Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

A LIFE UNVEILED

A LIFE UNVEILED

BY

A CHILD OF THE DRUMLINS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS

Ce livre est toute ma jeunesse; je

l’ai fait sans presque y songer.

—De Musset

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I fancy that this “Child of the Drumlins” did not know she was living amid drumlins when she passed her youth there. She knew them only as the long, smooth, loaf-shaped hills that were scattered over her native landscape, upon which she saw cattle grazing and grain ripening, and upon which she roamed and played in the freedom of childhood.

These curious-looking hills are found in certain parts of New England, and in a large section of the central and western parts of New York state. They would suggest artificial mounds were they not so large as to preclude all idea of their being the work of man. They were indeed made, but not by human hands. They are the work of the great continental ice-sheet which tens of thousands of years ago crept slowly over a large part of the Northern hemisphere, giving to the landscape, among many other strange new features, these long, low, rounded hills, called by the geologists drumlins, amid which the “Child” passed her early life. Carpeted with grass and often dotted with trees, these peaceful pastoral elevations are seldom more than a quarter of a mile long, and perhaps a hundred feet high. Their trend is in one direction, from northeast to southwest—the general course the ice-flood took. They are simply huge heaps of clay and water-worn boulders shovelled together by the gods of the Ice Age, though just how it all came about the geologists are not clear. But there they stand, making a marked feature in the landscape.

To the Land of the Drumlins, rich in its early associations, the writer of this narrative turns, giving a moving record of real life which to me makes fiction insipid. It presents the natural history of an American girl in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. (And why should we not have such a history, as well as that of much less interesting animals?) Herein we see pictured typical and representative conditions and individuals which contributed to the development of a dreaming, aspiring girl into a woman of serious purpose and substantial achievement in a strenuous and useful career. A notable piece of work of permanent literary and psychological value, it sweeps one along by its intrinsic interest, its candour, its playfulness, and its seriousness. Childhood memories, trivial and signal events, portraiture, incidents, form a picture of real life convincing as only real things can convince. Through it we look into a heart and a life. It is life. One sees the writer from her forebears up. With what admirable art she brings certain scenes before us! One is present, sees and feels them all, and shares her inmost thoughts and emotions. One’s tears stand trembling at the doorway; smiles and laughter are irresistibly evoked. The feeling with which the writer has invested the narrative is the principal source of its charm and value; it is that which makes us a sharer in all her life. The book does not appear to be written, but rather an unveiling of memories, with an entire absence of literary consciousness. Her mind seems transparent; her life like an open book before her where she can trace every passage. Does she forget nothing? Few persons can see themselves objectively and at the same time achieve such self-analysis.

One is carried along by the rush and spontaneity of the record, as the author evidently was in writing it. In her passionate confession, faults and errors are courageously set down. One rejoices to know that there were imps in the girl who shows at the same time such a serious, earnest nature, such a vibrant, susceptible personality. One likes her for her pranks and her naughtiness, her stubbornness, her primness, and her deep attachments. She piques one and leads one on, a willing sharer in all her experiences. One comes to see that he is always to expect the unexpected from this demure, enigmatic creature who, though preserving her own individuality, is so like all girls of her time and race. And it is this universal appeal which gives the record its value: other girls and women, other youths and men as well, will see themselves in this “Child of the Drumlins” who summons her past before us so vividly that we, too, live over again the days of our own youth.

TO THE READER

Have you ever reached a time in your life when all that had gone before seemed cut off from the present; when you felt an imperious need to review whatever had gone to the making of the You; when the preceding years, full as they had seemed, were barren of that which made the present so vital; when, because of that barrenness, they seemed to have belonged rather to the life of one you knew than to your own? If you have, you will understand the motive that sometimes leads one to deliberate self-study and self-delineation.

He who honestly undertakes such study is pledged to candour at all costs. Beginning by reviewing his ancestry and environment, he also tries to recapture some of those earliest, evanescent sense experiences and memories of childhood. He peers into that mysterious borderland between childhood and youth; surveys the formative influences, the outstanding events, the proclivities, longings, aspirations, achievements, struggles, temptations, successes, defeats—reviews them all, tries to estimate their influence, and to recognize their possible reappearance, in other guises perhaps, in his present self. The dawning of religious emotion, sex consciousness, the gradual transition from the receptiveness and naïve simplicity of childhood to the wilful caprice of adolescence (with its blind gropings, its heightened emotional life, its contradictory moods, its evolution of self-consciousness and social consciousness)—all these phases he passes in review and weighs, hoping to form a just estimate as to their effect upon his personality as he alone knows it.

One cannot compass this survey until one has passed beyond the seething period of adolescence which merges so insensibly into that of maturity. Immaturity, maturity—the difference is only of degree; the child is father to the man; the psychology we trace in child life is fundamentally the same that obtains when the individual achieves that self-control and balance, that steadiness of aim, that harmonious union of bodily and mental powers which characterize maturity. Until we understand this merging and blending of experiences that make up a life history, we may regard as trivial the fleeting events and memories of childhood which the psychologist knows are significant and far-reaching.

In the rapid setting down of what comes crowding into the consciousness as the canvas of one’s life unrolls before him, one is not especially concerned with the orderly sequence of events; mental associations are intractable forces to deal with; a certain looseness of exterior matters is inevitable; the eye cannot look both in and out at the same time. What really matters is that one accurately read one’s own consciousness, without mistakes, without self-deception, without wilful deceit. Unless this is achieved, one cheats one’s self.

Perhaps the record is made for self alone; perhaps for another; in any case not for the public; and yet as the years pass, and the events recorded have become so remote as to seem dissociated from the present self, it may happen that the question of sharing the record with others arises—a question which gives pause to the autobiographer with scant claim on the public.

“Who is this,” he imagines the reader inquiring, “who so confidently asks us to share all these details of her life?” And then there comes to mind that statement of Carlyle’s: that the humblest life, if truthfully presented, would be of absorbing interest; that a true delineation of the smallest man and his scene of pilgrimage throughout life, is capable of interesting the greatest men, since all men are brothers, and since human portraits, faithfully drawn, must be of all pictures the welcomest on human walls.

And so the story goes forth. If it faithfully depict the psychology of child life, of adolescence, of dawning maturity, devoid though it be of plot and, as a whole, of dramatic interest, it may yet, as a typical human portrait, justify itself; may aid the young to a better understanding of their own natures, and help those no longer young to a keener remembrance, a deeper sympathy, and a broader tolerance concerning the struggles, problems, and complexities that beset the young lives around them.

This book of my childhood and youth, written many years ago, is as sincere as such a thing can well be, and this constitutes its only excuse for being. Unless I have told the naked, unblushing truth, why pretend to unveil my life?[1] If I have concealed faults and follies, what is there in common with your life as you alone know it? Doubtless you yourself would shrink from the deliberate self-analysis and self-revelation I have made, and yet may find herein natural human reactions which tally with your own inarticulate experiences.

L’Innommée.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The names in the narrative are, of course, fictitious.

A LIFE UNVEILED

I once wandered in a beautiful garden. It had high walls which made one feel safe and sheltered. There were many flower-bordered paths, and some that were stony and rough. There were broad open spaces, dark, wooded corners, cosy nooks, and friendly trees. Openings in the wall gave glimpses that made one’s heart beat faster and that filled one with queer restless feelings, half pleasure, half pain.

There came a day when I left the garden and started on a long journey. I have never been back. Sometimes I have wanted to go back, but the great gate can never open from the outside.

When we lose our Edens, you and I, is it any wonder that we sometimes pause in the journey, and long to recapture the days when we played in the enchanted enclosure? What if, some day, one creeps back close to the wall, holding up the magic mirror he brought away with him? What if he gets glimpses that help him to continue on the way? What if he lets you peep into the mirror, too—the mirror which will reflect the garden you played in, the paths you trod, the flowers you gathered, the playmates you knew?

A LIFE UNVEILED

CHAPTER I The Family Tree

I seem always to have lived a life apart from the obvious one, seeing the strange contrasts, the incongruities, the dramatic moments, though always these things were unexpressed. Those about me had no inkling of what was passing in my mind. Perhaps it is so with all children. One can only know one’s self, and that so vaguely.

I was born near the foot of a drumlin. Their smooth level crests broke the horizon line of my native village. Amid the drumlins I shared in all the little world they bounded. On the summit of a drumlin my kindred lie buried, and back to the drumlins I shall one day turn—back to the commonplace little village where my life began. The village has not grown in all the years, either in population or importance; on the contrary, it seems to have dwindled to tiny dimensions. Whenever I go back there now, the houses and the prominent buildings look smaller, the drumlins lower, and all the distances are lessened to a surprising degree. I look at the one handsome residence the village boasts and ask, Is that the house I used to think so imposing? Are those the grounds so illimitable to my childish eyes? And is this the same hill near Grandfather’s barn that was so steep when three happy children clambered over it in search of sorrel leaves? What a paltry patch of ground Grandmother’s garden now is! yet there was a time when, engaged in one of the tasks of my childhood (that of picking Grandma’s raspberries and currants), her garden bounded my little world which then did not seem little at all. Nor was it; for while moving among the currant bushes, my fingers busy, my thoughts roamed far afield—out past the hop vines in the rear; out past the clump of big red “pineys” in front, and the corner where the smallage grew; past the snowball bush, even past the oxheart cherry tree; through the little blue gate, and out into the big wonderful world beyond. No, it was not a little garden; it was a very big garden then; some unkind trickery has been at work these later years to make it the poor cramped little enclosure which I viewed last summer through blinding tears.

And Grandma’s old house, too. How low the rooms are now! There was a time when, caught up in the arms of an uncle, and seated on his shoulder, the laughing faces below me seemed remote indeed to my half-pleased, half-frightened eyes. How tall I feel, almost stately, as I enter the rooms now; and what a chill and gloom strike to the marrow of my being to find no longer the dear old wrinkled face to greet me! To see the same paper on the walls, the same clock on the mantel, the same familiar things at every turn, worn and faded, but still there, while that cherished face, and those beneficent, toil-worn hands, and the tired, pain-racked heart are gone forever!

No one was ever so hospitable as Grandpa and Grandma. “Just sit by and have a bite of something,” Grandma would urge, unaware that she was dispensing a blessing instead of asking a boon. Their meals were frugal—no recollection of bounty comes to me, except at Thanksgiving or other family reunions; but Grandma’s bread and butter, her warmed-up potatoes, and her sugar cookies (with caraway seeds in them), touched the spot as no other food ever did or can. Then she used to place a cup of tea (green tea, it always was) slyly by my plate, saying: “I guess your Ma won’t care this time if you take a little.” I can see the little brown tea-pot now as she brings it from the back of the stove; the silver lustre sugar-bowl with its ribbed sides, and the nick on the knob of the cover; the blue dishes; the Britannia spoons—no one but Grandma had Britannia spoons—and the thin, pointed silver ones; the yellow-handled knives; and the funny little two-tined fork that Grandma herself used—the rest of us had forks with three tines.

There’s the Boston rocker in which Grandpa sat of a winter evening and peeled apples for drying. I wonder where his little old “shoe-knife” is. “What makes your hands tremble so, Grandpa?” Sister would ask; but in spite of the tremor he peeled a heaping pile of an evening.

“Eunice, fetch me a bigger pan,” he would call to Grandma, busy in kitchen or buttery; and how testy he got if she didn’t understand, or brought the wrong pan! I shuddered when he spoke that way to her, and wondered why it was; and her meek face and humble silence made me love and pity her the more. I never learned not to mind Grandpa’s angry tones. It was “his way” with her. His voice, as I remember it, was almost always harsh to her, but never to me, never to me. He was always indulgent with me, and with all of us children—except when we hung around the barn at milking-time—then he would forget himself, and one would have thought he was shouting to Grandma or to the cows instead. We learned not to put his temper to this strain very often—his hospitality did not extend that far. I don’t know how much an incident of my babyhood engendered this feeling: Grandpa had a white cow, a gentle, well-behaved “critter,” but one day when they took her calf away, maddened, she made a dash at me, playing near; caught me on her horns, and ran up the bank of the tow-path, while Mother looked on paralyzed with fear. As Grandpa and a neighbour ran up the bank, the cow ran faster, then tossed me wildly in the air.

“I didn’t know whether you would fall in the water or on her horns,” Mother used to say; “I expected to see you drowned in the canal or horribly wounded; but Mr. Mintline caught you in his arms—Grandpa sold the cow the next day.” Mother’s voice always trembled in recounting the incident.

Since then I have always been afraid of cows. If the peaceable creatures come slowly toward me, try as I will I cannot walk slowly away. I breathe freely only when the fence is between them and me. By some childish twist of the imagination, so vivid was the impression made upon me by hearing of being caught on the horns of that old white cow, I believed myself to have been injured by the act, and was quite a big child before I learned that certain anatomical mark on my body—the little deep dimple in the abdomen—was not made by the horns of that angry cow. It needed the confirmation given by seeing my sister’s and other children’s bodies similarly marked to disabuse my mind of that belief.

I remember when in my early ’teens I would meet that neighbour—Mintline—an unkempt man, who had long since forgotten his share in my life, I would think, “He caught you in his arms,” and would smile to myself at the incongruity as, fluttering past him on the street in my pretty muslin gown, I was acutely conscious of the contrast with his rough, untidy clothes. Turning and looking after him I would say under my breath, “You don’t know, but I do, and I’m grateful to you, even if you have forgotten it all.”

Grandpa, as I have said, was impatient and irascible; he was easily moved to profanity; but he was a man of probity of life and character and a hater of shams. His sense of humour was keen, also his sense of justice. He was a mason by trade; had built the brick church in the town, the old Academy, and a few other fine old brick buildings standing there to-day. I used to look upon these with pride, saying to myself, “Grandpa built that—and that”; though, since my earliest recollection, he had not worked at his trade. He led an active life up to his eighty-sixth year about his village farm, with his cows and his pigs, and his haying in the low-lying meadows. I can see him now riding his black horse, straight and sturdy, on his way to the pasture with the cows. Often they were wayward and the boys in the street would annoy him. I used to feel chagrined beyond words when I heard him swearing at the cows, or at the boys, and saw him brandishing his whip in the air. Mother felt the same. I could detect a look of relief on her face those days when Grandpa rode peaceably by with the cows.

