"Come, ye disconsolate,"
and
"How firm a foundation;"
and that she grew more cheerful; though I did not feel sure that my
singing cheered her so much as some happier thought that had come to
her out of her own heart. Nobody but my mother, indeed, would have
called my chirping singing. But as she did not seem displeased, I went
on, a little more confidently, with some hymns that I loved for their
starry suggestions,--
"When marshaled on the nightly plain,"
and
"Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,"
and
"Watchman, tell us of the night?"
The most beautiful picture in the Bible to me, certainly the loveliest
in the Old Testament, had always been that one painted by prophecy, of
the time when wild and tame creatures should live together in peace,
and children should be their fearless playmates. Even the savage wolf
Poverty would be pleasant and neighborly then, no doubt! A Little Child
among them, leading them, stood looking wistfully down through the soft
sunrise of that approaching day, into the cold and darkness of the
world. Oh, it would be so much better than the garden of Eden!
Yes, and it would be a great deal better, I thought, to live in the
millennium, than even to die and go to heaven, although so many people
around me talked as if that were the most desirable thing of all. But I
could never understand why, if God sent us here, we should be in haste
to get away, even to go to a pleasanter place.
I was perplexed by a good many matters besides. I had learned to keep
most of my thoughts to myself, but I did venture to ask about the
Ressurrection--how it was that those who had died and gone straight to
heaven, and had been singing there for thousands of years, could have
any use for the dust to which their bodies had returned. Were they not
already as alive as they could be? I found that there were different
ideas of the resurrection among "orthodox" people, even then. I was
told however, that this was too deep a matter for me, and so I ceased
asking questions. But I pondered the matter of death; what did it mean?
The Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than any of the
ministers did. And, as usual, a poem helped me. It was Pope's Ode,
beginning with,--
"Vital spark of heavenly flame,"--
which I learned out of a reading-book. To die was to "languish into
life." That was the meaning of it! and I loved to repeat to myself the
words,--
"Hark! they whisper: angels say,
'Sister spirit, come away!'"
"The world recedes; it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring."
A hymn that I learned a little later expressed to me the same
satisfying thought:
"For strangers into life we come,
And dying is but going home."
The Apostle's words, with which the song of "The Dying Christian to his
Soul" ends, left the whole cloudy question lit up with sunshine, to my
childish thoughts:--
"O grave, where is thy 'victory?
O death, where is thy sting?"
My father was dead; but that only meant that he had gone to a better
home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we should go home,
too.
Meanwhile the millennium was coming, and some people thought it was
very near. And what was the millennium? Why, the time when everybody on
earth would live just as they do in heaven. Nobody would be selfish,
nobody would be unkind; no! not so much as in a single thought. What a
delightful world this would be to live in then! Heaven itself could
scarcely be much better! Perhaps people would not die at all, but, when
the right time came, would slip quietly away into heaven, just as Enoch
did.
My father had believed in the near millennium. His very last writing,
in his sick-room, was a penciled computation, from the prophets, of the
time when it would begin. The first minister who preached in our
church, long before I was born, had studied the subject much, and had
written books upon this, his favorite theme. The thought of it was
continually breaking out, like bloom and sunshine, from the stern
doctrines of the period.
One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal. Were people
going to be made good in spite of themselves, whether they wanted to or
not? And what would be done with the bad ones, if there were any left?
I did not like to think of their being killed off, and yet everybody
must be good, or it would not be a true millennium.
It certainly would not matter much who was rich, and who was poor, if
goodness, and not money, was the thing everybody cared for. Oh, if the
millennium would only begin now! I felt as if it were hardly fair to me
that I should not be here during those happy thousand years, when I
wanted to so much. But I had not lived even my short life in the world
without leading something of my own faults and perversities; and when I
saw that there was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart I
had to conclude that it might be a great way off, after all. Yet the
very thought of it brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day
and by night. It was coming, some time! And the people who were in
heaven would be as glad of it as those who remained on earth.
That it was a hard world for my mother and her children to live in at
present I could not help seeing. The older members of the family found
occupations by which the domestic burdens were lifted a little; but,
with only the three youngest to clothe and to keep at school, there was
still much more outgo than income, and my mother's discouragement every
day increased.
My eldest brother had gone to sea with a relative who was master of a
merchant vessel in the South American trade. His inclination led him
that way; it seemed to open before him a prospect of profitable
business, and my mother looked upon him as her future stay and support.
