A white rose grew in a garden place,
On a slender stem, with a royal grace;
The nursling of June and her gentle showers,
Fairest and sweetest of all her flowers.
The south wind was out one day for a sail,
In a cloudy boat, so fleecy and frail,
And he chanced to spy, where musing she stood,
My dear little rose in her snowy hood.
Oh, softly he whispered and tenderly sighed,
"Starry Eyes, Starry Eyes, I wait for my bride."
But she laughed in his face, and told him to go;
She didn't see why he bothered her so.
A dewdrop fell in the starry hush,
Lured from heaven by her dreamy blush;
But the tender kiss of his balmy lip
She gave to a bee, next morning, to sip.
A bobolink left the bloom of a tree
To tell her tale of whimsical glee;
The moon dropped a pearl to wear in her breast;
Dawn wove her a cloak of silvery mist.
But her hard little heart was colder than ice,
She sent every suitor away in a trice;
Till the wind drew nigh, with a terrible roar,
And said: "Pretty Rose, your playtime is o'er."
He shook her with might, and he drenched her with rain,
Till the poor little rose swooned away with her pain;
And her shiny crown, with its moonbeam glow,
He tossed far and wide, like the feathery snow.
And all that is left of that splendid bloom,
The diadem gay, and the spicy perfume,
Is a handful of dust, that once was a rose--
The sport of the wind, as it fitfully blows.
* * * * *
Once upon a time there lived a woman. She was not very young, nor was
she very old. She was neither handsome, homely, a genius, nor a fool.
She was just a commonplace, good-intentioned, fair type of the average
woman. This woman prided herself but little upon the various
accomplishments that contribute to the modern woman's popularity. She
could not dance a step, save in front of a northeast gale, or in a game
of romps with her little folks. She could not decorate a tea cup to save
her life, nor hand-paint a clam shell, nor embellish a canvas with
fleshy cupids and no less corpulent rosebuds. She could sing a few
insignificant ballads, such as "Annie Laurie," "Twilight Dews," and
"Nearer, My God, to Thee." These with a number like them, she was always
ready to furnish in a manner to bring down the house, but I doubt if she
would have been a success either in a comic opera or a church choir. She
could make bread and pieplant pie after a fashion that would make a man
wish that he had been born earlier to enjoy more of them. She could tidy
up a room quicker than a cat could wink its eyes, and in the matter of
housecleaning she was a regular four-in-hand coach and a tiger. If you
had asked her to lead a class in ethical culture or make a speech on
suffrage or score a point for reform, this woman would have ignobly
turned her back and run away, and yet perhaps she wielded an influence
in the world quite as strong as many a woman whose name is recorded on
the roll call of noisy fame. But there was one thing this woman abhorred
with all the might and strength of her soul, and that was slang. She had
been brought up to consider the use of anything more pronounced than the
"yea" and "nay" of the Quaker vernacular an outrage to refinement, and
although drifting far from her childhood's faith in many ways still
preserved an innate shrinking from the exuberance of vain speech. She
allowed no little boys to slide the cellar door with her own precious
yellow-heads who could be positively convicted of using naughty
language. Her husband left his worldly ways in town and only carried
home to this nice little woman the aroma of propriety and coriander
seeds. But who ever yet was assured of a firm foothold upon the pinnacle
of self-righteousness that the old boy did not whip out an arrow and
bring them low? It becomes my painful duty to chronicle the temptation
and downfall of the upright woman.
It was a tempestuous day of early autumn. It not only rained, it poured!
It not only blew, but it tore, howled, twisted, cavorted! The woman had
to go to town. At the eleventh hour the family umbrella was kidnaped by
a demon. (When the prince of evil has nothing else to do he sends out
his imps to hide umbrellas, handkerchiefs, thimbles, scissors, and other
domestic essentials.) The woman had no time to track the umbrella to its
lair, so she pinned a newspaper over her bonnet and leaped for the
train. Arrived in town she bought a 50 cent umbrella from a man who was
peddling them on the street corner, and from that moment we date her
downfall. The umbrella proved to be fashioned of gum arabic and cobweb.
It leaked, it exuded, it faded away like a frost-flake in her hands, so
that ere half an hour had passed she gave it to a newsboy, and laughed
to see him kick it into an alley. Then she took off her plumed hat and
pinned it underneath her cloak, wrapped a lace scarf about her head and
proceeded on her way. Remarking the pleased expression on the faces of
all she met, she wondered at it, with an Indian outbreak so imminent.