Grandma was not pious, she was a saint. Though a church member, she seldom went to church. Toiling from morning till night, she endured hardship, harshness, and pain with a sweet reasonableness that endeared her to all. Grandpa’s impatience and shouting never provoked complaints from her. She seemed to think his quick temper and deafness excused him.

In contrast to her hard workaday life I was always dreaming of the romance of Grandma’s early days. Filling in related facts with fancies, I pored over her early picture with its quaint arrangement of gown and hair, rejoicing in traces of her girlish beauty. I liked her quaint name, Eunice (a cousin of hers, a courtly old gentleman, used to call her Eu-ni’-ce—that was beautiful, but Grandpa uncompromisingly pronounced it Eu’-nis); I liked the names of her sisters, too—Thankful, Peace, and Nancy.

In retrospect I mourned with my great-grandfather Albro when he lost his young wife and had to scatter his baby girls among their relatives. Near neighbours, John Gear and wife, had begged for little Eunice, then less than two years old. Though he let them take her, he had refused their repeated requests to adopt her. But one morning the neighbours were astonished to find the Gear house dismantled and deserted, the couple having stolen away in the night. They were bound to have that child. No trace of them could be obtained. That was in 1813. They easily escaped detection, though for years the poor father inquired diligently of chance strangers and travellers for news of the fugitives.

The Gears journeyed to a distant county. Eunice was reared in ignorance of her real parentage. Even when she married, her foster parents were loth to let her leave them. Her own home and children soon claimed all her thoughts, and she lived on unaware of the tragedy in the life of her father.

There was a certain youth, Otis Sprague, to whom Grandma had been attached before marrying Grandpa; at least, she went to parties with him. (I can’t tell just how much of this is my own romancing, but I convinced myself he was a disappointed suitor.) He left home in the early years after Grandma’s marriage, journeying to Washington county, the home of his ancestors. (I used to make believe he left because he could not bear to see Grandma the wife of another.) Visiting among his kindred, he came upon his uncle, my great-grandfather. As usual, the old man inquired of the traveller what parts he had come from, and then ventured, “Did you ever chance to meet a man, Gear—John Gear?”

“John Gear? Why, yes—there’s a John Gear lives in our place. I know him well.”

I could see the old man trembling with joy—the long-expected answer come at last! Faltering as he tried to frame the next question, he hesitated so long the young man thought him a little daft:

“And did you—has he—is there—did you ever hear tell of Eunice—a child with big blue eyes and”—then he broke off, afraid to question further—she might be dead, or, if living, must be a woman now.

Otis had his own reasons, I was confident, for remembering Eunice. He knew just how those wistful blue eyes looked, and how the soft brown hair waved over her forehead. Seeing at once that this meant more to the old man than he could express, Otis answered the unasked questions; told him there had been a Eunice Gear, eldest daughter of John Gear (for the childless couple had later had children born to them). She had married a young mason a few years ago—Crandall by name—quick tempered, but a good fellow; they had two babies when he came away, and he guessed there was another one a-coming. Yes, he went to school with her—took her to a party once.

Then I saw the scene that followed—the broken explanations of the joyous father—questions, answers, hurriedly uttered, and the growing eagerness of both men as they supplemented for each other the missing information about the lost-and-found Eunice.

Enraged at the Gears, on his return home Otis told Grandma the story of her abduction, and gave her the messages from her father and sisters.

After that, one hope dominated Grandma’s life—to save enough money to go to her father. Loving the Gears, her heart yet yearned for the father and sisters she had never known. But her children came near together; money was scarce; means of travel were difficult and uncertain; two children sickened and died; and the years went by with her hope unfulfilled, an infrequent and laboured correspondence being the only link between them.

After many years of careful saving, the little hoard was thought sufficient for the trip. The children were old enough to be left with Otis’s sister, and Grandma set out on her long journey.

There were no railroads then. She went on the canal “packet.” This scene was very real to me. I could see her starting, loth to leave her little family, yet eager to go; timid at the thought of the enterprise, but impatient at the slow-moving boat. I’m sure she often walked on the towpath to relieve excitement and suspense. I wonder how long it took that snail boat to make the trip. Parts of the journey were made by stagecoach.

On reaching her old home she found her sisters, but her father had moved to Warren County. More than that, he had had one or two strokes of apoplexy and could no longer converse; he would, as the sisters said, “say one word when he meant another.” Her money was not sufficient to meet the additional expenses; the extra time it would take was a serious drawback to the anxious mother; then there was her father’s inability to talk with her; so, torn between conflicting interests, hampered, anxious, and sore beset, she abandoned the quest, renounced her long-cherished hope of reunion with her father, and turned her face toward home and family, drawn by a half-defined fear lest they get scattered, too.

During Grandma’s last years her sister Thankful came and lived with her—two feeble old women, united in infancy, separated throughout their long lives, reunited just before the end! We children called her Aunt Unthankful: her presence added much to Grandma’s burdens, but no murmur passed the patient lips; nor would she suffer criticism of the poor soul who had found refuge in her home and heart.

As a girl I was keenly alive to the pathos of my great-grandfather’s life, and to the deferred, then all-but-accomplished hope in Grandma’s. My own mother’s cherished hope of one day taking Grandma to her childhood home was also doomed to unfulfilment; and with a curious prescience I used to ask, “Will the dearest hope that sleeps against my own heart meet a like rebuff?” Had the tired, saddened woman found her father at the last, I wonder if his failing mind could have grasped the truth. Perhaps he would have turned away in bitter disappointment when they had tried to make him understand; unable to articulate, but thinking, “That is not my baby Eunice that John Gear stole from me.” Perhaps he died hoping, believing, that his little Eunice would still come back.

As a child I remember being gathered into Grandma’s arms, conscious of an infinite tenderness, inarticulate but encompassing. I used to look up into her pale, weary face and wonder why she had to work so hard. I loved to stroke her soft cheeks; was mystified by the wrinkled flesh that hung beneath her chin; and her poor hands with their enlarged joints and crooked fingers—it seemed as though they must hurt to be so bent; vainly I tried to straighten them. It was such a puzzle, too—the contrast between age and youth as I saw and felt it in Grandma and myself when patting her face with my chubby hand. I looked and marvelled and questioned, then gave up questioning, and rested my head on her breast, content to be folded in her arms.

There was a pink china teapot with a broken spout high on Grandma’s pantry shelf. I never saw inside it, but a delightful jingle came from its capacious depths. In it Grandma kept pennies, nickels, half-dimes and dimes, and those tiny, three-cent coins I haven’t seen since childhood; yes, and there were the large three-cent pieces and the two-cent coppers that one sees no more. Grandma had a way of urging us children: “Now take a nickel for all your trouble,” just as she had of urging us to help her empty the old brown cookie jar. Although there were no injunctions concerning a reasonable amount of cookies, we were taught at home that we must not accept Grandma’s nickels (her milk and yeast money) for the errands we did; and to our credit, be it said, we refused them as a rule, even when we had to summon all our strength to refuse. I can see now three pairs of red-mittened hands quickly drawn away as Grandma would press the tempting coins, first on one, then the other, of her little helpers. Sometimes the nickel would fall into the pail, and we would fumble to get it out, while Grandma’s siren tones would urge: “There, run along home like good children and mind Grandma, just this once.” Ah, Grandma! many an enticing temptation of yours did our childish strength withstand! Would that the forbidden sweets and glittering coins Life has proffered had oftener met a like renunciation! And yet, can one ever really say that he would change anything that has become a part of him, of his experience—that, if he could, he would blot it out, make it as though it had never been?

So used to serving was she, instead of being served, Grandma seemed always to ask aid under protest; her gratitude was out of all proportion to the service rendered: “You poor child, when will you get paid for all you do for Grandma?” was the burden of her talk, though the “poor child” fairly doted on running errands for her. “Four pounds of white sugar, two of light brown, half a pound of green tea, and a ball of Babbitt’s concentrated lye”—this refrain I would con over and over on my way to the village, lest I forget it while loitering to watch the boats crawl under the canal bridge.

How many hours I have spent down in her cool sweet cellar over the little red churn, the dasher going up and down, up and down, while I said aloud my favourite poems—after Grandma had gone upstairs. Many a pat of butter has gathered under the dasher while I rehearsed the winning of Juliet, Othello’s speech to the senate, Portia’s speech to Shylock—extracts from Cathcart’s Literary Reader, which was my first introduction to real literature.

Men do not gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. As Grandma’s life had been one of service, so her daughter, my mother, was untiring in devotion to her mother; and so, too, I am glad to say, Mother’s children have tried to emulate the filial examples set them. By way of contrast I am reminded of a story illustrating hereditary tendencies: A boy was arrested for beating his father; the injured father defended his boy thus, “He can’t help beating me: I beat my father; my father beat his father; and my son’s son will beat him—it runs in our family.” I am glad it runs in our family to love and revere our parents. Yet, there was Grandpa with his habit of profanity, the son of a Baptist clergyman! Mother used to marvel how he could have grown up that way, since his father, who used to take boys to tutor in his own home, was said to have given him and them a very strict up-bringing. His mother, Katrina Klincke, born in Alsace, was an inexorable housekeeper. Her exacting ways have cropped out in full force in one of our aunts; and in later years I’m not sure but this great-grandmother wields an influence over my sister and me—we cannot be comfortable in disorder or slack housekeeping, nor—more’s the pity!—can we let any one else be.

My paternal ancestry is French and, probably, Scottish. Father used to say we were descended on his father’s side from one of the celebrated French Revolutionists, an intimate of Napoleon’s and Josephine’s; but my grandparents and great-grandparents were born in the Land of the Drumlins. When, some years ago, the memoirs of our reputed French ancestor were published, bringing to light his brilliant but unscrupulous career, I took a mischievous pleasure in sending Father the particularly scathing comments concerning “our ancestor.”

My father was the fifth child in a family of ten; his father died in early adult life, presumably of tuberculosis, though Father would never admit it. Two of his sisters had the same disease, and, because of my resemblance to one of them, and my not robust health in childhood, I was something of an object of solicitude in early girlhood, though all fears on that score vanished long ago. I have heard that my paternal grandfather drank to excess, and know that one of his sons did, which may largely account for my father’s life-long zeal for the Temperance Cause. His mother, of Scottish descent, left with a large family, was brave, strong, and resourceful to an unusual degree. Their little log-house being miles away from a neighbour, once during a big snow-storm lasting several days they had nothing in the house to eat but potatoes and salt. “But we ate them and were glad to get them,” said Father, who added, “We can never know how much inward anxiety Mother felt at such times, but whatever it was, none but herself ever knew.”

We children called her “the other Grandma,” for she then lived “way out West” (in Michigan), and we never saw her but once. I remember her serious face, which could look very merry when she smiled; and her black gown with a purple stripe running through it. She was at our house on one of my early birthdays and helped us smoke glass to look at a total eclipse of the sun. When she died, a cousin came running down the hill waving a yellow paper and saying breathlessly, “Grandma is dead!” And she smiled when she said it! A sensitive girl, overcome with the importance of being the bearer of such news, her smile, I know now, was a purely nervous manifestation; but I could not judge her leniently then. Moved by the grief of my parents, I wept to see them weep, but the shadow passed quickly; not so the resentment I held toward that cousin for her untimely smile.

As youth passes one longs for fuller knowledge of the lives that preceded one’s own. We are the result of all that has gone before, but how often important figures are missing; and even when not, how inexplicable the sum total is! Lives cut off in our childhood and youth, or perhaps before we were born, may have endowed us with this or that constitutional bias, this weakness, that strength—to which of them do I owe this fault?—is this trait, for which I am commended, my own, or my great grandmother’s?—insoluble complexities, yet how we seek an answer, here and there, as we study our tree of life from the roots up!

CHAPTER II The Roof-tree

If my father had married a certain sweetheart of his early youth, and Mother a suitor to whom she almost became engaged, what would have become of me?

Should I be I, or would it be

One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?

I often asked myself this question. But after each of my parents had had a preliminary romance, they met at a Methodist prayer-meeting, and each knew from the start what the outcome would be.

Mother was then a school-teacher, Father a dry-goods clerk. Both were born in log houses; both reared in the frugal way of their times; the snow often blew in on their coverlids through chinks in the logs; they slept in trundle beds; wore homespun clothes and calf-skin shoes, and had their education at the district schools to which they walked through the woods following marked trees. Born amid the drumlins less than fifty miles apart, all their married lives—more than fifty years together—have been spent in the little village where they met.

In the early years of their marriage Father had a travelling wagon called a “Yankee Notion and Boot and Shoe Store.” Brother, several years my senior, would tell with pride of Papa’s big wagon and the iron-gray horses. In girlhood I spent hours upstairs, when supposed to be putting the large closet to rights at the spring housecleaning, sitting on the floor poring over Father’s letters to Mother, written during those years. How like a romance to find those letters so full of solicitude and love!—comments on Brother’s baby ways; admonitions to the adopted brother; words of love to Mother—strange to get this glimpse of my parents; to see the young father’s pride in his boy; and to read these unrestrained expressions of devotion! For the father I knew, though affectionate and kind, was a more staid, reserved person than the one in the letters. Now the baby boy was grown up, the adopted brother scarcely a memory, and the girl who was not born when the letters were written was reading eagerly the ardent words that had gladdened her mother’s young heart!

