We had come home from our second Sunday service. Our evening meal of smoking brown bread and baked beans had been discussed, and the supper-things washed and put out of sight. There was an uneasy, chill moaning and groaning out of doors showing the coming up of an autumn storm, – just enough chill and wind to make the brightness of a social hearth desirable, – and my grandfather had built one of his most methodical and splendid fires.
The wide, ample depth of the chimney was aglow in all its cavernous length with the warm leaping light that burst out in lively jets and spirits from every rift and chasm. The great black crane that swung over it, with its multiplicity of pot-hooks and trammels, seemed to have a sort of dusky illumination, like that of old Cæsar’s black, shining face, as he sat on his block of wood in the deep recess of the farther corner, with his hands on the knees of his Sunday pantaloons, gazing lovingly into the blaze with all the devotion of a fire-worshipper. On week-day evenings old Cæsar used to have his jack-knife in active play in this corner, and whistles and pop-guns and squirrel-traps for us youngsters grew under his plastic hand; but on Sunday evening he was too good a Christian even to think of a jack-knife, and if his hand casually encountered it in his pocket, he resisted it as a temptation of the Devil, and sat peacefully winking and blinking, and occasionally breaking out into a ripple of private giggles which appeared to spring purely from the overflow of bodily contentment. My Uncle Bill was in that condition which is peculiarly apt to manifest itself in the youth of well-conducted families on Sunday evenings, – a kind of friskiness of spirits which appears to be a reactionary state from the spiritual tension of the day, inclining him to skirmish round on all the borders and outskirts of permitted pleasantry, and threatening every minute to burst out into most unbecoming uproariousness. This state among the youngsters of a family on Sunday evening is a familiar trial of all elders who have had the task of keeping them steady during the sacred hours.
My Uncle Bill, in his week-day frame, was the wit and buffoon of the family, – an adept in every art that could shake the sides, and bring a laugh out on the gravest face. His features were flexible, his powers of grimace and story-telling at times irresistible. On the preset occasion it was only my poor mother’s pale, sorrowful face that kept him in any decent bounds. He did not wish to hurt his sister’s feelings, but he was boiling over with wild and elfish impulses, which he vented now by a sly tweak at the cat’s tail, then by a surreptitious dig at black Cæsar’s sides, which made the poor black a helpless, quivering mass of giggle, and then he would slyly make eyes and mouths at Bill and me behind Aunt Lois’s chair, which almost slew us with laughter, though all the while he appeared with painful effort to keep on a face of portentous gravity.
On the part of Aunt Lois, however, there began to be manifested unequivocal symptoms that it was her will and pleasure to have us all leave our warm fireside and establish ourselves in the best room, – for we had a best room, else wherefore were we on tea-drinking terms with the high aristocracy of Oldtown? We had our best room, and kept it as cold, as uninviting and stately, as devoid of human light or warmth, as the most fashionable shut-up parlor of modern days. It had the tallest and brightest pair of brass andirons conceivable, and a shovel and tongs to match, that were so heavy that the mere lifting them was work enough, without doing anything with them. It had also a bright-varnished mahogany tea-table, over which was a looking-glass in a gilt frame, with a row of little architectural balls on it; which looking-glass was always kept shrouded in white muslin at all seasons of the year, on account of a tradition that flies might be expected to attack it for one or two weeks in summer. But truth compels me to state, that I never saw or heard of a fly whose heart could endure Aunt Lois’s parlor. It was so dark, so cold, so still, that all that frisky, buzzing race, who delight in air and sunshine, universally deserted and seceded from it; yet the looking-glass, and occasionally the fire-irons, were rigorously shrouded, as if desperate attacks might any moment be expected.
Now the kitchen was my grandmother’s own room. In one corner of it stood a round table with her favorite books, her great work-basket, and by it a rickety rocking-chair, the bottom of which was of ingenious domestic manufacture, being in fact made by interwoven strips of former coats and pantaloons of the home circle; but a most comfortable and easy seat it made. My grandfather had also a large splint-bottomed arm-chair, with rockers to it, in which he swung luxuriously in the corner of the great fireplace. By the side of its ample blaze we sat down to our family meals, and afterwards, while grandmother and Aunt Lois washed up the tea-things, we all sat and chatted by the firelight. Now it was a fact that nobody liked to sit in the best room. In the kitchen each member of the family had established unto him or her self some little pet private snuggery, some chair or stool, some individual nook, – forbidden to gentility, but dear to the ungenteel natural heart, – that we looked back to regretfully when we were banished to the colder regions of the best room.
There the sitting provisions were exactly one dozen stuffed-seated cherry chairs, with upright backs and griffin feet, each foot terminating in a bony claw, which resolutely grasped a ball. These chairs were high and slippery, and preached decorum in the very attitudes which they necessitated, as no mortal could ever occupy them except in the exercise of a constant and collected habit of mind.
Things being thus, when my Uncle Bill saw Aunt Lois take up some coals on a shovel, and look towards the best-room door, he came and laid his hand on hers directly, with, “Now, Lois, what are you going to do?”
“Going to make up a fire in the best room.”
“Now, Lois, I protest. You ‘re not going to do any such thing. Hang grandeur and all that.
‘ ‘mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there ‘s no place like home,’
you know; and home means right here by mother’s kitchen-fire, where she and father sit, and want to sit. You know nobody ever wants to go into that terrible best room of yours.”
“Now, Bill, how you talk!” said Aunt Lois, smiling, and putting down her shovel.
“But then, you see,” she said, the anxious cloud again settling down on her brow, – “you see, we ‘re exposed to calls, and who knows who may come in? I should n’t wonder if Major Broad, or Miss Mehitable, might drop in, as they saw you down from College.”
“Let ’em come; never fear. They all know we ‘ve got a best room, and that ‘s enough. Or, if you ‘d rather, I ‘ll pin a card to that effect upon the door; and then we ‘ll take our ease. Or, better than that, I ‘ll take ’em all in and show ’em our best chairs, andirons, and mahogany table, and then we can come out and be comfortable.”
“Bill, you ‘re a saucy boy,” said Aunt Lois, looking at him indulgently as she subsided into her chair.
“Yes, that he always was,” said my grandfather, with a smile of the kind that fathers give to frisky sophomores in college.
“Well, come sit down, anyway,” said my grandmother, “and let ‘s have a little Sunday-night talk.”
“Sunday-night talk, with all my heart,” said Bill, as he seated himself comfortably right in front of the cheerful blaze. “Well, it must be about ‘the meetin’,’ of course. Our old meeting-house looks as elegant as ever. Of all the buildings I ever saw to worship any kind of a being in, that meeting-house certainly is the most extraordinary. It really grows on me every time I come home!”