One day she came in among us children looking strangely excited. I
heard her tell some one afterwards that she had just been to hear
Father Taylor preach, the sailors minister, whose coming to our town
must have been a rare occurrence. His words had touched her personally,
for he had spoken to mothers whose first-born had left them to venture
upon strange seas and to seek unknown lands. He had even given to the
wanderer he described the name of her own absent son--"Benjamin." As
she left the church she met a neighbor who informed her that the brig
"Mexican" had arrived at Salem, in trouble. It was the vessel in which
my brother had sailed only a short time before, expecting to be absent
for months. "Pirates" was the only word we children caught, as she
hastened away from the house, not knowing whether her son was alive or
not. Fortunately, the news hardly reached the town before my brother
himself did. She met him in the street, and brought him home with her,
forgetting all her anxieties in her joy at his safety.
The "Mexican" had been attacked on the high seas by the piratical craft
"Panda," robbed of twenty thousand dollars in specie, set on fire, and
abandoned to her fate, with the crew fastened down in the hold. One
small skylight had accidentally been overlooked by the freebooters. The
captain discovered it, and making his way through it to the deck,
succeeded in putting out the fire, else vessel and sailors would have
sunk together, and their fate would never have been known.
Breathlessly we listened whenever my brother would relate the story,
which he did not at all enjoy doing, for a cutlass had been swung over
his head, and his life threatened by the pirate's boatswain, demanding
more money, after all had been taken. A Genoese messmate, Iachimo,
shortened to plain "Jack" by the "Mexican's" crew, came to see my
brother one day, and at the dinner table he went through the whole
adventure in pantomime, which we children watched with wide-eyed terror
and amusement. For there was some comedy mixed with what had been so
nearly a tragedy, and Jack made us see the very whites of the black
cook's eyes, who, favored by his color, had hidden himself--all except
that dilated whiteness--between two great casks in the bold. Jack
himself had fallen through a trap-door, was badly hurt, and could not
extricate himself.
It was very ludicrous. Jack crept under the table to show us how he and
the cook made eyes at each other down there in the darkness, not daring
to speak. The pantomime was necessary, for the Genoese had very little
English at his command.
When the pirate crew were brought into Salem for trial, my brother had
the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the court-room the
ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life. This boatswain and
several others of the crew were executed in Boston. The boy found his
brief sailor-experience quite enough for him, and afterward settled
down quietly to the trade of a carpenter.
Changes thickened in the air around us. Not the least among them was
the burning of "our meeting-house," in which we had all been baptized.
One Sunday morning we children were told, when we woke, that we could
not go to meeting that day, because the church was a heap of smoking
ruins. It seemed to me almost like the end of the world.
During my father's life, a few years before my birth, his thoughts had
been turned towards the new manufacturing town growing up on the banks
of the Merrimack. He had once taken a journey there, with the
possibility in his mind of making the place his home, his limited
income furnishing no adequate promise of a maintenance for his large
family of daughters. From the beginning, Lowell had a high reputation
for good order, morality, piety, and all that was dear to the
old-fashioned New Englander's heart.
After his death, my mother's thoughts naturally followed the direction
his had taken; and seeing no other opening for herself, she sold her
small estate, and moved to Lowell, with the intention of taking a
corporation-house for mill-girl boarders. Some of the family objected,
for the Old World traditions about factory life were anything but
attractive; and they were current in New England until the experiment
at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably
give their own character to their occupation. My mother had visited
Lowell, and she was willing and glad, knowing all about the place, to
make it our home.
The change involved a great deal of work. "Boarders" signified a large
house, many beds, and an indefinite number of people. Such piles of
sewing accumulated before us! A sewing-bee, volunteered by the
neighbors, reduced the quantity a little, and our child-fingers had to
take their part. But the seams of those sheets did look to me as if
they were miles long!
My sister Lida and I had our "stint,"--so much to do every day. It was
warm weather, and that made it the more tedious, for we wanted to be
running about the fields we were so soon to leave. One day, in sheer
desperation, we dragged a sheet up with us into an apple-tree in the
yard, and sat and sewed there through the summer afternoon, beguiling
the irksomeness of our task by telling stories and guessing riddles.
It was hardest for me to leave the garret and the garden. In the old
houses the garret was the children's castle. The rough rafters,--it was
always ail unfinished room, otherwise not a true garret,--the music of
the rain on the roof, the worn sea-chests with their miscellaneous
treasures, the blue-roofed cradle that had sheltered ten blue-eyed
babies, the tape-looms and reels and spinning wheels, the herby smells,
and the delightful dream corners,--these could not be taken with us to
the new home. Wonderful people had looked out upon us from under those
garret-eaves. Sindbad the Sailor and Baron Munchausen had sometimes
strayed in and told us their unbelievable stories; and we had there
made acquaintance with the great Caliph Haroun Alraschid.