The circumstances of my brother’s birth strongly appealed to my imagination: My parents had given up hopes of a child some years before he came. Father’s health had long been precarious—a persistent cough and exhausting night sweats were wasting him rapidly. Mother, at his side day and night, facing his approaching death, was facing a hidden dread as well—the fear that she was now to become a mother. As the weeks passed and the fear became a certainty, she determined to spare Father the knowledge, thinking it would kill him outright. She almost prayed for his release before the truth must be apparent. How she dreaded the scrutiny of the Doctor, and Father’s questioning eyes! How she resorted to evasion, artifice, and concealment! But one day, suddenly changing her mind, trusting in God to help him bear it, she told Father that the child they had hoped for so long was actually to come.

Instantly he became electrified with the glad tidings. Summoning unknown funds of strength he cried, “I must live, I will live!” It was a greatly improved patient that the Doctor found the next day, and recovery, though slow, dated from that time. (It was probably arrested tuberculosis.)

Many years later Father’s health again seemed precarious—dizziness, and numbness of the arms, caused the physician to prophesy approaching paralysis. I remember this as my first sorrow. I was perhaps fourteen years old. When Mother told me what the Doctor had said I flung myself on the bed in a paroxysm of grief. My Father was going to leave me! The utter helplessness and wretchedness of us all without him! It was an hour of agony. But there stood Mother with her own grief, and mine. This calmed me. I must help and comfort her, instead of giving way like this. The storm passed; but the days, weeks, and months that followed were shadowed by this dread, which, however, proved less well-founded than it had seemed; or else Father’s change in his mode of life effected a decided change in his condition. Closing out his boot-and-shoe store, and travelling again for the same firm for which he had travelled as a young man, he recuperated markedly. Now, in his seventy-second year, he is in fair health, alert, enduring, and with keen intellectual vigour—a man of undaunted courage and unconquerable optimism.

I have often wondered how it would seem to have more than one brother and sister; it always seems as if all the love I have went to these two, and that there would have been none left for others; or at least that it would have had to be divided up, leaving each the poorer—one does not have to divide for brother and sister—the love you give a sister is peculiarly hers, the love to a brother peculiarly his, but how is it that large families have enough to go around?

Death has never come nearer to me than when my grandparents were taken. Not unmindful of this escape, I think of it often now. Once I thought, “Death can never take away my father and mother, my sister and brother,” but of late I am losing the feeling that none of the calamities of life can come nigh me; and, instead, find myself trying to think what it would be like to live on if one of them were taken.

Once when Brother was a lad of perhaps twelve, during an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, his heart acted so badly that Sister and I were sent for in great haste to come home from school. The attack passed, but after that illness his disposition was altered; he was more irritable, with a temper much like Grandpa’s. He would domineer over us, as big brothers will, speaking sharply over trifles, and he and Sister would quarrel. I did not quarrel, but would grieve over his harsh tones. I never could endure angry tones, they always made me shudder. Noting this susceptibility, Brother was more patient with me than with Sister, who would get miffed easily and talk back. My tears, which came easily in those days, always melted him. Consciously or unconsciously, I ruled him to some extent by this weakness.

Once in school a boy whispered maliciously, “Genie, Art is reading a dime novel.” Now I had never read a dime novel, but having strait-laced notions of how wicked they were, my whole soul rose in denial—my brother do such a thing! No! But seeing Arthur bending over his geography with unaccustomed diligence, something in his absorption told me that what that boy said was true! The tears flowed fast. Ah, the bitterness of that knowledge! Someone—the same boy, was it?—told Arthur his little sister was weeping because he was reading a dime novel, and at recess he berated me; I cried the more bitterly; he then consoled me in his half-scolding, half-wheedling way, finally promising not to do it again.

And when he first learned to smoke! We were skating on the canal at noon-time, I skating with a girl that Arthur was “sweet on.” Suddenly he skated past us with a braggadocio air, a cigar in his mouth! Carrie and I gave one look at each other, one swift, comprehending look—if Arthur had robbed a bank or stolen a horse we could hardly have felt worse. We tacitly sat down and took off our skates, and, heavy-hearted, went ’cross-lots to school, the skates dangling from our arms, and the lumps in our throats choking us. I cannot remember that we talked about it; it was too awful to discuss. And that defiant look of Arthur’s, how it cut! Our grief-stricken faces must have worked on his conscience, for in the afternoon a note was passed to me (I’ve no doubt he wrote to Her, too), in which Arthur said:

Dear Sister,

Why did you leave the ice this noon? We had a good time.

Then as if in afterthought,

Did you feel bad because I was smoking? I won’t do it again.

Your loving brother,
Arthur.

He kept his word for a long time; then, whenever he would break it, there would be tears and repentance and fresh promises. Similar scenes occurred the first time I smelled his breath and learned that he had been drinking. Heart-breakings, attempted denials, then confessions, promises, struggles to keep them, followed by lapses, penitence, and tears.

“I’ll never do it again, Genie,” used to make my heart bound with hope. The tears no longer come now. Something too deep for tears is felt when the poor fellow, thinking he can keep his word this time, says penitently, “I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t do it again, Genie.”

This weakness of Arthur’s has been almost the only sorrow in our family. We each react to it in different ways, according to our temperaments. Father’s watchfulness, and the necessary work and care that are occasioned by this infirmity; his forgiveness, seventy times seven; and his optimism, are his ways of meeting the conditions; Mother suffers, pities him, and prays that with the grace of God he will yet be able to conquer; Sister, seeing the sorrow that follows in the wake of such indulgence, loses patience with a weakness she cannot understand, upbraids him, and chides the rest of us for lenience; yet, in spite of herself, breaks through her resolutions and, in practical ways, dispenses timely aid; and I, knowing it to be a disease, perhaps largely an inheritance, am bound to regard it charitably. Trying to throw around him what safeguards we can, I am thankful for the periods of well-doing, and can but be merciful when defeat comes. He tries hard, never stops trying, and suffers keen remorse at times. It is unspeakably pitiful, and especially in later years, since he has children of his own and sees how they suffer through his infirmity.

Who knows how much inherited tendencies in certain ancestors, the poor state of Father’s and Mother’s health before and at the time of his birth, and that critical illness when a lad, may have had to do with giving him an organization seriously hampered from the beginning? How can any of us blame another for a given course since, if we were that other, and were confronted with identical conditions, we should have to react to them in the same way? We make the mistake of saying virtually, “If I were you, I would be I” whereas, the truth would be, “If I were you, I should be you, and do as you do.”

But all my life with Brother has not been under a cloud. He used to let me go fishing with him (though I had to keep very still); sometimes go with him down to the pasture after Grandpa’s cows; and often when he went alone he would bring me back a flower—usually a syringa, “cabbaged” from a bush that overhung a fence we used to pass. This stolen sweet was precious to me, largely because he gave it, perhaps partly because it was stolen.

One especially joyous memory is that of a visit to a cousin in a neighbouring village, and the happy time we children had there one sunny forenoon. Three things contributed to our pleasure: Brother and Sister, who usually bickered a lot, were amiable; the spearmint was luxurious and abundant; and we followed a path across a meadow to a spring—little things, simple things, but that particular day with its keen joy of life is a red-letter day in my memory. That was the one spring of my childhood. To this day the taste and smell of spearmint bring all this back, and I mentally substitute “spearmint” for Tennyson’s “violet”—

Who can tell

Why to smell

The violet recalls the dewy prime

Of youth and buried time?

The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.

I never go past the little town nowadays without looking longingly at that farm from the car-window and wondering if the spring and the spearmint are still there. At times I have almost decided to get off the train and seek it, but have never dared—it would be a needless pain to find my one little spring gone dry.

The name of my mother’s rejected suitor was Fairchild. If she could have overcome a certain inexplicable repugnance and married him, “then I might have been a fair child,” I used to think, with a mental play upon the name; for I knew myself to be a very plain little girl. I suffered over this fact; could see myself objectively—greenish-gray eyes, a long nose, a prominent forehead—I hated the sight of my face in the glass, yet would torture myself with scrutinizing it, searching for some redeeming thing, but ending with, “No, there’s nothing, nothing nice about it.” My facial angle I used to study with a hand-glass, mentally cutting about half an inch from my nose, pinning back my ears, and thinking how nice it would be if the straight uncompromising hair would grow low in ripples on that ugly forehead. But, opposed to anything artificial, I would, not bang and curl my hair as the others girls did. Looking at certain girls that I now know were plainer than I, I wondered pitifully if I looked as well as they, afraid of deceiving myself with such cold comfort.

All of which shows how self-engrossed and morbid I was; what capacity for self-torture I developed early. I was constantly reading of beautiful persons. I lamented secretly because my mother was not beautiful. I loved her none the less, but had such a craving for the beautiful, which Fate had cruelly withheld from me and my mother. I have often been ashamed of this feeling; it seems as though a child should so love its mother (and such a mother!) that her face would have to be beautiful to it; but it was not so with me. And it was one of my bitter childish and girlish griefs that Mother would not take more pains always to appear at her best. It seems pathetic, how pleased I used to feel when she would wear particularly becoming gowns, or take special pains with dressing her hair. Unable to overcome this feeling, I have always envied one with a beautiful mother. My mother’s heart and soul are beautiful, but there was always this yearning for beauty of face as well as of character.

Once, as a child, when impersonating Summer at a school exhibition, crowned with roses and bedecked with garlands of flowers, elated by it all, I sang so much better at the concert than I had at rehearsals as to surprise every one, myself included. Best of all I overheard someone say that I “really looked pretty”; that she never knew before that my eyes were black! How I treasured that statement, though knowing it was only a temporary condition!

I have no doubt I exaggerated my ugliness somewhat for, in addition to youth and health, I had a clear dark skin, good teeth, unusually fine and abundant hair, and a well-formed body. The one thing I took pride in was my hair. It was a pardonable pleasure that I felt in contrasting my long heavy brown braids with the wisps of hair many of the girls had. But when I was perhaps sixteen, working too hard in school and with my music, my hair came out so rapidly that one day a girl sitting behind me leaned over and whispered, “Why, what has become of your hair?” Bitter were the tears I shed that night! “That is going, too!” I cried in my wretchedness. But it did not all go; I still had more than the average girl. Even to-day I sometimes get a sudden sense of that schoolgirl’s pang at the threatened loss of her one beauty.

In babyhood I received a burn the shock of which nearly cut short my life: Tied in a high chair and placed before a stove, I was pushed over by some frozen clothes which a “green” Irish girl had brought in from the yard. The under part of my chin rested upon the stove, leaving its imprint, when I was snatched from it.

As I grew up I grieved over the scar thus sustained. I became morbidly sensitive over it, though consoling myself somewhat that it was not in a more conspicuous place. I envied children and girls their smooth soft chins. It seemed to me the sweetest part of a girl’s features—that white, smooth place under the chin. When a child I would never play “Do you love butter?” although I liked to see the buttercup’s yellow shadow on the chins of the other girls. When my turn came I always drew away, painfully embarrassed.

As a young girl I used to think it would be lovely to faint away. When we “made believe,” I usually chose to be French, to have black eyes and red cheeks, and to faint away on critical occasions. But after studying physiology and hygiene, and acquiring more sensible views, I scorned these earlier ambitions, and ridiculed the silly girls who pretended to swoon when vaccinated; and who turned pale and asked to leave the room when the skeleton was brought in to the physiology recitations.

There were only eighteen months between my sister’s age and mine, and, although I was the elder, she dominated me. There was almost no difference in our heights, and not much in our figures. She had a pretty face with fairer skin and sunnier hair. Unobserving persons thought we looked alike. Dressing alike until we were sixteen, we were often asked by strangers if we were twins. Those who mistook one for the other could not have been very discriminating, for with the marked difference in our natures, there must have been, even in childhood, a corresponding difference in our looks. I was quiet, shy, and dreamy; Kate lively, active, outspoken. She had to take the lead because I would hang back. In church, when we were little things, she would fix a place for my head on her lap, then pull me down and pet me, whispering to me to keep still and go to sleep; and, although I knew I should have been the one to play that rôle, I would submit, while she carried out to the finish her assumed dignity.

How quick-witted she was! One summer Father had a certain pear tree that yielded only a few choice pears which he was jealously watching. We children had been admonished not to touch them. One day as Father walked around the yard, he hesitated before the ripening pears, then passed on. We thought him waiting unnecessarily long: one was surely dead ripe. That afternoon, while he was taking his Sunday nap, Kate picked that pear. She had just bitten into it as Father appeared. Putting both hands behind her, she edged backward in the yard till she stood under the astrachan tree, frightened, but “gamey.”

“Katherine, come here,” Father called sternly.

She came slowly, hands behind her and mouth full of the big bite she was vainly trying to swallow.

“What have you in your mouth?”

A gulp, and she said, “Nothing,” opening wide her little mouth.

“Let me see your hand.”

Out from behind her came the right hand.

“Let me see your other hand.”

Back went her right hand, out came her left, the pear still invisible.

“Let me see both hands,” said Father relentlessly.

Quick as thought the little minx lifted her leg and, hands still behind her, thrust the pear between her thighs, and calmly held out both hands. Father’s anger vanished.

Kate never resorted to deceit, and almost never to untruths, unless hard pressed. While my own hypocrisies were subtle, hers were palpable. But I long cherished resentment for one offense—an unusual one with her: Mother had a bed of choice tulips—her special pride, our special temptation. Kate succumbed one day, picking nearly all of them, and with such short stems they were useless. Mother’s anger really frightened Kate, who declared, “Genie did it.” Though denying it, I probably acted guilty, for Mother believed her. (I always blushed and looked the culprit in school if a general accusation was made; and if any one rapped on the door and asked if a certain article had been found, I used to feel so uncomfortable it is a wonder I was not accused of having stolen it—self-conscious little snip that I was!) To punish me for my supposed falsehood Mother put red pepper on my tongue—a practice which a cousin had told her that she followed with her children. It was terrible, and was all the worse because I was innocent; though I’ve no doubt it was good for me, for I was more given to prevarication than was Sister.