“Come, now Bill,” said Aunt Lois.
“Come, now! Ain’t I coming? Have n’t said anything but what you all know. Said our meeting-house was extraordinary, and you all know it is; and there ‘s extraordinary folks in it. I don’t believe so queer a tribe could be mustered in all the land of Israel as we congregate. I hope some of our oddities will be in this evening after cider. I need to study a little, so that I can give representations of nature in our club at Cambridge. Nothing like going back to nature, you know. Old Obscue, seems to me, was got up in fine fancy this morning; and Sam Lawson had an extra touch of the hearse about him. Hepsy must have been disciplining him this morning, before church. I always know when Sam is fresh from a matrimonial visitation: he ‘s peculiarly pathetic about the gills at those times. Why don’t Sam come in here?”
“I ‘m sure I hope he won’t,” said Aunt Lois. “One reason why I wanted to sit in the best room to-night was that every old tramper and queer object sees the light of our kitchen fire, and comes in for a lounge and a drink; and then, when one has genteel persons calling, it makes it unpleasant.”
“O, we all know you ‘re aristocratic, Lois; but, you see, you can’t be indulged. You must have your purple and fine linen and your Lazarus at the gate come together some time, just as they do in the meeting-house and the graveyard. Good for you all, if not agreeable.”
Just at this moment the conversation was interrupted by a commotion in the back sink-room, which sounded much like a rush of a flight of scared fowl. It ended with a tumble of a row of milk-pans toward chaos, and the door flew open and Uncle Fly appeared.
“What on earth!” said my grandmother, starting up. “That you, ‘Liakim? Why on earth must you come in the back way and knock down all my milk-pans?”
“Why, I came ‘cross lots from Aunt Bathsheba Sawin’s,” said Uncle Fly, dancing in, “and I got caught in those pesky blackberry-bushes in the graveyard, and I do believe I ‘ve torn my breeches all to pieces,” he added, pirouetting and frisking with very airy gyrations, and trying vainly to get a view of himself behind, in which operation he went round and round as a cat does after her tail.
“Laws a-massy, ‘Liakim!” said my grandmother, whose ears were startled by a peculiar hissing sound in the sink-room, which caused her to spring actively in that direction. “Well, now, you have been and done it! You ‘ve gone and fidgeted the tap out of my beer-barrel, and here ‘s the beer all over the floor. I hope you ‘re satisfied now.”
“Sorry for it. Did n’t mean to. I ‘ll wipe it right up. Where ‘s a towel, or floor-cloth, or something?” cried Uncle Fly whirling in more active circles round and round, till he seemed to me to have a dozen pairs of legs.
“Do sit down, ‘Liakim,” said my grandmother. “Of course you did n’t mean to; but next time don’t come bustling and whirligigging through my back sink-room after dark. I do believe you never will be quiet till you ‘re in your grave.”
“Sit down, uncle,” said Bill. “Never mind mother, – she ‘ll come all right by and by. And never mind your breeches, – all things earthly are transitory, as Parson Lothrop told us to-day. Now let ‘s come back to our Sunday talk. Did ever anybody see such an astonishing providence as Miss Mehitable Rossiter’s bonnet to-day? Does it belong to the old or the new dispensation, do you think?”
“Bill, I ‘m astonished at you!” said Aunt Lois.
“Miss Mehitable is of a most respectable family,” said Aunt Keziah, reprovingly. “Her father and grandfather and great-grandfather were all ministers; and two of her mother’s brothers, Jeduthun and Amariah.”
“Now, take care, youngster,” said Uncle Fly. “You see you young colts must n’t be too airy. When a fellow begins to speak evil of bonnets, nobody knows where he may end.”
“Bless me, one and all of you,” said Bill, “I have the greatest respect for Miss Mehitable. Furthermore, I like her. She ‘s a real spicy old concern. I ‘d rather talk with her than any dozen of modern girls. But I do wish she ‘d give me that bonnet to put in our Cambridge cabinet. I ‘d tell ‘ em it was the wing of a Madagascar bat. Blessed old soul, how innocent she sat under it! – never knowing to what wandering thoughts it was giving rise. Such bonnets interfere with my spiritual progress.”
At this moment, by the luck that always brings in the person people are talking of, Miss Mehitable came in, with the identical old wonder on her head. Now, outside of our own blood-relations, no one that came within our doors ever received a warmer welcome than Miss Mehitable. Even the children loved her, with that instinctive sense by which children and dogs learn the discerning of spirits. To be sure she was as gaunt and brown as the Ancient Mariner, but hers was a style of ugliness that was neither repulsive nor vulgar. Personal un-comeliness has its differing characters, and there are some very homely women who have a style that amounts to something like beauty. I know that this is not the common view of the matter; but I am firm in the faith that some very homely women have a certain attraction about them which is increased by their homeliness. It is like the quaintness of Japanese china, – not beautiful, but having a strong, pronounced character, as far remote as possible from the ordinary and vulgar, and which, in union with vigorous and agreeable traits of mind, is more stimulating than any mere insipid beauty.
In short, Miss Mehitable was a specimen of what I should call the good-goblin style of beauty, and people liked her so much that they came to like the singularities which individualized her from all other people. Her features were prominent and harsh; her eyebrows were shaggy, and finished abruptly half across her brow, leaving but half an eyebrow on each side. She had, however, clear, trustworthy, steady eyes, of a greenish gray, which impressed one with much of that idea of steadfast faithfulness that one sees in the eyes of some good, homely dogs. “Faithful and true,” was written in her face as legibly as eyes could write it.
For the rest, Miss Mehitable had a strong mind, was an omnivorous reader, apt, ready in conversation, and with a droll, original way of viewing things, which made her society ever stimulating. To me her house was always full of delightful images, – a great, calm, cool, shady, old-fashioned house, full of books and of quaint old furniture, with a garden on one side where were no end of lilies, hollyhocks, pinks, and peonies, to say nothing of currants, raspberries, apples, and pears, and other carnal delights, all of which good Miss Mehitable was free to dispense to her child-visitors. It was my image of heaven to be allowed to go to spend an afternoon with Miss Mehitable, and establish myself, in a shady corner of the old study which contained her father’s library, over an edition of Æsop’s Fables illustrated with plates, which, opened, was an endless field of enchantment to me.
