in spite of the spring chill and the stiffness of the best chairs.
They lingered before the picture of Mrs. Hender's soldier son, a poor
work of a poorer artist in crayons, but the spirit of the young face
shone out appealingly. Then they crossed the room and stood before
some bookshelves, and Abby Hender's face brightened into a beaming
smile of triumph.
"You didn't expect we should have all those books, now, did you, Joe
Laneway?" she asked.
He shook his head soberly, and leaned forward to read the titles.
There were no very new ones, as if times had been hard of late; almost
every volume was either history, or biography, or travel. Their owner
had reached out of her own narrow boundaries into other lives and into
far countries. He recognized with gratitude two or three congressional
books that he had sent her when he first went to Washington, and there
was a life of himself, written from a partisan point of view, and
issued in one of his most exciting campaigns; the sight of it touched
him to the heart, and then she opened it, and showed him the three or
four letters that he had written her,--one, in boyish handwriting,
describing his adventures on his first Western journey.
"There are a hundred and six volumes now," announced the proud owner
of such a library. "I lend 'em all I can, or most of them would look
better. I have had to wait a good while for some, and some weren't
what I expected 'em to be, but most of 'em's as good books as there is
in the world. I've never been so situated that it seemed best for me
to indulge in a daily paper, and I don't know but it's just as well;
but stories were never any great of a temptation. I know pretty well
what's goin' on about me, and I can make that do. Real life's
interestin' enough for me."
Mr. Laneway was still looking over the books. His heart smote him for
not being thoughtful; he knew well enough that the overflow of his own
library would have been delightful to this self-denying, eager-minded
soul. "I've been a very busy man all my life, Abby," he said
impulsively, as if she waited for some apology for his forgetfulness,
"but I'll see to it now that you have what you want to read. I don't
mean to lose hold of your advice on state matters." They both laughed,
and he added, "I've always thought of you, if I haven't shown it."
"There's more time to read than there used to be; I've had what was
best for me," answered the woman gently, with a grateful look on her
face, as she turned to glance at her old friend. "Marilla takes hold
wonderfully and helps me with the work. In the long winter evenings
you can't think what a treat a new book is. I wouldn't change places
with the queen."
They had come back to the kitchen, and she stood before the cupboard,
reaching high for two old gayly striped crockery mugs. There were some
doughnuts and cheese at hand; their early supper seemed quite
forgotten. The kitchen was warm, and they had talked themselves
thirsty and hungry; but with what an unexpected tang the cider
freshened their throats! Mrs. Hender had picked the apples herself
that went to the press; they were all chosen from the old russet tree
and the gnarly, red-cheeked, ungrafted fruit that grew along the lane.
The flavor made one think of frosty autumn mornings on high hillsides,
of north winds and sunny skies. "It 'livens one to the heart," as Mrs.
Hender remarked proudly, when the Senator tried to praise it as much
as it deserved, and finally gave a cheerful laugh, such as he had not
laughed for many a day.
"Why, it seems like drinking the month of October," he told her; and
at this the hostess reached over, protesting that the striped mug was
too narrow to hold what it ought, and filled it up again.
"Oh, Joe Laneway, to think that I see you at last, after all these
years!" she said. "How rich I shall feel with this evening to live
over! I've always wanted to see somebody that I'd read about, and now
I've got that to remember; but I've always known I should see you
again, and I believe 't was the Lord's will."
Early the next morning they said good-by. The early breakfast had to
be hurried, and Marilla was to drive Mr. Laneway to the station,
three miles away. It was Saturday morning, and she was free from
school.
Mr. Laneway strolled down the lane before breakfast was ready, and
came back with a little bunch of pink anemones in his hand. Marilla
thought that he meant to give them to her, but he laid them beside her
grandmother's plate. "You mustn't put those in your desk," he said
with a smile, and Abby Hender blushed like a girl.