My tendency to exaggerate was the cause of my fibs; they were usually harmless ones; facts never seemed startling enough; I liked to embellish them. Then, too, I was always making mistakes about quantities or anything with figures or distances, and some of my misstatements should be set down to this weakness rather than to deliberate deception. In this very matter, years after, when speaking of this red-pepper punishment, I used to say that my mother put a teaspoonful of red pepper on my tongue. I can’t remember that any one ever questioned or corrected the statement. I probably told it mostly to children. It is only within a few years that, telling the story again, my own common sense, so late to develop, showed me that that must have been a gross exaggeration—a teaspoonful of cayenne pepper on a child’s tongue!—the red pepper had punished one lie that had never been told, but had given rise to one that I had gone on repeating until at last I had sense enough to see that it was too preposterous to be believed!

Similarly in the matter of my weight: I had heard it mentioned—it was probably fifty pounds—but with my usual inaccuracy for figures I solemnly protested that I weighed five pounds, standing my ground even when corrected, till the absurdity of it was shown me.

I remember, too, hearing Mother talking with some women about how young a certain neighbour was when her daughter was born. In telling the school girls about it later, I announced that Mrs. H—— was only five years older than her daughter Ida. Shouts of derision greeted my statement, but I was firm. One big girl called me “little fool,” and I suffered I know not what ridicule. It was partly an exaggeration, partly ignorance. Grasping the main fact, that the mother was very young when her child was born, and having forgotten how young, but wanting to make my story worth while, I had resorted to a positive statement which I stoutly maintained. I could not see why those girls should doubt my word, even if the statement was startling. Of course it was unusual—that was why I had cited it. I have a fellow feeling for the Vassar student who, when asked by the resident woman physician what her paternal grandfather died of, and not knowing, but wishing not to seem ignorant, said, “I—I think he died in infancy.”

For years I was not a little given to reporting bright things people might have said, as though they had said them. It was such fun to embellish commonplace events and comments with additions of my own. Whenever I would tell these untruths I always had a queer feeling (almost of disappointment) to find that nothing happened to me; that no one questioned them; and that everything went on just as before the lie had slipped off my tongue. I don’t know whether I expected Ananias’s and Sapphira’s fate, or what, but I expected something, and nothing happened!

This tendency to exaggeration and misstatement, and, on occasion, to deliberate falsehood, I have tried conscientiously to overcome. In fact, for years I swung far to the other side. Now, in matters of fact, I think I am more often scrupulously accurate than not. If I cannot be accurate, I refrain from giving a definite statement. My special training in later years of course helped in this respect. But it was earlier, when I became a “Christian,” that this tendency appeared to me in all its heinousness, and in striving to overcome it I became, for a time, almost morbidly conscientious.

One day in school the word “conscientious” came up for discussion. I was not present, but learned from one of the girls that “Prof” had spoken out in school freely, using my name as an example of what conscientiousness meant. But my wise little sister (and how I loved her for it!), though pleased at the reference to me, went to all the girls she thought likely to mention it to me, and cautioned them not to. When I learned of it, from one who never could keep a secret, I asked why Sister didn’t want her to tell me. “Oh, she said it would make you proud, or something like that.” And she was right. I was too self-conscious as it was, and vain, in a demure kind of way. Kate knew my weaknesses.

Sister’s deceits, as I have said, were such funny ones; they never deceived any one—were never really intended to; they were only desperate measures resorted to when in a tight place, their drollery usually serving to protect her from punishment. As a rule she and Brother managed to quarrel when left to their own devices. I played the peace-maker between them, and have done it ever since. One Sunday, when we stayed home from church, they got into a wrangle. Spiteful words led to threats, and Kate was soon chasing Arthur round the room in childish rage, I trying to intervene. In the squabble my belt fell off—a black shiny belt with a metal buckle. As Kate could not reach Arthur, she grabbed up my belt and, brandishing it in the air, chased him, trying to hit him.

Crash! went the buckle against the rosewood mirror. When Father and Mother came home and saw that crack in the mirror, they saw also three guilty apprehensive children. Brother and Sister pitched in, telling about the quarrel, who did this, and who did that. “I don’t care about who started it, or who kept it up,” said Father, “I want to know who broke that looking-glass—the one to blame for that will be punished.”

“Genie is to blame for it,” Kate promptly rejoined.

Father looked at me in surprise, Arthur opened his mouth in wonderment, while I stood dumb and guilty-looking beyond question. Then Kate added:

“Arthur hit me, and I chased him with the belt, and the buckle broke the glass, and it was Genie’s belt-buckle!”

She escaped punishment.

We had fewer playthings than children have nowadays, but for that very reason they meant more to us. I had but two dolls in my childhood and one is still—living, I was about to say. One was a leather-head doll, with painted cheeks, black hair, and blue, blue eyes. But in the beginning of her career she met a strange fate—a boy much bigger than I snatched her from me and bit off her nose before my very eyes! This was one of my earliest griefs. I hated that boy but cherished the noseless doll for many years.

Later Kate and I had big wax dolls whose eyes would open and shut and who would cry when we pressed a little place in the pit of the stomach.

We played with them only on state occasions. They were kept up in the “front bedroom” in a bureau drawer. I saw them a year ago. They had on the same scarlet wool dresses trimmed with narrow black velvet ribbon, but the dresses were moth-eaten and the dolls showed the ravages of time.

Occasionally, other relatives joining us, we had a family Christmas tree—perhaps only four or five in our childhood. But there was always the hope of one, and when there was one, the joy recompensed for the lean years. One Christmas tree at Aunt Lucinda’s at which some Western relatives were present, stands out vividly—the big house overflowing with people, the smell of the dinner preparing, the air of mystery of the elders as they went to and fro to the parlour with various parcels; and then, at last, when the doors swung open and we got that first glimpse of the blessed tree! But how was my joy modified! Making our way, pell-mell, grown-ups and children, in the eagerness to push through, someone bumped against me, driving my nose against the door-jamb. I can feel the pain yet, and the blinding tears. Not all the splendour of that tree could drive that pain away. After that, in a way I had of accounting for things, I attributed a slight deflection of my nose to that bump. I recall black walnut work-boxes for Sister and me and a writing-desk for Brother as the most elaborate and expensive gifts which as children we ever received. Some years there were no gifts, except new clothing, which never satisfied the craving—except once—our white “moss velvet hats”—these made our hearts light as well as our heads. When there were no presents—can one ever forget the bitter disappointment? A trivial gift means so much to an expectant child! All in vain were we told (as we sometimes were in advance) that no gifts could be afforded that year. We never quite gave up hope. But, cruel as was the disappointment, perhaps the discipline was wholesome. One year there were crosses covered with crinkly paper bedecked with wreaths of worsted flowers, and framed in deep rustic frames. What works of art! Almost equal to the hanging basket made of allspice that adorned a cousin’s parlour, and to the framed pyramid of hair-flowers that hung in our own!

I still treasure a paper-covered Red Riding Hood, cut in the form of the little lass, with the wolf crouching at her feet, the text a metrical version, charmingly illustrated. I must have had it since I was seven or eight years old. I knew the verses “by heart,” and have heard Mother tell that I used to recite them and other long pieces in my sleep. A bottle of oil once made a spot on the book and the paper is yellow with age, but I still cherish it and would part with many a choicer possession sooner than with this childhood treasure.

In this connection I recall that when I was perhaps in my early ’teens, the instinct of acquisition developing, I went about the house placing my name upon all my belongings—every book and picture, even on the bottoms of little toy vases, a porcelain lamb, and so on. As to Red Riding Hood, I seemed to think it fitting to write my name in a big sprawling child’s hand, every letter a capital, with the notion, I suppose, that it would be thought that I had written it there when a child. I even selected a date, reckoning back as well as I could, and putting it upon one of my early birthdays. In the same way I mutilated a quaint book that had belonged to Grandpa, by writing his name on the fly leaf, and the legend, “His Book,” in what I considered an old-fashioned hand-writing. Some years later, coming upon these evidences of my silly deception, my cheeks burned with shame, and I erased the false records.

Fondness for my own belongings did not prevent me from a cruel piece of vandalism in regard to a cherished possession of my sister’s: She had made a clove-apple by sticking a greening full of cloves, and hiding it in a cuff-box in the upstairs closet, had declared she was going to keep it till she grew up. Laughing at her, I said it would decay, but she maintained that it would not. On rare occasions, as if it were a religious rite, she would peep into the box and sniff at the apple, vouchsafe us a sniff also, and put it carefully away. As it dwindled and dwindled, her attachment strengthened and strengthened. I believe she kept it six years. Although I had often threatened to throw it away, she never believed I would. But one day, whether out of spite, or because of my strenuous housekeeping, I did it, probably silencing my compunctions by thinking she was too old longer to indulge in such nonsense. But her grief and anger on learning of the loss were so moving that I was conscience-stricken, and would then have given anything to have restored the treasure. She scorned all attempts at extenuation. It is with real shame that I confess this misdeed—more, perhaps, than I feel for later, graver ones. I know now that as one of her treasures it should have been respected. Anything that another really loves—a toy, a bauble, an idol, a comforting superstition—why not let him keep it as long as he can?

We were a happy and harmonious family as such things go. I do not mean that we never said a cross word to one another; such families, I fancy, exist only in Sunday-school books. There was not always unity; our parents sometimes differed; Father was critical and methodical; Mother forgetful and wanting in system. She was tried by Father’s smoking and inordinate croquet-playing, and he was tried by her procrastination; at such times fault-finding was forthcoming. Sister and Brother had early and late unpleasantnesses; and, in our ’teens, Sister and I became less harmonious than formerly, about the time, I suppose, when we were each becoming more individual; at least, when, ceasing to be docile, I became more assertive. But there was always the good-night kiss all around, and Kate and I went to sleep with our arms around each other as long as we were girls at home. I do not think we could have slept had we let the sun go down upon our wrath.

I remember the first time I omitted our custom of kissing all round at night—the family and any guest staying with us. Some strange man was there; when I had kissed Father and Mother I hesitated before the man—I was getting to be a big girl—then, putting out my hand, said a bashful good night and went upstairs with burning cheeks, wondering if it had seemed rude not to kiss him.

We were not a demonstrative family—the good-night kiss was the chief expression of affection. I remember no fondling, no caresses after early childhood, except the habitual ones—no spontaneous overflow of affection at irregular intervals, such as I was inclined to, had the others been so minded. Once in a great while Father would call us the sweetest pet name in the world—“darling.” On these rare occasions I was secretly overjoyed. Had he known the delight it gave me, I’m sure he would have said it oftener. Mother sometimes jocosely called me “Keturah,” and when, in one of her rare playful moods, she dubbed me “Keturah Ketunk,” I liked it exceedingly.

I remember once—I was probably thirteen or fourteen—going into the bedroom to bid my parents good night, when, having kissed them, as I started to leave the bed, Father threw out his arm; and, seeing it in the half light, and thinking he did it to motion me back, I bent down and swiftly kissed him again—an unusual thing for either him or me. No sooner had I done it than my cheeks got hot as fire: perhaps I had misunderstood his gesture; he may have just happened to stretch out his arm, and was not beckoning me at all. Upstairs I went, torturing myself with the query which I never solved. Whether or not he had called me back, I now know he was not sorry to get the extra kiss. Why couldn’t I have thus comforted myself then? I suppose I was hungry for more demonstration of affection than I got, yet ashamed to show it. Sister, not at all demonstrative, provoked demonstration in me; the curve of her cheek, and her long eyelashes resting upon it, appealed to me as a child’s beauty appeals; I longed to kiss her at inopportune times, and sometimes did not resist. Half annoyed at me, she thought it nonsense, I suppose. As we grew up, when she would be fitting a dress for me, I would try to snatch kisses, sometimes calling forth her impatience, at others her laughing dexterity as she eluded me. I admired her prettiness, but was never jealous of her, though she could dance and skate, and do all such things, with an ease and grace I could never acquire. Making friends more readily than I, being sociable, lively, and even-tempered, she had plenty of beaux while I had none. But I had friends among the beaux of the other girls. Although I did not want them for beaux, I should have been unhappy had I not had them for friends—I understood myself well enough to know that much then, though the general impression among my schoolmates was that I cared nothing for the boys.

My hypersensitiveness about the life of the affections was apparent in the way I felt when Father would bid us all good-bye: When he kissed Mother I would always turn away. It never seemed right to look on; perhaps, partly, because it made me want to cry; but also because it seemed as though I had no right. Even to-day, if I see lovers on the stage whose acting is good enough to give the sense of reality, I find myself turning away—it seems too intimate for me to witness.

A favourite custom in our family was an annual Sunday drive in apple-blossom time. Father would hire a team and a sort of landau which, on a pinch, would hold ten persons—an aunt’s family and ours—big baskets would be stowed under the seats, and off we would go through the country on an all-day’s drive, stopping to picnic in some grove, or by a stream. Then on again under the blue skies, the air sweet with blossoming trees; and the tender spring green giving that hazy, twiggy look of early May. (That line of Whitman’s—“Rich apple-blossomed earth”—always brings back those far-off May-times with those perfect childish joys.) Then we would drive home in the twilight, singing as we went, old and young joining in the songs. Happy children, happy parents! I’m sure the apple blossom is an escape from the Beautiful Garden. I never breathe its fragrance without recalling those cherished drives in the Mays that are no more.

Our parents were wisely indulgent, giving us treats and privileges as they could afford them. We were brought up to go without a thing till it could be paid for; consequently, all of us have a horror of being in debt. Father spent a good deal (considering our circumstances) on our music, first and last, and he and Mother were ever looking forward to our advancement. But there was always a struggle over money matters. We had to economize and count the cost of any indulgence; but when it was decided that we could afford a given thing, how happy, almost jubilant, Father was over the expenditure!

One of the happiest hours in childhood (I was perhaps ten years old) was when, after spending the day from home, we returned at dusk and were met at the door by Father and Mother looking so excited and happy we knew something was on the carpet. And there was! In the sitting-room our eyes encountered a change—the furniture was rearranged, and there standing against the wall (were we awake or dreaming?) was a brand new organ!

