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.
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