"I've got those others now, dried and put away somewhere in one of my
books," she said quietly, and Marilla wondered what they meant.
The two old friends shook hands warmly at parting. "I wish you could
have stayed another day, so I could have had the minister come and see
you," urged Mrs. Hender regretfully.
"You couldn't have done any more for me. I have had the best visit in
the world," he answered, a little shaken, and holding her hand a
moment longer, while Marilla sat, young and impatient, in the high
wagon. "You're a dear good woman, Abby. Sometimes when things have
gone wrong I've been sorry that I ever had to leave Winby."
The woman's clear eyes looked straight into his; then fell. "You
wouldn't have done everything you have for the country," she said.
"Give me a kiss; we're getting to be old folks now," said the General;
and they kissed each other gravely.
A moment later Abby Hender stood alone in her dooryard, watching and
waving her hand again and again, while the wagon rattled away down the
lane and turned into the high-road.
Two hours after Marilla returned from the station, and rushed into the
kitchen.
"Grandma!" she exclaimed, "you never did see such a crowd in Winby as
there was at the depot! Everybody in town had got word about General
Laneway, and they were pushing up to shake hands, and cheering same
as at election, and the cars waited much as ten minutes, and all the
folks was lookin' out of the windows, and came out on the platforms
when they heard who it was. Folks say that he'd been to see the
selectmen yesterday before he came to school, and he's goin' to build
an elegant town hall, and have the names put up in it of all the Winby
men that went to the war." Marilla sank into a chair, flushed with
excitement. "Everybody was asking me about his being here last night
and what he said to the school. I wished that you'd gone down to the
depot instead of me."
"I had the best part of anybody," said Mrs. Hender, smiling and going
on with her Saturday morning work. "I'm real glad they showed him
proper respect," she added a moment afterward, but her voice faltered.
"Why, you ain't been cryin', grandma?" asked the girl. "I guess you're
tired. You had a real good time, now, didn't you?"
"Yes, dear heart!" said Abby Hender. "'T ain't pleasant to be growin'
old, that's all. I couldn't help noticin' his age as he rode away.
I've always been lookin' forward to seein' him again, an' now it's all
over."
* * * * *
_Looking Back on Girlhood_
In giving this brief account of my childhood, or, to speak exactly, of
the surroundings which have affected the course of my work as a
writer, my first thought flies back to those who taught me to observe,
and to know the deep pleasures of simple things, and to be interested
in the lives of people about me.
With its high hills and pine forests, and all its ponds and brooks and
distant mountain views, there are few such delightful country towns in
New England as the one where I was born. Being one of the oldest
colonial settlements, it is full of interesting traditions and relics
of the early inhabitants, both Indians and Englishmen. Two large
rivers join just below the village at the head of tide-water, and
these, with the great inflow from the sea, make a magnificent stream,
bordered on its seaward course now by high-wooded banks of dark pines
and hemlocks, and again by lovely green fields that slope gently to
long lines of willows at the water's edge.
There is never-ending pleasure in making one's self familiar with such
a region. One may travel at home in a most literal sense, and be
always learning history, geography, botany, or biography--whatever one
chooses.
I have had a good deal of journeying in my life, and taken great
delight in it, but I have never taken greater delight than in my rides
and drives and tramps and voyages within the borders of my native
town. There is always something fresh, something to be traced or
discovered, something particularly to be remembered. One grows rich in
memories and associations.
I believe that we should know our native towns much better than most
of us do, and never let ourselves be strangers at home. Particularly
when one's native place is so really interesting as my own!
Above tide-water the two rivers are barred by successive falls. You
hear the noise of them by night in the village like the sound of the
sea, and this fine water power so near the coast, beside a great
salmon fishery famous among the Indians, brought the first English
settlers to the town in 1627. I know some families who still live upon
the lands which their ancestors bought from the Indians, and their
single deed bears the queer barbaric signatures.
