[Illustration: Musical staff] takes another, The same repeated without conclusion.
SONG OF THE GOLDEN ROBIN. (_Icterus Baltimore._) [Illustration: Musical staff]
[Footnote 1: Mr. Charles S. Paine, of East Randolph, who, I believe, was the first to observe this habit of the Song-Sparrow.]
[Footnote 2: Mr. Augustus Fowler of Danversport, who has made one of the finest collections of the eggs of native birds. His drawings of the same are beautifully executed, accompanied by representations of the nests and of the foliage that surrounded them. This gentleman and his brother, Mr. S.P. Fowler, have found leisure, during the intervals of their occupation in a mechanical art, to acquire a knowledge of certain branches of natural history which would do honor to a professor.]
THE OLD WELL.
On a bright April morning many years ago, a stout, red-faced old gentleman, Geoffrey Purcill, followed by several workmen bearing shovels and pick-axes, took his way to a little knoll on which stood a wide-spreading chestnut-tree. When they reached the top of the knoll, the old man paused a moment and then struck his gold-headed cane upon the ground at some little distance from the trunk of the tree, saying, “Dig here.”
The workmen looked at each other and then at their master.
“It would be useless to dig a well here, Sir,” said one of the workmen, very respectfully,–“no water would ever come into it”
“Who asked for your opinion?” inquired Geoffrey, in an angry tone. “Do as I bid you;–the well shall be digged here, and water _shall_ come into it.”
The man ventured no further remonstrance; he took off his jacket, and struck his pickaxe into the hard, dry soil near the point where the cane rested.
Geoffrey Purcill was a choleric old gentleman, who, having had his own way all his life, was by no means inclined to forego that privilege now that he was advanced in years. As he sat beneath the chestnut-tree, one warm spring day, he felt very thirsty, and he suddenly thought what a good thing it would be to have a well there, so that he might refresh himself with a draught of clear, cool water, without the trouble of returning to the house. The more thirsty he grew, the pleasanter seemed the project to him,–a large, deep well, neatly stoned, with a sweep and buckets,–it would be a pretty object to look at, as well as comfort to man and beast. The well should be digged forthwith, and what Geoffrey Purcill once resolved upon he was not slow to execute; and, despite the remonstrances of those who knew better than he, the work was commenced at once.
A more unpromising place for a well could not have been selected in all his extensive grounds; but he was not a man to be patiently baffled even by Nature herself, and he stood looking with grim satisfaction at the hole which rapidly widened and deepened under the vigorous efforts of his sturdy workmen.
Day after day old Geoffrey watched his workmen on the knoll. The well increased in size till it was large enough to have watered a whole caravan,–but the desert of Sahara itself was not drier. Geoffrey fumed, raved, and swore; and when two of the men were killed by the falling of the earth, and the rest absolutely refused to work any longer, he bade them go, a pack of ungrateful scoundrels as they were, and, procuring more laborers, declared “he would dig there till the Devil came to fetch him.”
Geoffrey was as good as his word;–he labored with a pertinacity worthy of a better object, and dug deeper into the bowels of the earth, and partly stoned his well,–but no water, save that which fell from heaven, ever appeared in it.
And when old Geoffrey was gathered to his fathers, he left his house and grounds to his only daughter, Eleanor Purcill, on the express condition that the well was not to be filled up, but to remain open till water did come into it.
* * * * *
One July day, when Geoffrey Purcill had been some twenty years with his fathers, or with Satan, (which two destinies might have been one and the same, after all, for he came of a turbulent, wicked race,) two children, a boy and girl, sat on the brink of the well and looked down into it. It was half filled with the rubbish of the fallen stones, but it was still deep, and dark enough to tempt their curious eyes into trying to discover what lay hidden in its shadowy depths. The great chestnut-tree, rich with drooping, feathery blossoms, shaded them from the burning sun,–a few stray beams only finding their way through the glossy leaves, and resting on the golden curls of the girl.
The boy leaned over the well, and peered into it;–the little girl bent forward, as if to do the same, but drew back again.
“Take hold of my hand, Mark,” said she, “and let me lean over as you do.”
“What do you want to look in for?” asked the boy,–“there is nothing to see. Oh, yes,” continued he, mischievously, “there is a horrid dragon, just such as St. George fought with, lying all curled up in the bottom of the well, with fire and smoke coming out of his mouth.”
Rosamond Purcill was too true a descendant of old Geoffrey to be frightened at the thought of a dragon. She caught hold of Mark’s arm to steady herself, and leaned over the well.
“Let me see! let me see!” cried she, eagerly.
Mark made one or two feints of pushing her in, but at last held her firmly by the waist, while she looked in vain for the fabulous monster below.
“Where is he, Mark? I don’t see anything, and I don’t believe you saw him.”
“Oh, yes, I did,” said Mark;–“there, don’t you see the end of his tail sticking out from under the largest stone? May-be he has had one little girl for breakfast this morning, and don’t care about another for luncheon, or else he would spring up after you, and gobble you up in a minute.”
“What stories, Mark! Aunt Eleanor says there are no dragons, nor ever were.”
“Pooh!” retorted Mark, contemptuously,–“Aunt Eleanor has not seen everything that there is to be seen in the world. Look again, Rosy.”
Again the little curly head was bent over the well, somewhat puzzled which to believe, Aunt Eleanor or Mark, but half-inclined to credit Mark’s eyes rather than Aunt Eleanor’s words.
“Do you think that can be one of his scales?” asked she, pointing to a small piece of tin which glittered in a stray sunbeam among the stones.
Mark’s eyes followed the direction of her finger, and he was about to declare that it must be a scale that the dragon had scraped off his back, wriggling among the stones, when both children were startled by a loud voice calling out, “What are you doing, children? You will fall into the well and break your good-for-nothing little necks!”
Mark and Rosamond drew back, and saw a young man, their brother Bradford, with a basket and a fishing-rod in his hand, coming up the knoll.
“Why are you here, Mark?” asked he. “Aunt Eleanor thinks it a dangerous place, and has forbidden you to play here.”
Mark looked up at his brother. “I come,” said he, sturdily, “for that very reason,–because I am told not to. I won’t mind Aunt Eleanor, nor any other woman.”
Bradford shook his head and burst out into a laugh. “Ah, Mark, my boy,” said he, with a serious, comical air, “it will do very well for you to talk,–you will find out, sooner or later, that all men have to do just what women wish.”
Mark opened his incredulous eyes, and inwardly resolved that this should never be the case with him; and considering that Bradford was only eighteen it is somewhat remarkable that he should have gained so much wisdom, either by observation or experience, at so early an age.
“Mark says,” chimed in Rosamond, “that there is a dragon at the bottom of the well; and I want to see him.”
“A dragon?” cried Bradford,–“Mark is a story-teller, and you are a goose;–but if there is one, I will catch him for you”;–and he stood on the brink of the well, and sportively threw his line into it.
“You are a pretty fellow to talk about catching a dragon, Brad!” retorted Mark, a little nettled at the tone in which Bradford spoke of him,–“you can’t even catch a shiner!”–and he glanced at Bradford’s empty basket.
Bradford laughed louder than before. “And for that very reason I expect to catch the dragon. One kind of a line will not catch all kinds of fish; and this line may be good for nothing but dragons, after all.–There! I’ve got a bite. Stand back, Rosy,” cried he, “the dragon will be on the grass in a minute.”
Bradford tried to pull up his line, but it was either entangled among the stones, or had some heavy object attached to it, for the rod bent beneath the weight as he with a strong pull endeavored to draw up his prize. Rosamond’s eyes opened to their widest extent, and, fully expecting to see the dragon swinging wide-mouthed in the air over her head, drew a little closer to Mark, who, on his part, wondered what Bradford was at, and whether he was not playing some trick upon him.
When the end of the line rose to the top of the well, they saw suspended by the two hooks, not a winged, scaly monster, but a small rusty box, in the fastenings of which the hooks had caught.
Rosamond drew a long breath,–“Is that all, Bradford? I am so sorry! I thought, to be sure, you had the dragon.”
“Never mind the dragon, Rosy,” cried he; “let us see what I have caught.
“Who knows but the purse of Fortunatus or the slipper of Cinderella may be in here?–they have been lost for many a day, and nobody knows where they are.”
Bradford knelt down on the grass, and, unhooking his line, strove to undo the rusty hasp; but it resisted all the efforts of his fingers, and it was only by the aid of a knife and a stone that he opened the box. In it was a morocco case, much discolored, but still in tolerable preservation, from which he drew a small manuscript book.
