Looking over the world on a broad scale, do we not find that public entertainments have very generally been the sops thrown out by engrossing upper classes to keep lower classes from inquiring too particularly into their rights, and to make them satisfied with a stone, when it was not quite convenient to give them bread? Wherever there is a class that is to be made content to be plundered of its rights, there is an abundance of fiddling and dancing, and amusements, public and private, are in great requisition. It may also be set down, I think, as a general axiom, that people feel the need of amusements less and less, precisely in proportion as they have solid reasons for being happy.
Our good Puritan fathers intended to form a state of society of such equality of conditions, and to make the means of securing the goods of life so free to all, that everybody should find abundant employment for his faculties in a prosperous seeking of his fortunes. Hence, while they forbade theatres, operas, and dances, they made a state of unparalleled peace and prosperity, where one could go to sleep at all hours of day or night with the house door wide open, without bolt or bar, yet without apprehension of any to molest or make afraid.
There were, however, some few national fêtes: – Election day, when the Governor took his seat with pomp and rejoicing, and all the housewives outdid themselves in election cake, and one or two training days, when all the children were refreshed, and our military ardor quickened, by the roll of drums, and the flash of steel bayonets, and marchings and evolutions, – sometimes ending in that sublimest of military operations, a sham fight, in which nobody was killed. The Fourth of July took high rank, after the Declaration of Independence; but the king and high priest of all festivals was the autumn Thanksgiving.
When the apples were all gathered and the cider was all made, and the yellow pumpkins were rolled in from many a hill in billows of gold, and the corn was husked, and the labors of the season were done, and the warm, late days of Indian Summer came in, dreamy and calm and still, with just frost enough to crisp the ground of a morning, but with warm trances of benignant, sunny hours at noon, there came over the community a sort of genial repose of spirit, – a sense of something accomplished, and of a new golden mark made in advance on the calendar of life, – and the deacon began to say to the minister, of a Sunday, “I suppose it ‘s about time for the Thanksgiving proclamation.”
Rural dress-makers about this time were extremely busy in making up festival garments, for everybody’s new dress, if she was to have one at all, must appear on Thanksgiving day.
Aunt Keziah and Aunt Lois and my mother talked over their bonnets, and turned them round and round on their hands, and discoursed sagely of ribbons and linings, and of all the kindred bonnets that there were in the parish, and how they would probably appear after Thanksgiving. My grandmother, whose mind had long ceased to wander on such worldly vanities, was at this time officiously reminded by her daughters that her bonnet was n’t respectable, or it was announced to her that she must have a new gown. Such were the distant horizon gleams of the Thanksgiving festival.
We also felt its approach in all departments of the household, – the conversation at this time beginning to turn on high and solemn culinary mysteries and receipts of wondrous power and virtue. New modes of elaborating squash pies and quince tarts were now ofttimes carefully discussed at the evening fireside by Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and notes seriously compared with the experiences of certain other Aunties of high repute in such matters. I noticed that on these occasions their voices often fell into mysterious whispers, and that receipts of especial power and sanctity were communicated in tones so low as entirely to escape the vulgar ear. I still remember the solemn shake of the head with which my Aunt Lois conveyed to Miss Mehitable Rossiter the critical properties of mace, in relation to its powers of producing in corn fritters a suggestive resemblance to oysters. As ours was an oyster-getting district, and as that charming bivalve was perfectly easy to come at, the interest of such an imitation can be accounted for only by the fondness of the human mind for works of art.
For as much as a week beforehand, “we children” were employed in chopping mince for pies to a most wearisome fineness, and in pounding cinnamon, allspice, and cloves in a great lignum-vitæ mortar; and the sound of this pounding and chopping re-echoed through all the rafters of the old house with a hearty and vigorous cheer, most refreshing to our spirits.
In those days there were none of the thousand ameliorations of the labors of housekeeping which have since arisen, – no ground and prepared spices and sweet herbs; everything came into our hands in the rough, and in bulk, and the reducing of it into a state for use was deemed one of the appropriate labors of childhood. Even the very salt that we used in cooking was rock-salt, which we were required to wash and dry and pound and sift, before it became fit for use.
At other times of the year we sometimes murmured at these labors, but those that were supposed to usher in the great Thanksgiving festival were always entered into with enthusiasm. There were signs of richness all around us, – stoning of raisins, cutting of citron, slicing of candied orange-peel. Yet all these were only dawnings and intimations of what was coming during the week of real preparation, after the Governor’s proclamation had been read.
The glories of that proclamation! We knew beforehand the Sunday it was to be read, and walked to church with alacrity, filled with gorgeous and vague expectations.
The cheering anticipation sustained us through what seemed to us the long waste of the sermon and prayers; and when at last the auspicious moment approached, – when the last quaver of the last hymn had died out, – the whole house rippled with a general movement of complacency, and a satisfied smile of pleased expectation might be seen gleaming on the faces of all the young people, like a ray of sunshine through a garden of flowers.
Thanksgiving now was dawning! We children poked one another, and fairly giggled with unreproved delight as we listened to the crackle of the slowly unfolding document. That great sheet of paper impressed us as something supernatural, by reason of its mighty size, and by the broad seal of the State affixed thereto; and when the minister read therefrom, “By his Excellency, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a Proclamation,” our mirth was with difficulty repressed by admonitory glances from our sympathetic elders. Then, after a solemn enumeration of the benefits which the Commonwealth had that year received at the hands of Divine Providence, came at last the naming of the eventful day, and, at the end of all, the imposing heraldic words, “God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” And then, as the congregation broke up and dispersed, all went their several ways with schemes of mirth and feasting in their heads.
And now came on the week in earnest. In the very watches of the night preceding Monday morning, a preternatural stir below stairs, and the thunder of the pounding-barrel, announced that the washing was to be got out of the way before daylight, so as to give “ample scope and room enough” for the more pleasing duties of the season.
The making of pies at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the earth and under the earth.
The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies – pies with top crusts, and pies without, – pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction.
Fancy the heat and vigor of the great pan-formation, when Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and my mother and grandmother, all in ecstasies of creative inspiration, ran, bustled, and hurried, – mixing, rolling, tasting, consulting, – alternately setting us children to work when anything could be made of us, and then chasing us all out of the kitchen when our misinformed childhood ventured to take too many liberties with sacred mysteries. Then out we would all fly at the kitchen door, like sparks from a blacksmith’s window.
On these occasions, as there was a great looseness in the police department over us children, we usually found a ready refuge at Miss Mehitable’s with Tina, who, confident of the strength of her position with Polly, invited us into the kitchen, and with the air of a mistress led us around to view the proceedings there.