Our joy was unbounded, our parents’ delight no less. How we smoothed the polished walnut case; gingerly touched the black and the white keys; fingered the stops; tried the pedals; moved the swell; and asked to have the top lifted so we could look inside! And then Father sat down and struck a few rich chords—those chords with their variations that seemed peculiarly his own! Soon the music teacher came in, and some neighbours, and the new organ sounded throughout our home, and doubtless in our dreams that night; and the next morning it was still there!

Then began the lessons. Gradually the novelty wore away, lessons grew harder and harder. Kate and Arthur, restless beings that they were, made only fair progress; they disliked the practice. But, taking to it eagerly from the start, I made rather more than ordinary progress. It was as hard to get me away from the organ as it was to get Kate and Arthur to it. I was still very young when, one day, putting aside my exercise book, I opened the Methodist Hymnal and “picked out” one of the hymns—Boylston. I was scared, it sounded so natural—and I had done it alone! Mother came running in to see if it was really I who was playing.

Shortly after that, in Sunday School, the organist leaving before the close, the superintendent came to me, saying, “We want you to play the last piece.” I tried to beg off, but no, he knew I could do it; so, in fear and trembling, I got up and played. The treadles worked hard, and the stool was too high, so the superintendent pedalled for me, while the school rose and sang. It didn’t take us children long to get home that Sunday. “Genie played the organ! Genie played the organ!” shouted Kate and Arthur as we rushed into the house. After that this occurred so often that my timidity before the Sunday School wore away. This was the forerunner of a greater event: I had never touched the big organ, but as Father was chorister, we children often sat “in the choir” pretending to help sing. One day toward the close of the service the bass singer, leaning over, whispered, “Miss R—— has gone home, you will have to play for us, Genie.” Protesting, I looked imploringly at Father, but he only nodded and smiled encouragingly. My heart nearly thumped itself to pieces, but the wily Basso whispered, “We’ll sing so loud, if you make a mistake they’ll never know it, and we’ll pick out one with an easy bass.” So I undertook it. In time, as Miss R—— dropped out more and more, I became the regular organist. Later came piano lessons, and later still I had a teacher from a neighbouring city.

When I was developing rapidly, undergoing the physiological and emotional changes of pubescence, they unwisely put me to studying “Thorough Bass.” A paternal aunt had been an accomplished musician, and my parents hoped I would show a like talent. How my head used to ache over that study! As the lessons became more complicated, I grew stupid; my health failed perceptibly and our family physician was called. He talked with me a long time, then I was sent out of the room while he and Mother talked; then called in again, and the little black medicine-case was opened, while the Doctor folded the tiny powders that, he said, as he patted my head and called me “lassie,” were to make me strong again.

The upshot of it all was I had to drop my music, not only then, he advised, but for all time. I had too emotional a temperament, he said, to stand the strain. (What kind of a musician would a non-emotional person be!) But he was wise in prohibiting it then. I used to dignify the severe headaches which I had at that time by saying I had “brain fever.” (Girls in the books I read had “brain fever.”) But there was no real illness, no staying out of school, though for a time my hours were lessened.

Dropping music was a real cross to me. Probably, had I been allowed to resume it, I should have followed that as a vocation and not cast about for another field of work. Although discontinuing the study of music, I did not drop its practice. Music was an important part of our home life.

I remember how cruel I once thought my parents because they would not let me go to a distant county to pick hops. One of the schoolgirls had gone with her mother the year before, had earned a lot, and had had a “splendid time.” As the season came round again, I “teased” to go with this girl and her mother. I was hearing a good deal at home about economy, economy, and Nora’s account of the money she had made had fired me with the prospect of earning great sums to relieve our growing needs. Confident, I announced my plan. Was ever a girl so repulsed, so silenced? They wouldn’t even hear me out. I tried to say what Nora said, and what her mother said, but they were obdurate. A martyr in my own eyes for a time, it was probably years before I realized what I had asked to do. When I learned what class of young people usually engaged in such work, I understood how “out of the question” (a finality of Father’s) it had been for my parents even to discuss the project. I remembered, too, how the same bright-eyed Nora had soon left school; how she changed in manner; became coarsened; drifted out of our lives. Strange how, years after, children become aware of the safeguards thrown around them in youth! With this awareness, what a feeling of gratitude wells up within one toward the parents who have surrounded them with such wise and loving care! How one longs to fly home and tell them of it; yet how reticent are we, how chary of expressing this gratitude!

One of the deepest of my early griefs was when we first learned what it was as a family to be separated; when Brother, who was a printer, went to Colorado to work. We had been so closely bound together. I realized the anxiety of our parents, divined the loneliness Arthur would feel, and what it would mean to lose him from the home. What interesting and humorous letters he wrote us, with the homesickness sometimes peeping through! How we read and re-read them!

He stayed away less than a year. Shall I ever forget the day he came back? His clothes had become shabby; he was stained with travel, but I almost devoured him with my eyes. How good his voice sounded—every well-known tone; every gesture; and his laugh—my heart was like to burst. And, oh, the joy, the security, the blessed feeling that night, to know we were all together again under the home roof!

I used to resort to various devices to keep Arthur at home in the evening, which sometimes worked, sometimes not. The most effectual was to slip away from the supper table while the rest were still seated, under the pretext of wishing to try a new piece, thus getting him under the spell of the music while he was filling the stoves and bringing in water, so he would be drawn in spite of himself into the sitting-room. Once there, he would hang around and read, often appearing indifferent when I knew he was not. When he would get up to go, after I had held him as long as I could, how my heart would sink as the door closed and his steps sounded fainter and fainter on “stoop” and sidewalk! But I would keep on playing long enough so as not to make it too apparent to the others what I had been up to, though they were doubtless as well aware of my motive as I. Sometimes he would say, on going out, “Well, I’ve got to go now”—his way of thanking me for playing.

Even when he was doing his best, there was always more or less anxiety until Brother would come home at night. No matter what I was reading, when ten o’clock came, unless he had come, I felt an anxious pang. All of us felt it, though it was seldom mentioned. Mother sometimes spoke of it, or her sighs betrayed it, but as a rule we hid our anxiety under an assumed cheerfulness. I would listen when the steps came on the veranda to see if there were two walking, or only Father. Then if Father came alone, he would ask with apparent lightness, “Is Arthur home yet?” and I would hasten to answer, “No, not yet,” just to forestall Mother’s sadder negative with its accompanying sigh. Then we would all fall to talking to cover our fears. But when he did come, how we strove to conceal the delight that our fears had been unfounded! Putting up my books, but not too quickly, lest he be aware that I was trying to reward him for coming home early, I would go to the organ, and after making a pretense by first playing some indifferent thing, would play and sing the songs he liked best.

Oh, the safe housed feeling, when we could say good night to one another, and not have to lie awake listening for Brother’s footsteps that came so late sometimes, and sometimes not at all! After such nights of watching, Sister and I would peep into his room in the morning, to see if perchance he had come after we had fallen asleep. And when his bed was untouched—the dread and fear of what may have befallen him!

Brother was always good company. He is witty, and easily moved by humour or pathos. Once stir his worthy emotions and his better nature comes to the surface, though he resists being stirred as long as he can. A fond father, he is, on the whole, a wise one, except when his temper, or his infirmity, gets the better of him. Like our dear, testy grandfather in disposition, he reacts in much the same way, yet, with all his impatience, shows surprising tolerance with certain vagaries and eccentricities in others who, being the victims of hereditary and constitutional handicaps, are “gey ill to live with.” Love for his children is one of his strongest traits.

A few months ago, when a maternal uncle, an alcoholic, died, Brother took his own little son to the uncle’s coffin and there, telling the child what a promising youth the uncle had been, explained to him that drink had been his ruination. He wrote me that he had made the child (only three years old) understand it all; and then had made him promise that he would never touch alcohol in any form.

Poor, tempted, struggling soul! Whitman has expressed tenderly and understandingly the feelings that always well up in me at the thought of my brother’s struggles and defeats—“Vivas for those who have failed!” Such need pity, help, and credit far more than we are wont to give. Bobbie Burns knew whereof he spoke when he reminded us:

What’s done we partly may compute,

But know not what’s resisted.

Father and Mother still have hope in Brother’s ultimate victory[2]—such faith, and such optimism, combined with such tenderness and forgiveness! I know of nothing more God-like than these attributes as I have seen them exemplified in the daily lives of my parents. “Like as a father pitieth his children”—what a perfect example I have known of this infinite, compassionate love!

FOOTNOTE:

[2] The victory came some years after this was written. My brother now knows the triumph of him “who ruleth his spirit.”

CHAPTER III “A Child Went Forth”

Environment—what part does it play? Its stamp is upon us, but other forces and influences also determine our reactions and mould our characters. Is the objective environment alone the sea in which we swim? More significant still are the emotions which a given environment induces in each individual. To determine these it is needful to resort to our earliest memories. What were the things that so impressed us that we carry them on down through the years, an inseparable part of our inmost selves? What part have they played in shaping our characters?

I have said that it was a commonplace little village where I was born, and to another it may seem a commonplace outward life that I have to record. But who among us will own to a commonplace inner, subjective life?

Our village, named after him who sang of the “deep and dark blue ocean,” is a prosaic port on the Erie Canal along whose banks mules slowly draw the heavy-laden boats. The canal divides the village into north and south, as Owasco creek divides it into east and west. Rising from the level landscape here and there, the long, low lenticular drumlins form a conspicuous feature through that section of the state. Commonplace, did I say? But less than three miles away are the marshes of the Montezumas. What strange wild feelings the lighted skies at night evoked! “The marshes are burning!” was such an inadequate explanation of that lurid western sky. A few miles to the south is Goldsmith’s “loveliest village of the plain”; about the same distance west, one reaches Tyre; as far again, and Palmyra is found; while a little to the east sits Syracuse in all her glory—surely an illustrious environment, this Drumlin Land, if names could make it so.

In the upper and hilly part of the town, called “Nauvoo,” the house still stands where Brigham Young lived before he became famous—or, shall we say, infamous? He was a carpenter and painter, and several buildings are there pointed out as houses that “Brigham” built. They tell that the Mormon went to Utah owing a certain couple in our village for his board, and that years after, on learning that they were to celebrate their golden wedding, he sent them the amount he owed, with interest for all the years.

In the decrepit old hotel on the village green Isaac Singer once lived and dreamed of the sewing-machine which later made his name a household word. There, too, in our little hamlet faithful Henry Wells, sometimes a-foot, sometimes on horseback, went hither and yon amid the drumlins carrying in his shabby carpet-bags messages and parcels to the scattered homes. Trusty and dependable, there in our little village he laid the humble foundations of the Wells-Fargo Express of to-day.

Six churches, two hotels, several dry goods and grocery stores, a drug store, a meat market, the Post Office, sometimes a bank, a boot-and-shoe store, cigar shops and saloons, a pie factory, a shirt factory, the Masonic Hall—these, most of which were grouped around the Village fountain, constituted the town life I knew.

It was amid these scenes that I as a child went forth; the objects I looked upon became a part of me, interwoven with my very being: the familiar drumlins on the horizon, flowers and the wayside weeds, the pets I cherished, the family life, our neighbours, my teachers and playmates, the games we played, the songs we sang, the books I read, the sunset clouds, the friendly trees, and the winding creek; and mingled with these commonplace scenes, the sorrows, joys, affections, hopes, and fears—all these became a part of that child that went forth.

In thinking of my earliest memories, why does my mind revert to that little old tannery down by the dam which we passed on our way to Grandma’s? It was painted red. There was a multitude of little square, mahogany-brown pieces of wood that covered the yard like a carpet. There was a buzz of machinery which always frightened me (and machinery frightens me still), and a peculiar smell always emanated from the place. And though later a grist mill, still later a paper mill, and then a planing mill stood there, and now for many years dwelling houses have occupied the spot, yet as I think back to my childhood I recall most vividly the earliest scene, and the peculiar elastic feel of those pieces of tan-bark under my feet.

Quiet and shy, I was, as I have said, dominated by my sister till perhaps a year or two before I went away from home. More of a leader, more practical, in those days more executive, my sister had withal more common sense and far more initiative than I. She mothered me as a child, and “bossed” me as a little girl, and for a long time I was content to have it so. In truth, so established was that order of things that she has never, I think, quite accepted my emancipation.

I was more shy in Father’s presence than elsewhere, even in my late ’teens. I don’t know why, but involuntarily I became more reserved. I myself could see a difference in voice and manner. I was not afraid of him (though that was the way Sister put it), for I had no reason to be, he was kindness itself, and more gentle with me than with Kate, she being so full of pranks he often had to rebuke her. I don’t know just what the shyness was, but I was two different beings when with and away from my father. As nearly as I can explain it now, it was my exaggerated love of approbation making me so anxious for his approval that I over-exerted myself when near him, the result being a shy awkwardness. Yet he always seemed to understand me, and to make it easy for me. I never would ask him for favours; Kate always had to do such things for both herself and me. “You do it,” I would plead, and she would “sputter” and say I ought to do it for myself, but would give in. Sometimes she made me go with her, occasionally taking revenge by saying, “Genie wants to ask you for a penny.” Then I felt like running away. He seldom refused us; I don’t see why I was so bashful with him. It irritated Sister. Straightforward herself, she thought me two-sided. I don’t know when this shyness came, or when it wore away, but before it developed I have one memory that is significant—one of my earliest recollections. Years later I marvelled that I ever dared do it: I remember sitting on Father’s lap (he in a little black rocker) and “teasing” him to tell me where I came from. It must have been when I first began to wonder about such things. I recall how I kept pulling his face around by putting my hands in his long brown beard; how he would laugh and turn away, trying to avoid me; and I can remember just how he looked at Mother as they exchanged glances. I can’t recall how they answered me, but think they told me I would know when I was older. (I never remember being told about storks bringing babies, though I do remember someone saying the Doctor brought them, and that God sent them.) But that scene is very vivid to me; and afterward, when I began to know, though imperfectly, the answer to my question, I thought of how I had sat and coaxed Father to tell me. I would like to know just how old I was when this question first seemed so important to me. I recall when still very small, though later than this, being in the yard and digging in the ground when Brother and some older boys, going by, asked what we were doing. “Digging for babies,” we said, and it seems as though I can remember the smile that passed between Brother and the boys as they ran off shouting derisively, “Digging for babies!” That must have been in the days when we used earnestly to try to dig down to China.

