Adventures in Indigence
and Other Essays

ADVENTURES IN
INDIGENCE
AND
OTHER ESSAYS

BY
LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston

Copyright, 1918, by
The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

PREFACE

It is doubtful whether the present volume should be looked on as a collection of essays, or might not more aptly be called a book of personal experience. The true essayist offers you fewer doubts and peradventures. He comes with clear philosophies, to which he means to convert you. He is well armed for controversy. He will cite you Scripture, the Decalogue, and the statutes. You will find it difficult to pick a flaw in his argument. Never hope to prove him wrong! He leaves no man reasonable choice but to agree with him. He is a sworn advocate. His essay is his brief. If he be a man of force, his cause is won before the jurymen take their places. Be sure he will prove his point before any just judge. The case, it seems when you come to think upon it later, might almost have gone by default, so little is there any argument left you.

The papers in the present volume are not so forethought, nor are they designed to be so convincing. There is more memory than doctrine in them; more experience than authority, theology, or faith. In them will be found little that is taught by the schools, upheld by the courts, or propounded by the Fathers. Perhaps they contain not so much what I believe, as what, because of persistent personal observation and testing and proving, of my own, I have been at last unable to disbelieve. These papers, in short, deal with none of the usual and traditional theories of life, but rather with life as I have intimately found it and lived it.

It is one thing to uphold loyally an ancient faith which has from the beginning been taught one, or to which one has, on the respected authority of others, been converted; it is a wholly other thing to uphold sincerely, and for what it may be worth, a belief which one has but evolved and tested and proven for one's self. God forbid it should be upheld arrogantly! For, as the first method is calculated to produce devout believers, zealous to convert those whose beliefs differ from their own, so does the other tend, rather, to make devout observers; and as the passionate believer is to the last unable to understand how others could believe differently than he does; the devout observer is eager to mark where and how the observations of others differ from his own, or, it may be, happily coincide with them. He has a persistent desire to know whether, given the same experience and facts, others will approve of his findings.

It is for this reason, no doubt, that I find myself wondering whether the reader of this volume has discovered, as I have,—all tradition, teaching, theory, and articles of faith to the contrary,—indisputable evidence of the mysterious and imponderable powers of the poor. Has Life the Educator revealed herself to another in such a fashion as to me? Have you who read—you also—a secret belief in certain unmistakable superiorities hidden away in the unwritten records and the unadministered laws of lesser creatures than ourselves? Have you, like myself, lost birthdays irretrievably, and found in their place that larger nativity writ in a more universal horoscope?

Though these papers do not claim to be more than personal records of experience and adventure and consequent belief, yet there may be those who will decry the persistent personality, who will condemn the seeming egotism. To these there is recommended—perhaps a little wistfully—the paper, toward the last, which attempts to deal with this rather widespread failing.

L. S. P.

ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE

I
MUSGROVE

Both Stevenson and Lamb, writing of "Beggars," fall into what I take to be a grave misapprehension. They both write a defense, and constitute themselves advocates. Lamb brilliantly solicits our pity for these "pensioners on our bounty"; Stevenson, though he characteristically makes himself comrade and brother of his client, and presents the "humbuggery" of the accused as a legitimate art, nevertheless thinks himself but too evidently of a higher order, and the better gentleman of the two. Here, and it would seem in spite of himself, are patronage and condescension.

I own that such an attitude shocks me and makes me apprehensive. Were I superstitious, of a certain creed, I should cross myself to ward off calamity; or were I a Greek of the ancient times, I should certainly pour a propitiatory libation to Hermes, god of wayfarers, thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and the like.

"Poor wretches," indeed! "Pensioners," they! "Ragamuffins! humbugs!" They, with their occult powers! They, mind you, needing our advocacy! I could indeed bear a different testimony.

I think I began first to know the power of the poor, and to fall under their sway, when I was certainly not more than six years old. It must have been about then that I was learning to sew. This seems to have been a profession to which I was so temperamentally disinclined that my mother, to sweeten the task, was wont during the performance of it to read to me. While I sat on a hassock at her feet scooping an unwilling perpendicular needle in and out of difficult hems, my mother would read from one of many little chap-books and children's tracts, which were kept commonly in a flat wicker darning-basket in her wardrobe; little paper books held over from her own and her mother's childhood. They were illustrated with quaint woodcuts, and the covers of them were colored. I was allowed to choose which one was to be read.