A genius for entertaining was one of Tina’s principal characteristics; and she did not fail to make free with raisins, or citron, or whatever came to hand, in a spirit of hospitality at which Polly seriously demurred. That worthy woman occasionally felt the inconvenience of the state of subjugation to which the little elf had somehow or other reduced her, and sometimes rattled her chains fiercely, scolding with a vigor which rather alarmed us, but which Tina minded not a whit. Confident of her own powers, she would, in the very midst of her wrath, mimic her to her face with such irresistible drollery as to cause the torrent of reproof to end in a dissonant laugh, accompanied by a submissive cry for quarter.
“I declare, Tina Percival,” she said to her one day, “you ‘re saucy enough to physic a horn-bug! I never did see the beater of you! If Miss Mehitable don’t keep you in better order, I don’t see what ‘s to become of any of us!”
“Why, what did become of you before I came?” was the undismayed reply. “You know, Polly, you and Aunty both were just as lonesome as you could be till I came here, and you never had such pleasant times in your life as you ‘ve had since I ‘ve been here. You ‘re a couple of old beauties, both of you, and know just how to get along with me. But come, boys, let ‘s take our raisins and go up in the garret and play Thanksgiving.”
In the corner of the great kitchen, during all these days, the jolly old oven roared and crackled in great volcanic billows of flame, snapping and gurgling as if the old fellow entered with joyful sympathy into the frolic of the hour; and then, his great heart being once warmed up, he brooded over successive generations of pies and cakes, which went in raw and came out cooked, till butteries and dressers and shelves and pantries were literally crowded with a jostling abundance.
A great cold northern chamber, where the sun never shone, and where in winter the snow sifted in at the window-cracks, and ice and frost reigned with undisputed sway, was fitted up to be the storehouse of these surplus treasures. There, frozen solid, and thus well preserved in their icy fetters, they formed a great repository for all the winter months; and the pies baked at Thanksgiving often came out fresh and good with the violets of April.
During this eventful preparation week, all the female part of my grandmother’s household, as I have before remarked, were at a height above any ordinary state of mind, – they moved about the house rapt in a species of prophetic frenzy. It seemed to be considered a necessary feature of such festivals, that everybody should be in a hurry, and everything in the house should be turned bottom upwards with enthusiasm, – so at least we children understood it, and we certainly did our part to keep the ball rolling.
At this period the constitutional activity of Uncle Fliakim increased to a degree that might fairly be called preternatural. Thanksgiving time was the time for errands of mercy and benevolence through the country; and Uncle Fliakim’s immortal old rubber horse and rattling wagon were on the full jump, in tours of investigation into everybody’s affairs in the region around. On returning, he would fly through our kitchen like the wind, leaving open the doors, upsetting whatever came in his way, – now a pan of milk, and now a basin of mince, – talking rapidly, and forgetting only the point in every case that gave it significance, or enabled any one to put it to any sort of use. When Aunt Lois checked his benevolent effusions by putting the test questions of practical efficiency, Uncle Fliakim remembered that he ‘d “forgotten to inquire about that,” and skipping through the kitchen, and springing into his old wagon, would rattle off again on at full tilt to correct and amend his investigations.
Moreover, my grandmother’s kitchen at this time began to be haunted by those occasional hangers-on and retainers, of uncertain fortunes, whom a full experience of her bountiful habits led to expect something at her hand at this time of the year. All the poor, loafing tribes, Indian and half-Indian, who at other times wandered, selling baskets and other light wares, were sure to come back to Oldtown a little before Thanksgiving time and report themselves in my grandmother’s kitchen.
The great hogshead of cider in the cellar, which my grandfather called the Indian Hogshead, was on tap at all hours of the day; and many a mugful did I draw and dispense to the tribes that basked in the sunshine at our door.
Aunt Lois never had a hearty conviction of the propriety of these arrangements; but my grandmother, who had a prodigious verbal memory, bore down upon her with such strings of quotations from the Old Testament that she was utterly routed.
“Now,” says my Aunt Lois, “I s’pose we ‘ve got to have Betty Poganut and Sally Wonsamug, and old Obscue and his wife, and the whole tribe down, roosting around our doors, till we give ’em something. That ‘s just mother’s way; she always keeps a whole generation at her heels.”
“How many times must I tell you, Lois, to read your Bible?” was my grandmother’s rejoinder; and loud over the sound of pounding and chopping in the kitchen could be heard the voice of her quotations: “If there be among you a poor man in any of the gates of the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thy heart, nor shut thy hand, from thy poor brother. Thou shalt surely give him; and thy heart shall not be grieved when thou givest to him, because that for this thing the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thy works; for the poor shall never cease from out of the land.”
These words seemed to resound like a sort of heraldic proclamation to call around us all that softly shiftless class, who, for some reason or other, are never to be found with anything in hand at the moment that it is wanted.
“There, to be sure,” said Aunt Lois, one day when our preparations were in full blast, – “there comes Sam Lawson down the hill, limpsy as ever; now he ‘ll have his doleful story to tell, and mother ‘ll give him one of the turkeys.”
And so, of course, it fell out.
Sam came in with his usual air of plaintive assurance, and seated himself a contemplative spectator in the chimney-corner, regardless of the looks and signs of unwelcome on the part of Aunt Lois.
“Lordy massy, how prosperous everything does seem here!” he said, in musing tones, over his inevitable mug of cider; “so different from what ‘t is t’ our house. There ‘s Hepsy, she ‘s all in a stew, an’ I ‘ve just been an’ got her thirty-seven cents’ wuth o’ nutmegs, yet she says she ‘s sure she don’t see how she ‘s to keep Thanksgiving, an’ she ‘s down on me about it, just as ef ‘t was my fault. Yeh see, last winter our old gobbler got froze. You know, Mis’ Badger, that ‘ere cold night we hed last winter. Wal, I was off with Jake Marshall that night; ye see, Jake, he hed to take old General Dearborn’s corpse into Boston, to the family vault, and Jake, he kind o’ hated to go alone; ‘t was a drefful cold time, and he ses to me, ‘Sam you jest go ‘long with me’; so I was sort o’ sorry for him, and I kind o’ thought I ‘d go long. Wal, come ‘long to Josh Bissel’s tahvern, there at the Half-way House, you know, ‘t was so swinging cold, we stopped to take a little suthin’ warmin’, an’ we sort o’ sot an’ sot over the fire, till, fust we knew, we kind o’ got asleep; an’ when we woke up we found we ‘d left the old General hitched up t’ th’ post pretty much all night. Wal, did n’t hurt him none, poor man; ‘t was allers a favorite spot o’ his’n. But, takin’ one thing with another, I did n’t get home till about noon next day, an’, I tell you, Hepsy she was right down on me. She said the baby was sick, and there had n’t been no wood split, nor the barn fastened up, nor nothin’. Lordy massy, I did n’t mean no harm; I thought there was wood enough, and I thought likely Hepsy ‘d git out an’ fasten up the barn. But Hepsy, she was in one o’ her contrary streaks, an’ she would n’t do a thing; an’ when I went out to look, why, sure ’nuff, there was our old tom-turkey froze as stiff as a stake, – his claws jist a stickin’ right straight up like this.” Here Sam struck an expressive attitude, and looked so much like a frozen turkey as to give a pathetic reality to the picture.
