me. I
could not see that she was singing at all.

To stand up there and be one of the choir, seemed to me very little
short of promotion to the ranks of cherubim and seraphim. I quite
envied that tall, pretty sister of mine. I was sure that I should open
my mouth wide, if I could only be in her place. Alas! the years proved
that, much as I loved the hymns, there was no music in me to give them
voice, except to very indulgent ears.

Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly
places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy
that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing. But it is
something to feel music, if we cannot make it. That, in itself, is a
kind of unconscious singing.

As I think back to my childhood, it seems to me as if the air was full
of hymns, as it was of the fragrance of clover-blossoms, and the songs
of bluebirds and robins, and the deep undertone of the sea. And the
purity, the calmness, and the coolness of the dear old Sabbath days
seems lingering yet in the words of those familiar hymns, whenever I
bear them sung. Their melody penetrates deep into my life, assuming me
that I have not left the green pastures and the still waters of my
childhood very far behind me.

There is something at the heart of a true song or hymn which keeps the
heart young that listens. It is like a breeze from the eternal hills;
like the west wind of spring, never by a breath less balmy and clear
for having poured life into the old generations of earth for thousands
of years; a spiritual freshness, which has nothing to do with time or
decay.

IV.

NAUGHTY CHILDREN AND FAIRY TALES.

ALTHOUGH the children of an earlier time heard a great deal of
theological discussion which meant little or nothing to them, there was
one thing that was made clear and emphatic in all the Puritan training:
that the heavens and earth stood upon firm foundations--upon the Moral
Law as taught in the Old Testament and confirmed by the New. Whatever
else we did not understand, we believed that to disobey our parents, to
lie or steal, had been forbidden by a Voice which was not to be
gainsaid. People who broke or evaded these commands did so willfully,
and without excusing themselves, or being excused by others. I think
most of us expected the fate of Ananias and Sapphira, if we told what
we knew was a falsehood.

There were reckless exceptions, however. A playmate, of whom I was
quite fond, was once asked, in my presence, whether she had done
something forbidden, which I knew she had been about only a little
while before.  She answered "No," and without any apparent hesitation.
After the person who made the inquiry had gone, I exclaimed, with
horrified wonder, "How could you?"

Her reply was, "Oh, I only kind of said no." What a real lie was to
her, if she understood a distinct denial of the truth as only "kind-of"
lying, it perplexed me to imagine. The years proved that this lack of
moral perception was characteristic, and nearly spoiled a nature full
of beautiful gifts.

I could not deliberately lie, but I had my own temptations, which I did
not always successfully resist. I remember the very spot--in a footpath
through a green field--where I first met the Eighth Commandment, and
felt it looking me full in the face.

I suppose I was five or six years old. I had begun to be trusted with
errands; one of them was to go to a farmhouse for a quart of milk every
morning, to purchase which I went always to the money-drawer in the
shop and took out four cents. We were allowed to take a "small brown"
biscuit, or a date, or a fig, or a "gibraltar," sometimes; but we well
understood that we could not help ourselves to money.

Now there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop-window down
town, which I had seen and set my heart upon. I had learned that its
price was two cents; and one morning as I passed around the counter
with my tin pail I made up my mind to possess myself of that amount. My
father's back was turned; he was busy at his desk with account-books
and ledgers. I counted out four cents aloud, but took six, and started
on my errand with a fascinating picture before me of that pink and
green horseback rider as my very own.

I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him. I knew that his paint was
poisonous, and I could not have intended to eat him; there were much
better candies in my father's window; he would not sell these dangerous
painted toys to children. But the little man was pretty to look at, and
I wanted him, and meant to have him. It was just a child's first
temptation to get possession of what was not her own,--the same ugly
temptation that produces the defaulter, the burglar, and the highway
robber, and that made it necessary to declare to every human being the
law, "Thou shalt not covet."

As I left the shop, I was conscious of a certain pleasure in the
success of my attempt, as any thief might be; and I walked off very
fast, clattering the coppers in the tin pail.

When I was fairly through the bars that led into the farmer's field,
and nobody was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies, and looked at
them as they lay in my palm.

Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning, but it seemed
to me as if the sky grew suddenly dark; and those two pennies began to
burn through my hand, to scorch me, as if they were red hot, to my very
soul. It was agony to hold them. I laid them down under a tuft of grass
in the footpath, and ran as if I had left a demon behind me. I did my
errand, and returning, I looked about in the grass for the two cents,
wondering whether they could make me feel so badly again. But my good
angel hid them from me; I never found them.

I was too much of a coward to confess my fault to my father; I had
already begun to think of him as "an austere man," like him in the
parable of the talents. I should have been a much happier child if I
bad confessed, for I had to carry about with me for weeks and months a
heavy burden of shame. I thought of myself as a thief, and used to
dream of being carried off to jail and condemned to the gallows for my
offense: one of my story-books told about a boy who was hanged at
Tyburn for stealing, and how was I better than he?

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