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
run wild; some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of
ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only.
Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant
story-books of ours, and we went a-Maying there, with our transatlantic
playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our baskets, expecting
to find those English flowers in our own fields. How should children be
wiser than to look for every beautiful thing they have heard of, on
home ground?
And, indeed, our commonest field-flowers were, many of them,
importations from the mother-country--clover, and dandelions, and
ox-eye daisies. I was delighted when my mother told me one day that a
yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip, for I thought she meant that
it was the genuine English cowslip, which I had read about. I was
disappointed to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh-marigold.
My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself a great deal:
"Paul and Virginia;" "Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia;" "Nina: an
Icelandic Tale;" with the "Vicar of Wakefield;" the "Tour to the
Hebrides;" "Gulliver's Travels;" the "Arabian Nights;" and some odd
volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels.
I read the "Scottish Chiefs"--my first novel when I was about five
years old. So absorbed was I in the sorrows of Lady Helen Mar and Sir
William Wallace, that I crept into a corner where nobody would notice
me, and read on through sunset into moonlight, with eyes blurred with
tears. I did not feel that I was doing anything wrong, for I had heard
my father say he was willing his daughters should read that one novel.
He probably did not intend the remark for the ears of his youngest,
however.
My appetite for reading was omnivorous, and I devoured a great many
romances. My sisters took them from a circulating library, many more,
perhaps, than came to my parents' knowledge; but it was not often that
one escaped me, wherever it was hidden. I did not understand what I was
reading, to be sure; and that was one of the best and worst things
about it. The sentimentalism of some of those romances was altogether
unchildlike; but I did not take much of it in. It was the habit of
running over pages and pages to get to the end of a story, the habit of
reading without caring what I read, that I know to have been bad for my
mind. To use a nautical expression, my brain was in danger of getting
"water-logged." There are so many more books of fiction written
nowadays, I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth
of them have any brains left for every-day use.
One result of my infantile novel-reading was that I did not like to
look at my own face in a mirror, because it was so unlike that of
heroines, always pictured with "high white foreheads" and "cheeks of a
perfect oval." Mine was round, ruddy, and laughing with health; and,
though I practiced at the glass a good deal, I could not lengthen it by
puckering down my lips. I quite envied the little girls who were pale
and pensive-looking, as that was the only ladyfied standard in the
romances. Of course, the chief pleasure of reading them was that of
identifying myself with every new heroine. They began to call me a
"bookworm" at home. I did not at all relish the title.
It was fortunate for me that I liked to be out of doors a great deal,
and that I had a brother, John, who was willing to have me for an
occasional companion. Sometimes he would take me with him when he went
huckleberrying, up the rural Montserrat Road, through Cat Swamp, to the
edge of Burnt Hills and Beaver Pond. He had a boy's pride in explaining
these localities to me, making me understand that I had a guide who was
familiar with every inch of the way. Then, charging me not to move
until he came back, he would leave me sitting alone on a great craggy
rock, while he went off and filled his basket out of sight among the
bushes. Indeed, I did not want to move, it was all so new and
fascinating. The tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the
sky-openings above me, the graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted
with scarlet fairy-cups, as if the elves had just spread their table
for tea, the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air, all wove a
web of enchantment about me, from which I had no wish to disentangle
myself. The silent spell of the woods held me with a power stronger
even than that of the solemn-voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother
would get permission to take me on a longer excursion,--to visit the
old homestead at "The Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too
long a walk for a healthy child of five years; and that road, in the
old time, led through a rural Paradise, beautiful at every
season,--whether it were the time of song-sparrows and violets, of wild
roses, of coral-hung barberry-bushes, or of fallen leaves and
snow-drifts. The wildness of the road, now exchanged for elegant modern
cultivation, was its great charm to us. We stopped at the Cove Brook to
hear the cat-birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel in the sudden
surprise of the open sea, and to listen to the chant of the waves,
always stronger and grander there than anywhere along the shore. We
passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of
which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest
woodpath to us in all the world, the path to the ancestral farmhouse.
We found children enough to play with there,--as numerous a family as
our own. We were sometimes, I fancy, the added drop too much of already
overflowing juvenility. Farther down the road, where the cousins were
all grown-up men and women, Aunt Betsey's cordial, old-fashioned
hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two. We watched the milking,
and fed the chickens, and fared gloriously. Aunt Betsey could not have
done more to entertain us, had we been the President's children.
I have always cherished the memory of a certain pair of large-bowed
spectacles that she wore, and of the green calash, held by a ribbon
bridle, that sheltered her head, when she walked up from the shore to
see us, as she often did. They announced to us the approach of
inexhaustible kindliness and good cheer. We took in a home-feeling with
the words "Aunt Betsey" then and always. She had just the husband that
belonged to her in my Uncle David, an upright man, frank-faced,
large-hearted, and spiritually minded. He was my father's favorite
brother, and to our branch of the family "The Farms" meant "Uncle David
and Aunt Betsey."
My brother John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize
entirely with my own ideas. He had an inventive mind, and wanted me to
share his boyish sports. But I did not like to ride in a wheelbarrow,
nor to walk on stilts, nor even to coast down the hill on his sled and
I always got a tumble, if I tried, for I was rather a clumsy child;
besides, I much preferred girls' quieter games.
We were seldom permitted to play with any boys except our brothers. I
drew the inference that our boys must be a great deal better than "the
other boys." My brother John had some fine play-fellows, but he seemed
to consider me in the way when they were his guests. Occasionally we
would forget that the neighbor-boys were not girls, and would find
ourselves all playing together in delightful unconsciousness; although
possibly a thought, like that of the "Ettrick Shepherd," may now and
then have flitted through the mind of some masculine juvenile:--
"Why the boys should drive away
Little sweet maidens from the play,
Or love to banter and fight so well,--
That Is the thing I never could tell."