“Well now, Sam, why need you be off on things that ‘s none of your business?” said my grandmother. “I ‘ve talked to you plainly about that a great many times, Sam,” she continued, in tones of severe admonition. “Hepsy is a hard-working woman, but she can’t be expected to see to everything, and you oughter ‘ave been at home that night to fasten up your own barn and look after your own creeturs.”
Sam took the rebuke all the more meekly as he perceived the stiff black legs of a turkey poking out from under my grandmother’s apron while she was delivering it. To be exhorted and told of his shortcomings, and then furnished with a turkey at Thanksgiving, was a yearly part of his family programme. In time he departed, not only with the turkey, but with us boys in procession after him, bearing a mince and a pumpkin pie for Hepsy’s children.
“Poor things!” my grandmother remarked; “they ought to have something good to eat Thanksgiving day; ‘t ain’t their fault that they ‘ve got a shiftless father.”
Sam, in his turn, moralized to us children, as we walked beside him: “A body ‘d think that Hepsy ‘d learn to trust in Providence,” he said, “but she don’t. She allers has a Thanksgiving dinner pervided; but that ‘ere woman ain’t grateful for it, by no manner o’ means. Now she ‘ll be jest as cross as she can be, cause this ‘ere ain’t our turkey, and these ‘ere ain’t our pies. Folks doos lose so much, that hes sech dispositions.”
A multitude of similar dispensations during the course of the week materially reduced the great pile of chickens and turkeys which black Cæsar’s efforts in slaughtering, picking, and dressing kept daily supplied.
Besides these offerings to the poor, the handsomest turkey of the flock was sent, dressed in first-rate style, with Deacon Badger’s dutiful compliments, to the minister; and we children, who were happy to accompany black Cæsar on this errand, generally received a seed-cake and a word of acknowledgment from the minister’s lady.
Well, at last, when all the chopping and pounding and baking and brewing, preparatory to the festival, were gone through with, the eventful day dawned. All the tribes of the Badger family were to come back home to the old house, with all the relations of every degree, to eat the Thanksgiving dinner. And it was understood that in the evening the minister and his lady would look in upon us, together with some of the select aristocracy of Oldtown.
Great as the preparations were for the dinner, everything was so contrived that not a soul in the house should be kept from the morning service of Thanksgiving in the church, and from listening to the Thanksgiving sermon, in which the minister was expected to express his views freely concerning the politics of the country, and the state of things in society generally, in a somewhat more secular vein of thought than was deemed exactly appropriate to the Lord’s day. But it is to be confessed, that, when the good man got carried away by the enthusiasm of his subject to extend these exercises beyond a certain length, anxious glances, exchanged between good wives, sometimes indicated a weakness of the flesh, having a tender reference to the turkeys and chickens and chicken pies, which might possibly be overdoing in the ovens at home. But your old brick oven was a true Puritan institution, and backed up the devotional habits of good housewives, by the capital care which he took of whatever was committed to his capacious bosom. A truly well-bred oven would have been ashamed of himself all his days, and blushed redder than his own fires, if a God-fearing house-matron, away at the temple of the Lord, should come home and find her piecrust either burned or underdone by his over or under zeal; so the old fellow generally managed to bring things out exactly right.
When sermons and prayers were all over, we children rushed home to see the great feast of the year spread.
What chitterings and chatterings there were all over the house, as all the aunties and uncles and cousins came pouring in, taking off their things, looking at one another’s bonnets and dresses, and mingling their comments on the morning sermon with various opinions on the new millinery outfits, and with bits of home news, and kindly neighborhood gossip.
Uncle Bill, whom the Cambridge college authorities released, they did all the other youngsters of the land, for Thanksgiving day, made a breezy stir among them all, especially with the young cousins of the feminine gender.
The best room on this occasion was thrown wide open, and its habitual coldness had been warmed by the burning down of a great stack of hickory logs, which had been heaped up unsparingly since morning. It takes some hours to get a room warn, where a family never sits, and which therefore has not in its walls one particle of the genial vitality which comes from the in-dwelling of human beings. But on Thanksgiving day, at least, every year, this marvel was effected in our best room.
Although all servile labor and vain recreation on this day were by law forbidden, according to the terms of the proclamation, it was not held to be a violation of the precept, that all the nice old aunties should bring their knitting-work and sit gently trotting their needles around the fire; nor that Uncle Bill should start a full-fledged romp among the girls and children, while the dinner was being set on the long table in the neighboring kitchen. Certain of the good elderly female relatives, of serious and discreet demeanor, assisted at this operation.
But who shall do justice to the dinner, and describe the turkey, and chickens, and chicken pies, with all that endless variety of vegetables which the American soil and climate have contributed to the table, and which, without regard to the French doctrine of courses, were all piled together in jovial abundance upon the smoking board? There was much carving and laughing and talking and eating, and all showed that cheerful ability to despatch the provisions which was the ruling spirit of the hour. After the meat came the plum-puddings, and then the endless array of pies, till human nature was actually bewildered and overpowered by the tempting variety; and even we children turned from the profusion offered to us, and wondered what was the matter that we could eat no more.
When all was over, my grandfather rose at the head of the table, and a fine venerable picture he made as he stood there, his silver hair flowing in curls down each side of his clear, calm face, while, in conformity to the old Puritan custom, he called their attention to a recital of the mercies of God in his dealings with their family.
It was a sort of family history, going over and touching upon the various events which had happened. He spoke of my father’s death, and gave a tribute to his memory; and closed all with the application of a time-honored text, expressing the hope that as years passed by we might “so number our days as to apply our hearts unto wisdom”; and then he gave out that psalm which in those days might be called the national hymn of the Puritans.
“Let children hear the mighty deeds
Which God performed of old,
Which in our younger years we saw,
And which our fathers told.
“He bids us make his glories known,
His works of power and grace.
And we ‘ll convey his wonders down
Through every rising race.
“Our lips shall tell them to our sons,
And they again to theirs;
That generations yet unborn
May teach them to their heirs.
“Thus shall they learn in God alone
Their hope securely stands;.
That they may ne’er forget his works,
But practise his commands.”
This we all united in singing to the venerable tune of St. Martin’s, an air which, the reader will perceive, by its multiplicity of quavers and inflections gave the greatest possible scope to the cracked and trembling voices of the ancients, who united in it with even more zeal than the younger part of the community.