Rosamond’s disappointment was greater than before. “It is nothing but a writing-book, after all,” said she. “I wish you had not said anything about the purse or slipper, and then I should never have thought of them. You never heard anybody say where they thought the purse and slipper were hid,–did you?”
“Come, Rosy,” cried Mark, “come down to the meadow; there is nothing more to be got out of the old well. Let us leave Brad alone with his book and his fish.”
The children turned away towards the meadow,–Rosamond meditating upon the probability of her ever finding the purse and slipper, if she should ever set out in quest of them, and Mark thinking what a fool such a big fellow as Bradford must be, to mind any woman that ever was born.
Bradford took the box and the book to the chestnut-tree, and, stretching himself at full length in the shade, began to turn over the leaves. It was a journal, written in a delicate, graceful hand; and though the paper was somewhat yellow, and the ink faded, the writing was perfectly legible. Bradford looked at it, carelessly reading here and there a sentence, till his eye catching some familiar names, he opened it at the commencement, and read as follows:–
“_December_ 3l.–It is the last night of the old year. A few more steps, and the old year will have vanished into the great hall of the Past, where all the ages that ever have been are gathered. I have been sitting the last hour by myself, and have fancied that time moved not with its usual swiftness,–that the old year lingered with a sad regret, as if loath to pass away and let the new come in. Even now the midnight clock is striking,–eleven,–twelve;–the last flutter of the old year’s robe is out of sight, and the new year glides in with noiseless feet, like one who enters the chamber of the dead. These are but melancholy fancies;–because I am sad myself must I put all the world in mourning? The old year did not linger;–it is only I that am loath to go. I have been so happy here, that the prospect of spending the coming year with Cousin Eleanor fills my mind with sad forebodings;–and yet my childish remembrances of her have in them nothing unpleasant. I think of her as a grave, quiet woman, who never strove to attract and win the love of a child. How I shall miss the life and gayety, the jests and laughter of Madge and Bertha! Madge the more, because she is so full of whims and oddities. To-night she came into my room, and brought this little book for me to write a journal of all that befell me while I was gone, making me promise to write often in it. Not that she ever wished to see it again. Heaven forbid that she should ever be so cruelly punished as to be made to read anybody’s journal!–least of all such a stupid one as mine must be, shut up with Cousin Eleanor!–but she thought that I could never draw the book from the case (she had chosen one that fitted very tightly, and would give me much trouble for that very reason) without thinking of her;–and to be thought of often by her friends she confesses she is weak enough to wish.–Dear Madge, I could not forget her, if I would. The book just fits in a little japanned box that belonged to my grandmother, in which she used to keep rouge and pearl-powder. I will keep it in that, and remember my promise to Madge.
“_February_ 2l.–The journey is over, and I am at Cousin Eleanor’s. How the evils that we dread shrink into nothing when we fairly meet them! Cousin Eleanor received me kindly, and looked neither so grave nor so cold as my memory, assisted by my imagination, had pictured her; and Ashcroft is a pretty place, even in midwinter. I am never tired of sitting at the library-window, and looking at the bare branches of the black ash-trees, as they spread out their network against the winter sky. I have a little desk near the bay-window, where I have my drawing and writing materials, and where I pretend to write and draw, while Eleanor occupies a larger one at the opposite window. Eleanor is a woman of business,–keeps all her accounts, looks after her farm and servants, and manages all her own affairs, and, though a strict and exacting mistress, is neither harsh nor unkind;–she evidently intends to perform all her own duties punctually and faithfully, and expects others to do the same. I often look at her with wonder, her nature is so different from mine,–never impulsive, always cool and steady,–full of ceaseless activity, yet never hurried, and seemingly never perplexed. I sometimes think she sees the whole of her life mapped out before her, and takes up every event in order. With the exception of the servants, we are the only occupants of the house, Eleanor does not seek nor desire the society of her neighbors; and so while she works I dream, read, or answer Madge or Bertha’s letters.
“_February_ 28.–It has been snowing ceaselessly for two days. I have read, drawn, and sewed till I am as weary as Marianna in the moated grange. I have yawned aloud a dozen times, but Eleanor does not mind it. She has been extremely busy with accounts, papers, and letters. For the last four hours I do not think she has spoken a word. I hear nothing but the scratch of her pen as it moves over the paper, and the wind in the ash-trees. I have taken Madge’s journal in despair. Ah, Madge! I wish the bonnie girl were here;–how we would talk nonsense by the hour together, just to keep our tongues in practice, and Madge would hunt down an idea through all its turnings and windings, as if it were a hare, and she a dog in chase of it! A ring at the door;–I hope it may be some human body that will make Cousin Eleanor open her lips at last.
“_March_ 1.–The blots on the opposite page show with what haste I shut up my journal yesterday. The ring at the door brought more than I anticipated, and opened my eyes effectually for the rest of the day. ‘Mr. Lee,’ said the servant, throwing the library-door wide open, and ushering in a man wrapped in a cloak, with a travelling-cap in his hand. Cousin Eleanor rose instantly, and advanced to meet him. I expected to see her extend her hand towards him, and welcome him in her usual courteous manner. Instead of that, she gave him a hearty kiss, which could be heard as well as felt, and which was returned, as I thought, with interest. If the marble Widow Wadman in the library had kissed the sympathizing face of Uncle Toby, I should not have been so much surprised, and should have thought it much more likely to happen.
“‘I am very glad to see you, Thornton,’ said she. ‘I did not think you could come till to-morrow.’
“‘I have made the best use of my time,’ returned he, ‘and had no wish to spend my precious hours at a country inn. It seemed good to see winter and snow again, after so many months of summer.’
“Bending forward to catch a better view of him as he spoke, the rustling of my dress reminded Eleanor of my presence.
“‘My cousin Elizabeth Purcill, Thornton Lee,’ said she. ‘My two good friends I hope will also be friends to each other.’
“Mr. Lee made me a gentlemanly bow, and said something about the pleasure of seeing me; but more than suspecting that my presence in the library was no pleasure to either of them, I shut up my journal, crowded it into the box, and stole out of the room at the first convenient opportunity. On the stairs I met Mrs. Bickford, the housekeeper.
“‘Is any one in the library with Miss Purcill?’ asked she.
“‘Yes,–a Mr. Lee.’
“‘Mr. Lee?’ exclaimed she, in surprise. ‘I did not know as he was expected home now.’
“‘Who is Mr. Lee?’
“‘He is the gentleman whom Miss Purcill is to marry; but I thought he was not coming till autumn. I wonder if she knew it.’
“What Eleanor knows she always keeps to herself; none of her household are any the wiser for it. I was more surprised than Mrs. Bickford. Eleanor affianced! I never thought or dreamed of such a thing. Eleanor in love must be a curious spectacle. I did not feel sleepy any longer. What could a woman, so independent, so self-relying, so sufficient for herself, want of a lover? She always seemed to be a whole, and did not need another half to complete herself. I speculated much on the subject, and, when the bell rang for tea, went down-stairs with something of the same feeling of eager curiosity with which I open the pages of a good novel. There is nothing so interesting to idle, observant people as a pair of lovers, provided they are not silly, in which stage they are perfectly unbearable, and never should suffer themselves to be seen even by their intimate friends. Was it my fancy, or not? I thought Eleanor had grown young since I left the library. A soft light beamed in her eyes, and a clear crimson–the first trace of color I had ever seen in her face-burned on her cheek. It was a very different countenance from that at which I had been casting sidelong glances half the day, and yet it seemed to me that she was ashamed of these signs of joy, and thought it but a weakness to feel so glad. I sat silent nearly all the evening;–words always come more readily to my pen than to my lips, and, were it not so, there would have been no occasion for any speech of mine. Their conversation flowed on uninterruptedly, like a full, free river, whose current is strong and deep. How much richer both their lives seemed than mine! He had travelled, thought, seen, and felt so much, and had brought such wealth home with him, fitly coined into aptly chosen words; and she had gathered treasures as priceless from the literature of her own and foreign lands. I had nothing to offer either of them but my ears, and for those I doubt whether they felt grateful,–and when that doubt became a certainty, I crept into the great window in the drawing-room, and looked out upon the lawn. The moon, breaking through the clouds, shone brightly on the new-fallen snow. I sat down on a low chair,–the curtains fell about me,–their voices came to me with a low, dreamy sound,–I leaned my head on my hand, and fell asleep. When I awoke, the fire had died away, and the chairs were empty.
“_March_ 20.–Mr. Lee comes every day. His father lives only a few miles from us,–a distance so short as to be no obstacle to a lover with a good horse; though I suspect, if the horse could speak, he would wish the distance either less or greater. These midnight rides must be detrimental to the constitution of any steady horse, and he often wakes me up at night, pawing impatiently under the window while his master is making his lingering adieux on the door-step.