One day—"because the time was ripe," I suppose—I selected a little petunia-colored one, outwardly very pleasing to my fancy. It contained the story and the pictures of a miserable beggar and a haughty and unfeeling little girl. He was in rags, and reclined, from feebleness I fancy, on the pavement; she walked proudly in a full-skirted dress, strapped slippers, and pantalets. She wore a dipping leghorn with streamers. Just over this she carried a most proud parasol; just under it a nose aristocratically, it may even be said unduly, high in the air.

I think I need not dwell on the tale, save to say that it was one of the genus known as "moral." There was only one ending possible to the story: the triumph of humility, the downfall of pride and prosperity; swift and awful retribution falling upon her of the leghorn and pantalets. I believe they allowed her in the last picture a pallet of straw, a ragged petticoat, bare feet, clasped hands, and a prayerful reconciliation with her Maker. The story was rendered distinctly poignant for me by the fact that I possessed a parasol of pink "pinked silk," which was held on Sundays and certain other occasions proudly—it also—over a leghorn with streamers which dipped back and front exactly as did the little girl's in the story. But never, never,—once I had made the acquaintance of that story,—was my nose carried haughtily under it, when by chance I sighted one of that race so numerous and so ancient, so well known and so little known to us all. From that day I began to know the power of the poor.

I can remember delectable candies that I did not buy, delicious soft cocoanut sticks that I never tasted, joys that I relinquished, hopes that I deferred, for the questionable but tyrannous comfort of a penny in an alien tin cup, and the inevitable "God bless you, little lady!" which, remembering her of the leghorn and pantalets, I knew to be of necessity more desirable than the delights I forewent.

There was an old blind man there in my home town, whom I remember very keenly. He used to go up and down, he and his dog, in front of the only caravansary the place boasted,—the Hotel Latonia,—tap-tap, tap-tapping. He had the peculiar stiff, hesitating walk of the blind, the strange expectant upward tilt of the face. He wore across his shoulder a strap on which was fastened a little tin cup.

I used to see the drummers and leisurely men of a certain order, their chairs tilted back against the hotel wall, their heels in the chair-rungs, their hats on the back of their heads, their thumbs in their arm-holes, their cigars tilted indifferently to heaven, and they even cracking their jokes and slapping their knees and roaring with laughter, or perhaps yawning, perfectly unaware of the blind man, it seemed, while he passed by slowly, tap-tap, tap-tapping.

But it was never thus with me. His cane tapped, not only on the pavement, but directly on my heart. You could have heard it, had you put your ear there. It may have seemed that his eyes were turned to the sky. That was but a kind of physical delusion. I knew better. In some occult way they were searching me out and finding me. I can give you no idea of the command of the thing. Perhaps I have no need to. Your own childhood—it is not improbable—may have been under a similar dominion.

If I thought to experiment and withhold my penny, I might escape the blind man for a while: I might elude him, for instance, while the other members of the family and the guests in that old home of my childhood were gay and talkative at the supper-table; or afterward, when laughter and song drowned the lesser sounds; or while I stood safe in the loved shelter of my father's arm, listening to conversations I enjoyed, even though I could not understand them; or while, in the more intimate evenings, he took his flute from its case, screwed its wonderful parts together, and, his fingers rising and falling with magic and precision on the joined wood and ivory, played "Mary of Argyll" until I too heard the mavis singing. But later, later, when I lay alone in my bed in the nursery in the moonlight, or, if it were winter, in the waning firelight and the creeping shadows, then, then there came up the stairs and through the rooms the sound of the blind man's cane, tap-tap, tap-tapping. He had come for his penny. And the next time I saw him, with a chastened spirit and a sense of escape I gave him two.

But my own childish subserviency to the poor did not give me so great a sense of their power as my mother's relation to them. She, it seems, was perpetually at their service. Let them but raise a hand indicating their need ever so slightly, and she moved in quick obedience, although it seemed she too must sometimes have wearied of such service. Guests were many and frequent in that old home, as I have elsewhere told; but these came either by announcement or by invitation; the poor, on the contrary, came unasked, unannounced, and exactly when they chose, as by royal prerogative. Indeed, many a time I have seen my mother excuse herself to a guest, to wait sympathetically upon a man or a woman with a basket,—it might be the queen of the gypsies, with vivid, memorable face; or the Wandering Jew in the very flesh; or it might be Kathleen ni Houlihan herself, all Erin looking out, haunting you, from her tragic old eyes,—offering soap or laces at exorbitant prices, or other less useful wares, tendered for sale and excuse at the kitchen door.