Uncle Fliakim Sheril, furbished up in a new crisp black suit, and with his spindle-shanks trimly incased in the smoothest of black silk stockings, looking for all the world just like an alert and spirited black cricket, outdid himself on this occasion in singing counter, in that high, weird voice that he must have learned from the wintry winds that usually piped around the corners of the old house. But any one who looked at him, as he sat with his eyes closed, beating time with head and hand, and, in short, with every limb of his body, must have perceived the exquisite satisfaction which he derived from this mode of expressing himself. I much regret to be obliged to state that my graceless Uncle Bill, taking advantage of the fact that the eyes of all his elders were devotionally closed, stationing himself a little in the rear of my Uncle Fliakim, performed an exact imitation of his counter, with such a killing facility that all the younger part of the audience were nearly dead with suppressed laughter. Aunt Lois, who never shut her eyes a moment on any occasion, discerned this from a distant part of the room, and in vain endeavored to stop it by vigorously shaking her head at the offender. She might as well have shaken it at a bobolink tilting on a clover-top. In fact, Uncle Bill was Aunt Lois’s weak point, and the corners of her own mouth were observed to twitch in such a suspicious manner that the whole moral force of her admonition was destroyed.
And now, the dinner being cleared away, we youngsters, already excited to a tumult of laughter, tumbled into the best room, under the supervision of Uncle Bill, to relieve ourselves with a game of “blind-man’s-buff,” while the elderly women washed up the dishes and got the house in order, and the men-folks went out to the barn to look at the cattle, and walked over the farm and talked of the crops.
In the evening the house was all open and lighted with the best of tallow candles, which Aunt Lois herself had made with especial care for this illumination. It was understood that we were to have a dance, and black Cæsar, full of turkey and pumpkin pie, and giggling in the very jollity of his heart, had that afternoon rosined his bow, and tuned his fiddle, and practised jigs and Virginia reels, in a way that made us children think him a perfect Orpheus.
As soon as the candles were lighted came in Miss Mehitable with her brother Jonathan, and Tina, like a gay little tassel, hanging on her withered arm.
Mr. Jonathan Rossiter was a tall, well-made man, with a clear-cut, aquiline profile, and high round forehead, from which his powdered hair was brushed smoothly back and hung down behind in a long cue. His eyes were of a piercing dark gray, with that peculiar expression of depth and intensity which marks a melancholy temperament. He had a large mouth, which he kept shut with an air of firmness that suggested something even hard and dictatorial in his nature. He was quick and alert in all his movements, and his eyes had a searching quickness of observation, which seemed to lose nothing of what took place around him. There was an air of breeding and self-command about him; and in all his involuntary ways he bore the appearance of a man more interested to make up a judgment of others than concerned as to what their judgment might be about himself.
Miss Mehitable hung upon his arm with an evident admiration and pride, which showed that when he came he made summer at least for her.
After them soon arrived the minister and his lady, – she in a grand brocade satin dress, open in front to display a petticoat brocaded with silver flowers. With her well-formed hands shining out of a shimmer of costly lace, and her feet propped on high-heeled shoes, Lady Lothrop justified the prestige of good society which always hung about her. Her lord and master, in the spotless whiteness of his ruffles on wrist and bosom, and in the immaculate keeping and neatness of all his clerical black, and the perfect pose of his grand full-bottomed clerical wig, did honor to her conjugal cares. They moved through the room like a royal prince and princess, with an appropriate, gracious, well-considered word for each and every one. They even returned, with punctilious civility, the awe-struck obeisance of black Cæsar, who giggled over straightway with joy and exultation at the honor.
But conceive of my Aunt Lois’s pride of heart, when, following in the train of these august persons, actually came Ellery Davenport, bringing upon his arm Miss Deborah Kittery. Here was a situation! Had the whole island of Great Britain waded across the Atlantic Ocean to call on Bunker Hill, the circumstance could scarcely have seemed to her more critical.
“Mercy on us!” she thought to herself, “all these Episcopalians coming! I do hope mother ‘ll be careful; I hope she won’t feel it necessary to give them a piece of her mind, as she ‘s always doing.”
Miss Deborah Kittery, however, knew her soundings, and was too genuine an Englishwoman not to know that “every man’s house is his castle,” and that one must respect one’s neighbor’s opinions on his own ground.
As to my grandmother, her broad and buxom heart on this evening was so full of motherliness, that she could have patted the very King of England on the head, if he had been there, and comforted his soul with the assurance that she supposed he meant well, though he did n’t exactly know how to manage; so, although she had a full consciousness that Miss Deborah Kittery had turned all America over to uncovenanted mercies, she nevertheless shook her warmly by the hand, and told her she hoped she ‘d make herself at home. And I think she would have done exactly the same by the Pope of Rome himself, if that poor heathen sinner had presented himself on Thanksgiving evening. So vast and billowy was the ocean of her loving-kindness, and so firmly were her feet planted on the rock of the Cambridge Platform, that on it she could stand breathing prayers for all Jews, Turks, Infidels, Tories, Episcopalians, and even Roman Catholics. The very man that burnt Mr. John Rogers might have had a mug of cider in the kitchen on this evening, with an exhortation to go and sin no more.
You may imagine the astounding wassail among the young people, when two such spirits as Ellery Davenport and my Uncle Bill were pushing each other on, in one house. My Uncle Bill related the story of “the Wry-mouth Family,” with such twists and contortions and killing extremes of the ludicrous as perfectly overcame even the minister; and he was to be seen, at one period of the evening, with a face purple with laughter, and the tears actually rolling down over his well-formed cheeks, while some of the more excitable young people almost fell in trances, and rolled on the floor in the extreme of their merriment. In fact, the assemblage was becoming so tumultuous, that the scrape of Cæsar’s violin, and the forming of sets for a dance, seemed necessary to restore the peace.
Whenever or wherever it was that the idea of the sinfulness of dancing arose in New:England, I know not; it is a certain fact that at Oldtown, at this time, the presence of the minister and his lady was held not to be in the slightest degree incompatible with this amusement. I appeal to many of my readers, if they or their parents could not recall a time in New England when in all the large towns dancing assemblies used to be statedly held, at which the minister and his lady, though never uniting in the dance, always gave an approving attendance, and where all the decorous, respectable old church-members brought their children, and stayed to watch an amusement in which they no longer actively partook. No one looked on with a more placid and patronizing smile than Dr. Lothrop and his lady, as one after another began joining the exercise, which, commencing first with the children and young people, crept gradually upwards among the elders.
Uncle Bill would insist on leading out Aunt Lois, and the bright color rising to her thin cheeks brought back a fluttering image of what might have been beauty in some fresh, early day. Ellery Davenport insisted upon leading forth Miss Deborah Kittery, notwithstanding her oft-repeated refusals and earnest protestations to the contrary. As to Uncle Fliakim, he jumped and frisked and gyrated among the single sisters and maiden aunts, whirling them into the dance as if he had been the little black gentleman himself. With that true spirit of Christian charity which marked all his actions, he invariably chose out the homeliest and most neglected, and thus worthy Aunt Keziah, dear old soul, was for a time made quite prominent by his attentions.
