A CHILD OF THE HILLS.
"Come at once; Oscar very low."
This was the dispatch which an awkward telegraph messenger handed
to the principal teacher of "No. 5," one soft September day of
1866. He waited upon the rough stone step, while she, standing in
the doorway, read it again and again, or seemed to do so, as if she
could not make out the import of the few simple words it contained.
'No 5' was a school-house in one of the townships of Bankshire
County, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In it were taught
the children, within school age, of one of those little hamlets
which have crept up the valleys of the White Mountains, toled on
and on, year after year, farther and farther up the little rivulets
that dash down the mountain slopes, by the rumble and clatter of
newly-erected machinery.
These mountain streams are the magic handiwork of the nymphs and
fays who for ages have lain hidden in the springs that burst out
into little lakes upon the birch-crowned summits, and come rushing
and tumbling down the rocky defiles to join the waters of the
Housatuck. School-house No. 5 was thriftily placed on a bit of
refractory land just opposite the junction of two streams which had
their rise in two lakelets miles away from each other--one lying
under the shadow of Pixey Mountain, and the other hidden among the
wooded hills of Birket. They were called "ponds," but are, in truth,
great springs, in whose icy coldness the mountain trout delight.
Back of the school-house, which, indeed, was half built into it,
was a sharp, rocky hillside; across the road which ran before it
was a placid pond, bordered on the farther side by a dark fringe of
evergreens that lay between it and the-wide expanse of white-armed
birches and flaming maples, now beginning to feel the autumn's
breath, on the rugged mountain-side above. A little to the left
was the narrow gorge through which one of the streams discharged,
its bottom studded with ponds and mills, and its sharp sides flecked
with the little white-painted homes of well-to-do operatives; to
the right and left along the other branch and the course of the
united streams, the rumble of water-wheels, the puff of laboring
engines, and the groan of tortured machinery never ceased.
Machine-shops and cotton-factories, bagging-mills and box-mills,
and wrapping-mills, and print-mills, and fine-paper-mills, and
even mills for the making of those filmy creations of marvellous
texture and wonderful durability which become the representatives of
value in the form of bank-notes, were crowded into the narrow gorges.
The water was fouled with chemic combinations from source to mouth.
For miles up and down one hardly got a breath of air untainted with
the fumes of chemicals. Bales of rags, loads of straw, packages
of woody pulp, boxes of ultramarine dye, pipes leading from the
distant mountain springs, and, above all, the rumble and the groaning
of the beating-engines told to every sense that this was one of
the great hillside centres of paper-manufacture in New England.
The elegant residences of the owners were romantically situated
on some half-isolated promonotory around which the stream sweeps,
embowered with maples and begirt with willows at its base; or
nestled away in some nook, moss-lined and hemlock-shaded, which
marks where some spring brook bubbles down its brief career to the
larger stream; or in some plateau upon the other side, backed by a
scraggly old orchard, and hidden among great groves of rock-maples
which the careful husbandman spared a hundred years ago for a
"sugar-bush," little dreaming that the nabobs of the rushing streams
would build homesteads beneath their shade. And all along, here
and there, wherever a house could find a foothold or the native
ruggedness be forced to yield one lodgment, houses and shops
and crowded tenements stood thick. It was a busy and a populous
village, full of wealth and not barren of poverty, stretched along
the rushing tributary for more than a mile, and then branching with
its constituent forks up into the mountain gorges.
In the very centre of this busy whirl of life stood the little
white two-story school-house, flanked on one side by the dwelling
of a mill-owner, and on the other by a boarding-house; and just
below it, across the street, a machine-shop, and a little cottage
of cased logs, with minute-paned windows, and a stone chimney
which was built before the Revolution by the first inhabitant of
the little valley. A little to the left of the school-house was a
great granite boulder, rising almost to its eaves, which had been
loosened from the mountain-side two miles up the gorge when the
dam at the mouth of the pond gave way years before in a freshet,
and brought down and left, by the respectful torrent almost at the
threshold of the temple of knowledge.
Such was the scene the Indian summer sun looked down upon, while
the teacher stood gazing fixedly at the message which she held.
Curious faces peered out of the windows and through the door,
which she left ajar when she came into the hall. She took no note
of this infraction of discipline. "Any answer, ma'arn?" The
messenger-boy shifts his weight awkwardly upon the other foot, as
he asks, but receives no reply.
For two years Mollie Ainslie, with her assistants, had dispensed
the sweets of knowledge at "No. 5," to the children of the little
hamlet. The hazy morning light revealed a small, lithe figure,
scarcely taller than the messenger-boy that stood before her;
a fair, white face; calm, gray eyes; hair with a glint of golden
brown, which waved and rippled about a low, broad brow, and was
gathered in a great shining coil behind; and a mouth clear-cut and
firm, but now drawn and quivering with deep emotion. The comely head
was finely poised upon the slender neck, and in the whole figure
there was an air of self-reliance and power that accorded well with
the position which she held. A simple gray dress, with a bright
ribbon at the throat and a bunch of autumn flowers carelessly tucked
into the belt which circled the trim waist, completed the picture
framed in the doorway of the white school-house. She stood, with
eyes fastened on the paper which she held in one hand, while the
other pressed a pencil-head against her cheek, unmindful of the
curious glances that were fixed upon her from within, until the
messenger-boy had twice repeated his customary question:
"Any answer, ma'am?"
She reached forth her hand, slowly and without reply. The boy looked
up and saw that she was gazing far beyond him and had a strained,
fixed look in her eyes.
"Want a blank?" he asked, in a tone of unconscious sympathy.
She did not answer, but as he put his pad of blanks into her
outstretched hand she drew it back and wrote, in a slow and absent
manner, a message in these words:
"To CAPTAIN OSCAR AINSLIE, Boyleston, Va.
"Coming.
"MOLLIE."
"Collect?" asked the boy.
"No!"
She inquired, and paid the charges in the same unheeding way. The
messenger departed with a wistful glance at the dry, pained eyes
which heeded him not. With a look of dumb entreaty at the overhanging
mountain and misty, Indian summer sky, and a half perceptible shiver
of dread, Mollie Ainslie turned and entered again the school-room.