Miss Mehitable lived under the watch and charge of an ancient female domestic named Polly Shubel. Polly was a representative specimen of the now extinct species of Yankee serving-maids. She had been bred up from a child in the Rosseter family of some generations back. She was of that peculiar kind of constitution, known in New England, which merely becomes drier and tougher with the advance of time, without giving any other indications of old age. The exact number of her years was a point unsettled even among the most skilful genealogists of Oldtown. Polly was a driving, thrifty, doctrinal and practical female, with strong bones and muscles, and strong opinions, believing most potently in early rising, soap and sand, and the Assembly’s Catechism, and knowing certainly all that she did know. Polly considered Miss Mehitable as a sort of child under her wardship, and conducted the whole business of life for her with a sovereign and unanswerable authority. As Miss Mehitable’s tastes were in the world of books and ideas, rather than of physical matters, she resigned herself to Polly’s sway with as good a grace as possible, though sometimes she felt that it rather abridged her freedom of action.
Luckily for my own individual self, Polly patronized me, and gave me many a piece of good advice, sweetened with gingerbread, when I went to visit Miss Rossiter. I counted Miss Mehitable among my personal friends; so to-night, when she came in, I came quickly and laid hold of the skirt of her gown, and looked admiringly upon her dusky face, under the portentous shadow of a great bonnet shaded by nodding bows of that preternatural color which people used to call olive-green. She had a word for us all, a cordial grasp of the hand for my mother, who sat silent and thoughtful in her corner, and a warm hand-shake all round.
“You see,” she said, drawing out an old-fashioned snuff-box, and tapping upon it, “my house grew so stupid that I must come and share my pinch of snuff with you. It ‘s windy out to-night, and I should think a storm was brewing; and the rattling of one’s own window-blinds, as one sits alone, is n’t half so amusing as some other things.”
“You know, Miss Rossiter, we ‘re always delighted to have you come in,” said my grandmother, and my Aunt Lois, and my Aunt Keziah, all at once. This, by the way, was a little domestic trick that the females of our family had; and, as their voices were upon very different keys, the effect was somewhat peculiar. My Aunt Lois’s voice was high and sharp, my grandmother’s a hearty chest-tone, while Aunt Keziah’s had an uncertain buzz between the two, like the vibrations of a lose string; but as they all had corresponding looks and smiles of welcome, Miss Mehitable was pleased.
“I always indulge myself in thinking I am welcome,” she said. “And now pray how is our young scholar, Master William Badger? What news do you bring us from old Harvard?”
“Almost anything you want to hear Miss Mehitable. You know that I am your most devoted slave.”
“Not so sure of that, sir,” she said, with a whimsical twinkle of her eye. “Don’t you know that your sex are always treacherous? How do I know that you don’t serve up old Miss Rossiter when you give representations of the Oldtown curiosities there at Cambridge? We are a set here that might make a boy’s fortune in that line, – now are n’t we?”
“How do you know that I do serve up Oldtown curiosities?” said Bill, somewhat confused, and blushing to the roots of his hair.
“How do I know? Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? and can you help being a mimic, as you were born, always were and always will be?”
“O, but I ‘m sure, Miss Mehitable, Bill never would, – he has too much respect,” said Aunt Keziah and Aunt Lois, simultaneously again.
“Perhaps not; but if he wants to, he ‘s welcome. What are queer old women for, if young folks may not have a good laugh out of them now and then? If it ‘s only a friendly laugh, it ‘s just as good as crying, and better too. I ‘d like to be made to laugh at myself. I think generally we take ourselves altogether too seriously. What now, bright eyes?” she added, as I nestled nearer to her. “Do you want to come up into an old woman’s lap? Well, here you come. Bless me, what a tangle of curls we have here! Don’t your thoughts get caught in these curls sometimes?”
I looked bashful and wistful at this address, and Miss Mehitable went on twining my curls around her fingers, and trotting me on her knee, lulling me into a delicious dreaminess, in which she seemed to me to be one of those nice, odd-looking old fairy women that figure to such effect in stories.
The circle all rose again as Major Broad came in. Aunt Lois thought, with evident anguish, of the best room. Here was the major, sure enough, and we all sitting round the kitchen fire! But my grandfather and grandmother welcomed him cheerfully to their corner, and enthroned him in my grandfather’s splint-bottomed rocking-chair, where he sat far more comfortably than if he had been perched on a genteel, slippery-bottomed stuffed chair with claw feet.
The Major performed the neighborly kindnesses of the occasion in an easy way. He spoke a few words to my mother of the esteem and kindness he had felt for my father, in a manner that called up the blood into her thin cheeks, and made her eyes dewy with tears. Then he turned to the young collegian, recognizing him as one of the rising lights of Oldtown.
“Our only nobility now,” he said to my grandfather. “We ‘ve cut off everything else; no distinction now, sir, but educated and uneducated.”
“It is a hard struggle for our human nature to give up titles and ranks, though,” said Miss Mehitable. “For my part, I have a ridiculous kindness for them yet. I know it ‘s all nonsense; but I can’t help looking back to the court we used to have at the Government House in Boston. You know it was something to hear of the goings and doings of my Lord this and my Lady that., and of Sir Thomas and Sir Peter and Sir Charles, and all the rest of ’em.”
“Yes,” said Bill; “the Oldtown folks call their minister’s wife Lady yet.”
“Well, that ‘s a little comfort,” said Miss Mehitable; “one don’t want life an entire dead level. Do let us have one titled lady among us.”
“And a fine lady she is,” said the Major. “Our parson did a good thing in that alliance.”
While the conversation was thus taking a turn of the most approved genteel style, Aunt Keziah’s ears heard alarming premonitory sounds outside the door. “Who ‘s that at the scraper?” she said.
“O, it ‘s Sam Lawson,” said Aunt Lois, with a sort of groan. “You may be sure of that.”
“Come in, Sam, my boy,” said Uncle Bill, opening the door. “Glad to see you.”
“Wal now, Mr. Badger,” said Sam, with white eyes of veneration, “I ‘m real glad to see ye. I telled Hepsy you ‘d want to see me. You ‘re the fust one of my Saturday afternoon fishin’ boys that ‘s got into college, and I ‘m ‘mazing proud of ‘t. I tell you I walk tall, – ask ‘ em if I don’t, round to the store.”
“You always were gifted in that line,” said Bill. “But come, sit down in the corner and tell us what you ‘ve been about.”
“Wal, you see, I thought I ‘d jest go over to North Parish this afternoon, jest for a change, like, and I wanted to hear one of them Hopkintinsians they tell so much about; and Parson Simpson, he ‘s one on ’em.”
“Yu ought not to be roving off on Sunday, leaving your own meeting,” said my grandfather.
“Wal, you see, Deacon Badger, I ‘m interested in these ‘ere new doctrines. I met your Polly a goin’ over, too,” he said to Miss Mehitable.