“_April_ 1.–I dislike Eleanor more every day. I know not why, unless because I watch her so closely. When Mr. Lee is not here she works as industriously as ever. If I were in love, I would give myself up to a dream or reverie now and then, and build myself an air-castle, if it were only to see it tumble down, and call myself a fool for my pains; but she is too matter-of-fact to do that. Well, if there is not much romance about her love, perhaps there is more reality; yet Thornton Lee is just the man one could make an ideal of, if one only would. But this is not what I especially dislike her for; people must love according to their own nature and temperament, and not after another’s pattern. The thing that frets me most just now is the way that Eleanor has of divining my thoughts before they are spoken, and even before they are quite clear to myself. Sometimes, when we are talking together, some subject comes up on which I do not care to express my opinion. Eleanor fixes her clear, penetrating eyes upon me, and drags my thought out into the light, just as a kingfisher pounces upon and pulls a fish out of the water. Had I anything to conceal, any secret, I should be afraid of her; and as it is, I do not like this invasion of my personal kingdom,–though my thoughts often acquire new strength and beauty from Eleanor’s strong and vigorous language. Last evening, Mr. Lee, Eleanor, and myself were turning over the prints in a large portfolio. We paused at one, the Departure of Hagar into the Wilderness. The artist had represented Hagar turning away from the door of the tent with Ishmael and the bottle of water; Abraham was near her; while Sarah in the background with a triumphant face exulted at the driving out of the bondmaid. The picture had not much merit as a work of Art; but in Hagar’s face was such a look of despairing, wistful tenderness, as she turned towards Abraham for the last time, that it moved me almost to tears. I drew a long breath as the picture was turned over. Looking up, I saw Eleanor’s eyes fixed upon me.
“‘You pity Hagar, then? You think it was a harsh and cruel thing to drive her out into the wilderness with her child?’
“‘Yes,’ said I, shortly,–a little provoked that she should have seen it in my face.
“She went on: ‘Sarah was right. Had I been she, I would have driven her out as remorselessly and as pitilessly. Did she not, presuming upon her youth, her beauty, and her child, despise her mistress? and why should her mistress feel compassion for her? The love of a long life might well thrust aside the passion of a few months, and Sarah, contemned by her bondmaid, is more worthy of pity than Hagar, in my eyes.’
“I was about to say that Sarah was more to blame for Hagar’s conduct than she was herself, when Mr. Lee observed ‘that Abraham was more to be pitied than either of them, for he was unable or unwilling to protect either of the women whom he loved,–his wife from the contempt of her bondmaid, or the bondmaid from the fury of his wife.’
“I fancied Eleanor did not exactly like this remark, for she turned to the next print hastily and began commenting upon it.
“_May_ 6.–The groves and fields are beautiful with the fresh beauty of the early spring. We have given up our winter occupations for long rambles on the hills and in the woods. I sometimes decline being a third in the lovers’ walks; but Eleanor seems so dissatisfied, if I refuse to accompany them, that I consent, lagging behind often, and have learned to be both blind and deaf as occasion requires. I think, too, that Mr. Lee is not sorry to have me with them. He and Eleanor have been separated for three years, and I sometimes wonder if they have not grown away from each other in that time. A long absence is a dangerous experiment even for friends, much more for lovers. Besides, no life is long enough to allow such great gaps in it.
“_June_ 1.–We were sitting yesterday under the ash-trees on the lawn,–Eleanor netting, Mr. Lee reading Dante aloud, and I making myself rings and bracelets out of the shining blades of grass, and pretending to listen, when a servant brought Eleanor a letter. It was very short, for she did not turn the leaf. When she had read it she drew out her watch.
“‘I have an hour before the express-train starts. Tell Mrs. Bickford to pack my trunk for a journey. Harness the black horse to drive to the station.’
“She put the letter into Mr. Lee’s hands. ‘My brother is very ill, and I shall go to him at once. Elizabeth, I am sorry to leave you here alone, but while I am gone I hope Thornton will consider you under his charge and protection.’
“She rose, as she spoke, and went towards the house, followed by Thornton.
“In a few minutes she appeared again, dressed in a gray travelling-dress,–kissed me lightly on the check, and bade me good-bye. All her preparations for this long journey had been made without any hurry or confusion, and she did not apparently feel so agitated or nervous at the thought of travelling this distance alone as I should to have gone by myself to the nearest town. Why Thornton did not accompany her, whether he could not or she did not wish it, I do not know; but he parted from her at the station, and soon returned for his horse.
“_July_ 1.–Eleanor has been gone a month; in that time we have received but one letter from her. Her brother still lies in a very critical state, and she will not leave him at present. His motherless children, too, she thinks require her care. It seemed very lonesome at first without her. I did not think I could have missed an uncongenial person, one with whom I had so little sympathy, so much. I think I must belong to the tribe of creeping plants, which cling to whatever is nearest to them. Ashcroft grows daily more beautiful, and Thornton comes often to see me. We read together books that I like, (not Dante,) walk and sketch. We are on excellent terms, and call each other Cousin in view of our future relationship. I can talk more freely to him, now that Eleanor is not here,–and feel no disposition to hide my thoughts, now that I can keep them to myself, if I choose.
“_July_ 24.–A week ago, one fair midsummer afternoon, we strolled to the knoll, and sat down under the blossoming boughs of the chestnut-tree.
“‘I think,’ said I, ‘this is the pleasantest place in all the grounds; but Eleanor never seemed willing to come here.’
“‘Eleanor has many unpleasant remembrances connected with the place,’ replied Thornton. ‘Her father’s obstinate persistence in digging the well was a great annoyance to the whole household, and, unimaginative as Eleanor is, I fancy sometimes, from her avoidance of the spot, that she has some superstitious idea connected with the well,–that she fears through it some great misfortune may happen to some of the family.’
“‘I hardly see how that can be,’ said I, rising and going to the brink of the well; ‘it is very deep, but there was never any water in it.’
“Just then I caught sight of a little flower growing out of the cleft of one of the stones. I knelt down and bent over to reach it. I slipped, I know not how, and should have fallen, had not Thornton sprung to my side and caught me.
“‘Ah, my foolish cousin!’ said he, ‘there needs not to be water in the well to make it a dangerous place. Promise me that you will not attempt such a thing again.’
“‘Not I,’ said I, laughing gayly to conceal my fright,–for I did think I was about to break my neck on the stones below. ‘There is no harm done, and I have got what I was after,’–and I held up the flower.
“It was an ugly little thing, and looked not half so pretty in my hand as it did in the shadow of the well. I would not have gathered it, had I seen it growing by the roadside. ‘Is it not pretty?’
“‘Humph!’ said he, ‘very!–worth breaking one’s neck for!’
“‘I was about to offer it to you, but, since you despise it, I will keep it myself,’–and I stuck it into my hair.
“Some time after, I missed the flower. I did not see it on the grass, but a leaf strangely similar peeped out of Thornton’s waistcoat-pocket. When we passed by the well, on leaving the knoll, ‘Promise me,’ said he again, ‘that you will not reach over the well for flowers any more.’
“I was a little irritated at his pertinacity. ‘I shall do no such thing,’ returned I; ‘you are growing as superstitious as Eleanor. On the contrary, I think I shall make a garden there and tend it every day; and whenever I go away from Ashcroft, I will leave something on the stone for you, to show how idle your fears are.’
“Thornton did not answer. He was provoked, but showed his anger only by his silence. We sauntered back to the house in a different mood from that in which we had left it.
“_August_ 4.–Thornton came into the library to-day with a letter from Eleanor. She cannot leave her brother, and wrote to Thornton about some papers that she wished sent to her without delay. They were in the drawer of the desk at which I was sitting. Thornton said he was in haste, as he wished to prepare the packet for the next mail. I rose at once. In his hurry he knocked the little japanned box on to the floor. Begging pardon for his awkwardness, he picked it up, and looked at it a moment to assure himself that it had suffered no damage.
“‘It is a curious little thing,’ said he, ‘and looks as if it were a hundred years old.’
“‘It belonged once to my grandmother, and held pearl-powder and rouge,’ said I.
“‘And is used for the same purpose now?’ inquired he.
“‘Yes,’ returned I, my cheek reddening a little. ‘I was just putting some on as you entered.’
“‘It must be very uncommon rouge,’ remarked he, quietly fixing his eyes on me; ‘it grows red after it is put on, and must require much care in the use of it.’
“‘I thought you were in a great hurry, Thornton, when you came in.’