There are many things to remind one of these early settlers beside the
old farms upon which they and their descendants have lived for six or
seven generations. One is a quaint fashion of speech which survives
among the long-established neighborhoods, in words and phrases common
in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
One curious thing is the pronunciation of the name of the town:
Berwick by the elder people has always been called _Barvik_, after the
fashion of Danes and Northmen; never _Berrik_, as the word has so long
been pronounced in modern England.
The descendants of the first comers to the town have often been
distinguished in the affairs of their time. No village of its size in
New England could boast, particularly in the early part of the present
century, of a larger number of men and women who kept themselves more
closely in touch with "the best that has been thought and said in the
world."
As I write this, I keep in mind the truth that I have no inheritance
from the ancient worth and dignity of Berwick--or what is now North
Berwick--in Maine. My own people are comparatively late comers. I was
born in a pleasant old colonial house built near 1750, and bought by
my grandfather sixty or seventy years ago, when he brought his
household up the river to Berwick from Portsmouth.
He was a sea-captain, and had run away to sea in his boyhood and led a
most adventurous life, but was quite ready to forsake seafaring in his
early manhood, and at last joined a group of acquaintances who were
engaged in the flourishing West India trade of that time.
For many years he kept and extended his interests in shipping,
building ships and buying large quantities of timber from the
northward and eastward, and sending it down the river and so to sea.
This business was still in existence in my early childhood, and the
manner of its conduct was primitive enough, the barter system still
prevailing by force of necessity. Those who brought the huge sticks of
oak and pine timber for masts and planks were rarely paid in money,
which was of comparatively little use in remote and sparsely settled
districts. When the sleds and long trains of yoked oxen returned from
the river wharves to the stores, they took a lighter load in exchange
of flour and rice and barrels of molasses, of sugar and salt and
cotton cloth and raisins and spices and tea and coffee; in fact, all
the household necessities and luxuries that the northern farms could
not supply.
They liked to have a little money with which to pay their taxes and
their parish dues, if they were so fortunate as to be parishioners,
but they needed very little money besides.
So I came in contact with the up-country people as well as with the
sailors and shipmasters of the other side of the business. I used to
linger about the busy country stores, and listen to the graphic
country talk. I heard the greetings of old friends, and their minute
details of neighborhood affairs, their delightful jokes and
Munchausen-like reports of tracts of timber-pines ever so many feet
through at the butt.
When the great teams came in sight at the head of the village street,
I ran to meet them over the creaking snow, if possible to mount and
ride into town in triumph; but it was not many years before I began to
feel sorry at the sight of every huge lopped stem of oak or pine that
came trailing along after the slow-stepping, frosted oxen. Such trees
are unreplaceable. I only know of one small group now in all this part
of the country of those great timber pines.
My young ears were quick to hear the news of a ship's having come into
port, and I delighted in the elderly captains, with their sea-tanned
faces, who came to report upon their voyages, dining cheerfully and
heartily with my grandfather, who listened eagerly to their exciting
tales of great storms on the Atlantic, and winds that blew them
north-about, and good bargains in Havana, or Barbadoes, or Havre.
I listened as eagerly as any one; this is the charming way in which I
was taught something of a fashion of life already on the wane, and of
that subsistence upon sea and forest bounties which is now almost a
forgotten thing in my part of New England.
Much freight still came and went by the river gundelows and packets
long after the railroad had made such changes, and every village along
its line lost its old feeling of self-sufficiency.
In my home the greater part of the minor furnishings had come over in
the ships from Bristol and Havre. My grandfather seemed to be a
citizen of the whole geography. I was always listening to stories of
three wars from older people--the siege of Louisburg, the Revolution,
in which my father's ancestors had been honest but mistaken Tories,
and in which my mother's, the Gilmans of Exeter, had taken a nobler
part.
As for the War of 1812, "the last war," as everybody called it, it was
a thing of yesterday in the town. One of the famous privateer crews
was gathered along our own river shore, and one member of the crew, in
his old age, had been my father's patient.