“O yes,” said Miss Mehitable, “Polly is a great Hopkinsian. She can hardly have patience to sit under our Parson Lothrop’s preaching. It ‘s rather hard on me, because Polly makes it a point of conscience to fight every one of his discourses over to me in my parlor. Somebody gave Polly an Arminian tract last Sunday, entitled, ‘The Apostle Paul an Arminian.’ It would have done you good to hear Polly’s comments. ”Postle Paul an Arminian! He ‘s the biggest ‘lectioner of ’em all.'”
“That he is,” said my grandmother, warmly. “Polly ‘s read her Bible to some purpose.”
“Well, Sam, what did you think of the sermon?” said Uncle Bill.
“Wal,” said Sam, leaning over the fire, with his long, bony hands alternately raised to catch the warmth, and then dropped with an utter laxness, when the warmth became too pronounced, “Parson Simpson ‘s a smart man; but, I tell ye, it ‘s kind o’ discouragin’. Why, he said our state and condition by natur was just like this. We was clear down in a well fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin’ but glare ice; but we was under immediate obligations to get out, ’cause we was free, voluntary agents. But nobody ever had got out, and nobody would, unless the Lord reached down and took ’em. And whether he would or not nobody could tell; it was all sovereignty. He said there wa’ n’t one in a hundred, – not one in a thousand, – not one in ten thousand, – that would be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, ef that ‘s so they ‘re any of ’em welcome to my chance. And so I kind o’ ris up and come out, ’cause I ‘d got a pretty long walk home, and I wanted to go round by South Pond, and inquire about Aunt Sally Morse’s toothache.”
“I heard the whole sermon over from Polly,” said Miss Mehitable, “and as it was not a particularly cheerful subject to think of, I came over here.” These words were said with a sort of chilly, dreary sigh, that made me turn and look up in Miss Mehitable’s face. It looked haggard and weary, as of one tired of struggling with painful thoughts.
“Wal,” said Sam Lawson, “I stopped a minute round to your back door, Miss Rossiter, to talk with Polly about the sermon. I was a tellin’ Polly that that ‘ere was puttin’ inability a leetle too strong.”
“Not a bit, not a bit,” said Uncle Fly, “so long as it ‘s moral inability. There ‘s the point, ye see, – moral, – that ‘s the word. That makes it all right.”
“Wal,” said Sam, “I was a puttin’ it to Polly this way. Ef a man ‘s cut off his hands, it ain’t right to require him to chop wood. Wal, Polly, she says he ‘d no business to cut his hands off; and so he ought to be required to chop the wood all the same. Wal, I telled her it was Adam chopped our hands off. But she said, no; it was we did it in Adam, and she brought up the catechise plain enough, – We sinned in him, and fell with him.'”
“She had you there, Sam,” said Uncle Fly, with great content. “You won’t catch Polly tripping on the catechism.”
“Well, for my part,” said Major Broad, “I don’t like these doctrinal subtilties, Deacon Badger. Now I ‘ve got a volume of Mr. Addison’s religious writings that seem to me about the right thing. They ‘re very pleasing reading. Mr. Addison is my favorite author of a Sunday.”
“I ‘m afraid Mr. Addison had nothing but just mere morality and natural religion,” said my grandmother, who could not be withheld from bearing her testimony. “You don’t find any of the discriminating doctrines in Mr. Addison. Major Broad, did you ever read Mr. Bellamy’s ‘True Religion Delineated and Distinguished from all Counterfeits ‘?”
“No, madam, I never did,” said Major Broad.
“Well, I earnestly hope you will read that book,” said my grandmother.
“My wife is always at me about one good book or another,” said my grandfather; “but I manage to do with my old Bible, I have n’t used that up yet.”
“I should know about Dr. Bellamy’s book by this time,” said Miss Mehitable, “for Polly intrenches herself in that, and preaches out of it daily. Polly certainly missed her vocation when she was trained for a servant. She is a born professor of theology. She is so circumstantial about all that took place at the time the angels fell, and when the covenant was made with Adam in the Garden of Eden, that I sometimes question whether she really might not have been there personally. Polly is particularly strong on Divine sovereignty. She thinks it applies to everything under the sun except my affairs. Those she chooses to look after herself.”
“Well,” said Major Broad, “I am not much of a theologian. I want to be taught my duty. Parson Lothrop’s discourses are generally very clear and practical, and they suite me.”
“They are good as far as they go,” said my grandmother; “but I like good, strong, old-fashioned doctrine. I like such writers as Mr. Edwards and Dr. Bellamy and Dr. Hopkins. It ‘s all very well, your essays on cheerfulness and resignation and all that; but I want something that takes strong hold of you, so that you feel something has got you that can hold.”
“The Cambridge Platform, for instance,” said Uncle Bill.
“Yes, my son, the Cambridge platform. I ain’t ashamed of it. It was made by men whose shoe-latchet we are n’t worthy to unloose. I believe it, – every word on ‘t. I believe it, and I ‘m going to believe it.”
“And would if there was twice as much of it,” said Uncle Bill. “That ‘s right, mother, stand up for your colors. I admire your spirit. But, Sam, what does Hepsy think of all this? I suppose you enlighten her when you return from your investigations.”
“Wal, I try to. But lordy massy, Mr. Badger, Hepsy don’t take no kind o’ interest in the doctrines, no more ‘n nothin’ at all. She ‘s so kind o’ worldly, Hepsy is. It ‘s allers meat and drink, meat and drink, with her. That ‘s all she ‘s thinkin’ of.”
“And if you would think more of such things, she would n’t have to think so much,” said Aunt Lois, sharply. “Don’t you know the Bible says, that the man that provideth not for his own household hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel?”
“I don’t see,” said Sam, slowly flopping his great hands up and down over the blaze, – “I railly don’t see why folks are allers a throwin’ up that ‘ere text at me. I ‘m sure I work as hard as a man ken. Why, I was a workin’ last night till nigh twelve o’clock, doin’ up odd jobs o’ blacksmithin’. They kin o’ cumulate, ye know.”
“Mr. Lawson,” said my grandmother, with a look of long-suffering patience, “how often and often must I tell you, that if you ‘d be steadier round your home, and work in regular hours, Hepsy would be more comfortable, and things would go on better?”
“Lordy massy, Mis’ Badger, bless your soul and body, ye don’t know nothin’ about it – ye don’t know nothin’ what I undergo. Hepsy, she is at me from morning till night. First it ‘s one thing, and then another. One day it rains, and her clothes-line breaks. She ‘s at me ’bout that. Now I tell her, ‘Hepsy, I ain’t to blame, – I don’t make the rain.’ And then another day she ‘s at me agin ’cause the wind ‘s east, and fetches the smoke down chimbley I tell her, ‘Hepsy, now look here, – do I make the wind blow?’ but it ‘s no use talkin’ to Hepsy.”
