I can get used to my darling's dress
That hangs on the closet door;
And the little silent half-worn shoes
That patter no more on the floor.
I can get used to the hopeless blank
That greets my waking eyes,
As they meet the sight of the empty crib
Where no little nestling lies.
I can get used to the dreary hush,
In the home which my darling blest
With her prattling speech and her rippling laugh,
Ere we laid her away to rest.
But, ah! the touch of those little hands
That wandered o'er my face,
Like the wavering fall of rose-leaves soft,
In some sunlit garden place.
Those dimpled caressing baby hands!
I feel them again at night,
And in dreams I gather them back again
From their harp in the City of Light.
My hungry heart will claim them still;
I cannot let them depart.
So I gather them back again in dreams
To my desolate, breaking heart.
* * * * *
The other day my strolling took me into a second-hand furniture shop. I
wanted to find an ice chest. "Have you any second-hand chests?" I asked
of the hoary-headed son of Erin who tended the place and raked in the
shekels. He didn't answer a word, but silently arose and beckoned me to
follow. Through ranks of withered tables and blighted chairs I picked my
way until my guide dived down a gruesome stairway and then I stopped.
Presently his head emerged like a grimy Jack-in-the-box.
"Is it an ice chist yez want?" asked he. There was mold on his faded
cheeks and a cobweb on his brow as he awaited my answer.
"Must I go down there to find it?" I inquired. He replied in the
affirmative.
"Old man, I will go no further," said I, "but come back here and tell me
the price of this lovely desk." So saying, I designated a delightful old
claw-handled, brass-mounted, spider-legged piece of furniture, which
might have been used by Adam to cast up his accounts on. There was a
suggestion of secret drawers about it that was quite ravishing. The
doors were oddly shaped little panes of mirror glass, within which I
gazed pensively at a soot blemish on my nose. "Is it the price of that
yez'd be afther knowing?" said the old man, in the tone of one who dealt
with a harmless lunatic. "I thought it was ice chists yez was afther."
"Yes," said I, drawing out two long slabs as I spoke, such as were used
to support the shelf of the desk I remembered in my grandmother's house.
"That bit of furnichoor," said the old-man, gazing sadly meanwhile at
the grime of ages which I could not rub from off my nose, "is more than
two hundred years old." He stopped for a moment to see if I would
believe him, then went on: "Yis, ma'am, that same is nearer three
hundred years old, all told."
Here I gave him a look which stopped him at the threshold of the fourth
century.
"Yez may have it for $25," says he.
"I'll give you five," says I.
He turned away as one who found his mother tongue inadequate to express
the deep-seated scorn of his soul. I followed.
"Did yez say twenty?" he asked stopping abruptly and facing me with the
blurred photograph of what was once an engaging smile.
"I said five," I answered.
"Well, take it thin," said he, "but it would be dirt chape at fifty.
It's not a day less than four hun--"
"Stop," said I, "if you add another century I'll only pay you two and a
half for it."
And so to-night it comes to pass that I am writing at my new old desk. I
am half conscious, as my pencil glides along the paper, of a laughing
face, half-hidden by showers of falling hair, that flickers like a
shadow in and out of the soft gloom that enfolds me. Fingers, light as
air, seem to follow the motion of my own, and the ghost of the mistress
who thought and wrote at this same desk, one, two, three, four hundred
years ago, seems whispering in my ear. I wonder what will be the effect
if I read to that sweet, gentle woman of "ye olden time" a few bits from
the morning paper.
Madam, are you aware that a man kicked his wife to death yesterday
because she failed to have his supper ready for him? Are you not to be
congratulated that you are out of reach of this latter day development
of the human brute? Do you know that the Blank concerts began this last
week, and that the melodies that throng the beautiful hall yonder on the
avenue are like bands of singing angels charming a world's sorrows to
rest? Do not the gentle caprices of the flutes and the swing of the
fiddles make even you, flake of airy nothingness that you are! dance
like a thistle-down in a summer breeze? Madam, do you know, and how
does it affect you to know, that there are bargain sales in town where
you can buy a gown for a song, and a pair of all-wool blankets for the
worth of a dream? In your long time disembodied state have you yet
reached a point, I wonder, when such news as this can no longer thrill a
woman's heart? If so, madam, you are truly and undeniably dead, and your
room is better than your company. I bid you a gentle good evening.