“‘And so I am’;–and he began undoing and separating papers, but every few moments he would steal a glance–a glance that made me feel uneasy–towards me, as I sat at the other window busying myself with my needle.
“_August_ 25.–I wish Eleanor would come home. I sometimes think I will go away; but to leave Ashcroft now would imply a doubt of Thornton’s honor, and impute thoughts to him which perhaps have no existence but in my vanity.
“October 3.–Ah, why was I so foolish? Why did I not go when I saw the danger so clearly, instead of cheating myself into the belief that there was none? Would that I had never come to Ashcroft, or had had the courage to leave it! These last six weeks, I do not know, I cannot tell, how they have been spent. Thornton was ever by my side, and I–did not wish him away. We sat this afternoon on the lawn under the great ash-tree,–the one under which he sat reading Dante to Eleanor the last day she was with us. The love which had burned in his eyes all day found utterance at last, and flamed out in fiery, passionate words. He drew me towards him. His vehemence frightened me, and I muttered something about Eleanor. It checked him for a moment, but, quickly recovering, he spoke freely of himself and of her,–of the love which had existed between them,–a feeling so feeble and so poor, compared to that which he felt for me, as to be unworthy of the name. He entreated, he implored my love. I was silent. He bent over me, gazing into my face. There was a traitor lurking in my heart, which looked out of my eyes, and spoke without my consent. He understood that language but too well. I bent my eyes upon the ground,–his arm was around my waist, his hand clasped mine, his lips approached my cheek. A shadow seemed suddenly to come between me and the sun. I looked up and saw Eleanor, clad in mourning, standing before us. I started at once to my feet, and, like the coward that I am, fled and left them together. I ran down to the old hawthorn-tree, against which I leaned, panting and trembling. Yet, in a few moments, ashamed of my weakness, I stole back to where I could see them unobserved. Eleanor stood upon the same spot, calm and motionless. Thornton was speaking, but I was too far off to hear more than the sound of his voice. When he had ended, he approached her, as if to bid her adieu; but she passed him with a stately bow, and entered the hall-door. Thornton took his way to the stables, and I soon heard the clattering of his horse’s hoofs on the hard gravelled road. When the sound died away in the distance, I stole into the house and crept up to my chamber. How long I was there I could not tell; but when I heard the bell ring for tea, I washed my face and smoothed my hair. I would not be so cowardly as to fear to see Eleanor again, and perhaps it would be better for us both to meet in the presence of a third person.
“Mrs. Bickford was alone at the table. ‘Miss Purcill would not come down tonight,–she was fatigued with her journey.’
“The good lady strove to entertain me with her conversation, but, finding that I neither heard, answered, nor ate, our meal was soon brought to a close. It is long past midnight. I have thought till I am sick and giddy with thinking. I cannot sleep, and have been writing here to control the wildness of my imaginings. I have been twice to Eleanor’s chamber. The door is half ground-glass, and I can see her black shadow as she walks to and fro across the room. She has been walking so ever since she entered it.
“_October_ 4.–What shall I do? Where shall I go? All night and all day Eleanor has walked her chamber-floor. I have been to the door. I have knocked. I have called her by name. I have turned the handle,–the door is locked. No answer comes to me,–nothing but the black shadow flitting across the panes. I sat down by the threshold and burst into tears.
“Mrs. Bickford found me there. ‘Do not grieve so, Miss Elizabeth,’ said she, kindly. ‘It is dreadful, I know; but Miss Purcill walked the floor all night after her father died, and would admit no one to her room. She will be better to-morrow.’
“I shook my head. Could I believe that grief for the dead, and not sorrow for the conduct of the living, moved her thus, I should be happy. Then I could offer consolation and sympathy; but now, if I saw her, what could I say? Pity, sorrow for her grief, would be but idle words, which she would spurn with contempt,–and she would be right. There is but one thing left for me,–I must go from Ashcroft; then, perhaps, she and Thornton–But no, it cannot be; so wide asunder, they cannot come together again. And do I wish it? Is not his love as much mine now as it ever was hers? Ah, how some words once spoken cannot be forgotten! Before me now is the little picture of Hagar, which Eleanor had framed and hung in the library. Did she place it before my eyes as a warning to me? In Hagar’s fate I see my own; for even now I hear Eleanor asking if the passion of a few hours is to thrust aside the love of long years. The bondmaid will go ere she is driven out. But Thornton–I cannot, will not, see him again. He has written to me to-day, saying that he cannot come here, and asking me to meet him at the well to-morrow. By that time I shall be far on my way to Madge. He will wait for me, and I shall not come. How can I leave him thus? He will believe me heartless and cruel. I grieve even now for his pain and grief. He will think that I did not love, but only sported with him. How dearly I love him words cannot tell; and I go that his way may be smoother, and that in my absence he may find–peace at last. A little dried flower lies on the page that I turned. It is one of those that grew in the well, that I wore on my bosom one day, that he might see and know it, and chide me for having been there again. His chiding was sweeter to me than others’ praise. I will not be so unjust to myself. I will not go without one word. I jestingly told him once I would leave a token for him on the stone in the well when I went away from Ashcroft. I will put my journal there. He will see the box and remember it. He will learn that I have gone, and will know that I love, but that I leave and renounce him.”
* * * * *
The remaining pages of the book were blank. Elizabeth Purcill’s journal was ended. Bradford was busy with conjectures. Why had not Thornton found and kept the journal intended for him? Had it fallen at once to the bottom of the well, and lain there for years, while he waited in vain for her coming or her token? Her departure had not brought Eleanor Purcill and Thornton Lee together; for his aunt still remained unwedded, and he came every Sunday to the village church, with a sweet matronly-faced woman on his arm, and two children by his side.
Bradford thrust the journal into his pocket, took up his fishing-rod and basket, and sauntered towards the village. He thought he remembered the name of Elizabeth Purcill on a head-stone in the church-yard. He opened the little wicket and went in. The setting sun threw the long shadows of the head-stones across the thick, rank grass. The sounds of the village children at play on the green came to his ear softened and mellowed by the distance.
He turned towards the spot where, year after year, the Purcills had been gathered,–those who had died in their beds in their native town, and those who had perished in far-off climes, and whose bones had been brought to moulder by the old church-wall. He found the stone, and, bending down, read, “Elizabeth Purcill, died Oct. 5th, 18–, aged 19.” Bradford opened the journal and looked at the last date. She had died, then, the day after the journal was ended. But how, and where?
He sat down on the flat stone which covered his grandfather, and turned over the pages again, as if they could tell him more than he already knew. So absorbed was he, that he did not see a woman who a few minutes afterwards knelt down before the same stone, and with a sickle began to cut away the weeds and grass.
Bradford looked up at last, and, as the woman raised her head for an instant, saw that it was Mrs. Bickford. He approached her and called her by name. She gave a little start, as she heard his voice.
“Why, Master Bradford, who would have thought of seeing you here at this time?”
Bradford smiled. “Whose grave is this that you are taking such pains to clear?”
She pointed to the name with her sickle.
“Yes, I know all that that can tell me. But who was Elizabeth Purcill?–what relation was she to me?–and how came she to die so young, and to be buried here?”
“Why do you think I should know?” she replied. “People often die young; and no matter where the Purcills die, they all wish to come here at last;–that one died in Cuba,–that in France,–that in Greece,–and that at sea.” And she turned her hand towards them, as she spoke.
“But you do not care for their graves; look, how the grass and weeds nod over that tombstone; and you would not clear this, unless you knew something about the girl that lies underneath it.”
“It is an old story,” said she, with a sigh, “and I can tell you but little of it.” She laid her sickle down on the cut grass and sat down by it.
“Elizabeth Purcill was the daughter of your grandfather’s brother, and therefore your father’s cousin. Long as I have lived in the family, I never saw him; for he went to India, while a young man, to seek a fortune, which was found too late to benefit either himself or his children. Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, was sent home for her education, and lived first with one of her kinsfolk, and then another, as her father’s whims or their convenience dictated. You remember, though so young, when your Aunt Eleanor came to your father’s house on her way to your Uncle Erasmus in his last illness?”
Bradford nodded.
“A little before that time Elizabeth Purcill came to Ashcroft. She was a pretty, lively girl, and it was pleasant to see in our sober household one who had time to be idle and could laugh. Your Aunt Eleanor was always a busy woman,–busier then than she is now,–and had no time for mirth. Every servant in the house liked Miss Elizabeth for her sunny smile and her pleasant ways. Shortly afterwards, Thornton Lee came home. He had been three years in Africa, and he and your aunt were to be married in the autumn.