To go away from the little garden was almost as bad. Its lilacs and
peonies were beautiful to me, and in a corner of it was one tiny square
of earth that I called my own, where I was at liberty to pull up my
pinks and lady's delights every day, to see whether they had taken
root, and where I could give my lazy morning-glory seeds a poke,
morning after morning, to help them get up and begin their climb. Oh, I
should miss the garden very much indeed!
It did not take long to turn over the new leaf of our home experience.
One sunny day three of us children, my youngest sister, my brother
John, and I, took with my mother the first stage-coach journey of our
lives, across Lynnfield plains and over Andover hills to the banks of
the Merrimack. We were set down before an empty house in a yet
unfinished brick block, where we watched for the big wagon that was to
bring our household goods.
It came at last; and the novelty of seeing our old furniture settled in
new rooms kept us from being homesick. One after another they
appeared,--bedsteads, chairs, tables, and, to me most welcome of all,
the old mahogany secretary with brass-handled drawers, that had always
stood in the "front room" at home. With it came the barrel full of
books that had filled its shelves, and they took their places as
naturally as if they had always lived in this strange town.
There they all stood again side by side on their shelves, the dear,
dull, good old volumes that all my life I had tried in vain to take a
sincere Sabbath-day interest in,--Scott's Commentaries on the Bible,
Hervey's "Meditations," Young's "Night Thoughts," "Edwards on the
Affections," and the Writings of Baxter and Doddridge. Besides these,
there were bound volumes of the "Repository Tracts," which I had read
and re-read; and the delightfully miscellaneous "Evangelicana,"
containing an account of Gilbert Tennent's wonderful trance; also the
"History of the Spanish Inquisition," with some painfully realistic
illustrations; a German Dictionary, whose outlandish letters and words
I liked to puzzle myself over; and a descriptive History of Hamburg,
full of fine steel engravings--which last two or three volumes my
father had brought with him from the countries to which he had sailed
in his sea-faring days. A complete set of the "Missionary Herald",
unbound, filled the upper shelves.
Other familiar articles journeyed with us: the brass-headed shovel and
tongs, that it had been my especial task to keep bright; the two
card-tables (which were as unacquainted as ourselves with ace, face,
and trump); the two china mugs, with their eighteenth-century lady and
gentleman figurines curiosities brought from over the sea, and
reverently laid away by my mother with her choicest relics in the
secretary-desk; my father's miniature, painted in Antwerp, a treasure
only shown occasionally to us children as a holiday treat; and my
mother's easy-chair,--I should have felt as if I had lost her, had that
been left behind. The earliest unexpressed ambition of my infancy had
been to grow up and wear a cap, and sit in an easy-chair knitting and
look comfortable just as my mother did.
Filled up with these things, the little one-windowed sitting-room
easily caught the home feeling, and gave it back to us. Inanimate
Objects do gather into themselves something of the character of those
who live among them, through association; and this alone makes
heirlooms valuable. They are family treasures, because they are part of
the family life, full of memories and inspirations. Bought or sold,
they are nothing but old furniture. Nobody can buy the old
associations; and nobody who has really felt how everything that has
been in a home makes part of it, can willingly bargain away the old
things.
My mother never thought of disposing of her best furniture, whatever
her need. It traveled with her in every change of her abiding-place, as
long as she lived, so that to us children home seemed to accompany her
wherever she went. And, remaining yet in the family, it often brings
back to me pleasant reminders of my childhood. No other Bible seems
quite so sacred to me as the old Family Bible, out of which my father
used to read when we were all gathered around him for worship. To turn
its leaves and look at its pictures was one of our few Sabbath-day
indulgences; and I cannot touch it now except with feelings of profound
reverence.
For the first time in our lives, my little sister and I became pupils
in a grammar school for both girls and boys, taught by a man. I was put
with her into the sixth class, but was sent the very next day into the
first. I did not belong in either, but somewhere between. And I was
very uncomfortable in my promotion, for though the reading and spelling
and grammar and geography were perfectly easy, I had never studied any
thing but mental arithmetic, and did not know how to "do a sum." We had
to show, when called up to recite, a slateful of sums, "done" and
"proved." No explanations were ever asked of us.