* * * * *
Among the many things I shall be glad to find out some day will be why,
in spite of heroic effort to keep it straight, my hat always gets
crooked and my hair becomes disordered on the march. I thoroughly detest
the sight of a typical "blue-stocking," or a literary woman who affects
a sublime superiority to appearances, and yet Mrs. Jellyby was nowhere
as to general demoralization of raiment compared to my unfortunate self.
Taking my seat in a down-town restaurant the other day, I found myself
surrounded by half a dozen girls as bright and pretty and jolly as
girls go. No sooner was I seated than the whisper went round that a
newspaper woman had invaded the party. "Looks like one," murmured the
plumpest one of the lot, and I could have cried. "Girls," I wanted to
say, "judge not by appearances. The best christians sometimes have red
noses, just as the jolliest literary folks have frowsy hair and
abandoned hats. They can't help it, my dears, any more than a black cat
can help being somber. It is never safe to condemn anybody, not even a
poor, miserable scribbler for the press, on circumstantial evidence. You
see a crooked hat, electric hair, and that is all. Put on Titbottom
spectacles and look deeper. Perhaps you will then see an
anguish-stricken woman rising at 5 a. m. to make herself smart for the
day. You will note how carefully she adjusts the feeble adjuncts to her
toilet, how she places her hat on straight and secures it with a
cast-iron cable! How she combs out her curls and sticks a feathery
kerchief within her belt. Two hours later the cable hat-pin has been
struck by a tidal-wave and swept from its anchorage; the curls have
degenerated into wisps of wind-tossed hay; and the kerchief? Gone as a
feather is gone when the summer tempest gets behind it! We mean well,
girls. We want to look trim and slick and span. All of us poor literary
people do, but we can't bring it about. Life is so everlastingly full,
anyway, that it seems preposterous to spend more than half one's time in
getting fixed up. Sometimes I am foolish enough to believe that good St.
Peter, when we come toiling up to his gate, won't look so much to the
condition of our hats and our hair as he will to the way we wear our
souls. If they are tip-tilted and frowsy it may go a little bit hard
with us. Of course, it is a good thing to be able to wear a hat
straight, and be remarked for your pretty hair and generally pleasing
appearance, but I declare to you if it comes to a question of mental
array and soul-correction as opposed to style and good form, I am
willing to choose the former and be laughed at now and then by saucy
girls."
* * * * *
That's right. Stand on shore and beat him back when he attempts to make
a landing. If necessary, club him under water and congratulate yourself
that you are so self-righteous and everlastingly holy that nobody can
get a chance to swing a club at you. What is this half-dead thing that
is trying to force its way onto dry land from the whelming waters of
temptation and misery? A rat? Oh, no; only a human creature like
yourself. Sin overtaken and subdued by evil. He is young, perhaps, and
never had a mother's care or a father's training. He has drifted with
easy currents into dangerous waters, and the devil, who lurks beneath
the flood, is trying to snatch him down to hell! Raise your club and
give him a clip! The audacity of such a boy trying to be anything with
such a record behind him! Oh, I am sick of you all, you omniverous
feeders on reputation, you unveilers of past records of shame! I hope in
my heart that if ever you get your own foot on the threshold of some
haven of relief, after a tight tussle with danger and death, an angel
will stand over against the doorway with a flaming sword and demand to
see your credentials. No hope of that, though. Angels are not up to that
sort of work; it is left to men, and sometimes--God pity us all!--to
women.