Although asking my father this question is one of my earliest recollections, I think the very earliest is that of my first day in school. I can remember just how I trotted along by my brother’s side; how my starched skirts stood out proudly, and how my heart swelled with excitement when, at the sound of the “first bell,” I started off to school. Arthur was very nice to me, and granted permission (!) to two of the bigger girls to let me sit between them. I recall the delicious feeling of being the object of interest in the little flock, and how they petted and entertained me. But the most wonderful thing was a little wire frame which the teacher let me take to amuse myself with—a frame with coloured balls big as cranberries, which could be moved back and forth on the wires. Not long after I began going to school regularly, and that little frame (years later I learned it was called an abacus) was given out as a reward of merit. I can see now the look of blushing pride mantling the cheeks of the favoured pupils as they marched from the teacher’s desk back to their seats bearing the coveted trophy.

One evening shortly after my first day in school, we were startled by the alarm of fire, and saw the flames coming from the direction of the Academy. “Goody, Goody!” shouted some boys in the street, “We won’t have to go to school any more!” But I cried as though my heart would break, until a neighbour came down the hill and told us it was some unimportant building farther away.

A few years ago the Academy did burn, and the news came to me with a far keener pang than that felt in childhood at the false alarm. The present was momentarily blotted out. My thoughts flew back to the old building where the most tender and beautiful memories centred. Of that place so rich in associations only ashes remained; only in memory could I see again the old brick walls—the walls my grandfather had helped to build—only in memory hear the school bell ring! Curious, but more than all the furnishings—the books, the globes, the maps and charts, the chemical apparatus—more than all the things really of value in the building, my thoughts kept going back perversely to that dear little wire frame with coloured balls which I had so cherished since my first day at school!—that was gone past recall!—that and the old bell! At those earlier home-comings after graduation, one of my keenest pleasures had been to be awakened in the morning by the sound of the school bell; it brought back so much: I was a girl again; the past was bridged over; it stirred a host of chaotic feelings of mingled sweetness and sadness—longing for my lost girlhood, and exultation at the successes and achievements of to-day—the Spell of the Past was in that bell.

A fine high-school building, well equipped, now stands where the old Academy stood. To the younger generation it will doubtless mean all that the old school meant to us, but how like an interloper it is! Only the ground and the old trees are left—the old linden trees under which we played, where we used to gather the tiny round nuts and eat the sweet brown kernels that ripen in September!

Once when Sister was a little thing, perhaps four or five years old, and an aunt, in telling her Bible stories, started to make some explanation about God, Kate interrupted her in a superior way with, “Oh, yes, I know God—he lives over there,” pointing to a meadow opposite our house. Astonished, Aunt Kate inquired further, when the child added:

“He’s got white hair and wears a long coat; he walks around there when it’s getting dark.” She meant an old man with a white beard and flowing locks who, like Old Grimes, wore a “long gray coat all buttoned down before.” His unusual appearance as he came and went in the hay-meadows had appealed to the child’s imagination, and she had settled to her own satisfaction that he was God!

An experience of my own, some years later however, illustrates the marked difference in our minds and temperaments—the one given to definite, concrete ways of thinking, and to settled convictions which satisfy her, however inadequate they may seem to others; the other, at that time, to vague, even mystical interpretations. And a similar tendency exists to-day in our attitudes where temperament and personal bent are concerned: One spring, going to a sheltered strip in our yard where we had previously transplanted wild flowers from the woods, I found a pale blue hepatica in bloom. I remember the directness with which the flower spoke to me. Something in its gem-like beauty and its completeness touched me peculiarly; my eyes filled with tears. I hesitate to write it, but it seemed almost as though the flower whispered to me, “God.” It was an exquisite moment. The beauty and purity of that flower spoke to my soul, and for a brief while I had a conception of Divinity that made the day and hour memorable.

To my mother I am primarily indebted for my love of nature. She used to take us to the cowslip woods every spring, and later to the Wintergreen woods. We would begin coaxing to go weeks beforehand. Something sweet and tender stirs at the thought of our excursions to those distant moist woods in the early spring days. With what eagerness we started off, Mother as eager as any of us! How we ran across lots, climbed rail fences and a stone wall, peeped into deserted barns, traversed meadow after meadow, till we came to the swampy woods where the gay flowers grew! It was dark and wet and mysterious in those woods; we knew them only as the cowslip woods; other woods we frequented at other times of the year, these only in the cowslip days. I liked the crackle as we gathered the plant for “greens.” We even ate the bitter buds raw. Often we would slip from the mossy, decaying logs into the brown pools; we always returned home with squeaking shoes, wet feet, full baskets, and happy hearts.

Mother used to go wading with us, too. Taking our luncheon, we would follow the winding creek along the willows a mile or more till we came to a little grove, a sort of natural park, with an island and a dam, and a big swimming hole on one side of the island. Brother, who had been to Niagara Falls, called this Goat Island; the water that went over the dam was Niagara; and the grove was Prospect Park. Many a time he has lain in his little bedroom, his door and ours open, and recounted to Sister and me his visit to Niagara, always getting excited and waxing eloquent, and seeming to see it all over again, as he talked to his willing listeners till sleep overtook them.

“Down to the dam”—there some of our sweetest childhood hours were spent, Mother, one with us, wading the stream, teaching us the names of the flowers, and telling us what was “good to eat.” When she was in doubt about a certain thing, and so would caution us, I was pretty sure to taste it, thus finding out for myself that many a thing is good to eat at which others looked askance. Some Eves begin early to taste forbidden fruit.

Up the Ditch Bank was another favourite place for our picnics—a high grassy bank running along a feeder, and farther up a big round pond on one side of the bank, and a long stretch of marshy creek below on the other. From the bank, across a precarious bridge we got into “Groom’s Woods,” where the wake robins grew, and the large white trilliums, Dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, crinkle root, spring beauties, anemones, hepaticas, blood roots, and mandrakes. Mother taught us these names, and the names of what few birds we knew—robins, goldfinches, humming birds, and orioles, chiefly. Each year in cherry-blossom time, Mother would say, “The orioles are here again.”

I had a goldfinch in a cage for a time, I called it a wild canary, and grew much attached to it, but it soon died, and after that I never cared to have another bird. I had one cat that I loved, too; his name was Nimrod. He got so old a neighbour took him away. They told me what was going to happen, but when I heard the gun-shot, far away, though I had braced for it, I was nearly frantic. I could never bear to have it mentioned after that, and loathed the man who did it. Children’s griefs are about little things, but they are not little griefs. I feel sorry for the child who suffered some of the things I remember. Mother used to say,

“Poor Nimrod’s dead, he’s run his race,

No other cat can fill his place.”

And no other cat ever did. I have never cared for cats since. Cats came and went, there was always one at home; they multiplied as cats have a way of doing, but after Nimrod’s death I was indifferent to them. I had one dog, too—one cat, one bird, one dog, and ever after eschewed all pets. A little yellow dog came to our house once—from heaven, I guess. We called him Ponto—such a big name for such a roly-poly dog! Æolus would have suited him better, for we knew not whence he came, nor whither he went, months later, after having endeared himself to us all. He came the night I was brought home with a broken arm, and was such a dear companion during my six weeks in splints that I grew inordinately fond of him. Rheumatism attacking the arm caused me more suffering than did the fracture itself. Ponto would cry when I cried, putting up his paws so imploringly that, just to hear him take on, I’d stop crying in earnest, only to cry louder in make-believe. How piteously he wailed! I would get ashamed of myself for enlisting his ever-ready sympathy. He left so mysteriously that we found no trace of him. One of the desires of my heart for a year or two was to have Ponto back. I believe I used to pray for his return. “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire,” and my soul surely longed for Ponto.

Another love of mine, a less responsive one, was my big willow tree. It was only one of many trees along the creek, but oh, the difference to me! Cows grazed in the pasture near by; spearmint grew in patches along the path; the water flowed quietly. It was about ten minutes’ walk from home, but I was in another world when there. Seated in the heart of the old tree, I looked out upon a scene commonplace enough to the eye—level fields and houses and distant drumlins, but ah, what inner visions! What happy hours I have spent ensconced in that old willow! Just a little climb (for I never could really climb a tree—I was too afraid of getting up high), and there I sat, a queen on her throne. Safe in the tree I was not afraid of the cows. There I read and sang, recited poetry, and dreamed dreams.

“I am monarch of all I survey,” I usually began with—the place really belonged to me. The old farmer who came after his cows every night thought he owned the land, but I knew and the old tree knew who was the real owner. For years, as a child and a girl, I kept tryst with this tree; and for years only the cows and I knew just where it was that I went when I stole away “to the willows,” for I guarded the exact spot jealously. Often in going past it with others, I have feigned indifference, lest someone note its natural seat. I wanted it all to myself. I used to feel uneasy when I had to climb down, about supper-time; for the cows, eager for their own supper, came near the bars and insisted on coming close to me. Although my heart beat wildly at their approach, I would try to brave it out and look them down as I had heard one should do. On they always came, bland and peaceable. Facing them as long as I could, ashamed to show fright, even to cows, I finally had to cut and run, and then how chagrined I felt! Once in running from them, in my hurry to get under the fence, I flung my book ahead of me, and it went into the creek—my beloved Cathcart’s Literary Reader! To this day its stained leaves and warped cover remind me of the fright I got from the harmless, curious cows.

“Oh, aren’t they cute, they must be twins,” was a remark Sister and I often heard, long before we knew what twins really meant. Mother would follow such remarks with, “No, there’s eighteen months’ difference between them.”

We thought “twins” must be something pretty nice, and learned to feel the disappointment that we saw on the faces of strangers when Mother set them right. Once at camp-meeting we were playing together, when some ladies stopped us asking, “Little girls, are you twins?” Mother was not near. Kate and I looked at each other and knew that our time had come to be twins. With one accord we nodded yes, and had some few minutes of unalloyed pleasure. Days later, while playing in our tent door, the same lady and another passed. Pausing and noting us as we sat with our big wax dolls (they, too, dressed just alike) the one lady told the other that we were twins.

“Oh, no, there’s eighteen months’ difference between them,” said Mother, sitting near.

“But they told me they were twins,” insisted the lady. We were covered with confusion; tears, chidings, shame, and repentance followed. Though I am not sure whether at that time we knew what twins really meant, still we knew very well that we were not twins.

When we were perhaps ten and eleven years of age, one of our schoolmates, a child in a destitute Irish family living in the west part of the village, died of scarlet fever. They lived in the “haunted house” on the hill—a house near which we never ventured, though Mother had repeatedly assured us there was no such thing as a haunted house. Now, however, because of the fever, one would have thought we would have still kept our distance. But hearing of the child’s death, Sister was bound to go there. The dead always had a strange fascination for her; she wanted to feel the corpse—the last thing I wanted to do. At noon Kate made me go with her to that house. Other children accompanied us. Awe-struck, we crept up the hill; we glanced furtively at the broken shutters of the windows from which a ghostly arm was said often to beckon. Such poverty and squalor we had never before come in contact with. We filed past the body of our little schoolmate (Kate touched the marble forehead), awed by the presence of Death, and uneasy at what we knew was wrong. If the ghosts of the Board of Health of to-day could have antedated themselves and walked there, what consternation would they have felt at the presence of those children in the fever-stricken precinct!

The bereaved mother howled hysterically. An elder sister told us they had no underclothes to put on the dead child. Kate marched me home, enjoining strict secrecy. Moved by the poverty and grief we had seen, with one accord we stole upstairs and purloined a suit of our best underclothes, secreting them till after dinner, when we ran with them to the house of mourning, intending then to hurry back to school. I can see now the trimming on that little white petticoat that we stole from ourselves; we hesitated, it was such a pretty petticoat; but the need was urgent, and, somehow, we thought it must be the very best that we give to the dead child.

The family welcomed us effusively, blessing us, or asking Holy Mary to, as they immediately put our offerings to use; and still we lingered on. Presently they asked Kate to go with them to the burial, bribing her with a nice long drive; before I knew it, it was all settled. Kate ordered me to stop my opposition, she was going to that funeral. She also persuaded, or commanded, me to give her my hat, having lent hers to the sister. Then she made me promise to go back to school and say nothing; she would soon be home. The “last bell” had long since rung when, bareheaded, frightened, and alone, Miss Docility ran to school, tardily repentant over the whole strange proceedings. A wretched afternoon! As soon as school was out, I rushed up to the Post Office and in tears and penitence told it all to Father. I can see now his growing anxiety on learning of our visit to that fever-stricken house; and then of Kate’s having gone to the burial. He upbraided me for not coming to him at once, but knew that, as usual, Kate had dominated me.

“Run home and tell your mother not to worry,” he said; “we will soon get track of her and see that she gets home safe.”

Mother’s distress was pitiful. Tormenting herself and me, she rehearsed tales of Catholic funerals where they raced horses and got drunk—perhaps they would have a runaway—Kate might be thrown out—hurt, maybe killed—and perhaps we would all get the scarlet fever!

When Father came home to supper, no trace had yet been found of the funeral train, though a man had driven to the cemetery—the mourners were either driving home by some other road, or had gone on to a near-by city.

How the hours dragged! But the joy when Father came in bringing Kate, safe and sound, her elation over the experience only a little dampened by the fear of punishment! But she escaped it that time; and we all escaped the fever!