“Well, Sam, I take your part,” said Bill. “I always knew you was a regular martyr. Come, boys, go down cellar and draw a pitcher of cider. We ‘ll stay him with flagons, and comfort him with apples. Won’t we, Sam?”
As Sam was prime favorite with all boys, my brother Bill and I started willingly enough on this errand, one carrying the candle and the other a great stone pitcher of bountiful proportions, which always did hospitable duty on similar occasions.
Just as we returned, bearing our pitcher, there came another rap at the outside door of the kitchen, and Old Betty Poganut and Sally Wonsamug stood at the door.
“Well, now, Mis’ Badger,” said Betty, “Sally and me, we thought we must jest run in, we got so scar’t. We was coming through that Bill Morse’s woods, and there come such a flash o’ lightin’ it most blinded us, and the wind blew enough to blow a body over; and we thought there was a storm right down on us, and we run jest as fast as we could. We did n’t know what to do, we was so scar’t. I ‘m mortal ‘fraid of lightning,”
“Why, Betty, you forgot the sermon to-day. You should have said your prayers, as Parson Lothrop tells you,” said my grandfather.
“Well, I did kind o’ put up a sort o’ silent ‘jaculation, as a body may say. That is, I jest said, ‘O Lord,’ and kind o’ gin him a wink, you know.”
“O, you did?” said my grandfather.
“Yes, I kind o’ thought He ‘d know what I meant.”
My grandfather turned with a smile to Miss Mehitable. “These Indians have their own wild ways of looking at things after all.”
“Well, now, I s’pose you have n’t had a bit of supper, either of you,” said my grandmother, getting up. “It ‘s commonly the way of it.”
“Well, to tell the truth, I was sayin’ to Sarah that if we come down to Mis’ Deacon Badger’s I should n’t wonder if we got something good,” said Betty, her broad, coarse face and baggy cheeks beginning to be illuminated with a smile.
“Here, Horace, you come and hold the candle while I go into the buttery and get ’em some cold pork and beans,” said my grandmother, cheerily. “The poor creturs don’t get a good meal of victuals very often; and I baked a good lot on purpose.”
If John Bunyan had known my grandmother, he certainly would have introduced her in some of his histories as “the house-keeper whose name was Bountiful”, and under her care an ample meal of brown bread and pork and beans was soon set forth on the table in the corner of the kitchen, to which the two hungry Indian women sat down with the appetite of wolves. A large mug was placed between them, which Uncle Bill filled to the brim with cider.
“I s’pose you ‘d like twice a mug better than once a mug, Sally,” he said, punning on her name.
“O, if the mug ‘s only big enough,” said Sally, her snaky eyes gleaming with appetite; “and it ‘s always a good big mug one gets here.”
Sam Lawson’s great white eyes began irresistibly to wander in the direction of the plentiful cheer which was being so liberally dispensed at the other side of the room.
“Want some, Sam, my boy?” said Uncle Bill, with a patronizing freedom.
“Why, bless your soul, Master Bill, I would n’t care a bit if I took a plate o’ them beans and some o’ that ‘ere pork. Hepsy did n’t save no beans for me; and, walkin’ all the way from North Parish, I felt kind o’ empty and windy, as a body may say. You know Scriptur’ tells about bein’ filled with the east wind; but I never found it noways satisfyin’, – it sets sort o’ cold on the stomach.”
“Draw up, Sam, and help yourself,” said Uncle Bill, putting plate and knife and fork before him; and Sam soon showed that he had a vast internal capacity for the stowing away of beans and brown bread.
Meanwhile Major Broad and my grandfather drew their chairs together, and began a warm discussion of the Constitution of the United States, which had been recently presented for acceptance in a Convention of the State of Massachusetts.
“I have n’t seen you, Major Broad,” said my grandfather, “since you came back from the Convention. I ‘m very anxious to have our State of Massachusetts accept that Constitution. We ‘re in an unsettled condition now; we don’t know fairly where we are. If we accept this Constitution, we shall be a nation, – we shall have something to go to work on.”
“Well, Deacon Badger, to say the truth, I could not vote for this Constitution in Convention. They have adopted it by a small majority; but I shall be bound to record my dissent from it.”
“Pray, Major, what are your objections?” said Miss Mehitable.
“I have two. One is, it gives too much power to the President. There ‘s an appointing power and a power of patronage that will play the mischief some day in the hands of an ambitious man. That ‘s one objection. The other is the recognizing and encouraging of slavery in the Constitution. That is such a dreadful wrong, – such a shameful inconsistency, – when we have just come through a battle for the doctrine that all men are free and equal, to turn round and found our national government on a recognition of African slavery. It cannot and will not come to good.”
“O, well,” said my grandfather, “slavery will gradually die out. You see how it is going in the New England States.”
“I cannot think so,” said the Major. “I have a sort of feeling about this that I cannot resist. If we join those States that still mean to import and use slaves, our nation will meet some dreadful punishment. I am certain of it.” *
“Well, really,” said my grandfather, “I ‘m concerned to hear you speak so. I have felt such anxiety to have something settled. You see, without a union we are all afloat, – we are separate logs, but no raft.”
“Yes,” said Miss Mehitable, “but nothing can be settled that is n’t founded on right. We ought to dig deep, and lay our foundations on a rock, when we build for posterity.”
“Were there many of your way of thinking in the Convention, Major?” said my grandfather.
“Well, we had a pretty warm discussion, and we came very near to carrying it. Now, in Middlesex County, for instance where we are, there were only seventeen in favor of the Constitution, and twenty-five against; and in Worcester County there were only seven in favor and forty-three against. Well, they carried it at last by a majority of nineteen; but the minority recorded their protest. Judge Widgery of Portland, General Thomson of Topsham, and Dr. Taylor of Worcester, rather headed the opposition. Then the town of Andover instructed its representative, Mr. Symmes, to vote against it, but he did n’t, he voted on the other side, and I understand they are dreadfully indignant about it. I saw a man from Andover last week who said that he actually thought Symmes would be obliged to leave the town, he was so dreadfully unpopular.”
“Well, Major Broad, I agree with you,” said my grandmother, heartily, “and I honor you for the stand you took. Slavery is a sin and a shame; and I say, with Jacob, ‘O my soul, come not thou into their secret, – unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united.’ I wish we may keep clear on ‘t. I don’t want anything that we can’t ask God’s blessing on heartily, and we certainly can’t on this. Why, anybody that sees that great scar on Cæsar’s forehead sees what slavery comes to.”