“When Miss Purcill went away, Mr. Lee remained, and came often to see Miss Elizabeth. She had a winsome face, that few men could look upon and not love; and I sometimes thought, when I saw them together, how much better she was suited to Mr. Lee than your Aunt Eleanor, and wondered if he had not found it out himself. Your aunt was away a long time, and, by some mistake, the letter, saying that she was coming home, did not reach us till the day after her arrival.
“It was a beautiful October afternoon. I had been gathering the grapes that grew on the garden wall, and was carrying a basket of them to Miss Elizabeth, whom I had seen, half an hour before, with Mr. Lee, on the lawn. As I was crossing the hall, Miss Purcill, dressed in deep mourning, looking ghastly pale, entered the front door. I started as if I had seen a ghost, and dropped my basket. Miss Eleanor passed me quickly and went up-stairs. I spoke to her. She did not answer, but, entering her chamber, fastened the door behind her.
“I looked out of the window. No one was on the lawn; but presently I saw Mr. Lee coming out of the stable, leading his horse. He mounted and was out of sight in an instant. Miss Elizabeth was nowhere to be seen. What had happened I could not tell. I could only guess.
“Miss Elizabeth was the only one who came to tea, and her eyes were heavy and dull, and she seemed like one in a dream. That night was a wretched one to both. When I went to the library to see if the windows were fastened for the night, Miss Elizabeth sat by the smouldering fire with her face buried in her hands. I shut the door softly and left her, and till I slept I heard Miss Eleanor’s steps across her chamber-floor.
“The day was no better than the night. Miss Purcill did not leave her room, and her cousin wandered about the house, as if her thoughts would not let her rest. Once I found her in tears at your aunt’s door, and tried to console her; but she shook her head impatiently, as if I could not understand the cause of her grief.
“The next morning, while I was dressing, my niece Sally came to me in great haste, saying that Roger, the gardener, wished to see me at once. I hurried on my clothes and went down. I knew by the man’s face that something dreadful had happened; but when he told me that he had been to the old well, and had found Miss Elizabeth lying dead at the bottom of it, I felt as if I was stunned.
“I roused myself at last. I ran to Miss Purcill’s door. I shook it violently and called her by name. She came and opened the door in her night-dress. Somehow, I know not and cared not how, for it seemed to me that she had something to do with all this, I told her that her Cousin Elizabeth was lying dead at the bottom of the old well. She staggered and leaned against the door like one who had received a heavy blow. For a moment I repented my roughness. But she was soon herself again. She thrust her feet into her slippers, and, wrapping her dressing-gown about her, went down-stairs, and gave directions, as calmly and collectedly as if she were (Heaven help her!) ordering a dinner for the men–to bring the body home. Ah, me! I never shall forget how the poor thing looked when the four men who bore the litter set it down on the library-floor. A bruise on the temple showed where she had struck on the cruel stones. The hoarfrost, which had turned into drops of dew, glittered among her soft brown curls.”
The tears which had been gathering in Mrs. Bickford’s eyes fell in large drops into her lap as she went on.
“On the day of the funeral, she lay in the library, still and cold in her coffin. I had gathered a few flowers, with which I was vainly trying to cheat death into looking more like life, by placing them on her bosom and in her stiffened fingers. Miss Eleanor sat at the foot of the coffin, almost as motionless as the form within it. I had finished my task and turned away, when the door opened and Mr. Lee came in silently. A slight shudder went through him, as he came to the coffin and bent over it. What a change had three days made in the man! Ten years would not have taken so much youth and life from him and made him look so old and wan. He looked upon her as a man who looks his last upon what he loved best in the world;–his whole soul was in his eyes.
“I think he did not see Miss Eleanor till he was about to leave the room. She had not spoken, and he was unconscious of her presence. He turned towards her and held out his hand; his lips moved, but no words escaped them. I heard Miss Purcill’s low, unfaltering answer to his unspoken thoughts. She did not take his proffered hand, but said, ‘Nothing can unite us again, Thornton,–not even death.’
“His hand dropped by his side;–he quickly left the room, and never came to Ashcroft again. When I went to take a last look of Miss Elizabeth, I saw that the white rose which I had placed in her hand was gone;–he had taken it.”
Mrs. Bickford paused. Her story was ended. In a few minutes she took up her sickle again, and Bradford stood leaning against the head-stone till the grass was all cut on the grave. He had no more questions to ask,–for the journal had told him more of the dead below, than Mrs. Bickford, with all her love and sympathy, could do. She had fallen into the well, then, while endeavoring to place the box on the stone. When Mrs. Bickford’s task was done, she walked silently back to Ashcroft with Bradford.
Late in the evening he was alone in the library with his Aunt Eleanor. The picture of Hagar, now so full of interest to him, still hung on the wall, and the little desk was at the window which looked out upon the lawn. Should he show the journal to his aunt, or keep it to himself? Would Elizabeth Purcill wish her Cousin Eleanor to read her written words as she once read her untold thoughts?
Wrapped up in his own musings, he started suddenly when Miss Purcill said to him, “Rosamond tells me that you found a book to-day in the old well; what was it?”–and answered promptly, “It was Elizabeth Purcill’s journal.”
It was the first time Eleanor had heard the name for years. She showed no signs of emotion. “I should like to see it,” said she; “give it to me.”
Bradford had been brought up in such habits of obedience, that he never thought of disputing his aunt’s command. He drew the journal from his pocket and handed it to her without speaking.
“You have read it?” said she, fixing her keen eyes upon him.
“Yes.”
She drew the lamp towards her and opened the book. The shade on the lamp kept the light from her face; but had Bradford seen it, it would have told him no more of the thoughts beneath it than the stone in the churchyard had told him of Elizabeth Purcill.
He watched her turning over the leaves slowly, and thought that her hand trembled a little at the close. Those pages must have stirred many a memory and many a grief, as the wind shakes the bare boughs of the trees, though blossom, fruit, and leaves have long since fallen.
She closed the book, and spoke at last:–“I think, Bradford, this book belongs rightfully but to one person,–Mr. Thornton Lee. Shall I send it to him?”
Eleanor’s question was uttered in a tone that seemed to admit of but one reply. Bradford assented. If he might not keep the journal himself, he would rather Thornton Lee should have it than his aunt.
The next day, Thornton Lee received a small packet, accompanied by a note which ran thus:–
“To do justice to the memory of one who, years ago, came between us, I send you this little book, found in the old well yesterday. From it you will learn how she came by her death, and–how much she loved you. ELEANOR PURCILL.”
As Thornton Lee read the journal, his children climbed his knee and twined his gray curls around their fingers, and his wife came and leaned sportively over his shoulder and looked at the yellow leaves.
In some lives, as in some years, there is an after-summer; but in others, the hoar-frosts are succeeded by the winter snow.
THE DEAD HOUSE.
Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold To the foot it had felt before,
A glow came forth to meet me
From the flame that laughed in the grate, And shadows a-dance on the ceiling
Danced blither with mine for a mate.
“I claim you, old friend,” yawned the arm-chair,– “This corner, you know, is your seat.” “Best your slippers on me,” beamed the fender,– “I brighten at touch of your feet”
“We know the practised finger,”
Said the books, “that seems like brain”; And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.
Sang the pillow, “My down once quivered On nightingales’ throats that flew
Through moonlit gardens of Hafiz
To gather quaint dreams for you.”
Ah, me, where the Past sowed heart’s-ease, The Present plucks rue for us men!
I come back: that scar unhealing
Was not in the churchyard then.
But, I think, the house is unaltered; I will go and beg to look
At the rooms that were once familiar To my life as its bed to a brook.
Unaltered! Alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
‘Tis a dead man I see in the mirrors, ‘Tis his tread that chills the floor!
To learn such a simple lesson
Need I go to Paris and Rome,–
That the many make a household,
But only one the home?
‘Twas just a womanly presence,
An influence unexprest,–
But a rose she had worn on my grave-sod Were more than long life with the rest!
‘Twas a smile, ’twas a garment’s rustle, ‘Twas nothing that I can phrase,–
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious, And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine, I would close the shutters, Like lids when the life is fled,
And the funeral fire should wind it, This corpse of a home that is dead.
For it died that autumn morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.
* * * * *
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.
[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them habitually, at oar breakfast-table.–We’re very free and easy, you know; we don’t read what we don’t like. Our parish is so large, one can’t pretend to preach to all the pews at once. Besides, one can’t be all the time trying to do the best of one’s best; if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn’t be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get through this paper.]