* * * * *
If you expect to escape criticism, girls, in this world, you will put
yourselves very much in the plight of flower-roots that expect to grow
without the discipline of the hoe. Before we can amount to anything
either in blossom or as fruit, we must undergo much honest criticism,
and of such we need never be afraid. A candid and above-board enemy is
of far more benefit, often, than a timid friend, who, seeing our faults,
is afraid to tell us of them. The fact that boys stone certain trees and
pass others by, is explained when we find that the stones are always
thrown at the fruit-bearing trees. And so with character; the fact that
we are criticized proves that we are something better than scrub-oak
saplings. But all criticism that does not make us grow, and put forth
fairer and richer blossoms, is like a hoe made of wood, or a cultivator
without power applied to cause it to destroy the weeds. If the unanimous
verdict of the community in which we live asserts that we are proud, or
ill-natured, or lazy, we may be pretty sure that there is some cause
for the application of that particular stroke of the hoe, and the sooner
we set about seeking to remedy the evil, the better for our next world's
crop of blossoms. Nobody (save One) was ever yet maligned without some
little cause. Those who come in contact with you at home may not see
little blemishes upon your conduct or character which those who meet you
in business may detect. For instance, to the folks at home you never put
on that indifferent and languid air to which you treat the customer who
drops in to buy ribbon, or the woman who asks you a question at your
office desk. The customer and the questioner go away with an estimate of
your behavior very unlike the one held at home, where you are frank and
cheerful, and willing to please. And, on the other hand, the party with
whom you associate casually in business, or with whom you ride daily to
and from your office and your home, has no conception how snappy and
snarly you can be when none but familiar ears are open to your surly
complaints.
The statement from your little brother or sister that you are a "cross
old thing" would hardly be believed by those who meet you away from
home. And yet the hoe in the little hands strikes at a weed that
threatens to make havoc in the garden. Better look to it, dearie, before
the ugly thing quite overtops the mignonette and the pinks! Whenever you
hear of an adverse criticism set to find the weed somewhere in your
character. I believe firmly that every one of us was born into the world
with capabilities for almost every evil under the sun if environment
favors the development. Like a garden patch, the roots of the weeds lie
already deep, the flower seeds must be sown. And no gardener ever
struggled with "pusley" and burdock as we must struggle with the evil
crop, heredity-sown. Thanks be to the quick eye, then, be it of friend
or foe, who discerns the weed before we do, and whips out the hoe to
attack it. We are not exactly pleased when it is borne in upon us
through the criticism of some acquaintance or neighbor, that we are
selfish in little things. Our folks don't say so, and we try to believe
the charge is a libel. Next time you throw your banana skin heedlessly
on the pavement, or crowd into a seat without a "by your leave," or
refuse to move up in a crowded car, or open your window without asking
if it be agreeable to the person behind you, or eat peanuts and throw
the shucks on the floor instead of out of the window, or see a lady
going by with a disarranged dress and don't tell her of it, or return an
indifferent answer to a civil question, or refuse the sweet service of a
smile and a gentle look to the humblest wayfarer that jostles you on the
road, just remember the criticism, and see if there is not occasion for
it. Set about correcting the little faults, and the great ones leave to
God. He will keep you, no doubt, from theft, and murder, and perjury,
but you don't ask or seem to stand in need of His help in getting rid of
temptations to be mean and selfish, and discourteous and lazy.
What would you think of a gardener who went about with a spade seeking
to exterminate nothing but Canada thistles, and let all the rest of the
weeds go? It is not often that so big and determinate a thing as a
Canada thistle gets in among the roses, and when it does it is quickly
disposed of. But oh, the wee growths! The tiny shoots that come up
faster than flies swarm in dog-days, and need to be forever stood over
against with a steady hand and a hoe. If my neighbor comes out and
charges me with stealing a barrel of flour from her storehouse, or
attacking her first-born with a meat-axe, I can quickly disprove that
sort of a charge; but when she says that I am unprincipled because I
steal in and coax her girl away from her with the offer of higher
wages--how is that? Or that I am selfish because she sees me let my old
mother wait on me to what I am able to get myself; or cross, because I
am untender to the children; or untruthful, because I instruct the
servant to say I am "not at home" when I am, how am I going to dispose
of those charges? Sure as you live, there are weeds in front of such hoe
strokes, and with heaven's help we'll get rid of 'em.