The Berwick people were great patriots, and were naturally proud of
the famous Sullivans, who were born in the upper part of the town, and
came to be governors and judge and general.
I often heard about Lafayette, who had made an ever-to-be-remembered
visit in order to see again some old friends who lived in the town.
The name of a famous Colonel Hamilton, the leader in the last century
of the West India trade, and the histories of the old Berwick houses
of Chadbourn and Lord were delightfully familiar, and one of the
traditions of the latter family is more than good enough to be told
again.
There was a Berwick lad who went out on one of the privateers that
sailed from Portsmouth in the Revolution. The vessel was taken by a
British frigate, and the crew put in irons. One day one of the English
midshipmen stood near these prisoners as they took their airing on
deck, and spoke contemptuously about "the rebels."
Young Lord heard what he said, and turned himself about to say boldly,
"If it were not for your rank, sir, I would make you take that back!"
"No matter about my rank," said the gallant middy. "If you can whip
me, you are welcome to."
So they had a "capital good fight," standing over a tea-chest, as
proud tradition tells, and the Berwick sailor was the better fighter
of the two, and won.
The Englishman shook hands, and asked his name and promised not to
forget him--which was certainly most handsome behavior.
When they reached an English port all the prisoners but one were sent
away under guard to join the other American prisoners of war; but the
admiral sent for a young man named Nathan Lord, and told him that his
Grace the Duke of Clarence, son of his Majesty the King, begged for
his pardon, and had left a five-pound note at his disposal.
This was not the first or last Berwick lad who proved himself of good
courage in a fight, but there never was another to whip a future King
of England, and moreover to be liked the better for it by that fine
gentleman.
My grandfather died in my eleventh year, and presently the Civil War
began.
From that time the simple village life was at an end. Its provincial
character was fading out; shipping was at a disadvantage, and there
were no more bronzed sea-captains coming to dine and talk about their
voyages, no more bags of filberts or oranges for the children, or
great red jars of olives; but in these childish years I had come in
contact with many delightful men and women of real individuality and
breadth of character, who had fought the battle of life to good
advantage, and sometimes against great odds.
In these days I was given to long, childish illnesses, and it must be
honestly confessed, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up in
school. I had apparently not the slightest desire for learning, but my
father was always ready to let me be his companion in long drives
about the country.
In my grandfather's business household, my father, unconscious of
tonnage and timber measurement, of the markets of the Windward
Islands or the Mediterranean ports, had taken to his book, as old
people said, and gone to college and begun that devotion to the study
of medicine which only ended with his life.
I have tried already to give some idea of my father's character in my
story of "The Country Doctor," but all that is inadequate to the gifts
and character of the man himself. He gave me my first and best
knowledge of books by his own delight and dependence upon them, and
ruled my early attempts at writing by the severity and simplicity of
his own good taste.
"Don't try to write _about_ people and things, tell them just as they
are!"
How often my young ears heard these words without comprehending them!
But while I was too young and thoughtless to share in an enthusiasm
for Sterne or Fielding, and Smollett or Don Quixote, my mother and
grandmother were leading me into the pleasant ways of "Pride and
Prejudice," and "The Scenes of Clerical Life," and the delightful
stories of Mrs. Oliphant.
The old house was well provided with leather-bound books of a deeply
serious nature, but in my youthful appetite for knowledge, I could
even in the driest find something vital, and in the more entertaining
I was completely lost.
My father had inherited from his father an amazing knowledge of human
nature, and from his mother's French ancestry, that peculiarly French
trait, called _gaieté de coeur_. Through all the heavy responsibilities
and anxieties of his busy professional life, this kept him young at
heart and cheerful. His visits to his patients were often made
perfectly delightful and refreshing to them by his kind heart, and the
charm of his personality.
I knew many of the patients whom he used to visit in lonely inland
farms, or on the seacoast in York and Wells. I used to follow him
about silently, like an undemanding little dog, content to follow at
his heels.
