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.