There was one whom I especially remember—Musgrove. He was a fine marquis of a man, was Musgrove, as slender as a fiddle and with as neat a waist. He used to come to the front door and sit by the old hall clock, waiting my mother's pleasure. He had a wife and seven or nine children, and a marvelous multiplicity of woes. There was a generosity and spaciousness about the calamities of Musgrove—something mythopœic, promethean. Tragedies befell him with consistent abundance. Four or five of the seven or nine had broken their arms, almost put out their eyes, or had just escaped by a hair's breadth from permanent blanket-mortgage disability when the floor of the cottage they lived in fell through; or they had been all but carried off wholesale by measles. Once all nine, as I remember it, were poisoned en gros by Sunday-school-picnic ice-cream, which left the children of others untouched. Only myths were comparable. Niobe alone, and she not altogether successfully, could have matched calamities with him.

By and by Time itself, I think, wearied of Musgrove. I think my mother, sympathetic as she was, must have come to think the arrows of outrageous fortune were falling far too thick for likelihood, even on so shining a mark as Musgrove. She came from interviews with him with a kind of gentle weariness. But Musgrove, I am very sure, had an eye for the drama. He knew his exits and his entrances, and I have reason to believe no shade of feeling in my mother's face was lost upon him.

He came one day to say good-bye, his shabbiness heightened, but brightened also, by a red cravat. It was safe now, no doubt, to allow himself this gayety. He knew that my mother would be glad to hear that, through the kindness of someone nearly as kind as herself, he had been able to obtain a position in a large city. He lacked but the money to move. After that—prosperity would be his.

My mother did not deny him his chance, Musgrove himself, you see, having contrived it so that the chance was not without a certain advantage and privilege for her. So he made his fine bow, and he and his fine marquis manners were gone.

I think my mother must have missed him. I know I did. The other pensioners came as regularly as ever—the gypsy with her grimy laces; the Jew with his tins and soap; rheumatic darkies by the dozen, frankly empty-handed; the little girl with the thin legs and with the black shawl pinned over her head and draped down over the shy and empty basket on her arm; and the old German inventor who always brought the tragedy of old and outworn hopes along with some new invention; or, at infrequent intervals, for a touch of color, there came an Italian organ-grinder, and—if the gods were good—a monkey. But there were times when I would have exchanged them all to see Musgrove again, with his fine promethean show of endurance, his incomparable assortment of unthinkable calamities.

Another, it is true, came in his place, but he was of a wholly different type. He had not the old free manner of Musgrove, yet he was strangely appealing, too. He wore a beard and was stooped and spent and submissive, a man broken by fate. He did not complain. He did not wait rather grandly by the hall clock as Musgrove had done; no, but in the kitchen, about breakfast-time, biding the cook's not always cordial pleasure.

In spite of my mother's sympathy,—which should certainly have made amends for any lack of it in the cook,—he had a way of slipping in and out with a little shrinking movement of his body, like the hound that does the same to escape a blow. One would have said that body and soul flinched. He limped stiffly, and seemed always to have come a little dazed from far countries.

My mother took even a very keen interest in him. This man was more difficult to reach, but by that very token seemed no doubt the more worthy. He told no wonderful tales to tax your credulity. His very reticence was moving and hard to endure; the death of nine or seven children would have been less sad. He kept coming for quite a long time. Then the day dawned—a day quite like any other, I suppose, though it should have been dark with cloudy portent—when, by some slight misstep, some trifling but old reference on his part when his mind was off its guard, my mother discovered, as by a sudden lightning flash, that this was Musgrove.

I have known some dramatic moments in my life, but I would not put this low on the list.

He seemed to know for an intense arrested instant that he had spoken a false line, that he had for a miserable moment forgotten his part. He staggered into it again with what I know now was fine courage, and managed in perfect character to get away. I can still see him as he departed, bent and submissive (having most meekly thanked my mother), and not forgetting to limp stiffly, going along under the falling leaves of the grape-arbor, in the autumn sunshine, the shadows of the stripped vines making a strange and moving pattern on his old coat as he went; nor have I failed to see him in all the years since, thus departing,—inevitably, irretrievably,—and have found my heart going many a time along with him.

My mother, and I with my hand in hers, went back into the quiet comfortable rooms of that old house. But if you suppose we went in any spirit of ascendency, or righteous indignation, or justification, you are indeed mistaken. To be in the right is such an easy, such a pleasant thing; what is difficult and must be tragically difficult to endure is to be artistically, tragically in the wrong. I think it likely that my mother remembered Musgrove, as I have done, through all the years, a little as a survivor might remember one who had gone down before his eyes. It is thus, you see, that Musgrove, bent and always departing, still continues to sway others with his strange powers, as it is fitting, no doubt, that one of his rare genius should do.