Of course the dances in those days were of a strictly moral nature. The very thought of one of the round dances of modern times would have sent Lady Lothrop behind her big fan in helpless confusion, and exploded my grandmother like a full-charged arsenal of indignation. As it was, she stood, her broad, pleased face radiant with satisfaction, as the wave of joyousness crept up higher and higher round her, till the elders, who stood keeping time with their heads and feet, began to tell one another how they had danced with their sweethearts in good old days gone by, and the elder women began to blush and bridle, and boast of steps that they could take in their youth till the music finally subdued them, and into the dance they went.
“Well, well!” quoth my grandmother; “they ‘re all at it so hearty, I don’t see why I should n’t try it myself.” And into the Virginia reel she went, amid screams of laughter from all the younger members of the company.
But I assure you my grandmother was not a woman to be laughed at; for whatever she once set on foot, she “put through” with a sturdy energy befitting a daughter of the Puritans.
“Why should n’t I dance?” she said, when she arrived red and resplendent at the bottom of the set. “Didn’t Mr. Despondency and Miss Muchafraid and Mr. Readytohalt all dance together in the Pilgrim’s Progress?” – and the minister in his ample flowing wig, and my lady in her stiff brocade, gave to my grandmother a solemn twinkle of approbation.
As nine o’clock struck, the whole scene dissolved and melted; for what well-regulated village would think of carrying festivities beyond that hour?
And so ended our Thanksgiving at Oldtown.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RAID ON OLDTOWN, AND UNCLE FLIAKIM’S BRAVERY.
THE next morning after Thanksgiving, life resumed its usual hard, laborious course, with a sharp and imperative reaction, such as ensues when a strong spring, which has been for some time held back, is suddenly let fly again.
Certainly Aunt Lois appeared to be astir fully an hour in advance of the usual time, because Aunt Lois was under some vague impression of infinite disturbances in the house, owing to the latitude of the last two weeks, and of great furbishings and repairs to be done in the best room, before it could be again shut up and condemned to silence.
While we were eating our breakfast, Sam Lawson came in, with an air of great trepidation.
“Lordy massy, Mis’ Badger! what do you s’pose has happened?” he exclaimed, holding up his hands. “Wal! if I ever – no, I never did!” – and, before an explanation could be drawn out of him, in fluttered Uncle Fliakim, and began dancing an indignant rigadoon round the kitchen.
“Perfectly abominable! the selectmen ought to take it up,” he exclaimed, – “ought to make a State affair of it, and send to the Governor.”
“Do for mercy’s sake, Fliakim, sit down, and tell us what the matter is,” said my grandmother.
“I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!!! I ‘ve just got to hitch right up and go on after ’em; and mebbe I ‘ll catch ’em before they get over the State line. I just wanted to borrow your breech-band, ’cause ours is broke. Where is it? Is it out in the barn, or where?”
By this time we had all arisen from table, and stood looking at one another, while Uncle Fliakim had shot out of the back door toward the barn. Of course our information must now be got out of Sam Lawson.
“Wal, you see, Deacon, who ever would ha’ thought of it? They ‘ve took every child on ’em, every one!”
“Who ‘s taken? what children?” said my grandmother. “Do pray begin at the right end of your story, and not come in here scaring a body to death.”
“Wal, it ‘s Aunt Nancy Prime’s children. Last night the kidnappers come to her house an’ took her an’ every single one of the child’en, an’ goin’ to carry ’em off to York State for slaves. Jake Marshall, he was round to our house this mornin’, an’ told me ’bout it. Jake, he ‘d ben over to keep Thanksgivin’, over t’ Aunt Sally Proddy’s; an’ way over by the ten-mile tahvern he met the waggin, an’ Aunt Nancy, she called out to him, an’ he heerd one of the fellers swear at her. The’ was two fellers in the waggin, an’ they was a drivin’ like mad, an’ I jest come runnin’ down to Mr. Sheril’s, ’cause I know his horse never gits out of a canter, an’ ‘s pretty much used to bein’ twitched up sudden. But, Lordy massy, s’posin’ he could ketch up with ’em, what could he do? He could n’t much more ‘n fly at ’em like an old hen; so I don’t see what ‘s to be done.”
“Well,” said my grandfather, rising up, “if that ‘s the case, it ‘s time we should all be on the move; and I ‘ll go right over to Israel Scran’s, and he and his two sons and I ‘ll go over, and I guess there ‘ll be enough of us to teach them reason. These kidnappers always make for the New York State line. Boys, you go out and tackle the old mare, and have our wagon round to the house; and, if Fliakim’s wagon will hold together, the two will just carry the party.”
“Lordy massy! I should like to go ‘long too,” said Sam Lawson. “I hain’t got no special business to-day but what could be put off as well as not.”
“You never do have,” said Aunt Lois. “That ‘s the trouble with you.”
“Wal, I was a thinkin’,” said Sam, “that Jake and me hes been over them roads so often, and we kind o’ know all the ups an’ downs an’ cross-roads. Then we ‘s pretty intimate with some o’ them Injun fellers, an’ ye git them sot out on a trail arter a body, they ‘s like a huntin’ dog.”
“Well, father,” said Aunt Lois, “I think it ‘s quite likely that Sam may be right here. He certainly knows more about such things than any decent, industrious man ought to, and it ‘s a pity you should n’t put him to some use when you can.”
“Jes’ so!” said Sam. “Now, there ‘s reason in that ‘ere; an’ I ‘ll jes’ go over to Israel’s store with the Deacon. Yeh see ye can’t take both the boys, ’cause one on ’em ‘ll have to stay and tend the store; but I tell you what ‘t is, I ain’t no bad of a hand a hittin’ a lick at kidnappers. I could pound on ’em as willingly as ever I pounded a horseshoe; an’ a woman ‘s a woman, an’ child’en ‘s child’en, ef they be black; that ‘s jes’ my ‘pinion.”
“Sam, you ‘re a good fellow,” said my grandmother, approvingly. “But come, go right along.”
Here, now, was something to prevent the wave of yesterday’s excitement from flatting down into entire insipidity.
Harry and I ran over instantly to tell Tina; and Tina with all her eloquence set it forth to Miss Mehitable and Polly, and we gave vent to our emotions by an immediate rush to the garret and a dramatic representation of the whole scene of the rescue, conducted with four or five of Tina’s rag-dolls and a little old box wagon, with which we cantered and re-cantered across the garret floor in a way that would have been intolerable to any less patient and indulgent person than Miss Mehitable.