Small boys danced by her in the rain to the sound of their own bright
laughter; strong men seemed overcome as she drew near, and even the
stern policemen at the street crossings turned aside to hide a 9x14
smile. The woman lunched at a popular restaurant in the midst of a
mysterious carnival of glee, and finally took the train for home and,
leaving the city limits, skirted the northern shores of the lake to the
sound of muffled mirth. Reaching home and looking into the mirror she
was confronted by a countenance that bore all the seeming "of a demon
that is dreaming." The sea-green warp of cotton in the gum-arabic
umbrella had melted and run in long lines over brow and nose and chin.
For one moment the woman gazed at her frescoed charm, and as to what
follows we will drop the curtain. Suffice it to say, she fell, and the
shocked echoes of that little home put cotton in their ears and fainted
into lonely space at being called upon to repeat the strong language
that rent the air. Who shall blame the woman if she said "darn" with an
emphasis that might have made a pirate wan with envy? Who shall cast the
first stone at her until the day dawns that releases my sex from the
thralldom of its bondage to those demons who walk abroad and plot her
downfall in rainy weather?
* * * * *
Wear this bead upon your heart, girls; have nothing whatever to do with
so-called "fascinating" or "magnetic" men. Put no faith in mystery when
it comes to a question of the man you think you love. Rapt glances and
tender sighs that lead to nothing in the way of an honest declaration
are as despoiling to your womanhood as the breath of a furnace is to a
flower. There is no mystery in genuine love, and there is no
counterfeiting it, either. It is open-faced, ready-tongued and
clear-eyed. It is a virtue for heroes, not a platitude in the mouth of
fools. It is undefiled and set apart, like the snow on high hills. Allow
no man to make you a party to anything clandestine. A man who is afraid
to meet you at your own home, and appoints a tryst in the park, or a
down-town restaurant, is as much of a menace to your happiness as a
pestilence would be to your health. Remember, in all your experience
with so-called love, that the fewer adventures a young woman has, the
fewer flirtations and the fewer "affairs," the more glad she will be, by
and by, when she is a good man's wife and a brave boy's or sweet girl's
mother. A gown oft handled, you know, is seldom white, and each romance
you weave with idle fellows who roll their eyes and talk love, but never
show you the respect to offer you their hand in honest marriage--these
fascinating "Rochesters" and wicked "St. Elmos," already married, or
steeped to the lips in evil-doing--deprive you of your whiteness and
your bloom.
* * * * *
Do you ever get discouraged and feel like saying: "Oh, it's no use! I
want to amount to something! I have it in me to do great and grand
things, but the circumstances of poverty are against me. I can be
nothing but a drudge and the sooner I get over dreaming of anything
higher, the better!" Of course you have just such times of thinking and
talking, but did you ever comfort yourself with the thought that though
all these things you can not be, you are, really, in the sight of God?
A diamond is no less a diamond because it has been mislaid, and passed
off through ignorance as common glass. A tulip seed is no less the
sheath of a flower because through mistake somebody has labeled it as
common timothy. A silk fabric is no less the product of the
mulberry-feeding worm because somebody has wrapped it in a brown paper
parcel and valued it as domestic jeans. What you are, you are, and there
is no power on earth can gainsay it. Other folks may ignore it in you;
half the world, nay all the world, may fail to see it, but if nobility,
and strength, and sweetness are there you are worth just that much to
God! Blessed thought, isn't it, you poor, overworked clerk, with your
brain always in a muddle with the dry details of a business you hate!
Blessed thought, isn't it, you dear, tired woman with more burdens to
carry than a maple tree has leaves! No matter how impossible it may be
for you to live out what is in you, that something true and grand and
beautiful is deathless and shall have its chance of development by and
by.
I shall never again meet the pretty maid with the larkspur eyes and the
corn silk hair who traveled with us a part of the way, but wherever she
goes, joy go with her! She was so modest and unspoiled and sweet, I
declare the sight of such a girl in this day of dancers and
high-steppers is like the sound of "Annie Laurie" between the carousals
of a break-down jig, or the taste of a wild strawberry after pepper tea.
God bless the old-fashioned girl with her helpful ways, her arch face
and her blithe and hearty laugh. May her type never vanish from the face
of the earth, and may the mold after which her soul was fashioned never
get mislaid and lost in the heavenly work-shop.
* * * * *
I think I shall be a little sorry when the commanding officer sends out
the word to break camp and leave this dear old earth forever. For I love
this world. I never walk out in the morning when all its radiant colors
are newly washed with dew, or at splendid noon, when, like an untired
racer the sun has flashed around his mid-day course, or at evening, when
a fringe of shadow, like the lash of a weary eye, droops over mountain
and valley and sea, or in the majestic pomp of night when stars swarm
together like bees and the moon clears its way through the golden fields
as a sickle through the ripened wheat, that I do not hug myself for very
joy that I am yet alive. The cruel grave has not got me! Those jaws of
darkness have not swallowed me up from the sweet light of mortal day!