—-Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,–such as these:–He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.–To-day’s dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday’s revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould’s private planets.–Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.–Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,–which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality. There was a story about “strahps to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny to us fellows–on the road from Milan to Venice.–_Coelum, non animum_,–travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.–Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for “establishing raws” upon each other.–A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under “the great elm,” and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow’s telling another that his argument was _absurd_; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase, “reductio ad absurdum”; the rest badgering him as a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for _Padus_, the Po, “a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
—-Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in _undress_ often affects more than one in full costume.
“Is this the mighty ocean?–is this all?”
says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World’s Mistress in her stone girdle–_alta maenia Romae_–rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning’s work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum! (Look at Carlyle’s article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two “filles de la paroisse,”–gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzaepfli’s restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God’s servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.–I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,–the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,–and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water,–which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.
Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definite pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. “The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf that holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother’s portrait is blistered with tears.
My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind that strike the imagination, especially when one is still young. You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned;–if any of the “Note and Query” tribe can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.–What is that?–I said.–That,–answered the coachman,–is _the hangman’s pillar_. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.
And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something that may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noon-day nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one’s twenty digits. While I was on it, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o’nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward,–I think he said some feet.
Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril’s in an old journal,–the “Magazin Encyclopedique” for _l’an troisieme_, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing’s happening in a stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a blade of grass? I suppose.
You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;–perhaps we will have some philosophy by and by;–let me work out this thin mechanical vein.–I have something more to say about trees, I have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;–nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was slow,–then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714; then for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.
Look here. Here are some human lies laid down against the periods of its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare’s. The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died. A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson’s life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon’s career;–the tree doesn’t seem to have minded it.
I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section. I have seen many wooden preachers,–never one like this. How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!
I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people’s ages, as they do in the country. He swore–(ministers’ sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)–that the children were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through striking.] At the foot of “the hill,” down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (_Credat Hahnemannus_,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.
Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that? And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises! And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich!–Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.
Nor_wich_.
Por_ch_mouth.
Cincinnat_ah_.
What a sad picture of our civilization!
I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years, and did not like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and even noted down, as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I had ever seen. I have received a document, signed by two citizens of a neighboring town, certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college-class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to belong, who, though he has _formerly_ been a member of Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree “girts” eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don’t have “youth at the prow,” we will have “pleasure at the ‘elm.”
And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but thanks.
[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many communications, in prose and verse, since I began printing these notes. The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem, from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
—-Sometimes very young persons send communications, which they want forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of it.
Dear Sir,–You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I was at your age. I don’t wish to be understood as saying too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.
You long to “leap at a single bound into celebrity.” Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else,–very rarely to those who say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!” The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in notoriety;–that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to pillory which is crowded with fools who could not hold their tongues and rogues who could not hide their tricks.
If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it. The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the ripe apples and pears are. Produce anything really good, and an intelligent editor will jump at it. Don’t flatter yourself that any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame. Nothing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having from a new hand. There is always a dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head; some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb.
You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is not demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want it. It not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in our national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one, among his friends and no takers, that he is the real, genuine, no-mistake Osiris.
_Qu’est ce qu’il a fait?_ What has he done? That was Napoleon’s test. What have you done? Turn up the faces of your picture-cards, my boy! You need not make mouths at the public because it has not accepted you at your own fancy-valuation. Do the prettiest thing you can and wait your time.
For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I dare not affirm that they show promise. I am not an editor, but I know the standard of a some editors. You must not expect to “leap with a single bound” into the society of those whom it is not flattery to call your betters. When “The Paetolian” has paid you for a copy of verses,–(I can furnish you a list of alliterative signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe Zenith,)–when “The Ragbag” has stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name out,–when “The Nut-cracker” has thought you worth shelling, and strung the kernel of your cleverest poem,–then, and not till then, you may consider the presumption against you, from the fact of your rhyming tendency, as called in question, and let our friends hear from you, if you think it worth while. You may possibly think me too candid, and even accuse me of incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half so plain-spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. If you prefer the long jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try it like a man. Only remember this,–that, if a bushel of potatoes is shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes always get to the bottom.
Believe me, etc., etc.
* * * * *
I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these are by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, querulous, unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with. Is a young man in the habit of writing verses? Then the presumption is that he is an inferior person. For, look you, there are at least nine chances in ten that he writes _poor_ verses. Now the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of feebleness and a debilitating agent. A young man can get rid of the presumption against him afforded by his writing verses only by convincing us that they are verses worth writing.
All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed to any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of these pages. I would always treat any given young person passing through the meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of adolescence with great tenderness. God forgive us, if we ever speak harshly to young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths, and so, sooner or later, smite sonic tender-souled poet or poetess on the lips who might have sung the world into sweet trances, had we not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings! Just as my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for the ungifted who are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-estimate. I have always tried to be gentle with the most hopeless cases. My experience, however, has not been encouraging.
—-X. Y., aet. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls in his village, and “got the mitten” (pronounced mittin) two or three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and training, in the newspapers. Sends me some strings of verses, candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I learn for the millionth time one of the following facts: either that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with time or with a chime. Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice as to his future course.
What shall I do about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth? One doesn’t like to be cruel,–and yet one hates to lie. Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism, –recommends study of good models,–that writing verse should be an incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,–and, above all, that there should be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least use in all this. The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy. One of these young brains is like a bunch of India crackers; once touch fire to it and it is best to keep hands off until it has done popping,–if it ever stops. I have two letters on file; one is a pattern of adulation, the other of impertinence. My reply to the first, containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous language, had brought out the second. There was some sport in this, but Dulness is not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after he is struck. You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your _opinion_ really want your _praise_, and will be contented with nothing less.
There is another kind of application to which editors, or those supposed to have access to them, are liable, and which often proves trying and painful. One is appealed to in behalf of some person in needy circumstances who wishes to make a living by the pen. A manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication. It is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient. If Rachel’s saying is true, that “fortune is the measure of intelligence,” then poverty is evidence of limited capacity, which it too frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception here and there. Now an editor is a person under a contract with the public to furnish them with the best things he can afford for his money. Charity shown by the publication of an inferior article would be like the generosity of Claude Duval and the other gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much they robbed the rich to have the means of relieving them.
Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the trials to which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to develope enormous calluses at every point of contact with authorship. Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect. They must reject the unfit productions of those whom they long to befriend, because it would be a profligate charity to accept them. One cannot burn his house down to warm the hands even of the fatherless and the widow.
THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.
–You haven’t heard about my friend the Professor’s first experiment in the use of anaesthetics, have you?
He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his about the chaise. He spoke to me once or twice about another poem of similar character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would listen to and criticize.
One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking very red in the cheeks and heavy about the eyes.–Hy’r’ye?–he said, and made for an arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat and then his person, going smack through the crown of the former as neatly as they do the trick at the circus. The Professor jumped at the explosion as if he had sat down on one of those small _calthrops_ our grandfathers used to sow round in the grass when there were Indians about,–iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a half long,–stick through moccasins into feet,–cripple ’em on the spot, and give ’em lockjaw in a day or two.
The Professor let off one of those big words which lie at the bottom of the best man’s vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in his life,–just as every man’s hair _may_ stand on end, but in most men it never does.
After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript, together with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just been writing an introduction or prelude to the main performance. A certain suspicion had come into my mind that the Professor was not quite right, which was confirmed by the way he talked; but I let him begin. This is the way he read it:–
_Prelude_.
I’m the fellah that tole one day
The tale of the won’erful one-hoss-shay.
Wan’ to hear another? Say.
–Funny, wasn’it? Made _me_ laugh,– I’m too modest, I am, by half,–
Made me laugh ‘s _though I sh’d split_,– Cahn’ a fellah like fellah’s own wit?
–Fellahs keep sayin’,–“Well, now that’s nice; Did it once, but cahn’ do it twice.”–
Don’ you b’lieve the’z no more fat; Lots in the kitch’n ‘z good ‘z that.
Fus’-rate throw, ‘n’ no mistake,– Han’ us the props for another shake;–
Know I’ll try, ‘n’ guess I’ll win; Here sh’ goes for hit ‘m ag’in!
Here I thought it necessary to interpose.–Professor,–I said,–you are inebriated. The style of what you call your “Prelude” shows that it was written under cerebral excitement. Your articulation is confused. You have told me three times in succession, in exactly the same words, that I was the only true friend you had in the world that you would unbutton your heart to. You smell distinctly and decidedly of spirits.–I spoke, and paused; tender, but firm.