The fact is, however, that she shared in the universal excitement to such a degree, that she put on her bonnet immediately, and rushed over to the minister’s to give vent to her feelings, while Polly, coming up garret, shouldered one of the guns lovingly, and declared she ‘d “like nothing better than to fire it off at one o’ them fellers”; and then she told us how, in her young days, where she was brought up in Maine, the painters (panthers) used to come round their log cabin at night, and how ad growl; and how they always had to keep the guns loaded; and how once her mother, during her father’s absence, had treed a painter, and kept him up in his perch for hours by threatening him whenever he offered to come down, until her husband came home and shot him.
Pretty stanch, reliant blood, about those times, flowed in the bosoms of the women of New England, and Polly relieved the excitement of her mind this morning by relating to us story after story of the wild forest life of her early days.
While Polly was thus giving vent to her emotions at home, Miss Mehitable had produced a corresponding excitement in the minister’s family. Ellery Davenport declared his prompt intention of going up and joining the pursuing party, as he was young and strong, with all his wits about him; and, with the prestige of rank in the late Revolutionary war, such an accession to the party was of the greatest possible importance. As to Miss Deborah Kittery, she gave it as her opinion that such uprisings against law and order were just what was to be expected in a democracy. “The lower classes, my dear, you know, need to be kept down with a strong hand,” she said with an instructive nod of the head; “and I think we shall find that there ‘s no security in the way things are going on now.”
Miss Mehitable and the minister listened with grave amusement while the worthy lady thus delivered herself; and, as they did not reply, she had the comfort of feeling that she had given them something to think of.
All the village, that day, was in a ferment of expectation; for Aunt Nancy was a general favorite in all the families round, and was sent for in case of elections or weddings or other high merry-makings, so that meddling with her was in fact taking away part of the vested property of Oldtown. The loafers who tilted, with their heels uppermost, on the railings of the tavern veranda, talked stringently of State rights, and some were of opinion that President Washington ought to be apprised of the fact without loss of time. My grandmother went about house in a state of indignation all day, declaring it was a pretty state of things, to be sure, and that, next they should know, they should wake up some morning and find that Cæsar had been gobbled up in the night and run off with. But Harry and I calmed the fears which this seemed to excite in his breast, by a vivid description of the two guns over in Miss Mehitable’s garret, and of the use that we should certainly make or them in case of an attack on Cæsar.
The chase, however, was conducted with such fire and ardor that before moonrise on the same night the captives were brought back in triumph to Oldtown village, and lodged for safe-keeping in my grandmother’s house, who spared nothing in their entertainment.
A happy man was Sam Lawson that evening, as he sat in the chimney-corner and sipped his mug of cider, and recounted his adventures.
“Lordy massy! well, ‘t was providential we took Colonel Devenport ‘long with us, I tell you; he talked to them fellers in a way that made ’em shake in their shoes. Why, Lordy massy, when we fust came in sight on ’em, Mr. Sheril an’ me, we wus in the foremost waggin, an’ we saw ’em before us just as we got to the top of a long, windin’ hill, an’ I tell you if they did n’t whip up an’ go lickity-split down that ‘ere hill, – I tell you, they rattled them child’en as ef they ‘d ben so many punkins, an’ I tell you one of ’em darned old young-uns flew right over the side of the waggin, an’ jest picked itself up as lively as a cricket, an’ never cried. We did n’t stop to take it up, but jes’ kep’ right along arter; an’ Mr. Sheril, he hollers out, ‘Whoa! whoa! stop! stop thief!’ as loud as he could yell; but they jes’ laughed at him; but Colonel Devenport, he come ridin’ by on horseback, like thunder, an’ driv’ right by ’em, an’ then turned round an’ charged down on their horses so it driv’ ’em right out the road, ar’ the waggin was upsot, an’ the fellers, they were pitched out, an’ in a minute Colonel Devenport had one on ’em by the collar an’ his pistol right out to the head o’ t’other. ‘Now,’ ses he, ‘if you stir you ‘re a dead man!’
“Wal, Mr. Sheril, he made arter the other one, – he always means mighty well, Mr. Sheril does, – he gin a long jump, he did, an’ he lit right in the middle of a tuft of blackberry-bushes an’ tore his breeches as ef the heavens an’ ‘arth was a goin’ asunder. Yeh see, they never ‘d a got ’em ef ‘t had n’t ben for Colonel Devenport. He kep’ the other feller under range of his pistol, an’ told him he ‘d shoot him ef he stirred; an’ the feller, he was scart to death, an’ he roared an’ begged for mercy in a way ‘t would ha’ done your heart good to hear.
“Wal, wal! the upshot on’t all was, when Israel Scran come down with his boy (they was in the back waggin), they got out the ropes an’ tied ’em up snug, an’ have ben a fetchin’ on ’em along to jail, where I guess they ‘ll have one spell o’ considerin their ways. But, Lordy massy, yeh never see such a sight as your uncle’s breeches wus. Mis’ Sheril, she says she never see the beater of him for allus goin’ off in his best clothes, ’cause, you see, he heard the news early, an’ he jes’ whips on his Thanksgivin’ clothes an’ went off in ’em just as he was. His intentions is allus so good. It ‘s a pity, though, he don’t take more time to consider. Now I think folks ought to take things more moderate. Yeh see, these folks that hurries allus, they gits into scrapes, is just what I ‘m allus a tellin’ Hepsy.”
“Who were the fellows, do you know?” said my grandmother.
“Wal, one on ’em was one of them Hessians that come over in the war times, – he is a stupid crittur; but the other is Widdah Huldy Miller’s son, down to Black Brook there.”
“Do tell,” said my grandmother, with the liveliest concern; “has Eph Miller come to that?”
“Yes, yes!” said Sam, “it ‘s Eph, sure enough. He was exalted to heaven in p’int o’ privilege, but he took to drink and onstiddy ways in the army, and now here he is in jail. I tell you, I tried to set it home to Eph, when I was a bringin’ on him home in the waggin, but, Lordy massy, we don’t none of us like to have our sins set in order afore us. There was David, now, he was crank as could be when he thought Nathan was a talkin’ about other people’s sins. Says David, ‘The man that did that shall surely die’; but come to set it home, and say, ‘Thou art the man,’ David caved right in. ‘Lordy massy bless your soul and body, Nathan,’ says he, ‘I don’t want to die.'”
It will be seen by these edifying moralizings how eminently Scriptural was the course of Sam’s mind. In fact, his turn for long-winded, pious reflection was not the least among his many miscellaneous accomplishments.
As to my grandmother, she busied herself in comforting the hearts of Aunt Nancy and the children with more than they could eat of the relics of the Thanksgiving feast, and bidding them not to be down-hearted nor afeard of anything, for the neighbors would all stand up for them, confirming her words with well-known quotations from the Old Testament, to the effect that “the triumphing of the wicked is short,” and that “evil-doers shall soon be cut off from the earth.”
This incident gave Ellery Davenport a wide-spread popularity in the circles of Oldtown. My grandmother was predisposed to look on him with complacency as a grandson of President Edwards, although he took, apparently, a freakish delight in shocking the respectable prejudices, and disappointing the reasonable expectations, of people in this regard, by assuming in every conversation precisely the sentiments that could have been least expected of him in view of such a paternity.