Although I had had to drop the study of music in early girlhood, music continued to be an important part of our home life. Other boys and girls in our street used to gather round our organ in the winter evenings, or sit on the veranda in summer, and sing till we had to stop for hoarseness, the neighbours often calling to us for this and that favourite. “Gathering up the Sea Shells,” “Pass under the Rod,” “Jamie’s on the Stormy Sea,” “O, Fair Dove,” “We’d Better Bide a Wee,” “I’ll Be All Smiles To-night, Love,” “Then You’ll Remember Me,” “Juanita”—a heterogeneous repertoire, the list seems interminable. There were certain favourites we would get Father to sing—“Bonnie Doon,” “The Sword of Bunker Hill,” and “My Susanna”—songs inseparably linked with home and those happy days.

I used to sing Father to sleep Sunday afternoons. No matter how many other songs I introduced, I always had to sing Longfellow’s “Bridge,” and “The Day Is Done.” I was annoyed if he asked for the latter before the day was done. I liked best to sing it as the afternoon light began to fade and barely come in at the west window, just enough for me to trace the notes.

Sometimes of a Sunday evening an aunt and uncle would ask for more lively songs than those I chose, for there was a long period when I steadfastly refused to sing secular songs on the Sabbath. At their request, I would evade and substitute; but if their insistence became too pronounced to be set aside, I would refuse point blank. In my unregenerate days there had been a time when I had sung “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Nancy Lee,” “Putting on the Style,” “Father, Come Down with the Stamps,” and such worldly things, but later the little Puritan was shocked to be asked to desecrate the Sabbath with such levity. They learned to cater to my strait-laced notions. I am afraid I was a not very pleasant person to deal with when a question of what I considered the fitness of things was involved. (Perhaps I am not even now.) I strongly suspect I was a self-righteous little prig for several years. At a later period one of the schoolboys described me to a newcomer in the town as “a nice girl, only such a prim little Methodist.” Not many weeks later, that girl and I were laughing in great glee over the description which, though it had once been true, was then hardly applicable; but I was still living on the reputation of a past phase of religious emotion.

We had a song called “Fire Bells Are Ringing,” a dramatic account of a fire on a wild winter night, the chorus ringing out with repeated cries of “Fire!” One windy night in February as Sister and I were at the organ singing this with all the dramatic power we could summon, the wild night putting us in the mood, Father, who had been in the kitchen popping corn, came running in shouting “Fire!” even louder than we were. Smiling, we sang on with redoubled energy, pleased that we had put him in the spirit of acting, too. He rushed around the room frantically shouting, “Fire! I tell you! Girls! do you hear?” Louder and more dramatic grew our efforts, and louder grew his cries until, a still more desperate tone in his voice, and the words, “Girls! Get me my coat, quick!” finally made us understand he was in earnest. Mother, too, had thought him fooling and there he was, excited as he always got at the alarm of fire, almost in despair of making any of us take him seriously!

It was a house on the street above. A fierce conflagration was under way. With the high wind, the adjoining house of a neighbour was endangered, and we had an exciting time helping our friends gather together valuables and other belongings, though luckily the fire did not spread. Ah! the cruel, relentless sight of that burning home! What if it was “the meanest man in town” whose house was burning down—everyone pitied him that wild night when they saw the pitiless flames.

We never associated with the neighbours on our right, except to be civil to them (and I to borrow their novels by Mary Jane Holmes—whenever I could without the knowledge of my parents). The man was coarse and illiterate, his wife a silly, slovenly, red-haired woman who would sit on her husband’s lap on the doorstep in full view of passers-by. But our left-hand neighbours, though shiftless and lawless, were interesting and likeable. Great borrowers, always borrowing, they would keep our belongings till we had to go after them. I would feel chagrined to have to ask for our own flatirons, or tack-hammer, or chopping-knife, when we needed them, but Jean, the witty daughter, would relieve my embarrassment by her ready assurance: “Certainly, Miss Genie, you are welcome to the irons; keep them as long as you like—we’ll come after them when we need them again.”

Formerly there had been a picket fence between our yard and theirs, along which the “myrtle” grew, and a board fence farther back, between the gardens; but, little by little, first the board fence disappeared, later the picket fence—whenever they got out of kindling wood they would take a board here, a picket there (usually early in the morning, or late at night). In time both fences were down, and only the “myrtle” in front and the pie-plant bed and berry bushes in the rear marked the division between our yards.

Mother would try shaming them out of it by wondering (to them) who could be carrying off our fence boards, and the wily Jean would reply, “It’s a shame, Mrs. Arnold, such people ought to have something done to them,” when perhaps that very morning Mother had seen her slip out, knock off a picket or two, and hustle with it into the woodshed. But the whole family had a way with them that was irresistible, and they were kindness itself when any one was sick or in trouble.

A slack housekeeper, the mother of the family, proud as Lucifer, was a remarkable character. She reared a large family, all “smart as whips,” but inclined to waywardness of one kind and another—the boys handsome and debonair, but profane and given to drink, yet more gentlemanly when drunk than many are when sober. Although we lived near them all their lives, the young men never spoke to Sister and me after we reached our ’teens without prefixing our names with “Miss,” and lifting their hats. If they stood at the wood-pile (perhaps sawing some of our fence-boards!) when we went to the well, they would bid us a courteous good morning, always cutting short their profanity, if indulging in it at the time.

I admired their chivalrous manners, their good looks, and their witty talk, even though knowing less admirable things about them.

The father, a crafty man, with no visible means of support, lived mostly by his wits. He was handsome, and humorous in a droll way. Never lifting his hand to help his over-worked wife, he would yet say ingratiatingly, “Mother, I don’t like to see you work so hard—we are not worthy of it.” And she, knowing how lazy he was, how it was all talk, would beam on him, proud of his good looks—the handsome father of her handsome sons—pleased with the affectionate protestations that he shouted in her deaf ears. She never criticized him or her sons to others; but sometimes her lips would shut in an emphatic way and her eyes say unutterable things if she thought herself unobserved; but the face she turned to others was innocent of all this. How her eyes would shine as she watched her sons start out of the house, well dressed, with manly carriage, and that air of distinction that never wholly left them! and when they came home intoxicated, how fertile she was in resources to get them quietly out of sight; how apt in concealing the loquacity induced by a lesser degree of intoxication!

An incident in her earlier days put her on a pedestal in my regard. Jean, her daughter, a fiery girl with coal-black eyes and hair was witty and irresponsible, as I have said, but energetic and warm-hearted. The neighbours knew her to be capable of escapades of which her doting mother was innocent! More than once she had been seen creeping down the slanting veranda-roof and down the porch pillars, from which she dropped softly to the ground. But no one dared acquaint her mother with the fact. In the course of time Jean was missing. Her brother traced her to a neighbouring town, and going to the hotel where she and her lover were staying, so arranged it that when they came into the dining-room, there he sat confronting them!

Equal to the occasion, Jean, I’ll wager, showed no embarrassment, and though her brother was bursting with rage and shame, he, too, was mindful not to make a scene. But what a dinner it must have been! Yet I can imagine that Jean kept the conversation going in her inimitable way. Dinner over, she asked her brother when he was going home. “Just as soon as you can get your things packed,” Dick said significantly. Knowing the Norton blood was up, she made the best of it and returned with him. After that she stayed closely at home. People in general did not know of her elopement, nor of the fact that she was to become a mother. Both she and her mother kept secluded for months. I wish I knew just how old her mother’s youngest child was when Jean’s child was born. My impression is that he was at least three or four years old. Nevertheless, it is stated as a fact, and was generally believed in the village, that at the birth of Jean’s baby, Mrs. Norton, its grandmother, put the baby to her own breast, and, by sheer force of will causing the milk to flow, brought up the child at her breast! He always called her “Mamma,” and his own mother by her given name; and although after a time, the fact of his parentage was learned, the family pride was saved to a great degree. People tacitly accepted the child as Jean’s youngest brother, and he himself thought he was until quite a lad.

Not having learned of all this till years after it occurred, the impression it made upon me was far less pronounced than when I learned about a certain girl, nearer my own age, who “went wrong.” But I did not learn of this little tragedy till a year or two afterward, although when I did, I was so sorry for the girl that there was no room for blame, and I was glad to know that Mother, knowing it all along, had befriended her; I loved my mother the more for it. But how incredible that such a thing had happened to one I actually knew! I used to wonder how she could go on living and acting like other folk; how she could meet that young man on the street; how she could fulfil her daily tasks. Divining what she must secretly have suffered, I felt sure her keenest grief must come from knowing that she was not as good as people thought her. I used to wish that she knew I knew of it, and that Mother had known it all the time, and yet that we felt the same toward her. I was sure that would have been a comfort to her.

A boy in our neighbourhood, a gay, boastful, light-hearted boy, who was always whistling on the street, got into difficulties, became entangled with low companions, and a grave charge was made against him from which he was only partly exonerated. The first year I was away from home, in writing to me about it, Mother had said, “Howard has lost his whistle.” How significant that was! The merry-hearted boy was never the same after that. These and other revelations concerning townspeople I knew made a profound impression upon me. They were the beginnings of my plucking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and I found it bitter. Every taste saddened me. The dispersion of every illusion was accompanied by a distinct pain. I think it must always be so for those who believe that persons and things are what they seem. The surface so smooth, so fair—incredible that beneath lie many diverse strata seldom or never seen. Outcroppings come as a revelation, and with the shattering of an ideal—inevitable sadness and pain!

One of my vivid childhood experiences comes to me here—that of being taken through the State Prison at Auburn, and to chapel services there, and how my throat ached as those hundreds and hundreds of men in convict garb filed in and took their places! The striped gray-and-black cloth for their suits was made at a woolen mill just outside our village. We sat in the gallery and looked down on the men. I have never forgotten the pain I felt, child that I was, at seeing such a mass of men branded with shame and crime, many imprisoned for life. I wonder if my sympathy and tolerance for wrong-doing were not generated by that early experience, when I pitied them so that there was no room to condemn.

Notes of piercing sweetness sounded through that vast auditorium as a convict played on a cornet the prelude to “Watchman, tell us of the night.” When they began singing I thought my heart would break. A part of the men sang the questions, then another body of them the answers, all joining in the refrain. Mother and all of us were in tears. Always after that, at home, when we would sing that piece, that moving scene would be vividly reproduced.

Chaplain Searle preached that day, and I remember (or think I remember) his beautiful, beneficent spirit as he talked to the men. (He used later to lecture in our village, and those impressions of him became blended with the earlier. One of his lectures was “The Sunny Side of Life in Libby Prison.”)

We saw the men march to dinner; saw their coarse fare, and peered into their bare cells; and a great pity rose within me for their blighted lives. To this day the sight of “Copper John”—the statue we see on the top of the prison, on driving in to Auburn—awakens the recollection of the painful emotions born that day when I first learned how hard the way of the transgressor really is.

About the only plays I ever saw, until I went away from home, were “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and “Ten Nights in a Bar Room,” played in our home town, and “East Lynne” in Syracuse. These were my only preparation for the appreciation and understanding of Booth’s “Hamlet,” which I saw my first year in Boston.

A mere child when “Uncle Tom” came to town, and too moved to do anything but cry openly, I was unmercifully tormented the next day at school by the older girls who, having witnessed my humiliation of the night before, jeered at and mimicked me. Curiously enough, many years later, while visiting in Worcester, Massachusetts, I encountered the star of this performance at close quarters: I was taken ill while there, and the landlady of my hostess was the “Topsy” of my early remembrance. When she learned that I had seen her as “Topsy,” she doubled her offices in my behalf: there was a distinct improvement in my toast and gruel, although her housekeeping was almost as “shifless” as “Aunt Ophelia” had complained of years before.

My first experience with remorse came when I was quite a little girl, on learning of the death of a schoolmate: One of the older girls, on seeing me weeping bitterly, looking at me coldly said, “Humph! you needn’t cry—you used to quarrel with her—you know you did.” As though I didn’t know it only too well! For years that girl’s twitting me of those irrevocable quarrels seemed the most unfeeling thing imaginable.

It was perhaps when I was sixteen that another schoolmate, going into a rapid decline, died of “consumption.” During that summer I went almost daily to brush her hair; she said I did not tangle it as others did. It was painful to see her wasting daily: that ominous cough, that sickly odour, and her pathetic hopefulness as her condition became more hopeless! But I had a strong sense of duty then. It was about the time, I suppose, that youthful altruism developed. Sometimes I would be so tired from work at home that I could hardly drag myself up the hill, and I dreaded the depressing environment. When she died they sent for me to dress her hair. She had requested it. That seemed more than I could do. (I have never been able to conquer my repugnance to touching a dead body.) But there was no way out of it. After the task was done, with which there was no one to help me except her brother, who was no help at all, I stayed and got supper for the invalid parents, and did other little things round the house, waiting for someone to come in who would stay the night. But no one came. I could not leave those helpless parents alone, so sent word home that I was going to stay, at the same time sending for a schoolmate to come and bear me company.

We had Louisa M. Alcott’s “Old-Fashioned Girl” to read, and proceeded to pass the night sitting up in the room next to the one where our dead schoolmate lay. The girl’s brother (the same who years before had bitten off the nose of my leatherhead doll), kept coming into the room and lamenting his sister’s death; then, going into the parlour, he would weep over the body, groaning and reproaching himself noisily for his past unkindness. The wildness of his grief, which came in paroxysms, was terrible. I pitied him, but it was a relief when he calmed down and went to bed.

Late in the evening the undertaker came and was alone in the parlour a long time. On coming out he asked who was going to stay over night. Lizzie and I told him we were. “But what grown person, I mean.” On learning that there was no one else, he scrutinized us a moment, then said to me, “If you will step in here, I will show you what I wish you to do.” Wondering, I followed him and learned that at midnight I was to remove the cloth from the face, moisten it in a solution, replace it, “taking care to press it well down on the eyes and around the nose and lips.” I have forgotten what else we had to do, but remember that I had to remove the folded hands from across the chest. (I did it by taking hold of the nightgown sleeves at the wrist. How startled I was at the spring the arms gave as I let go the sleeves!) He added that if I did it at midnight, and again at three or four o’clock in the morning, it would answer.