The girl who sat next to me saw my distress, and offered to do my sums
for me. I accepted her proposal, feeling, however, that I was a
miserable cheat. But I was afraid of the master, who was tall and
gaunt, and used to stalk across the schoolroom, right over the
desk-tops, to find out if there was any mischief going on. Once, having
caught a boy annoying a seat-mate with a pin, he punished the offender
by pursuing him around the schoolroom, sticking a pin into his shoulder
whenever he could overtake him. And he had a fearful leather strap,
which was sometimes used even upon the shrinking palm of a little girl.
If he should find out that I was a pretender and deceiver, as I knew
that I was, I could not guess what might happen to me. He never did,
however. I was left unmolested in the ignorance which I deserved. But I
never liked the girl who did my sums, and I fancied she had a decided
contempt for me.
There was a friendly looking boy always sitting at the master's desk;
they called him "the monitor." It was his place to assist scholars who
were in trouble about their lessons, but I was too bashful to speak to
him, or to ask assistance of anybody. I think that nobody learned much
under that regime, and the whole school system was soon after entirely
reorganized.
Our house was quickly filled with a large feminine family. As a child,
the gulf between little girlhood and young womanhood had always looked
to me very wide. I suppose we should get across it by some sudden jump,
by and by. But among these new companions of all ages, from fifteen to
thirty years, we slipped into womanhood without knowing when or how.
Most of my mother's boarders were from New Hampshire and Vermont, and
there was a fresh, breezy sociability about them which made them seem
almost like a different race of beings from any we children had
hitherto known.
We helped a little about the housework, before and after school, making
beds, trimming lamps, and washing dishes. The heaviest work was done by
a strong Irish girl, my mother always attending to the cooking herself.
She was, however, a better caterer than the circumstances required or
permitted. She liked to make nice things for the table, and, having
been accustomed to an abundant supply, could never learn to economize.
At a dollar and a quarter a week for board,(the price allowed for
mill-girls by the corporations) great care in expenditure was
necessary. It was not in my mother's nature closely to calculate costs,
and in this way there came to be a continually increasing leak in the
family purse. The older members of the family did everything they
could, but it was not enough. I heard it said one day, in a distressed
tone, "The children will have to leave school and go into the mill."
There were many pros and cons between my mother and sisters before this
was positively decided. The mill-agent did not want to take us two
little girls, but consented on condition we should be sure to attend
school the full number of months prescribed each year. I, the younger
one, was then between eleven and twelve years old.
I listened to all that was said about it, very much fearing that I
should not be permitted to do the coveted work. For the feeling had
already frequently come to me, that I was the one too many in the
overcrowded family nest. Once, before we left our old home, I had heard
a neighbor condoling with my mother because there were so many of us,
and her emphatic reply had been a great relief to my mind:--
"There is isn't one more than I want. I could not spare a single one of
my children."
But her difficulties were increasing, and I thought it would be a
pleasure to feel that I was not a trouble or burden or expense to
anybody. So I went to my first day's work in the mill with a light
heart. The novelty of it made it seem easy, and it really was not hard,
just to change the bobbins on the spinning-frames every three quarters
of an hour or so, with half a dozen other little girls who were doing
the same thing. When I came back at night, the family began to pity me
for my long, tiresome day's work, but I laughed and said,--
"Why, it is nothing but fun. It is just like play."
And for a little while it was only a new amusement; I liked it better
than going to school and "making believe" I was learning when I was
not. And there was a great deal of play mixed with it. We were not
occupied more than half the time. The intervals were spent frolicking
around around the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older
girls, or entertaining ourselves with the games and stories in a
corner, or exploring with the overseer's permission, the mysteries of
the the carding-room, the dressing-room and the weaving-room.
I never cared much for machinery. The buzzing and hissing and whizzing
of pulleys and rollers and spindles and flyers around me often grew
tiresome. I could not see into their complications, or feel interested
in them. But in a room below us we were sometimes allowed to peer in
through a sort of blind door at the great water-wheel that carried the
works of the whole mill. It was so huge that we could only watch a few
of its spokes at a time, and part of its dripping rim, moving with a
slow, measured strength through the darkness that shut it in. It
impressed me with something of the awe which comes to us in thinking of
the great Power which keeps the mechanism of the universe in motion.
Even now, the remembrance of its large, mysterious movement, in which
every little motion of every noisy little wheel was involved, brings
back to me a verse from one of my favorite hymns:--
"Our lives through various scenes are drawn,
And vexed by trifling cares,
While Thine eternal thought moves on
Thy undisturbed affairs."