II
THE HARP AND THE VIOLIN

Besides those that I have mentioned, there were two especially of that ancient race whose fortunes were bound in with my early memories.

It was upon a day when I was a little more than fourteen that I came to know them. I was alone at home, save for the maids in the house, and was reading at my ease, as I loved to do, in that old verandah that fronted the south. I remember well that the book I read was "Rasselas, or The Happy Valley."

The verandah was deep and long. Beside it ran a brick pavement, delightful in color and texture. Over this, joining the verandah, there curved a latticed grape-arbor of most gracious lines, on which grew, in lovely profusion, a wistaria, a catawba grape-vine, moonflower, and traveler's-joy. When the wistaria, like a spendthrift, had lavished all its purple blossoms, and there were left but green leaves in its treasury, then the grape bloom lifted its fragrance; and when this was spent, the traveler's-joy, as though it had foreseen and saved for the event, flung forth its abundance; and when at last its every petal had fallen and nothing more remained,—for the moonflower had its own prejudice, persistently refused the demands of the sun, and would open its riches only to the moon and the night moths,—then the early autumn sun, feeling through the thinning leaves, hardly expectant, would come upon that best treasure of all, stored long, against this time, in the reddening clusters of the grapes.

All these things lent I cannot say what charm inexhaustible to that old verandah, and made it a place of abiding romance and delight. The pattern of the sunshine and of the moonlight on the floor of it, as they fell through the lattice and the leaves, are things that still haunt my memory with the sense of a lovely security, of a generous abundance, and, as it were, of the lavish inexhaustible liberality of life itself.

There, secure against interruption, I read and pondered, with the imaginative ponderings of fourteen, the strange longings of that Prince who should have been so content in the Happy Valley.

As I read, I was aware of a strange intrusion: a bent form in baggy trousers and rusty coat stooped under the weight of an old and worn harp; behind him, bent also, but by no visible burden, an old man with a violin entered the gateway of the arbor. They came very slowly and deliberately, yet without pause or uncertainty. They did not introduce themselves, being, I knew instantly, quite above such plebeian need. They asked no permission, nor solicited any tolerance. They spoke not a word. It was as if they had long outgrown the need of such earthly trivialities.

He of the rusty coat and baggy trousers, having taken a slow look at the place around,—as though to establish in his mind some mysterious identity,—let the harp slip from his shoulders to the brick pavement, adjusted it there very deliberately, and proceeded to pluck one or two of its strings with testing fingers, still looking around carefully all the while; then he adjusted his camp-stool, seated himself, pulled the worn, yet delicate and feminine instrument toward him, so that her body lay against his shoulder, and put his hands in position to play.

The old violin, more lordly, made no concession whatever to harmony; he tuned or touched not a string, but with a really kingly gesture put his instrument in the worn hollow of his shoulder, laid his head and cheek over against it, as though lending his whole soul to listen, raised the bow, held it for an immortal instant over the strings, and then drew out a long preliminary note—on, on, on, to the very quivering tip of the bow.

My education had not been neglected as to music. There had always been much of it in my home, where flute and voice and harp and violin and piano spoke often, and my home town was near a great musical centre, where, young as I was, I had heard the best that was to be heard. Had I been in a critical mood, I should have noted how badly the long-drawn note was drawn; I can hear still how excruciating it was, how horribly it squawked; but rendered solemn, as I was, by the strangeness of their appearance and their presence, and dimly, dimly aware of their immortal powers, it thrilled me more than I remember those of Sarasate or Ysaye to have done.

The long note at an end, without so much as a consultation of the eyes, they then began. With never a word, only with thrilling tones horribly off the key, the violin spoke, say rather wrung its hands and wailed,—"Oh, don't you remember"—("Oh, yes; I remember!" throbbed and sobbed the harp)—"Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?"

They played it all through, even to what must have been the "slab of granite so gray," varying all the while from one half to one tone off the key, the old violin lending his ear as attentively all the while to the voice of his instrument as if she spoke with the tongues of angels; his dim veiled eyes fixed on incalculable distances, like those of an eagle in captivity.

The old harp, on the contrary, kept his eyes lowered stubbornly on the vibrating strings; and the harp, as he smote, quivered like some human thing struck upon its remembering heart. From the painfully reminiscent song they leaped without pause into that second most wailful melody in the world,—

Ah, I have sighed to rest me,
Deep in the quiet grave,—

and played that on to the end also.