What matter if I am poor and unsheltered and costumeless? Thank God, I
am yet alive! People who tire of this world before they are seventy and
pretend that they are ready to leave it are either crazy or stuck full
of bodily ailments as a cushion is of pins. The happy, the warm-blooded,
the sunny-natured and the loving cling to life as petals cling to the
calyx of a budding rose. By and by when the rose is over-ripe, or when
the frosts come and the November winds are trumpeting through all the
leafless spaces of the woods, will be the time to die. It is no time
now, while there is a dark space left on earth that love can brighten,
while there is a human lot to be alleviated by a smile, or a burden to
be lifted with a sympathizing tear. It will be time to die when you are
too old or too sick to be a comfort in the world, but if God has given
you a warm heart and a ready hand, look about you and be glad He lets
you live. Yesterday I was passing through the street and I saw a woman
stoop down and pick up a faded lilac from the middle of a crossing and
transfer it to a corner where it would not be trampled under foot. The
world wants such people alive in it, not buried under its green sods.
The heart that is not unmindful of a crushed flower will be a royal hand
in the ministrations of life. May the day tarry long on its way that
lays in the grave such helpful, tender hands that seek to do good.
* * * * *
The good book says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," but it don't say,
Tell thy neighbor all thy secrets. We can love one another without
establishing an unsafe intimacy. In an age when so little remains set
apart and sacred, keep the treasury of your inmost heart intact. It is a
hard thing to believe that in every present friend is hidden a possible
future enemy, but it is safer to shape the conduct of our life upon that
belief than to live to see our inmost thoughts and the sanctities of
one's heart of hearts hawked about like green peas in a street vender's
basket by a spiteful and treacherous enemy. The safest course to pursue
in a world so full of unfaith and desertions is to be friendly and sweet
and helpful to all, but communicative and confiding to none.
* * * * *
Once when I was a child, with two long yellow braids down my back, and a
very great capacity for happiness in my heart, I lived in a remote
country with an aunt who didn't believe in any one having too good a
time here on earth. She thought they would appreciate the new Jerusalem
all the more, perhaps, for having a dismal experience here (there are
lots like her, too, in the world to-day). Well, once afterward when I
came home from school (and, ah! as I write how I can see the old road
where I walked, winding its way under silver birches by the side of a
trout-brook), somebody came out of the house and beckoned wildly, madly
for me to hurry up. It was my little cousin, and she looked as though
she had just skipped out of heaven! Her cheeks were all aglow and her
eyes were shining like stars. "Oh, come! Come quick!" she shouted.
"There's something in the parlor." I made haste to enter, and there
before me sat a doll, the biggest and most splendid it had ever entered
my young heart to imagine. It was dressed in pink tarletan, and had a
pair of jeweled earrings in its exceedingly life-like ears. At once I
became embarrassed. Self-consciousness sprang into full being. I was
painfully aware that my own dress and general appearance suffered by
contrast with the doll. Nor have I ever since experienced a keener
sensation of embarrassment than overcame me as I faced that gaudy image
in wax. My aunt's sarcastic remark, "No wonder that child's mother can't
lay up a cent for a rainy day when she throws away her dollars on a doll
like that!" gave me the sad impression that my darling mother was a
spendthrift, something after the pattern of the prodigal son. From the
first moment the doll was a source of disappointment and sorrow to me. I
never could play with it with any comfort because I was afraid of
soiling its splendid clothes, losing its earrings, or feeling myself and
my calico and homespun abashed by its superior attire. That doll did me
no good, and just what it did for me its costly and extravagantly
dressed sisterhood is doing for hundreds of little girls to-day. Too
fine to be played with, rigged out in all its paraphernalia of empty
headed flesh and blood women, with powder, puff and bustles, real
jewelry and costly lingerie, the modern doll is a demoralizer, a
torment.
* * * * *
Protracted broiling is, I think, on the whole, more wearing to the
sensibilities than sudden conflagration. A lightning stroke is soon
over, but who shall deliver us from the torments of dog-days? A bull of
Bashan encountered in a ten-acre lot may be outrun, but who shall escape
from a cloud of mosquitoes on a windless night? Give me any day a life
to live with a tempestuous, gusty sort of person, and I can endure it,
but deliver me from existence with one who bottles up his thunder and
looks like a storm that never breaks. A hearty shower, beating down the
flowers to call them up again in fresher beauty, brightening the hills
and swelling the brooks, treading with musical footfall the dusty
streets, and lashing the violet-tinted lake into a foam-flecked sea,
veining the hot air with sudden fire, and calling out a thousand echoes
to answer the thunder's call, is it not far better than lowering skies
that look rain and won't yield it, dragging, sultry days of neither
sunshine nor storm?
* * * * *