My grandmother always pointed her anti-slavery arguments with an appeal to this mark of ill-usage which old Cæsar had received at the hands of a brutal master years before, and the appeal never failed to convince the domestic circle.
“Well,” said my grandfather, after some moments of silence, in which he sat gazing fixedly at the great red coals of a hickory log, “you see, Major, it ‘s done, and can’t be helped.”
“It ‘s done,” said the Major, “but in my opinion mischief will come of it as sure as there is a god ‘n heaven.”
“Let ‘s hope not,” said my grandfather, placidly.
Outside the weather was windy and foul, the wind rattling doors, shaking and rumbling down the chimney, and causing the great glowing circle lighted by the fire to seem warmer and brighter. The Indian woman and Sam Lawson, having finished their meal and thoroughly cleaned out the dishes, grouped themselves about the end of the ingle already occupied by black Cæsar, and began a little private gossip among themselves.
“I say,” says Sam, raising his voice to call my grandfather’s attention, “do you know, Deacon Badger, whether anybody is living in the Dench house now?”
“There was n’t, the last I knew about it,” said my grandfather.
“Wal, you won’t make some folks believe but what that ‘ere house is haunted.”
“Haunted!” said Miss Mehitable; “nothing more likely. What old house is n’t? – if one only knew it; and that certainly ought to be if ever a house was.”
“But this ‘ere ‘s a regular haunt,” said San. “I was a talkin’ the other night with Bill Payne and Jake Marshall, and they both on ’em said that they ‘d seen strange things in them grounds, – they ‘d seen a figger of a man – “
“With his head under his arm,” suggested Uncle Bill.
“No, a man in a long red cloak,” said Sam Lawson, “such as Sir Harry Frankland used to wear.”
“Poor Sir Harry!” said Miss Mehitable, “has he come to that?”
“Did you know Sir Harry?” said Aunt Lois.
“I have met him once or twice a the Governor’s house,” said Miss Mehitable. “Lady Lothrop knew Lady Frankland very well.”
“Well, Sam,” said Uncle Bill, “do let ‘s hear the end of this haunting.”
“Nothin’, only the other night I was a goin’ over to watch with Lem Moss, and I passed pretty nigh the Dench place, and I thought I ‘d jest look round it a spell. And as sure as you ‘re alive I see smoke a comin’ out of the chimbley.”
“I did n’t know as ghosts ever used the fireplaces,” said Uncle Bill. “Well, Sam, did you go in?”
“No, I was pretty much in a hurry; but I telled Jake and Bill, and then they each on ’em had something to match that they ‘d seen. As nigh as I can make it out, there ‘s that ‘ere boy that they say was murdered and thrown down that ‘ere old well walks sometimes. And then there ‘s a woman appears to some, and this ‘ere man in a red cloak; and they think it ‘s Sir Harry in his red cloak.”
“For my part,” said Aunt Lois, “I never had much opinion of Sir Harry Frankland, or Lady Frankland either. I don’t think such goings on ever ought to be countenanced in society.”
“They both repented bitterly, – repented in sackcloth and ashes,” said Miss Mehitable. “And if God forgives such sins, why should n’t we?”
“What was the story?” said Major Broad.
“Why,” said Aunt Lois, “have n’t you heard of Agnes Surridge, of Marblehead? She was housemaid in a tavern there, and Sir Harry fell in love with her, and took her and educated her. That was well enough; but when she ‘d done going to school he took her home to his house in Boston, and called her his daughter; although people became pretty sure that the connection was not what it should be, and they refused to have anything to do with her. So he bought this splendid place out in the woods, and built a great palace of a house, and took Miss Agnes out there. People that wanted to be splendidly entertained, and that were not particular as to morals, used to go out to visit them.”
“I used to hear great stories of their wealth and pomp and luxury,” said my grandmother, “but I mourned over it, that it should come to this in New England, that people could openly set such an example and be tolerated. It would n’t have been borne a generation before, I can tell you. No, indeed, – the magistrates would have put a stop to it. But these noblemen, when they came over to America, seemed to think themselves lords of God’s heritage, and free to do just as they pleased.”
“But,” said Miss Mehitable, “they repented, as I said. He took her to England, and there his friends refused to receive her; and then he was appointed Ambassador to Lisbon, and he took her there. On the day of the great earthquake Sir Harry was riding with a lady of the court when the shock came, and in a moment, without warning, they found themselves buried under the ruins of a building they were passing. He wore a scarlet cloak, as was the fashion; and they say that in her dying agonies the poor creature bit through this cloak and sleeve into the flesh of his arm, and made a mark that he carried to his dying day. Sir Harry was saved by Agnes Surridge. She came over the ruins, calling and looking for him, and he heard her voice and answered, and she got men to come and dig him out. When he was in that dreadful situation, he made a vow to God, if he would save his life, that he would be a different man. And he was a changed man from that day. He was married to Agnes Surridge as soon as they could get a priest to perform the ceremony; and when he took her back to England all his relations received her, and she was presented in court and moved in society with perfect acceptance.”
“I don’t think it ever ought to have been,” said Aunt Lois. “Such women never ought to be received.”
“What! is there no place for repentance for a woman?” said Miss Mehitable. “Christ said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.'”
I noticed again that sort of shiver of feeling in Miss Mehitable; and there was a peculiar thrill in her voice, as she said these words, that made me sensible that she was speaking from some inward depth of feeling.
“Don’t you be so hard and sharp Lois,” said my grandmother; “sinners must have patience with sinners.”
“Especially with sinners of quality, Lois,” said Uncle Bill. “By all accounts Sir Harry and Lady Frankland swept all before them when they came back to Boston.”
“Of course,” said Miss Mehitable; “what was done in court would be done in Boston, and whom Queen Charlotte received would be received in our upper circles. Lady Lothrop never called on her till she was Lady Frankland, but after that I believe she has visited out at their place.”
“Wal, I ‘ve heerd ’em say,” said San Lawson, “that it would take a woman two days jest to get through cleaning the silver that there was in that ‘ere house, to say nothing about the carpets and the curtains and the tapestry. But then, when the war broke out, Lady Frankland, she took most of it back to England, I guess, and the house has been back and forward to one and another. I never could rightly know jest who did live in it. I heard about some French folks that lived there one time. I thought some day, when I had n’t nothin’ to do, I ‘d jest walk over to old granny Walker’s, that lives over the other side of Hopkinton. She used to be a housekeeper to Lady Frankland, and I could get particulars out o’ her.”
“Well,” said Miss Mehitable, “I know one woman that must go back to a haunted house, and that is this present one.” So saying, she rose and put me off her knee.