But though to the outward eye these visitors played upon the harp and violin, how much more indeed did they play upon me! Young, and sensitive, and as yet unsounded, how, with dim compelling fingers they searched and found and struck and drew from me emotions I had never known! Old and worn and bowed with life, and weather-beaten of the world, they played there in the mottled sunlight of that romantic arbor, as might Ulysses have stood mistaken and unhonored by those who had but heard of Troy. There was to me something suddenly overwhelming in the situation. Oh, who was I, to enjoy so much, in such security; to feast upon plenty, and to know the generous liberality of life, while these, doomed to the duress of the gods, went through the world, day after day, half-starved, playing miserable memorable music fearfully off the key!

Perhaps I was intense; certainly I was young; and as certainly I had all the eager vivid imagination of youth. Moreover, this was, it should not be overlooked, my very first adventure, all my own, with the poor; my first piece of entirely independent service to those mysterious powers. Meanwhile, the divinities in disguise played on—a wild, boisterous tune it was now, set to a rollicking measure and infinitely more sad for that than the sighs of "Trovatore," or than sweet Alice under the stone. Bent they seemed on sounding every stop. You may think they were but a grimy pair, dull and squalid; probably embittered. I can only tell you that they invoked for me that day, as with the mournful powers of the Sibyl of Cumæ, love and life and death, and joy irrevocable, and memory—these they called up to pass before me, and bade them as they went, for one summoning moment, to reveal their faces to me.

Presently, I do not know with what dark thoughts, these two would have departed, but I remembered and begged them to stay. I flew upstairs and found my purse, and emptied it, and gave them what it held. They took it without thanks, merely as lawful tribute exacted. Again they would have departed, but I begged them still to remain. Should this ancient Zeus and Hermes be allowed to depart without bread? I disappeared into the house with a beating heart. I found bread and milk and meat. I brought these and set them out for them, and drew chairs for them. All this, too, they took for granted, with some shrewd glances at me; they shuffled their feet about under the table, bent low to their plates like hungry men, and shoveled their food into their mouths dexterously with their knives, the better, no doubt, to disguise their divinity.

While they ate, I went, with a heart troubled yet high, and gathered for them grapes that hung immortally lovely in the sun. These too they ate, with a more manifest pleasure, cleaning the bunches down to the stems; and when they had made away with all they could, slipped the remaining clusters in their pockets against a less hospitable occasion.

I remember that then they went and left me standing there in a world of dreams and speculation and adventure. They had gone as they had come but me they left forever changed. As they departed, certain doors in my young days swung and closed mysteriously. For me the channels of life were permanently deepened. With them had departed my complacent, inexperienced attitude of mind; with them had fared forth the care-free child that I had been. This adventure all my own, conducted in my own manner, had initiated me into vast possibilities, the more impressive because but dimly seen. On me had depended for a little while these two of God knows what ancient descent. I too had begun to know and taste life. I too would begin to count my memories. Oh, strange new world! And with strange people in it!

On this world, enter, upper left stage, Leila the maid.

"Oh, Miss Laura, honey, what you bin' doin'? Dey ain't nothin' but no-'count beggars, chile. Don't you know dey mought 'a' come indo's and carried off all de silver? Dat's just de kind would steal fum you when you warn't lookin'. I ain't right sho' now dey ain't got some o' de silver in dey pockets!" And she took savage stock of what lay on the table.

O Leila, ingenuous mind! Dearly as I loved her, how little she knew! How far she was from understanding the habits and predilections of the gods! Would they trouble, do you think, to take a silver knife or fork, who can take away the priceless riches of childhood with them? Would they pause to purloin a mere petty silver spoon, who can carry off an entire golden period of your existence, and leave you with the leaden questions and dull philosophy and heavy responsibility of older years?

I should have asked their names, that I might set these in my prayers, but I had not had presence of mind enough to do that; so, that night, while I knelt by my bed, alone in the moonlight, a very devout little girl, there stood there, shadowy in the shadows, and among my nearest and dearest, on whom I asked the Lord's blessing, the old harp and violin; while, with my head buried passionately in my hands, I begged Providence to have an especial care of these new friends of my heart, to bless them, to let its face shine upon them, and to give them peace.