I have done much harder things since, but never remember undertaking anything that seemed more of an ordeal than that was then—our dead schoolmate, my shrinking at the feel of a corpse, the mere staying up in this remote house that night, no neighbours within call, we two girls, with the sick parents and the remorse-stricken brother—no one to give us moral support—small wonder that I quailed! But it had to be done.

My companion, less self-contained, and terrified on learning what was required, began to be hysterical. It was not easy to get her interested in the book, but we read on and on, taking turns through the long hours, our feverish excitement increasing as the dread hour approached. How loud the clock ticked! how every little sound about the house smote our ears! how furtively we kept glancing at the time, pretending not to be thinking of it! how our voices trembled! We both started in affright as the clock began to strike twelve! Lizzie held the lamp while I did as I had been instructed. Poor girls! They seem like someone else, not I and another. She trembled and nearly dropped the lamp; and when it was done, we almost ran from the room. It was no vulgar fear of the corpse; it was the general gruesomeness, our loneliness, and all that—the uncanny, tiny little mother, a mere skeleton; the Quilp-like father—everything added to our shuddering dread.

No sooner had we closed the creaking folding-doors and were back in the sitting-room than my companion, heaving a sigh of relief, said, “Now let’s go and have something to eat.” I could have screamed outright—“Eat now! after that experience!” My hands felt contaminated, even after repeated washings. I begged her to wait awhile. So Miss Alcott still diverted us till I felt I could go and eat. After that we grew cheerful, even hilarious, and then felt guilty for laughing in that house of mourning.

Long hours passed in talking and reading till we had to go in that dread room again. Finally morning came, and with it a neighbour who relieved us. Going home in the early dawn, the queer look of the quiet streets, the physical weariness, combined with the night’s experiences, made me feel years older. Stealing up the steps at home and creeping into the hammock on the veranda, I slept until the opening of doors and windows in the house announced the family astir.

Perhaps a year after the death of this girl, another schoolmate died of the same disease—a brilliant, beautiful girl with smouldering dark eyes, a girl of great promise, who had made a brave fight for life.

Her mother, who was given to doing things in a theatrical way, asked four of us girls to be honorary pall-bearers—to dress in white and follow the casket in and out of the church.

At the house the general gloom and our own grief had been a strain on us, but as we got into the carriage we calmed down from our weeping and were trying to get in condition to face the ordeal at the church when, just as we were driving through the main street, without any warning, one of us broke into laughter! Two others followed in sympathy, the fourth girl looking so disgusted that it made us laugh the more. Finally she gave way, too, and we were all in a state of uncontrolled, unreasoning mirth!

Although the carriage was closed, we feared the driver would hear us, or people in the street catch a glimpse of us. Our efforts at self-control were painful in the extreme. What would Ruth think if she could know of our conduct? But everything we tried to say only made matters worse. When the carriage drove into the churchyard, we were still in a pitiable plight, and how we ever mastered ourselves enough to step out and walk past the by-standers and on into the church behind the casket is something I marvel at even yet. But we had had our escape-valve, and now everything was done “decently and in order.” Long after that, we thought with remorse of our conduct, not understanding how blameless we were—how wrong it was to subject a group of impressionable girls to such an emotional strain.

I recall some by-word meetings which I think had some share in my development at a plastic period. They were conducted by the wife of the Presbyterian minister, their object being to help us refrain from the use of slang. That minister’s wife seems to me, even yet, the most beautiful woman I ever saw—tall, slender, with a queenly carriage, the smoothest, creamiest skin, bewitching dimples, jet black hair and eyes, and slender white hands.

On the street she wore a heavy veil, and when she lifted it as she came into the meetings, it was like the unveiling of a beautiful statue. She had a silvery voice, so different from any voice I had heard. In fact, she seemed a little too bright and good for everyday life. We children idolized her. Some of our playmates would not go to her meetings, and spitefully told us she was “proud”; wore a veil to preserve her complexion; never ate butter; and nearly starved herself to keep slender; but, resenting these rude charges against our divinity, we continued her willing devotees.

How good she used to talk to us! She began her prayers with “Dear Father,” praying easily as she stood before us, as though talking to a loved parent. She listened to our confessions of what by-words we had been betrayed into saying during the week, smiling brilliantly at times, looking grieved at other disclosures, and sometimes shocked, but always encouraging us to try harder the next week. The by-words permitted were, “Oh!” “Oh, my!” “Oh, dear!” and “Oh, dear me!”—these with varying intensity were the legitimate outlets for the various experiences and emotions of our lives! All others we must strive to keep from saying, “with the aid of our Heavenly Father.” I think “Grief!” was the word with which I kicked over the traces the oftenest; but her reproving smile was not a hard punishment; and it was such a delight to see her approval when we could make a good confession. It was an excellent influence she shed, not the least of which was due to her beauty. My aversion to slang (except when “right off the bat”) is probably due to those early by-word meetings.

Although the hands of this woman strongly appealed to me by their beauty and delicacy, my mother’s appealed more powerfully—the whole woman in her seems typified in her hands. Not small, nor especially white, they are well-formed, and, in spite of a life filled with work, are soft, yet firm, strong, capable, and tender. Even as a child I seemed aware of her emotion, as well as her strength, in them. I used to like to clasp them—such a warm, sustaining grasp! And I liked to open them and look at the palms. She has a hollow palm (something like my own), and all the mounds are full and elastic—a warm, soft, brooding handclasp peculiarly her own. In my emotional nature I am more like Mother, in mental make-up more like Father. Sister’s hands are more like Father’s, yet her physical type in general, and her mental, is more like Mother’s. From Mother she and Brother get their fairer skin, while mine is the brunette shade, like Father’s. How mysterious it all is! How complex!—“Mate and make beget such different issues!”

CHAPTER IV In the Old Paths

Does one ever outgrow one’s early religious training? Though he outgrow his credulity, his faith, his observance of rite and ceremony, and though he wander far from the paths he followed when being trained “in the way he should go,” still must the religious influences shed round him in those early, plastic years have their permanent bearing upon his after life, even though sometimes so transformed as to be traceable only to the keen student of personality.

“Back to the Old Paths” was a gospel hymn I heard in the days when those paths were traversed by my childish feet; and back to the old paths I now turn, seeking to retrace the steps which time and disuse have almost obliterated.

Being Methodists, we children had been baptized in infancy, and our childhood and youth had been divided into three-year periods, diminutive dynasties, marked by the reigns of the different ministers, events being referred to as “during Brother Gregg’s stay,” “in Brother Carrier’s time,” “when Brother Browne was here.” What excitement toward the close of one of those “dynasties” to see what the new minister would be like!

Father was one of the church trustees, Mother had a class in Sunday School. Although we children regularly attended church and Sunday School, and often prayer-meeting and class-meeting, we showed little of the early piety which our Sunday-school books set forth. When there was no one to leave us with at home, Mother usually took us to prayer-meeting. All would kneel during the seasons of prayer—each consisting of about three prayers—then would rise and sing; then kneel for another season, and so on. I remember once awaking in shame and confusion, still on my knees while the others stood round me singing. Crouching there, a miserable heap on the floor, I waited for them to kneel again, hoping no one but Mother had noticed me. But as it proved the last season that evening, when the hymn ended and all took their seats, the little heap on the floor had to creep up and seat itself shamefacedly by its mother, its discomfiture unrelieved until they rose and sang “Blest Be the Tie that Binds,” and the meeting closed.

Sometimes Mother put us to bed when she went to evening meetings. It was a hardship to be locked in the house those spring twilights with the church bells tolling and the boys and girls calling us to come out and play “I-Spy.” Everything called us out of doors. What was there about that time of day that seemed made for frolic? How we pitied ourselves when the “All free” of our playmates floated to us on the twilight air! Once we climbed out of the window and played in the street—bare-footed, too! Oh, the delight of our bare feet on the soft, cool grass! But we had to climb in again soon, gloating guiltily over the stolen liberty. We thought Mother unfeeling to leave us locked in the house, but if we objected to the prayer-meetings she sometimes had no alternative. We rather liked the class-meetings; there were only two or three prayers then, and all gave their “experiences.” We knew by heart some of the stereotyped speeches. Sometimes we would signal to one another when it was about time for certain expressions that amused us; and again would giggle if the good brethren and sisters varied their remarks and failed to repeat the queer things we expected.

One man at a certain stage in his prayer always rubbed his palms together, then as his voice got louder, he would rub faster and faster; his straggling hair would fall over his face; the veins would swell in his forehead; and he would reach a climax of frenzied petition from which he would gradually subside, tapering to a breathless “Amen!” Sister could repeat this prayer and his manœuvres to perfection: “Oh, Lord-ah, we have come here to night-ah, to crave thy mercy-ah”—thus regaling us with reproductions of “Brother Aaron” and other eccentric ones—when Mother was not near. Mother herself, though quiet in testimony and prayer, would not let us ridicule those who were not. There were three or four of the brethren and sisters of the old-fashioned kind of Methodists, who were a boon to sleepy children; but as I grew older I wearied of their stereotyped speeches, and felt a repugnance to their emotional storms.

In the home, at seasons of special religious fervour, we had family prayers. There was something peculiarly satisfying to me in all of us kneeling together while Father prayed. His prayers were controlled and rational; I never felt uneasy when he prayed; while with Mother there was always the fear that her voice would tremble, as it did when she read touching passages in our Sunday-school books. I could not bear to hear the tears come in her voice, for it meant we would all ultimately break down and cry.

Mother loved the Bible. How well she knew it! It was history, poetry, and all literature to her. How interesting she made the stories when telling them in her own words—the story of Ruth, of Queen Esther, of Joseph and his coat of many colours—how inseparably these are linked with Mother’s interpretations!

She loved music, too, but none of her family could carry a tune, except one brother who died in his youth. She would try so hard to sing, “Hush, My Dear, Lie Still and Slumber,” usually getting the first two lines pretty well, then would flounder around, unable to get the rest. In church she would start out bravely to sing the “Doxology,” or “By Cool Siloam’s Shady Rill,” or “There is a Land of Pure Delight,” but would falter and have to stop entirely before the end of the first stanza. I have seen her almost weep because she wanted so much to sing. At first we laughed at her—it seemed so funny, and so easy to catch a tune—but with her it was so serious a matter that I learned to pity her.

Unless Sister was watched throughout the church service, she would excite the risibilities of all around by her antics and imitation of the minister. Quick as a flash she would jump up on the seat, tiny mite that she was, and flourish her arms as the speaker was doing. Mrs. R——, the wife of a certain pastor who made very awkward gestures, used to say it was bad enough to see the gestures themselves, but to see them so perfectly reproduced was much too much; still she would laugh about it till the tears ran down her cheeks. Kate would imitate the twisting gait and fidgety manner of a sister of Father’s so well that a neighbour seeing her would say, “There goes your Aunt Lucinda, boiled down.”

I learned early to while away the long sermons by reading Sunday-school books, Mother remonstrating, but often ignoring the practice, for it lightened her duties—she was thus sure of one of us being quiet during services. If not reading, Arthur and I were bound to titter at Kate’s pranks.

“Who is this?” she would whisper, then pull down her face like old Aaron Wilson in the side pew, or again like Brother Schermerhorn, or saintly Sister Brown, or lugubrious Sister Stiles. She could look like any of them in a jiffy, and we would nearly explode, while she was tickled to get us in such an uncomfortable plight. Mother was often on pins and needles lest we laugh outright in church.

Sometimes it would please the minx to assume a demure, reverential air throughout the entire service. Then we almost went into spasms. She would turn the leaves of the Bible, rise, bow her head, and sing; would place a hymn-book behind her, as the good sister in front of us did, halfway through the sermon, to ease her back; would use her handkerchief in a grown-up way—all apparently unaware of her giggling brother and sister, except when she would turn upon us a pained, reproving glance—usually the last straw for the poor camels.

I kept up the habit of reading during services till the pastor mentioned it so pointedly in Sunday School that I had to stop. When the sermons interested me, I no longer cared to read. I recall three of our ministers who were liberally educated for pastors in small churches. One, in particular, a Scotch-Irishman, was an original thinker, emotional, with a tumultuous Carlylean eloquence. He preached remarkable sermons. Father and I followed his thought, I think, more closely than any one else in the congregation. He seemed to feel this, too, addressing us almost personally, sure of sympathetic attention. Many of his stolid hearers had no idea “what he was driving at.” Sometimes he would labour so to bring forth his thought that it was painful to watch him—it was as though his mind was laid bare. Carried away with the grandeur of a conception, he would wrestle with it, conquer it, and finally unfold it. His influence on my mental and religious nature (I was seventeen then) was unquestionable, but unsettling, seeming to increase the chaotic state of my mind; at least, it was during his “dynasty” that I became so unsettled—doubting and trying to think a way out of the inconsistencies I was continually coming upon.

But earlier wanderings in the old paths claim their share in this backward glance. Tenting at camp-meeting (Auburndale), perhaps four times in all—not four years in succession, for that would have been too great a boon—was a keen pleasure of our childhood. How we felt the deprivation of the blank years! What a homesick longing for our tent in the woods when the August days came round! The woods were perhaps five miles away. It seemed a long journey. What fun to see the wagon piled with bedding, furniture, and tinware; to see kettles dangling below; to hear the rattle as we sat a-top of the heterogeneous array! Then the ride along the sunny country road to the camp-grounds! I wonder if a part of my fascination for gypsy wagons and the life of the Romanys isn’t due to our own gypsying in the camp-meeting woods.

Mother usually shared a tent with a certain good sister, an old-fashioned fat countrywoman who was very devout and who made good cookies. We liked her best for the last quality.