There were compensations for being shut in to daily toil so early. The
mill itself had its lessons for us. But it was not, and could not be,
the right sort of life for a child, and we were happy in the knowledge
that, at the longest, our employment was only to be temporary.
When I took my next three months at the grammar school, everything
there was changed, and I too was changed. The teachers were kind, and
thorough in their instruction; and my mind seemed to have been ploughed
up during that year of work, so that knowledge took root in it easily.
It was a great delight to me to study, and at the end of the three
months the master told me that I was prepared for the high school.
But alas! I could not go. The little money I could earn--one dollar a
week, besides the price of my board--was needed in the family, and I
must return to the mill. It was a severe disappointment to me, though I
did not say so at home. I did not at all accept the conclusion of a
neighbor whom I heard talking about it with my mother. His daughter was
going to the high school, and my mother was telling him how sorry she
was that I could not.
"Oh," he said, in a soothing tone, "my girl hasn't got any such
head-piece as yours has. Your girl doesn't need to go."
Of course I knew that whatever sort of a "head-piece" I had, I did need
and want just that very opportunity to study. I think the solution was
then formed, inwardly, that I would go to school again, some time,
whatever happened. I went back to my work, but now without enthusiasm.
I had looked through an open door that I was not willing to see shut
upon me.
I began to reflect upon life rather seriously for a girl of twelve or
thirteen. What was I here for? What could I make of myself? Must I
submit to be carried along with the current, and do just what everybody
else did? No: I knew I should not do that, for there was a certain
Myself who was always starting up with her own original plan or
aspiration before me, and who was quite indifferent as to what people,
generally thought.
Well, I would find out what this Myself was good for, and that she
should be! It was but the presumption of extreme youth. How gladly
would I know now, after these long years, just why I was sent into the
world, and whether I have in any degree fulfilled the purpose of my
being!
In the older times it was seldom said to little girls, as it always has
been said to boys, that they ought to have some definite plan, while
they were children, what to be and do when they were grown up. There
was usually but one path open before them, to become good wives and
housekeepers. And the ambition of most girls was to follow their
mothers' footsteps in this direction; a natural and laudable ambition.
But girls, as well as boys, must often have been conscious of their own
peculiar capabilities,--must have desired to cultivate and make use of
their individual powers. When I was growing up, they had already begun
to be encouraged to do so. We were often told that it was our duty to
develop any talent we might possess, or at least to learn how to do
some one thing which the world needed, or which would make it a
pleasanter world.
When I thought what I should best like to do, my first dream--almost a
baby's dream--about it was that it would be a fine thing to be a
schoolteacher, like Aunt Hannah. Afterward, when I heard that there
were artists, I wished I could some time be one. A slate and pencil, to
draw pictures, was my first request whenever a day's ailment kept me at
home from school; and I rather enjoyed being a little ill, for the sake
of amusing myself in that way. The wish grew up with me; but there were
no good drawing-teachers in those days, and if there had been, the cost
of instruction would have been beyond the family means. My sister
Emilie, however, who saw my taste and shared it herself, did her best
to assist me, furnishing me with pencil and paper and paint-box.
If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be
happy! or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of
winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me
that I should be willing to spend years in trying. I did try a little,
and very often. Jack Frost was my most inspiring teacher. His sketches
on the bedroom window-pane in cold mornings were my ideal studies of
Swiss scenery, crags and peaks and chalets and fir-trees,--and graceful
tracery of ferns, like those that grew in the woods where we went
huckleberrying, all blended together by his touch of enchantment. I
wondered whether human fingers ever succeeded in imitating that lovely
work.
The taste has followed me all my life through, but I could never
indulge it except as a recreation. I was not to be an artist, and I am
rather glad that I was hindered, for I had even stronger inclinations
in other directions; and art, really noble art, requires the entire
devotion of a lifetime.
I seldom thought seriously of becoming an author, although it seemed to
me that anybody who had written a book would have a right to feel very
proud. But I believed that a person must be exceedingly wise before
presuming to attempt it: although now and then I thought I could feel
ideas growing in my mind that it might be worth while to put into a
book,--if I lived and studied until I was forty or fifty years old.
I wrote my little verses, to be sure, but that was nothing; they just
grew. They were the same as breathing or singing. I could not help
writing them, and I thought and dreamed a great many that were ever put
on paper. They seemed to fly into my mind and away again, like birds
with a carol through the air. It seemed strange to me that people
should notice them, or should think my writing verses anything
peculiar; for I supposed that they were in everybody's mind, just as
they were in mine, and that anybody could write them who chose.