“Send this little man over to see me to-morrow,” she said to my mother. “Polly has a cake for him, and I shall find something to amuse him.”
Major Broad, with old-fashioned gallantry, insisted on waiting on Miss Mehitable home; and Sam Lawson reluctantly tore himself from the warm corner to encounter the asperities of his own fireside.
“Here, Sam,” said good-natured Bill, – “here ‘s a great red apple for Hepsy.”
“Ef I dares to go nigh enough to give it to her,” said Sam, with a grimace. “She ‘s allers a castin’ it up at me that I don’t want to set with her at home. But lordy massy, she don’t consider that a fellow don’t want to set and be hectored and lectured when he can do better elsewhere.”
“True enough, Sam; but give my regards to her.”
As to the two Indian women, they gave it as their intention to pass the night by the kitchen fire; and my grandmother, to whom such proceedings were not at all strange, assented, – producing for each a blanket, which had often seem similar service. My grandfather closed the evening by bringing out his great Bible and reading a chapter. Then we all knelt down in prayer.
So passed an evening in my grandmother’s kitchen, – where religion, theology, politics, the gossip of the day, and the legends of the supernatural all conspired to weave a fabric of thought quaint and various. Intense earnestness, a solemn undertone of deep mournful awe, was overlaid with quaint traceries of humor, strange and weird in their effect. I was one of those children who are all ear, – dreamy listeners, who brood over all that they hear, without daring to speak of it; and in this evening’s conversation I had heard enough to keep my eyes broad open long after my mother had lain me in bed. The haunted house and its vague wonders filled my mind, and I determined to question Sam Lawson yet more about it.
But now that I have fairly introduced myself, the scene of my story, and many of the actors in it, I must take my reader off for a while, and relate a history that must at last blend with mine in one story.
CHAPTER VII.
OLD CRAB SMITH.
ON the brow of yonder hill you see that old, red farm-house, with its slanting back roof relieved against the golden sky of the autumn afternoon. The house lifts itself up dark and clear under the shadow of two great elm-trees that droop over it, and is the first of a straggling, irregular cluster of farm-houses that form the village of Needmore. A group of travellers, sitting on a bit of rock in the road below the hill on which the farm-house stands, are looking up to it, in earnest conversation.
“Mother, if you can only get up there, we ‘ll ask them to let you go in and rest,” said a little boy of nine years to a weary, pale, sick-looking woman who sat as in utter exhaustion and discouragement on the rock. A little girl two years younger than the boy sat picking at the moss at her feet, and earnestly listening to her older brother with the air of one who is attending to the words of a leader.
“I don’t feel as if I could get a step farther,” said the woman; and the increasing deadly paleness of her face confirmed her words.
“O mother, don’t give up,” said the boy; “just rest here a little and lean on me, and we ‘ll get you up the hill; and then I ‘m sure they ‘ll take you in. Come, now; I ‘ll run and get you some water in our tin cup, and you ‘ll feel better soon.” And the boy ran to a neighboring brook and filled a small tin cup, and brought the cool water to his mother.
She drank it, and then, fixing a pair of dark, pathetic eyes on the face of her boy, she said: “My dear child, you have always been such a blessing to me! What should I do without you?”
“Well, mother, now if you feel able, just rest on my shoulder, and Tina will take the bundle. You take it, Tina, and we ‘ll find a place to rest.”
And so, slowly and with difficulty, the three wound their way up to the grassy top of the hill where stood the red house. This house belonged to a man named Caleb Smith, whose character had caused the name he bore to degenerate into another which was held to be descriptive of his nature, namely, “Crab “; and the boys of the vicinity commonly expressed the popular idea of the man by calling him “Old Crab Smith.” His was one of those sour, cross, gnarly natures that now and then are to be met with in New England, which, like, knotty cider-apples, present a compound of hardness, sourness, and bitterness. It was affirmed that a continual free indulgence in very hard cider as a daily beverage was one great cause of this churlishness of temper; but be that as it may, there was not a boy in the village that did not know and take account of it in all his estimates and calculations, as much as of northeast storms and rainy weather. No child ever willingly carried a message to him; no neighbor but dreaded to ask a favor of him; nobody hoped to borrow or beg of him; nobody willingly hired themselves out to him, or did him cheerful service. In short, he was a petrified man, walled out from all neighborhood sympathies, and standing alone in his crabbedness. And it was to this man’s house that the wandering orphan boy was leading his poor sick mother.
The three travellers approached a neat back porch on the shady side of the house, where an old woman sat knitting. This was Old Crab Smith’s wife, or, more properly speaking, his life-long bond-slave, – the only human being whom he could so secure to himself that she should be always at hand for him to vent that residue of ill-humor upon which the rest of the world declined to receive. Why half the women in the world marry the men they do, is a problem that might puzzle any philosopher; how any woman could marry Crab Smith, was the standing wonder of all the neighborhood. And yet Crab’s wife was a modest, industrious, kindly creature, who uncomplainingly toiled from morning till night to serve and please him, and received her daily allowance of grumbling and fault-finding with quiet submission. She tried all she could to mediate between him and the many whom his ill-temper was constantly provoking. She did surreptitious acts of kindness here and there, to do away the effects of his hardness, and shrunk and quivered for fear of being detected in goodness, as much as many another might for fear of being discovered in sin. She had been many times a mother, – had passed through all the trials and weaknesses of maternity without one tender act of consideration, one encouraging word. Her children had grown up and gone from her, always eager to leave the bleak, ungenial home, and go out to shift for themselves in the world, and now, in old age, she was still working. Worn to a shadow, – little, old, wrinkled, bowed, – she was still about the daily round of toil, and still the patient recipient of the murmurs and chidings of her tyrant.
“My mother is so sick she can’t get any farther,” said a little voice from under the veranda; “won’t you let her come in and lie down awhile?”
“Massy, child,” said the little old woman, coming forward with a trembling, uncertain step. “Well, she does look beat out, to be sure. Come up and rest ye a bit.”
“If you ‘ll only let me lie down awhile and rest me,” said a faint, sweet voice.
“Come up here,” said the old woman, standing quivering like a gray shadow on the top doorstep; and, shading her wrinkled forehead with her hand, she looked with a glance of habitual apprehension along the road where the familiar cart and oxen of her tyrant might be expected soon to appear on their homeward way, and rejoiced in her little old heart that he was safe out of sight. “Yes, come in,” she said, opening the door of a small ground-floor bedroom that adjoined the apartment known in New England houses as the sink-room, and showing them a plain bed.
