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.