THE year, growing old, began to feel ashamed of the jaunty green in
which the spring and summer had decked him, and was laying aside his
verdant garments, leaf by leaf, for the more dignified russet of
autumn, when we—that is to say, father, mother and myself—prepared
to return to our winter residence in Wilmington. I, of course, have no
recollection of the journey, but have since been told that I stood it
like a little soldier, though whether diminutive stature has anything
to do with military fortitude I leave to nursery disputants to settle;
as I believe their invariable encouragement to patience and endurance
is the example of a fictitious officer of small size. The man has never
been a child who has not been requested to take a dose of physic or
bear a mustard plaster like a little captain, thereby inspiring himself
with the greatest respect and admiration for the immense deglutitory
capacity of that functionary, and the callosity of his epidermis.
The winter in turn passed away, and another spring and summer in the
country, and we were returning again to town in the Fall, before I can
begin to recollect things on my own account. What vague, undefined and
grotesque memories they are! The carriage in which we travelled seems
now to have been a chaos of shawls and baskets, from which father,
mother and Aunt Hannah protruded helplessly, like pictures of fairies
coming out of flowers. It was very cloudy, or at least everything now
seems to have been gray when we started. The wheels commenced humming
a drowsy tune, as they rolled through the sand, and soon hummed me
to sleep; and when I awoke the carriage was going backward, and the
sun had come out in the wrong place. Then we stopped at a well, near
a house with a fat, wooden chimney, and an aspen tree in front,
whose leaves seemed to be blinking all their eyes at me. A man in a
broad-flapped hat came out with a gourd in his hand, and behind him
a large yellow dog, that was tied to a piece of wood, and barked and
jumped on each side of the string as if he wanted to shake it off.
The well had a long pole, with a bucket at one end and a large stone
at the other; and when Horace, our driver, went to it to draw some
water for the horses, the stone seemed to fly up to the clouds. Then
Horace filled the bucket and carried it to the horses, and I could
hear them kissing it, as if they were so glad to see it; and, while I
was listening at that, the man with the hat and dog handed in, at the
carriage window, the great cool-looking gourd, with a long, crooked
handle, down into which the water clicked, as if laughing, when father
held it to me to drink.
After I had been bidden to “thank the kind gentleman, Johnnie,” and
done so, Horace strapped the bucket again under the carriage, got up
to his seat, and the house and well moved back out of sight, just as
the man sent the stone flying up again to the sky. All is a blank for a
long time—till Horace drives over a snake, and they hold me up to the
window to see it. My eyes can discover nothing but the shadow of the
bucket swinging between the wheels; and ever afterwards a bucket, under
one of the old fashioned carriages, is associated with a dead snake and
a hot, sandy road. There is another sleepy blank, and I drowsily rouse
up, as we drive into town, to find it dark, and the lights all in a
hurry to go somewhere, chasing each other by the carriage window, till
one bold blaze stops right in front of it, and father exclaims, “Here
we are!”
We get out, shawls, chaos and all, and I am carried up some broad
stone steps, into a large hall with bright lights, and on through to a
strange room, where there are new faces among the servants, a little
excrescence of a fireplace, filled with red coals, and a large table
steaming with good smelling dishes. Everything, for an indefinite
period after this, is confused and unsatisfactory, and I can eliminate
nothing into distinct recollection but two series of events, which,
from their frequent repetition, have become facts of memory, viz.,
rides in my little carriage, and, in educational phrase, corrections;
more plainly, whippings.
What tortures I suffered in my carriage, children alone know. Enclosed
on three sides by the leather curtains, I was confined in front by a
strap, which was buckled across my breast, to keep me from falling
out, and, thus cooped up like a criminal, I would sit, listening to
the grinding, gritty sound of the wheels as they rolled over the flag
stones, bumping my head against the framework, knocking my cap awry,
and not knowing how to put it straight again, and suffering the misery
of whining without being noticed—a source of much affliction, by the
way, to many grown-up children—my nurse all the while walking behind,
and pushing me along, engaged in too deep a conversation with other
nurses to heed my murmuring!
One of my sorest trials was to pass the stores, and have some pert
clerk stop my carriage and say:
“Hello! Auntie, whose child is that?”
“Col. Smith’s, sir.”
“Why,” coming to me, and squatting down by the carriage, “I’ll declare,
he’s a fine little fellow. How d’ye do, sir.”
“Tell the gentleman how d’ye,” persuades Aunt Hannah, who, like all
nurses, is flattered by compliments to her protégé; but, before I can
turn away in disgust, his tobacco-smelling moustache scratches my face.
My greatest consolation, in all this persecution, was to meet little
Lulie Mayland, my assigned sweetheart, though I was rather young for
the blind god’s arrow. Our nurses would lift us from our carriages
and hold us up to kiss each other; and I would be in a perfect glee
as she tried to put her little plump fingers into my eyes, and I felt
her moist little mouth on my cheek. Putting me down in the foot of her
carriage, we would be rolled home together, as happy and joyous as
children only can be.
The other series of events to which I have alluded were, from their
very frequency, fixed still more indelibly upon my mind; though
the intense activity of certain cognitive faculties, during their
occurrence, may have contributed somewhat to their retention. They were
the immediate and inevitable consequence of any recusancy, on my part,
in regard to the rules of the bath. I possessed the usual hydrophobic
prejudice of extreme youth, and dreaded morning ablutions as Rome did
the Gauls. Had I been old enough to have managed the bath myself I
should not have cared, but to be washed like a dish, put into the tub,
and spongeful after spongeful squeezed over me, was more than my good
nature could submit to. Mother, finding her reasoning wasted, and her
commands disregarded, would send for switches, and laying me across her
lap, pour hot embers, as it seemed to me, on my naked legs. I did not
stop to debate, which I might have done with propriety, whether the
friction developed the latent heat of the rods, or whether they were
actually set on fire and then applied; I simply recognized the fact,
that unless the bath came the fire did, and I wisely chose the former.
The embers’ influence would last, on an average, about two days, when
they would have to be again applied.