In fact, Ellery Davenport was one of those talkers who delight to maintain the contrary of every proposition started, and who enjoy the bustle and confusion which they thus make in every circle.
In good, earnest, intense New England, where every idea was taken up and sifted with serious solemnity, and investigated with a view to an immediate practical action upon it as true or false this glittering, fanciful system of fencing which he kept up on all subjects, maintaining with equal brilliancy and ingenuity this to-day and that to-morrow, might possibly have drawn down upon a man a certain horror, as a professed scoffer and a bitter enemy of all that is good; but Ellery Davenport, with all his apparent carelessness, understood himself and the world he moved in perfectly. He never lost sight of the effect he was producing on any mind, and had an intuitive judgment, in every situation, of exactly how far he might go without going too far.
The position of such young men as Ellery Davenport, in the theocratic state of society in New England at this time, can be understood only by considering the theologic movements of their period.
The colonists who founded Massachusetts were men whose doctrine of a Christian church in regard to the position of its children was essentially the same as that of the Church of England. Thus we find in Doctor Cotton Mather this statement: –
“They did all agree with their brethren at Plymouth in this point: that the children of the faithful were church-members with their parents; and that their baptism was a seal of their being so; only, before their admission to fellowship in any particular church, it was judged necessary that, being free from scandal in life, they should be examined by the elders of the church, upon whose approbation of their fitness they should publicly and personally own the covenant, and so be received unto the table of the Lord. And accordingly the eldest son of Mr. Higginson, being about fifteen years of age, and laudably answering all the characters expected in a communicant, was then so received.”
The colony under Governor Winthrop and Thomas Dudley was, in fact, composed of men in all but political opinion warmly attached to the Church of England; and they published, on their departure, a tract called “The Humble Request of His Majesty’s Loyal Subjects, the Governor and Company lately gone for New England, for the Obtaining of their Prayers, and the Removal of Suspicions and Misconstruction of their Intentions”; and in this address they called the Church of England their dear mother, acknowledging that such hope and part as they had attained in the common salvation, they had sucked from her breasts; and entreating their many reverend fathers and brethren to recommend them unto the mercies of God, in their constant prayers, as a church now springing out of their own bowels. Originally, therefore, the first young people who grew up in New England were taught in their earliest childhood to regard themselves as already members of the church, as under obligations to comport themselves accordingly, and at a very early age it was expected of them that they would come forward by their own act and confirm the action of their parents in their baptism, in a manner much the same in general effect as confirmation in England. The immediate result of this was much sympathy on the part of the children and young people with the religious views of their parents, and a sort of growing up into them from generation to generation. But, as the world is always tending to become unspiritual and mechanical in its views and sentiments, the defect of the species of religion thus engendered was a want of that vitality and warmth of emotion which attend the convert whose mind has come out of darkness into marvellous light, – who has passed through interior conflicts which have agitated his soul to the very depths. So there was always a party in New England who maintained that only those who could relate a change so marked as to be characterized as supernatural should hope that they were the true elect of God, or be received in churches and acknowledged as true Christians.
Many pages of Cotton Mather record the earnest attention which not only the ministers, but the governors and magistrates, of New England, in her early days, gave to the question, “What is the true position of the baptized children of the Church?” and Cotton Mather, who was warmly in favor of the Church of England platform in this respect, says: “It was the study of those prudent men who might be called our seers, that the children of the faithful should be kept, as far as may be, under a church watch, in expectation that they might be in a fairer way to receive the grace of God; so that the prosperous condition of religion in our churches might not be a matter of one age alone.”
Old Cotton waxes warm in arguing this subject, as follows: –
“The Scriptures tell us that men’s denying the children of the Church to have any part in the Lord hath a strong tendency in it to make them cease from fearing the Lord, and harden their hearts from his fear. But the awful obligations of covenant interest have a great tendency to soften the heart and break it and draw it home to God. Hence, when the Lord would powerfully win men to obedience, he often begins with this: that he is their God. The way of the Anabaptists, to admit none unto membership and baptism but adult professors, is the straitest way. One would think it should be a way of great purity, but experience hath shown that it has been an inlet unto great corruption, and a troublesome, dangerous underminer of reformation.”
And then old Cotton adds these words, certainly as explicit as even the modern Puseyite could desire: –
“If we do not keep in the way of a converting, grace-giving covenant, and keep persons under those church dispensations wherein grace is given, the Church will die of a lingering, though not a violent death. The Lord hath not set up churches, only that a few old Christians may keep one another warm while they live and then carry away the Church into the cold grave with them when they die. No; but that they might with all care and with all the obligations and advantages to that care that may be, nurse up another generation of subjects to our Lord, that may stand up in his kingdom when they are gone.”
It was for some time doubtful whether the New England Church would organize itself and seek its own perpetuation on the educational basis which has been the foundation of the majority of the Christian Church elsewhere; and the question was decided, as such society questions often are, by the vigor and power of one man. Jonathan Edwards, a man who united in himself the natures of both a poet and a metaphysician, all whose experiences and feelings were as much more intense than those of common men as Dante’s or Milton’s, fell into the error of making his own constitutional religious experience the measure and standard of all others, and revolutionizing by it the institutions of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Regeneration, as he taught it in his “Treatise on the Affections,” was the implantation by Divine power of a new spiritual sense in the soul, as diverse from all the other senses as seeing is from hearing, or tasting from smelling. No one that had not received this new, divine, supernatural sense, could properly belong to the Church of Christ, and all men, until they did receive it, were naturally and constitutionally enemies of God to such a degree, that, as he says in a sermon to that effect, “If they had God in their power, they would kill him.”
It was his power and his influence which succeeded in completely upsetting New England from the basis on which the Reformers and the Puritan Fathers had placed her, and casting out of the Church the children of the very saints and martyrs who had come to this country for no other reason than to found a church.
It is remarkable that, in all the discussions of depravity inherited from Adam, it never seemed to occur to any theologian that there might also be a counter-working of the great law of descent, by which the feelings and habits of thought wrought in the human mind by Jesus Christ might descend through generations of Christians, so that, in course of time, many might be born predisposed to good, rather than to evil. Cotton Mather fearlessly says that “the seed of the Church are born holy,” – not, of course, meaning it in a strictly theological sense, but certainly indicating that, in his day, a mild and genial spirit of hope breathed over the cradle of infancy and childhood.