Cultivate your critics, then, provided they be honest and fair-dealing.
Avoid only such as strike in the dark. The man who goes out to hoe weeds
in the night time is not to be trusted, and the enemy who resorts to the
underhand methods of backbiting and scandal to do his work, is not worth
talking about, much less heeding. Take criticism that is fair and open,
as you occasionally take quinine, to tone up the system and dissipate
the malaria of sloth and inertia. Only they shall come into the
festival by and by, bearing garlands of roses, and wreaths of hearts'
delight and balm, who have welcomed the strong stroke of the hoe at the
root of every blossom to bear down the weeds and loosen the tough and
sun-baked soil.
As Charles Kingsley says:
"My fairest child, I have no song to give you;
No lark could pipe 'neath skies so dull and gray;
Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you
For every day:
"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long,
And so make life, death and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song."
* * * * *
See that half-grown man? He never will know as much again as he does now
at the ripe age of twenty. When he gets to be fifty, when his hair is
grizzled and his hopes are like the dead leaves that cling to November
trees, he will look back upon these years of rare wisdom and colossal
effrontery and blush a little, perhaps, at the recollection. Now he has
no reverence for a woman or for God. He sneers at good in a world whose
threshold he has barely crossed, as a year-old child might stand in the
doorway of his nursery and denounce what was going on in the
drawing-room. Most of the scathing things that are said about domestic
felicity, and the sneers that are bestowed on love, and the gibes that
are flung at purity, and the scoffs that are launched at established
religions; all the jokes at the expense of noble womanhood and the
witticisms that are lavished upon the old-fashioned virtues, spring from
the gigantic brain of the youth of the period.
* * * * *
Often as I pass along the streets of this town I notice certain places
which I do not burn down, nor tear down, nor otherwise demolish, merely
because of inherent cowardice and inadequate strength. If I had a
wide-awake, growing boy I would no more turn him loose in your town, Mr.
Alderman, than I would cut his throat with my own hand. Not, certainly,
if there was a spark of human nature within him, and a boy without such
a spark is hardly worth raising. And more than that, I will say this,
that what with your saloons and your wide-open gambling resorts, and
your doorways of hell, wherein sit spiders luring flies, it has come to
pass that every mother whose boy encounters harm thereby should be
entitled to damages at least as great as juries award a careless
pedestrian who gets his legs cut off at a railway crossing. You say that
laws are inadequate to cope with evils of this kind; if that is so, then
an outraged citizenhood should rise superior to law, and enter upon a
crusade to destroy the infamous dens that decoy our boys. On a certain
downtown street there is a newly opened resort, the windows of which are
closely draped, and before the door of which a placard is suspended
which invites only men to enter within. Now and then a hideously ugly
man, with a yellow beard, comes to the ticket window and looks out like
a tarantula from its hole, but in the main the place seems absolutely
unfrequented.
Take your stand and watch for awhile, though, and you will see young men
and small boys, old men and slouching reprobates of all conditions and
colors going in and coming out by dozens. Why doesn't some good citizen
enter a complaint of that place and break it up? We would pounce upon a
smallpox case soon enough wherever it might lurk, but we are strangely
indifferent where the menace is only to the soul.
How can we expect to keep our boys pure and raise them to lives of
usefulness when such iniquitous places are run wide open on public
streets at noonday, granting admission to all masculinity between the
ages of 7 and 70?
A well-guarded youth is supposed to be at home in the night time and not
to be frequenting shy neighborhoods at any hour. So that we might feel
comparatively safe about the boy we send out into the world at an early
age to begin his career as errand boy or messenger if these pernicious
decoys were maintained only at night and in low vicinities. When the
trap is set, however, right in the business center of the town by
daylight, what safety have we? Whenever I look into the face of an
eager, bright, curious, thoroughly alive boy I feel like shaking every
other duty of life and going forth to do battle with the devil for that
lad's soul.