The worn and wasted stranger sunk down on it, and, as she sunk, her whole remaining strength seemed to collapse, and something white and deathly fell, as if it had been a shadow, over her face.
“Massy to us! she ‘s fainted clean away,” said the poor old woman quiveringly. “I must jest run for the camphire.”
The little boy seemed to have that unchildlike judgment and presence of mind that are the precocious development of want and sorrow. He ran to a water-pail, and, dipping his small tin cup, he dashed the water in his mother’s face, and fanned her with his little torn straw hat. When the old woman returned, the invalid was breathing again, and able to take a few swallows of camphor and water which had been mixed for her.
“Sonny,” said the old woman, “you are a nice little nurse – a good boy. You jest take care now; and here ‘s a turkey-feather fan to fan her with; and I ‘ll get on the kettle to make her a cup of tea. We ‘ll bring her round with a little nursing. Been walking a long way, I calculate?”
“Yes,” said the boy, “she was trying to get to Boston.”
“What, going afoot?”
“We did n’t mind walking, the weather is so pleasant,” said the boy; “and Tina and I like walking; but mother got sick a day or two ago, and ever since she has been so tired!”
“Jes’ so,” said the old woman, looking compassionately on the bed. “Well, I ‘ll make up the fire and get her some tea.”
The fire was soon smoking in the great, old-fashioned kitchen chimney, for the neat, labor-saving cook-stove had as yet no being, and the thin, blue smoke, curing up in the rosy sunset air, received prismatic coloring which a painter would have seized with enthusiasm.
Far otherwise, however, was its effect on the eye of Old Crab Smith, as, coming up the hill, his eye detected the luminous vapor going up from his own particular chimney.
“So, burning out wood, – always burning out wood. I told her that I would n’t have tea got at night. These old women are crazy and bewitched after tea, and they don’t care if they burn up your tables and chairs to help their messes. Why a plague can’t she eat cold pork and potatoes as well as I, and drink her mug of cider? but must go to getting up her fire and biling her kettle. I ‘ll see to that. Halloa there,” he said, as he stamped up on to the porch, “what the devil you up to now? I s’pose you think I hain’t got nothing else to do but split up wood for you to burn out.”
“Father, it ‘s nothing but a little brush and a few chips, jest to bile the kettle.”
“Bile the kettle, bile the kettle! Jest like yer lazy, shif’less ways. What must you be a bilin’ the kettle for?”
“Father, I jest want to make a little tea for a sick woman.”
“A sick woman! What sick woman?”
“There was a poor sick woman came along this afternoon with two little children.”
“Wal, I s’pose you took ’em in. I s’pose you think we keep the poor-house, and that all the trampers belong to us. We shall have to go to the poor-house ourselves before long, I tell ye. But you never believe anything I say. Why could n’t you ‘a’ sent her to the selectmen? I don’t know why I must keep beggars’ tavern.”
“Father, father, don’t speak so loud. The poor critter wa’ n’t able to stir another step, and fainted dead away, and we had to get her on to a bed.”
“And we shall have her and her two brats through a fit of sickness. That ‘s just like you. Wal, we shall all go to the poor-house together before long, and then you ‘ll believe what I say, wont ye? But I won’t have it so. She may stay to-night, but to-morrow morning I ‘ll cart her over to Joe Scran’s, bright and early, brats and all.”
There was within hearing of this conversation a listener whose heart was dying within her, – sinking deeper and deeper at every syllable, – a few words will explain why.
A younger son of a family belonging to the English gentry had come over to America as a commissioned officer near the close of the Revolutionary war. He had persuaded to a private marriage the daughter of a poor country curate, a beautiful young girl, whom he induced to elope with him, and share the fortunes of an officer’s life in America. Her parents died soon after; her husband proved a worthless, drunken, dissipated fellow and this poor woman had been through all the nameless humiliations and agonies which beset helpless womanhood in the sole power of such a man. Submissive, gentle, trusting, praying, entreating, hoping against hope, she had borne with him many vicissitudes and reverses, – always believing that at last the love of his children, if not of her, would awaken a better nature within him. But the man steadily went downward instead of upward, and the better part of him by slow degrees died away, till he came to regard his wife and children only as so many clogs on his life, and to meditate night and day on a scheme to abandon them, and return, without their encumbrance, to his own country. It was with a distant outlook to some such result that he had from the first kept their marriage an entire secret from his own friends. When the English army, at the close of the war, re-embarked for England, he carried his cowardly scheme into execution. He had boarded his wife and children for a season in a country farm-house in the vicinity of Boston, with the excuse of cheapness of lodgings. Then one day his wife received a letter enclosing a sum of money, and saying, in such terms as bad men can find to veil devilish deeds, that all was over between them, and that ere she got this he should be on the ocean. The sorest hurt of all was that the letter denied the validity of their marriage; and the poor child found, to her consternation, that the marriage certificate, which she had always kept among her papers, was gone with her husband.
The first result of this letter had been a fit of sickness, wherein her little stock of money had melted almost away, and then she had risen from her bed determined to find her way to Boston, and learn, if possible, from certain persons with whom he had lodged before his departure, his address in England, that she might make one more appeal to him. But, before she had walked far the sickness returned upon her, till, dizzy and faint, she had lain down, as we have described, on the bed of charity.
She had thought, ever since she received that letter, that she had reached the bottom of desolation, – that nothing could be added to her misery; but the withering, harsh sounds which reached her ear revealed a lower deep in the lowest depths. Hitherto on her short travels she had met only that kindly country hospitality which New England, from one end to the other, always has shown to the stranger. No one had refused a good meal of brown bread and rich milk to her and her children, and more often the friendly housewife, moved by her delicate appearance, had unlocked the sanctum where was deposited her precious tea caddy, and brewed an amber cup of tea to sustain the sickly-looking wanderer. She and her children had been carried here and there, as occasion offered, a friendly mile or two, when Noah or Job or Sol “hitched up the critter” to go to mill or country store. The voice of harsh, pitiless rejection smote on her ear for the first time, and it seemed to her the drop too much in her cup. She turned her face to the wall and said, “O my God, I cannot bear this! I cannot, I cannot!” She would have said, “Let me die,” but that she was tied to life by the two helpless, innocent ones who shared her misery. The poorest and most desolate mother feels that her little children are poorer and more desolate than she; and, however much her broken spirit may long for the rest of Paradise, she is held back by the thought that to abide in the flesh is needful to them. Even in her uttermost destitution the approaching shadow of the dark valley was a terror to the poor soul, – not for her own sake, but for theirs. The idea of a harsh, unpitiful world arose before her for the first time, and the thought of leaving her little ones in it unprotected was an anguish which rent her heart.