Two large tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor’s lids,–in obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that delicious bit of bladdery bathos, “The very law that moulds a tear,” with which the “Edinburgh Review” attempted to put down Master George Gordon when that young man was foolishly trying to make himself conspicuous. One of these tears peeped over the edge of the lid until it lost its balance,–slid an inch and waited for reinforcements,–swelled again,–rolled down a little further,–stopped,–moved on,–and at last fell on the back of the Professor’s hand. He held it up for me to look at, and lifted his eyes, brimful, till they met mine.
I couldn’t stand it,–I always break down when folks cry in my face,–so I hugged him, and said he was a dear old boy, and asked him kindly what was the matter with him, and what made him smell so dreadfully strong of spirits.
Upset his alcohol lamp,–he said,–and spilt the alcohol on his legs. That was it.–But what had he been doing to get his head into such a state?–had he really committed an excess? What was the matter?–Then it came out that he had been taking chloroform to have a tooth out, which had left him in a very queer state, in which he had written the “Prelude” given above, and under the influence of which he evidently was still.
I took the manuscript from his hands and read the following continuation of the lines he had begun to read me, while he made up for two or three nights’ lost sleep as he best might.
PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY:
OR, THE PRESIDENT’S OLD ARM-CHAIR.
Facts respecting an old arm-chair.
At Cambridge. Is kept in the College there. Seems but little the worse for wear.
That’s remarkable when I say
It was old in President Holyoke’s day. (One of his boys, perhaps you know,
Died, _at one hundred_, years ago.) _He_ took lodging for rain or shine
Under green bed-clothes in ’69.
Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.–
Born there? Don’t say so! I was, too. (Born in a house with a gambrel-roof,– Standing still, if you must have proof.– “Gambrel?–Gambrel?”–Let me beg
You’ll look at a horse’s hinder leg,– First great angle above the hoof,–
That’s the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.) –Nicest place that ever was seen,–
Colleges red and Common green,
Sidewalks brownish with trees between. Sweetest spot beneath the skies
When the canker-worms don’t rise,– When the dust, that sometimes flies
Into your mouth and ears and eyes, In a quiet slumber lies,
_Not_ in the shape of unbaked pies Such as barefoot children prize.
A kind of harbor it seems to be,
Facing the flow of a boundless sea. Bows of gray old Tutors stand
Ranged like rocks above the sand;
Rolling beneath them, soft and green, Breaks the tide of bright sixteen,–
One wave, two waves, three waves, four, Sliding up the sparkling floor;
Then it ebbs to flow no more,
Wandering off from shore to shore
With its freight of golden ore!
–Pleasant place for boys to play;– Better keep your girls away;
Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
Which countless fingering waves pursue, And every classic beach is strown
With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.
But this is neither here nor there;– I’m talking about an old arm-chair.
You’ve heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELL? Over at Medford he used to dwell;
Married one of the Mather’s folk;
Got with his wife a chair of oak,– Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge,– One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings,– But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand,– Fit for the worthies of the land,–
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in, Or Cotton Mather to sit–and lie–in,
–Parson Turell bequeathed the same To a certain student,–SMITH by name;
These were the terms, as we are told: “Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde; When he doth graduate, then to passe
To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe, On payment of”–(naming a certain sum)– “By him to whom ye Chaire shall come;
He to ye oldest Senior next,
And soe forever,”–(thus runs the text,)– “But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime, That being his Debte for use of same.”
_Smith_ transferred it to one of the BROWNS, And took his money,–five silver crowns. _Brown_ delivered it up to MOORE,
Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four. _Moore_ made over the chair to LEE,
Who gave him crowns of silver three. _Lee_ conveyed it unto DREW,
And now the payment, of course, was two. _Drew_ gave up the chair to DUNN,–
All he got, as you see, was one.
_Dunn_ released the chair to HALL, And got by the bargain no crown at all. –And now it passed to a second BROWN,
Who took it, and likewise _claimed a crown_. When _Brown_ conveyed it unto WARE,
Having had one crown, to make it fair. He paid him two crowns to take the chair; And _Ware_, being honest, (as all Wares be,) He paid one POTTER, who took it, three. Four got ROBINSON; five got DIX;
JOHNSON _primus_ demanded six;
And so the sum kept gathering still Till after the battle of Bunker’s Hill. –When paper money became so cheap,
Folks wouldn’t count it, but said “a heap,” A certain RICHARDS, the books declare,
(A.M. in ’90? I’ve looked with care Through the Triennial,–_name not there_,) This person, Richards, was offered then Eight score pounds, but would have ten; Nine, I think, was the sum he took,–
Not quite certain,–but see the book. –By and by the wars were still,
But nothing had altered the Parson’s will. The old arm-chair was solid yet,
But saddled with such a monstrous debt! Things grew quite too bad to bear,
Paying such sums to get rid of the chair! But dead men’s fingers hold awful tight, And there was the will in black and white, Plain enough for a child to spell.
What should be done no man could tell, For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse, And every season but made it worse.
As a last resort, to clear the doubt, They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out.
The Governor came with his Light-horse Troop And his mounted trackmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew,
French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band,
Till the President met him, cap in hand. –The Governor “hefted” the crowns, and said,– “A will is a will, and the Parson’s dead.” The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he,– “There is your p’int. And here’s my fee. These are the terms you must fulfil,–
On such conditions I BREAK THE WILL!” The Governor mentioned what these should be. (Just wait a minute and then you’ll see.) The President prayed. Then all was still, And the Governor rose and BROKE THE WILL! –“About those conditions?” Well, now you go And do as I tell you, and then you’ll know. Once a year, on Commencement-day,
If you’ll only take the pains to stay, You’ll see the President in the CHAIR,
Likewise the Governor sitting there. The President rises; both old and young May hear his speech in a foreign tongue, The meaning whereof, as lawyers swear,
Is this: Can I keep this old arm-chair? And then his Excellency bows,
As much as to say that he allows.
The Vice-Gub. next is called by name; He bows like t’other, which means the same. And all the officers round ’em bow,
As much as to say that _they_ allow. And a lot of parchments about the chair Are handed to witnesses then and there, And then the lawyers hold it clear
That the chair is safe for another year.
God bless you, Gentlemen! Learn to give Money to colleges while you live.
Don’t be silly and think you’ll try To bother the colleges, when you die,
With codicil this, and codicil that, That Knowledge may starve while Law grows fat; For there never was pitcher that wouldn’t spill, And there’s always a flaw in a donkey’s will!
* * * * *
—-Hospitality is a good deal a matter of latitude, I suspect. The shade of a palm-tree serves an African for a hut; his dwelling is all door and no walls; everybody can come in. To make a morning call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an apple with a worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace a regular gradation between these two extremes. In cities where the evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors, where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the interchange of civilities. A good deal, which in colder regions is ascribed to mean dispositions, belongs really to mean temperature.
Once in a while, even in our Northern cities, at noon, in a very hot summer’s day, one may realize, by a sudden extension in his sphere of consciousness, how closely he is shut up for the most part.–Do you not remember something like this? July, between 1 and 2, P.M. Fahrenheit 96 deg., or thereabout. Windows all gaping, like the mouths of panting dogs. Long, stinging cry of a locust comes in from a tree, half a mile off; had forgotten there was such a tree. Baby’s screams from a house several blocks distant;–never knew of any babies in the neighborhood before. Tinman pounding something that clatters dreadfully,–very distinct, but don’t know of any tinman’s shop near by. Horses stamping on pavement to get off flies. When you hear these four sounds, you may set it down as a warm day. Then it is that one would like to imitate the mode of life of the native at Sierra Leone, as somebody has described it: stroll into the market in natural costume,–buy a watermelon for a halfpenny,–split it, and scoop out the middle,–sit down in one half of the empty rind, clap the other on one’s head, and feast upon the pulp.
—-I see some of the London journals have been attacking some of their literary people for lecturing, on the ground of its being a public exhibition of themselves for money. A popular author can print his lecture; if he deliver it, it is a case of _quaestum corpore_, or making profit of his person. None but “snobs” do that. _Ergo_, etc. To this I reply,–_Negatur minor_. Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part of the service for which she is paid. We do not consider it low-bred in her to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it so to hearing it from any other person or reading it. His Grace and his Lordship exhibit themselves very often for popularity, and their houses every day for money.–No, if a man shows himself other than he is, if he belittles himself before an audience for hire, then he acts unworthily. But a true word, fresh from the lips of a true man, is worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, or even of fifty dollars a lecture. The taunt must be an outbreak of jealousy against the renowned authors who have the audacity to be also orators. The sub-lieutenants of the press stick a too popular writer and speaker with an epithet in England, instead of with a rapier, as in France.–Poh! All England is one great menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the talking-bird’s and the nightingale’s being willing to become a part of the exhibition!