Musical beggars! I have seen them often since, in one guise or another. Sometimes they trumpet on the trombone or cornet, or blow fearful blasts upon the French horn; I have known them to finesse upon the flute or flageolet. These differences are but inconsiderable. Always I find them equally mighty. I have thought sometimes to get past them with giving them only a great deal more than I could afford. Useless frugality! futile economy! For still they will be laying ghostly hands upon you; still will they be exacting a heavier tribute and demanding that gold and silver of the soul which, as Plato is so well aware, is how infinitely more precious.

Though to outward appearance they are busy with their instruments, how they lay ghostly hands upon your imagination. How they conjure up before the inward eye themselves as they might have been, to levy a new tax upon you. The man with the horn, he who plays always off the key, and always a little ahead of the others, he, it is now mysteriously revealed to you, had meant perhaps, at the very least, to play in an orchestra. And the baggy battered old violin was to have wiped his heated brow with a grand gesture, and bowed condescendingly over his collar to metropolitan audiences, had not his dreams so unaccountably miscarried. And the old thread-bare harp-player, his shabbiness and his bitter face to the contrary notwithstanding, had meant, had really meant, to pluck some sweetness out of life. And the harp itself (yes, even so extensive is the occult power they wield) makes its own special appeal to you, and with its taste for delicacy seems suddenly like a dull tormented thing, swaying and trembling under the stiff sullen fingers of its master, there on the garish pavement—an instrument which, but for the uncertainty of life (ah, the uncertainty of life!), might have responded how devotedly, in the tempered light of a curtained alcove, to the touch of delicate fingers.

All this they conjure up before the mind's eye, ere they stop their excruciating playing. Then the violin, at the very moment that should have been his gracious one, counts the miserably few pennies. The sullen horn, his instrument tucked under his arm, goes on, still a stave ahead of the rest, a sodden expression in his eyes. The old harpist swings the harp rudely over his shoulder, and gives the strap an extra twitch to ease the dull weight, and they are off to fresh pavements and districts new. I have seen great tragedians. I have sat through the sleep-walking scene in "Macbeth." I have heard Banquo knock. I have seen Juliet waken too late in the Capulet tomb and call for Romeo: "O comfortable friar! Where is my lord?" In my schoolgirl days I saw Booth in his great parts; but none of these master-scenes and fine harmonies have stirred in me so intolerable an emotion of pity or sense of fatality as an old horn, or harp and violin, grouped on a garish pavement, their lives dedicated to cheap music fearfully off the key.

These are people of power, let appearances be what they may. You may patronize them if you like, and look upon them as the downtrodden and the dregs of existence. I am, indeed, not so hardy. I have read a different fate in their groups and constellations.

III
MAJOR LOBLEY

There were other poor whose influence was potent in my childhood, but I pass them by, to note but one more, of a curiously strong type, who crossed my path when I might have been about sixteen. She was a Salvation Army major,—Major Lobley,—and she had at her heels an army of poor wretches, "flood-sufferers." That great river on which my home town was situated had risen and overtrod its banks, spreading devastation. As it happened, my mother had standing idle at that time three or four small houses. Into these a large and variegated band of "flood-sufferers" was assisted to move. They came, poor things, bringing their lares and penates. One, whom I take to have been an aristocrat among them, led a mule. Among them all, like a burst of sunshine over a dark and variegated landscape, came Major Lobley and the drum. It would make a better recital, I know, if I said that she was beating it—but I am resolved to tell of things only as I remember them. The drum, however, even though silent, was to the eye sufficiently triumphant and sounding.

My acquaintance with Major Lobley began the morning after her installation. We had already, for the comfort of her clan, parted with all the available covers we could spare. She came seeking more. The maid brought me her name. I went into the parlor to receive her and to learn her errand. I take the liberty of reminding you that I was young and proud, with a traditional training and conventional pride.

In that curtained and rather sombre room, there sat Major Lobley, like a brilliant bit of sunshine. Before I knew what she was about, she was on her feet, had hold of both my hands, had kissed me on both cheeks, was holding me away from her a little,—a quick pleased gesture seen oftener on the stage than off it,—and was saying dazzlingly, "Sister! Are you saved?"

They tell me that even the bravest at the Yser were demoralized by the first use of poisonous gases and other methods of warfare unknown, even undreamed of, by them; and a like panic is said to have seized the Germans at earliest sight of the British armored monsters which ploughed over the ground disdainful of every obstacle, taking their own tracks with them.