Why should evil have so much greater chance than good? For one reason I
don't believe we make the good attractive enough. The devil has stolen
the trademark of light for half his wares. Why not have more fun and
frolic in the home? Why not add a gymnasium and dancing hall to the
Sunday school and filter some of the world's innocent sunshine inside
its gloomy walls? Why may not the eager, active heart of youth find its
good cheer and jollity somewhere else than in forbidden places and among
smooth and unscrupulous knaves? If we made our churches less austere and
their gatherings more alluring to the young, these low and vicious
resorts might close for lack of patronage.
God bless the boys. I love them next best to girls, and sometimes even a
little better, when they are especially frank and brave and true. I am
not going to see them harmed without a protest, either, and I would be
one of a crowd this very day to march upon the resorts of evil that lie
in wait, all over town, to destroy the bonnie fellows. If I had my way,
every man or woman who makes money by pandering to the curiosity of a
boy's nature, inciting to unworthy passion by means of lewd pictures
and the like, should be consigned to instant perdition. The earth is too
hallowed to receive their vile dust!
* * * * *
Dear girls, if you would be beautiful with the beauty that strikes root
in heaven, first of all be natural. Be true to something within you
higher than any conventional code or worldly wise mandate. If it is your
natural impulse to be courteous, and sympathetic, and sweet (and blessed
be the fact, it is the natural impulse of most girls so to be!), don't
let miserable conformity and its tricksters exchange your genuine
blossom for a mere shred of painted muslin, fashioned though it be after
even so perfect a similitude of a rose. The birds of the air nor the
angels in heaven will ever be fooled by any artificial rose, let me tell
you, however much dudes and society feather-heads may pretend to desire
it. Grow for something better than this world; wear your sweetness in
your heart rather than on your pocket handkerchief.
* * * * *
The great drawback to domestic felicity often lies in the fact that we
get too familiar with one another. There should be a certain reserve in
the most intimate relationships. Sisters and brothers have no right to
burst into one another's private rooms without knocking. Wives have no
more right to search their husband's pockets than they have to do the
same little service for a distant acquaintance. I have no right to read
the Young Person's letters without permission, although I have a right
to win her confidence so that she shows them freely. The Captain has no
more right to visit the Boy's bank for pennies because he is her
brother, than she has to abstract money from the grocery-man's till. You
have no more right to obtrude your conversation upon your wife, nor she
upon her husband, when either is in the middle of a thrilling story,
than you or she would have to interrupt the Queen of England at her
devotions. An "excuse me," if a mother is obliged to interrupt her
youngest child's babble, is quite as good a way to teach the baby
manners as a course of lectures later on etiquette. The man who gets up
and slams shut the ventilator in a crowded car to suit his own
convenience, or the woman who throws open a car-window regardless of the
occupants of the seat behind her, is no ruder than Bess is when she
ignores brother Tom's comfort at home, or Tom is when he pounces for the
biggest orange on the plate when only Bess and he are at table. When
either makes rude remarks to the other, they sin against the true code
of etiquette more than when they are discourteous at a party or
boisterously unkind with a comrade, just as he is more criminally
careless who pounds a piano to pieces with a hammer than he who batters
the pine case it was brought in. The greater the value of the article,
the choicer we are supposed to be of it, and in the same line of
argument, the dearer and closer the tie that binds us, the more
considerate we should be in the handling of it. I may hurt the feelings
of a society acquaintance, and there is restitution and forgiveness, but
when I stab the dear old mother's heart with an unkind word, or wound my
child's feelings with an injustice or a cruelty, or ridicule the
sensitive feelings of a brother or a sister, not eternity itself shall
be long enough to extract the sting from my memory when my dear ones are
dead and love's opportunity is vanished forever.
Study politeness, then, which is the bodyguard of love, and build up for
yourself the structure of a happy home.
* * * * *
Has it been borne in upon you what radiant mornings and September nights
the last two weeks have brought in? Have you stopped, Mr. Busyman, to
note the wonder of the skies, never so glorious as of late? Did you see
the sunset the other evening when a gigantic cloud stood almost zenith
high against the flaming west, and took on for a time the panoply of a
king? Did you notice the purple center and the dazzling edge, with the
rose blush that fringed its borders? Did you see it pale to gray and
vanish like a ghost into the starry night? Do you ever stop, Mrs.