THE LONG PATH.
(_Last of the Parentheses_.)
Yes, that was my last walk with the _schoolmistress_. It happened to be the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young woman, who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor, and she was provided for elsewhere. So it was no longer the school-mistress that I walked with, but–Let us not be in unseemly haste. I shall call her the schoolmistress still; some of you love her under that name.
—-When it became known among the boarders that two of their number had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side, there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I pitied our landlady. It took her all of a suddin,–she said. Had not known that we was keepin’ company, and never mistrusted anything partic’lar. Ma’am was right to better herself. Didn’t look very rugged to take care of a family, but could get hired haaelp, she calc’lated.–The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her daughter.
—-No, poor, dear woman,–that could not have been. But I am dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile on my face all the time.
The great mystery of God’s providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. _Laus Deo_] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;–her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl’s story in the “Book of Martyrs.” The “dry-pan and the gradual fire” were the images that frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!
Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain, overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young person, whoever you may be, now reading this,–little thinking you are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such multitudes worthier than yourself. But it is only my surface-thought which laughs. For that great procession of the UNLOVED, who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the locks of brown or gray,–under the snowy cap, under the chilling turban,–hide it even from themselves,–perhaps never know they wear it, though it kills them,–there is no depth of tenderness in my nature that Pity has not sounded.
Somewhere,–somewhere,–love is in store for them,–the universe must not be allowed to fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small, half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-given instincts!
Read what the singing-women–one to ten thousand of the suffering women–tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken! Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue slate stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true that “all sounds of life assumed one tone of love,” as for Letitia Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give words to her grief, and they could not.–Will you hear a few stanzas of mine?
THE VOICELESS.
We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,– But o’er their silent sister’s breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number? A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;– Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their hearts’ sad story,– Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow’s churchyard pillow.
O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till Death pours out his cordial wine
Slow-dropped from Misery’s crushing presses,– If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!
I hope that our landlady’s daughter is not so badly off, after all. That young man from another city, who made the remark which you remember about Boston State-house and Boston folks, has appeared at our table repeatedly of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive to this young lady. Only last evening I saw him leaning over her while she was playing the accordion,–indeed, I undertook to join them in a song, and got as far as “Come rest in this boo-oo,” when, my voice getting tremulous, I turned off, as one steps out of a procession, and left the basso and soprano to finish it. I see no reason why this young woman should not be a very proper match for a man that laughs about Boston State-house. He can’t be very particular.
The young fellow whom I have so often mentioned was a little free in his remarks, but very good-natured.–Sorry to have you go,–he said.–Schoolma’am made a mistake not to wait for me. Haven’t taken anything but mournin’ fruit at breakfast since I heard of it.–_Mourning fruit,_–said I,–what’s that?–Huckleberries and blackberries,–said he;–couldn’t eat in colors, raspberries, currants, and such, after a solemn thing like this happening.–The conceit seemed to please the young fellow. If you will believe it, when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it out as follows. You know those odious little “saaes-plates” that figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns, into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery teaspoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub,–(not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or “lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon,” and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the Tower-stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy,–as people in the green stage of millionism will have them,–I can dally with their amber semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,)–you know these small, deep dishes, I say. When we came down the next morning, each of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf. On lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black huckleberries. But one of those plates held red currants, and was covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was covered with a white rose. There was a laugh at this at first, and then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna handkerchief.
–“What was the use in waiting? We should be too late for Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer.”–The hand I held trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed herself before the feet of Ahasuerus.–She had been reading that chapter, for she looked up,–if there was a film of moisture over her eyes, there was also the faintest shadow of a distant smile skirting her lips, but not enough to accent the dimples,–and said, in her pretty, still way,–“If it please the king, and if I have found favor in his sight, and the thing seem right before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes”–
I don’t remember what King Ahasuerus did or said when Esther got just to that point of her soft, humble words,–but I know what I did. That quotation from Scripture was cut short, anyhow. We came to a compromise on the great question, and the time was settled for the last day of summer.
In the mean time, I talked on with our boarders, much as usual, as you may see by what I have reported. I must say, I was pleased with a certain tenderness they all showed toward us, after the first excitement of the news was over. It came out in trivial matters,–but each one, in his or her way, manifested kindness. Our landlady, for instance, when we had chickens, sent the _liver_ instead of the _gizzard_, with the wing, for the schoolmistress. This was not an accident: the two are _never_ mistaken, though some land-ladies _appear_ as if they did not know the difference. The whole of the company were even more respectfully attentive to my remarks than usual. There was no idle punning, and very little winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant,–except when the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the landlady’s daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until she would ask what he was pokin’ his fun at her for, and if he wasn’t ashamed of himself. In fact, they all behaved very handsomely, so that I really felt sorry at the thought of leaving my boarding-house.
I suppose you think, that, because I lived at a plain widow-woman’s plain table, I was of course more or less infirm in point of worldly fortune. You may not be sorry to learn, that, though not what _great merchants_ call very rich, I was comfortable,–comfortable,–so that most of those moderate luxuries I described in my verses on _Contentment_–_most_ of them, I say–were within our reach, if we chose to have them. But I found out that the schoolmistress had a vein of charity about her, which had hitherto been worked on a small silver and copper basis, which made her think less, perhaps, of luxuries than even I did,–modestly as I have expressed my wishes.
It is rather a pleasant thing to tell a poor young woman, whom one has contrived to win without showing his rent-roll, that she has found what the world values so highly, in following the lead of her affections. That was a luxury I was now ready for.
I began abruptly:–Do you know that you are a rich young person?
I know that I am very rich,–she said,–Heaven has given me more than I ever asked; for I had not thought love was ever meant for me.
It was a woman’s confession, and her voice fell to a whisper as it threaded the last words.
I don’t mean that,–I said,–you blessed little saint and seraph!–if there’s an angel missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her at this boarding-house!–I don’t mean that; I mean that I–that is, you–am–are–confound it!–I mean that you’ll be what most people call a lady of fortune.–And I looked full in her eyes for the effect of the announcement.
There wasn’t any. She said she was thankful that I had what would save me from drudgery, and that some other time I should tell her about it.–I never made a greater failure in an attempt to produce a sensation.
So the last day of summer came. It was our choice to go to the church, but we had a kind of reception at the boarding-house. The presents were all arranged, and among them none gave more pleasure than the modest tributes of our fellow-boarders,–for there was not one, I believe, who did not send something. The landlady would insist on making an elegant bride-cake, with her own hands; to which Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add certain embellishments out of his private funds,–namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done in white sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars and stripes, which had a very pleasing effect, I assure you. The landlady’s daughter sent a richly bound copy of Tupper’s Poems. On a blank leaf was the following, written in a very delicate and careful hand:–
Presented to… by…
On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony. May sunshine ever beam o’er her!
Even the poor relative thought she must do something, and sent a copy of “The Whole Duty of Man,” bound in very attractive variegated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled. From the divinity-student came the loveliest English edition of “Keble’s Christian Tear.” I opened it, when it came, to the _Fourth Sunday in Lent_, and read that angelic poem, sweeter than anything I can remember since Xavier’s “My God, I love thee.”—-I am not a Churchman,–I don’t believe in planting oaks in flower-pots,–but such a poem as “The Rose-bud” makes one’s heart a proselyte to the culture it grows from. Talk about it as much as you like,–one’s breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion. A man should be a gentleman in his hymns and prayers; the fondness for “scenes,” among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that–
“God only and good angels look
Behind the blissful scene,”–
and that other,–
“He could not trust his melting soul But in his Maker’s sight,”–
that I hope some of them will see this, and read the poem, and profit by it.
My laughing and winking young friend undertook to procure and arrange the flowers for the table, and did it with immense zeal. I never saw him look happier than when he came in, his hat saucily on one side, and a cheroot in his mouth, with a huge bunch of tea-roses, which he said were for “Madam.”
One of the last things that came was an old square box, smelling of camphor, tied and sealed. It bore, in faded ink, the marks, “Calcutta, 1805.” On opening it, we found a white Cashmere shawl, with a very brief note from the dear old gentleman opposite, saying that he had kept this some years, thinking he might want it, and many more, not knowing what to do with it,–that he had never seen it unfolded since he was a young super-cargo,–and now, if she would spread it on her shoulders, it would make him feel young to look at it.
Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid of all work! What must she do but buy a small copper breast-pin and put it under “Schoolma’am’s” plate that morning, at breakfast? And Schoolma’am would wear it,–though I made her cover it, as well as I could, with a tea-rose.
It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and I could not leave them in utter silence.