Major Lobley attacked me in a fashion I had never before even dreamed of. She was carrying her own tracks with her. None of my own aforethought invulnerable defenses were of the least use. She had thrown down and traversed the most ancient barriers. She had attacked me in the very intrenchments of my oldest traditions. Where were dignity, convention, pride of place, custom of behavior, and other supposedly impregnable defenses? Where were distinctions of class, fortifications of good taste, intrenchments of haughtiness? Where were reserve and other iron and concrete and barbed-wire entanglements? I tell you, they were as though they were not! This glib inquiry about my soul routed me, demoralized me so completely, that I do not even remember what I said. I only know that I fled precipitately for safety into the covert of the nearest subject. Was there anything she needed? And how could I serve her?

At this she was eager.

"Well, I'll tell you! We need another comfort. Darius needs a comfort for his mule. Darius is a good man and his soul is saved. Now couldn't you lend another comfort to the Lord?"

"Yes," said I, in what now seems to me a kind of hypnotized state. "I think I can find another for you." And I went myself and took it from my bed.

She received it with hallelujahs and went away beaming, assuring me as she went, and as on the authority of an ambassador, that I would certainly have my reward.

I make no apology for all this. I know well that I was the weak and routed one. I know that this gypsy from nowhere, with her lack of advantages and her Cinderella training among the ashes and dregs of life, had me at an astonishing disadvantage. I know that, while I stood by, in my futile pride, she went off unaccountably, in a spangled coach, as it were, carrying with her salvation and all the satisfaction in the world, and happily possessed of the bed-covers without which I was to sleep somewhat chilly that night.

But I think it due to myself to say that this weakness on my part was not single. For weeks, months,—as long as she stayed in the neighborhood,—Major Lobley swayed people as by a spell. One would have sworn her drumstick was a wand. In theory, and out of her presence, we younger ones declared her presuming and impossible, but were reduced to serve her whenever she appeared. My mother and my elder sister, who were experienced and better judges, continued to give her and her thin ragged ranks daily help. Pans of biscuit, pots of soup, drifted in that northwesterly direction as by some gulf stream of sympathy which you might speculate and argue about all you liked, but whose course remained mystical and unchanged.

One point I must not fail to mention. I had worried somewhat concerning Darius's mule. There was, I knew, no shelter for him save a tiny woodshed just about half his size. I pictured him standing there, with only his forequarters or hindquarters sheltered, and the rest of him the sport of the elements and the biting weather. Needless anxiety; futile concern! I might have read a different fate for him in Orion and Pleiades! Such anxiety comes of thinking too meanly of life. Darius had a better opinion of it, and it may be with better cause. Perhaps he argued that a power that was able to save his soul was perfectly well able to look after his mule; and rendered expectant by this belief, Darius's eyes saw what my less faithful ones would certainly have overlooked, namely, that the comfortable kitchen of the little house, with its sunshine and its neat wainscoting, made an ideal abiding-place for his friend. Here, therefore, positively benefiting by misfortune and like an animal in a fairy tale, the mule of Darius abode, and, no doubt, more comfortably than ever in his life before; and even if his meals continued to be meagre, he was enabled to eke them out with a generous attention to the wainscoting.

You see! What can be said of a people like that, able to turn the most unlikely things to strange and immediate uses, for all the world as the fairy godmother did the pumpkin and the mice!

What stands out most clearly, as I remember Major Lobley, is neither her scoop-bonnet, nor the drum, nor her solicitude for my soul, but rather the way she managed, say rather contrived, to have us to do whatever she wanted us to do. This was not accomplished by tact, not by craft, not even by intelligence, certainly, I think, not by pity. It was rather, I am persuaded, something ancient and inherited, and not acquired in Major Lobley's brief span; something, rather, dating back to gypsy centuries, God knows how many æons ago—something that had ruled and triumphed, with sounding and loud timbrel, on countless occasions before now; some freedom, some innate self-approval; some linking, it would almost seem, of the powers of poverty with the powers of the Deity.

Have it as you will, the finer appearance still clings to the improvident. They give you color and incident without your asking; they scatter romance and wonder with largesse, as kings. As mere memorable characters, were not the old blind man and Musgrove and Major Lobley worth the money and the anxiety they cost us? And who will contend that Darius's tradition is not to be valued above a mere strip of wainscoting and the cost of a few repairs?

I have long believed that Æsop needs rewriting in many instances, and very especially in that of "The Grasshopper and the Ant." What should be told—since Æsop's creatures are intended to exemplify human behaviors and draw human morals—is how the Grasshopper spent the winter with the Ant, and ate up all the Ant's preserves and marmalades, and fiddled nightly and gayly by the Ant's fire, and managed somehow to make the Ant feel that the privilege had been all her own, to have labored long for the benefit of so interesting and so gifted a gentleman.