I had no consciousness of watching or listening, or indeed of any
special interest in the country interiors. In fact, when the time came
that my own world of imaginations was more real to me than any other,
I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to
certain points of interest in the character or surroundings of our
acquaintances.
I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself,
in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now,
as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the
wise things he said, and the sights he made me see. He was only
impatient with affectation and insincerity.
I may have inherited something of my father's and grandfather's
knowledge of human nature, but my father never lost a chance of trying
to teach me to observe. I owe a great deal to his patience with a
heedless little girl given far more to dreams than to accuracy, and
with perhaps too little natural sympathy for the dreams of others.
The quiet village life, the dull routine of farming or mill life,
early became interesting to me. I was taught to find everything that
an imaginative child could ask, in the simple scenes close at hand.
I say these things eagerly, because I long to impress upon every boy
and girl this truth: that it is not one's surroundings that can help
or hinder--it is having a growing purpose in one's life to make the
most of whatever is in one's reach.
If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart of
them. Don't for one moment believe that if you had different
surroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path any
easier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not the
determination and the power to grow in yourself.
I was still a child when I began to write down the things I was
thinking about, but at first I always made rhymes and found prose so
difficult that a school composition was a terror to me, and I do not
remember ever writing one that was worth anything. But in course of
time rhymes themselves became difficult and prose more and more
enticing, and I began my work in life, most happy in finding that I
was to write of those country characters and rural landscapes to which
I myself belonged, and which I had been taught to love with all my
heart.
I was between nineteen and twenty when my first sketch was accepted by
Mr. Howells for the _Atlantic_. I already counted myself as by no
means a new contributor to one or two other magazines--_Young Folks_
and _The Riverside_--but I had no literary friends "at court."
I was very shy about speaking of my work at home, and even sent it to
the magazine under an assumed name, and then was timid about asking
the post-mistress for those mysterious and exciting editorial letters
which she announced upon the post-office list as if I were a stranger
in the town.
* * * * *
_The Passing of Sister Barsett_
Mrs. Mercy Crane was of such firm persuasion that a house is meant to
be lived in, that during many years she was never known to leave her
own neat two-storied dwelling-place on the Ridge road. Yet being very
fond of company, in pleasant weather she often sat in the side doorway
looking out on her green yard, where the grass grew short and thick
and was undisfigured even by a path toward the steps. All her faded
green blinds were securely tied together and knotted on the inside by
pieces of white tape; but now and then, when the sun was not too hot
for her carpets, she opened one window at a time for a few hours,
having pronounced views upon the necessity of light and air. Although
Mrs. Crane was acknowledged by her best friends to be a peculiar
person and very set in her ways, she was much respected, and one
acquaintance vied with another in making up for her melancholy
seclusion by bringing her all the news they could gather. She had been
left alone many years before by the sudden death of her husband from
sunstroke, and though she was by no means poor, she had, as some one
said, "such a pretty way of taking a little present that you couldn't
help being pleased when you gave her anything."
For a lover of society, such a life must have had its difficulties at
times, except that the Ridge road was more traveled than any other in
the township, and Mrs. Crane had invented a system of signals, to
which she always resorted in case of wishing to speak to some one of
her neighbors.
The afternoon was wearing late, one day toward the end of summer, and
Mercy Crane sat in her doorway dressed in a favorite old-fashioned
light calico and a small shoulder shawl figured with large palm
leaves. She was making some tatting of a somewhat intricate pattern;
she believed it to be the prettiest and most durable of trimmings, and
having decorated her own wardrobe in the course of unlimited leisure,
she was now making a few yards apiece for each of her more intimate
friends, so that they might have something to remember her by. She
kept glancing up the road as if she expected some one, but the time
went slowly by, until at last a woman appeared to view, walking fast,
and carrying a large bundle in a checked handkerchief.