Those very persons whom President Edwards addresses in such merciless terms of denunciation in his sermons, telling them that the earth daily groans to open under them, – and that the wind and the sun and the waters are all weary of them and longing to break forth and execute the wrath of God upon them, – were the children for uncounted generations back of fathers and mothers nursed in the bosom of the Church, trained in habits of daily prayer, brought up to patience and self-sacrifice and self-denial as the very bread of their daily being, and lacking only this supernatural sixth sense, the want of which brought upon them a guilt so tremendous. The consequence was, that, immediately after the time of President Edwards, there grew up in the very bosom of the New England Church a set of young people who were not merely indifferent to religion, but who hated it with the whole energy of their being.
Ellery Davenport’s feeling toward the Church and religion had all the bitterness of the disinherited son, who likes nothing better than to point out the faults in those favored children who enjoy the privileges of which he is deprived. All the consequences that good, motherly Cotton Mather had foreseen as likely to result from the proposed system of arranging the Church were strikingly verified in his case. He had not been able entirely to rid himself of a belief in what he hated. The danger of all such violent recoils from the religion of one’s childhood consists in this fact, – that the person is always secretly uncertain that he may not be opposing truth and virtue itself; he struggles confusedly with the faith of his mother, the prayers of his father, with whatever there may be holy and noble in the profession of that faith from which he has broken away; and few escape a very serious shock to conscience and their moral nature in doing it.
Ellery Davenport was at war with himself, at war with the traditions of his ancestry, and had the feeling that he was regarded in the Puritan community as an apostate; but he took a perverse pleasure in making his position good by a brilliancy of wit and grace of manner which few could resist; and, truth to say, his success, even with the more rigid, justified his self-confidence. As during these days there were very few young persons who made any profession of religion at all, the latitude of expression which he allowed himself on these subjects was looked upon as a sort of spiritual sowing of wild oats. Heads would be gravely shaken over him. One and another would say, “Ah! that Edwards blood is smart; it runs pretty wild in youth, but the Lord’s time may come by and by”; and I doubt not that my grandmother that very night, before she slept, wrestled with God in prayer for his soul with all the enthusiasm of a Monica for a St. Augustine.
Meantime, with that easy facility which enabled him to please everybody, he became, during the course of a somewhat extended visit which he made at the minister’s, rather a hero in Oldtown. What Colonel Davenport said, and what Colonel Davenport did, were spoken of from mouth to mouth. Even his wicked wit was repeated by the gravest and most pious, – of course with some expressions of disclaimer, but, after all, with that genuine pleasure which a Yankee never fails to feel in anything smartly and neatly hit off in language.
He cultivated a great friendship with Miss Mehitable, – talking with her of books and literature and foreign countries, and advising her in regard to the education of Tina, with great unction and gravity. With that little princess there was always a sort of half whimsical flirtation, as she demurely insisted on being treated by him as a woman, rather than as a child, – a caprice which amused him greatly.
Miss Mehitable felt herself irresistibly drawn, in his society, as almost everybody else was, to make a confidant of him. He was so winning, so obliging, so gentle, and knew so well just where and how to turn the conversation to avoid anything that he did n’t like to hear, and to hear anything that he did. So gently did his fingers run over the gamut of everbody’s nature, that nobody dreamed of being played on.
Such men are not, of course, villains; but, if they ever should happen to wish to become so, their nature gives them every facility.
Before she knew what she was about, Miss Mehitable found herself talking with Ellery Davenport on the strange, mysterious sorrow which imbittered her life, and she found a most sympathetic and respectful listener.
Ellery Davenport was already versed in diplomatic life, and had held for a year or two a situation of importance at the court of France; was soon to return thither, and also to be employed on diplomatic service in England. Could he, would he, find any traces of the lost one there? On this subject there were long, and, on the part of Miss Mehitable, agitating interviews, which much excited Miss Tina’s curiosity.
CHAPTER XXIX.
MY GRANDMOTHER’S BLUE BOOK.
READER, this is to be a serious chapter, and I advise all those people who want to go through the world without giving five minutes’ consecutive thought to any subject to skip it. They will not find it entertaining, and it may perhaps lead them to think on puzzling subjects, even for so long a time as half an hour; and who knows what may happen to their brains, from so unusual an exercise?
My grandmother, as I have shown, was a character in her way, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, brave, generous, energetic, large-hearted, and impulsive. Theoretically she was an ardent disciple of the sharpest and severest Calvinism, and used to repeat Michael Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom” to us in the chimney-corner, of an evening, with a reverent acquiescence in all its hard sayings, while practically she was the most pitiful, easy-to-be-entreated old mortal on earth, and was ever falling a prey to any lazy vagabond who chose to make an appeal to her abounding charity. She could not refuse a beggar that asked in a piteous tone; she could not send a child to bed that wanted to sit up; she could not eat a meal in peace when there were hungry eyes watching her; she could not, in cool deliberate moments, even inflict transient and necessary pain for the greater good of a child, and resolutely shut her eyes to the necessity of such infliction. But there lay at the bottom of all this apparent inconsistency a deep cause that made it consistent, and that cause was the theologic stratum in which her mind, and the mind of all New England, was embedded.
Never, in the most intensely religious ages of the world, did the insoluble problem of the WHENCE, the WHY, and the WHITHER of mankind receive such earnest attention. New England was founded by a colony who turned their backs on the civilization of the Old World, on purpose that they might have nothing else to think of. Their object was to form a community that should think of nothing else.
Working on a hard soil, battling with a harsh, ungenial climate, everywhere being treated by Nature with the most rigorous severity, they asked no indulgence, they got none, and they gave none. They shut out from their religious worship every poetic drapery, every physical accessory that they feared would interfere with the abstract contemplation of hard, naked truth, and set themselves grimly and determinately to study the severest problems of the unknowable and the insoluble. Just as resolutely as they made their farms by blasting rocks and clearing land of ledges of stone, and founded thrifty cities and thriving money-getting communities in places which one would think might more properly have been left to the white bears, so resolutely they pursued their investigations amid the grim mysteries of human existence, determined to see and touch and handle everything for themselves, and to get at the absolute truth if absolute truth could be got at.
They never expected to find truth agreeable. Nothing in their experience of life had ever prepared them to think it would be so. Their investigations were made with the courage of the man who hopes little, but determines to know the worst of his affairs. They wanted no smoke of incense to blind them, and no soft opiates of pictures and music to lull them; for what they were after was truth, and not happiness, and they valued duty far higher than enjoyment.
The underlying foundation of life, therefore, in New England, was one of profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered, melancholy, which regarded human existence itself as a ghastly risk, and, in the case of the vast majority of human beings, an inconceivable misfortune.
My grandmother believed in statements which made the fortunate number who escaped the great catastrophe of mortal life as few and far between as the shivering, half-drowned mariners, who crawl up on to the shores of some desert island, when all else on board have perished. In this view she regarded the birth of an infant with a suppressed groan, and the death of one almost with satisfaction. That more than half the human race die in infancy, – that infanticide is the general custom in so many heathen lands, – was to her a comforting consideration, for so many were held to escape at once the awful ordeal, and to be gathered into the numbers of the elect.