One day I thoughtlessly accepted an invitation to get through a gap in
the garden-fence, to where the doctor's two boys were preparing to take
an imaginary sleigh-ride in midsummer. The sleigh was stranded among
tall weeds an cornstalks, but I was politely handed in by the elder
boy, who sat down by my side and tucked his little brother in front at
our feet, informing me that we were father and mother and little son,
going to take a ride to Newburyport. He had found an old pair of reins
and tied them to a saw-horse, that he switched and "Gee-up"-ed
vigorously. The journey was as brief as delightful. I ran home feeling
like the heroine of an elopement, asking myself meanwhile, "What would
my brother John say if he knew I had been playing with boys?" He was
very particular about his sisters' behavior. But I incautiously said to
one sister in whom I did not usually confide, that I thought James was
the nicest boy in the lane, and that I liked his little brother
Charles, too. She laughed at me so unmercifully for making the remark,
that I never dared look towards the gap in the fence again, beyond
which I could hear the boys' voices around the old sleigh where they
were playing, entirely forgetful of their former traveling companion.
Still, I continued to think that my courteous cavalier, James, was the
nicest boy in the lane.
My brother's vigilant care of his two youngest sisters was once the
occasion to them of a serious fright. My grandfather--the
sexton--sometimes trusted him to toll the bell for a funeral. In those
days the bell was tolled for everybody who died. John was social, and
did not like to go up into the belfry and stay an hour or so alone, and
as my grandfather positively forbade him to take any other boy up
there, he one day got permission for us two little girls to go with
him, for company. We had to climb up a great many stairs, and the last
flight was inclosed by a rough door with a lock inside, which he was
charged to fasten, so that no mischievous boys should follow.
It was strange to be standing up there in the air, gazing over the
balcony-railing down into the street, where the men and women looked so
small, and across to the water and the ships in the east, and the
clouds and hills in the west! But when he struck the tongue against the
great bell, close to our ears, it was more than we were prepared for.
The little sister, scarcely three years old, screamed and shrieked,--
"I shall be stunned-ded! I shall be stunned-ded!" I do not know where
she had picked up that final syllable, but it made her terror much more
emphatic. Still the great waves of solemn sound went eddying on, over
the hills and over the sea, and we had to hear it all, though we
stopped our ears with our fingers. It was an immense relief to us when
the last stroke of the passing-bell was struck, and John said we could
go down.
He took the key from his pocket and was fitting it into the lock, when
it slipped, beyond our reach. Now the little sister cried again, and
would not be pacified; and when I looked up and caught John's blank,
dismayed look, I began to feel like crying, too. The question went
swiftly through my mind,--How many days can we stay up here without
starving to death?--for I really thought we should never get down out
of our prison in the air: never see our mother's face again.
But my brother's wits returned to him. He led us back to the balcony,
and shouted over the railing to a boy in the street, making him
understand that he must go and inform my father that we were locked
into the belfry. It was not long before we saw both him and my
grandfather on their way to the church. They came up to the little
door, and told us to push with our united strength against it. The
rusty lock soon yielded, and how good it was to look into those two
beloved human faces once more! But we little girls were not invited to
join my brother again when he tolled the bell: if we had been, I think
we should have promptly declined the invitation.
Many of my childish misadventures came to me in connection with my
little sister, who, having been much indulged, too it for granted that
she could always have what she wanted.
One day we two were allowed to take a walk together; I, as the older,
being supposed to take care of her. Although we were going towards the
Cove, over a secluded road, she insisted upon wearing a brand-new pair
of red morocco boots. All went well until we came to a bog by the
roadside, where sweet-flag and cat-tails grew. Out in the middle of the
bog, where no venturesome boy had ever attempted their seizure, there
were many tall, fine-looking brown cat-tails growing. She caught sight
of them, and before I saw what she was doing, she had shot from my side
like an arrow from the bow, and was far out on the black, quaking
surface, that at first upheld her light weight. I stood petrified with
horror. I knew all about that dangerous place. I had been told that
nobody had ever found out how deep that mud was. I was uttered just one
imploring "Come back!" when she turned to me with a shriek, throwing up
her arms towards me. She was sinking! There was nobody in sight, and
there was no time to think. I ran, or rather flew, across the bog, with
just one thought in my mind, "I have got to get her out!" Some angel
must have prevented me from making a misstep, and sinking with her. I
felt the power of a giant suddenly taking possession of my small frame.
Quicker than I could tell of it, I had given one tremendous pull (she
had already sunk above her boot-tops), and had dragged her back to the
road. It is a marvel to me now how I--a child of scarcely six
years--succeeded in rescuing her. It did not seem to me as if I were
doing it myself, but as if some unseen Power had taken possession of me
for a moment, and made me do it. And I suppose that when we act from a
sudden impulse to help another out of trouble, it never is ourself that
does the good deed. The Highest Strength just takes us and uses us. I
certainly felt equal to going straight through the earth to China after
my little sister, if she had stink out of sight.
We were two miserable looking children when we reached home, the sticky
ooze having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps of mud, with which
my own clothes also were soiled. I had to drag or carry her all the
way, for she could not or would not walk a step. And alas for the
morocco boots! They were never again red. I also received a scolding
for not taking better care of my little sister, and I was not very soon
allowed again to have her company in my rambles.
We usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out-of-door
amusement near home. And our sports, as well as our books, had a spice
of Merry Old England. They were full of kings and queens, and made
sharp contrasts, as well as odd mixtures, with the homeliness of our
everyday life.