Featherhead, to mark the beauty of our wayside clover or the sparkle of
a buttercup in the dew? Have you found the nooks where, like shy
children, the violets cluster? Did you mark a certain day, a week or so
ago, when the heavens were full of cloud battalions, taking new shapes
every minute, and often dissolving in long lines of purple rain, shot
through with stitches of golden light? Have you seen the lake lately, as
blue as a heather bell, as wild as a wood-bird, as peaceful as a
brooding dove? Where were you the other night when out of the sullen
storm cloud the "light that never was on land or sea" enfolded us, and
the world hung like an emerald in a topaz sky?
* * * * *
No law of morals should be less arbitrary for men than it is for women.
An impure heart, a riotous appetite, a profane tongue, are no more
excusable in a man than they are in a woman. If a man is supposed to
shrink from selecting his wife among the unclean in thought and immoral
of practice, why should not a young girl be allowed an undefiled
selection? When girls grow so queenly natured that they demand that
their lover should be of the royal stock and never demean themselves to
stoop to mate with impurity and profligacy just because it carries a
handsome face and a well-filled pocketbook, there will be some chance
for happiness in the married estate. It is this placing white flowers in
smutty buttonholes, or, in other words, the wedding of pure women to
blase and wicked men, that sows the seed of the tare in what was meant
by the primal law to be a harvest of golden grain. Do you pick
slug-eaten roses and wind-fall blossoms? When you go forth to buy
material for a new gown do you choose cotton warp fabrics and colors
that will fade in the first washing? Your answers to all these question
are prompt enough, but when I ask you what choice you make of gentlemen
friends, you are not quite so ready with a reply. Do you choose the
young man who has a clean record, who neither drinks nor wastes his
money in riotous practices? How about the tobacco chewers and the
swearers? How about the lewd jesters and the low-minded? Provided he
wears fine clothes, can dance well and make a good appearance in
society, and above all can give you a handsome diamond for an engagement
ring, are you not willing to accept a lover in spite of his known
reputation as a fast young man about town? Girls, you had much better
choose a specked peach for canning than such a man for a husband. Do you
imagine that by and by at the upper court, whither we are all hastening
as quickly as the old patrol wagon of time can carry us, there will be
any distinction made between men and women? Think you a man is going to
get off easier than a sorrowful and sinful woman merely because the
world falsely taught him that the exigencies of his nature demanded
greater latitude than hers?
* * * * *
You may retouch a faded picture, you may patch up an old piano, you may
mend a shattered vase, but you cannot make a plucked rose grow again; it
will wither and die in spite of every effort to restore it to the stem
from which it fell. And so with the heart from which a low desire in the
guise of an alluring temptation has snatched the flower of innocence.
That heart will fade into hopeless loss unless a greater love than yours
or mine intervenes to save. An impure soul never started out impure from
the first any more than a peach was decayed in the blossom. It is the
small beginnings, dear girls, that lead up to the bitter endings. The
impure book read on the sly, the questionable jest laughed at in secret,
the talk indulged in with a schoolmate or a friend which you would be
unwilling for "mother" to hear, the horrible card circulated under the
desk or behind the teacher's back, those are the beginnings of an ending
sadder than the blight of any desolation that storm or drought or frost
can bring upon the blossoms. If I only could, how gladly I would dip my
pen to-night in a light that should outshine the electric splendor of
our streets and write a message against the dark background of the sky,
to startle young girls into the realization of the danger that lurks in
the first indulgence of thoughts and companionships that are not pure.
Avoid all such as you would avoid the contagion of small-pox, and a
thousand times more. Small-pox, at its worst, can only mar the body, but
the friend who lends you bad books or tells you "smutty" stories
proffers a contagion to your soul which all the fountains of all your
tears can never cleanse away.
* * * * *