I can recall from time to time, all through my childhood and girlhood, that I and mine made a kind of festival of a like circumstance, and how gladly we toiled for the benefit of that class which might be said to winter perpetually on our sympathies. I do not allude merely to tableaux, fairs, private theatricals, musicales, and the like, given for the benefit of those who neither sowed nor gathered into barns. I would be afraid to say how many times, from my early years, I was for their sake a spangled fairy, a Queen Elizabeth court dame, an "Elaine," white, pallid, on a barge, dead of unrequited love, a Gainsborough or Romney portrait, or a Huguenot lady parting from her lover, or a demure "Priscilla," or a dejected "Mariana," or a shaken-kneed reciter of verses, or a trembling performer on the piano. I remember that there was a huge trunk in the old attic at home given over to nothing but amateur theatrical properties. I remember coming home often from dragging, wearisome rehearsals, how tired, but happy! What fun it was to toil and practise and rehearse and labor until your little bones ached "for the benefit of—!"

"For the benefit of"! I tell you it is a magic phrase! I remember my mother coming home again and again,—from some charitable conclave I suppose,—radiant and eager, as she so often was, to announce that we were once more to be permitted to labor in response to its magic. Once, after her attendance on some missionary meeting, it was conveyed to us that we were to be allowed to dress fifty dolls "for the benefit of" as many gregarious little grasshoppers of Senegambia, to the end that their Christmas and our own should be the happier.

It had all the air of a fine adventure. It was a fine adventure. I really would not have missed it. Yet unless you have dressed, let us say, thirty dolls, and know that twenty more remain naked, you can hardly guess how doll-dressmaking may hang heavy, even on the most eager fingers. I can still see them all in their pretty and varied dresses, ranged triumphant at last on top of the old square piano, that we might behold the labor of our hands—their feet straight ahead of them, their eyes fixed, staring but noncommittal, supposedly on Senegambia.

It seems to me now a gay, even though at the same time a somewhat futile, thing to have done; but turn it as you will, the true privilege was ours.

We and our forebears, you see, had in perfect innocence laid by a few stores through the generations. We had preserved and retained certain standards and comfortable customs and conveniences of living; certain traditions, too, of education and treasures of understanding; by which token it became our privilege to entertain and provide for those cicada souls who had followed the more romantic profession of fiddling; and that we might have our privilege to the full, we were graciously permitted to set out preserves, not merely for the swarming grasshoppers of our own land: it was vouchsafed us to sustain and supply with dolls and other delights the appealing little grasshoppers of Senegambia.

Recalling all my childhood and girlhood experience with the poor, I am led by every path of logic to believe that they have some secret power of their own—some divine right and authority by which they rule, beside which the most ancient dynasties are but tricks of evanescence, and the infallibility of the Pope a mere political exigency. The powers they wield would seem to me unique. Show me a dictatorship, empire, oligarchy, system, or a suzerainty, seignory or pashawlic, which presides over and possesses anything commensurate with their realm; which sways and commands anything comparable to their wide dominion!

Will you show me any other people outside of the fairy-books who can put the most fearful calamity on like a cloak and doff it at will, who can augment their families to seven or eight children overnight, and reduce them as readily to five or six the following day, if it but seem to them advisable? Where outside their ranks is there any one capable of persuading you that it is a privilege to sleep cold so that some Darius you never saw or care to see shall, he and his allegorical mule, go better warmed? Who else, being neither of your kith nor kin, has such power over you that, with a mere bloodshot eye and shiver of the shoulders, he can turn your automobile, your furs, your warmth, and all your pleasant pleasures into Dead Sea apples of discomfort? Or, did any of your own class, by merely playing "Ben Bolt," raggedly and horribly off the key, under a grape-arbor, exercise so great a power over you that, having given him what you had, you went awed and chastened of all vanity, and set his name in your prayers that night as the Church service does the king? Are these people of rank who can do this? Or will you still cling to your aristocracies?

It is likely that I shall be accused of sentimentality. Some will say that to talk of the power of the poor is but cruel irony. If I would speak wisely and not as one of the foolish women, let me live and work among the poor, or better still, be of them. This is the only way fairly to judge them.

I am of a like opinion; and am therefore resolved to ask you to let me speak of a later time when I myself was poor, and of the wider knowledge of the powers of the poor which that circumstance afforded me. For, in my advantageous days, I was permitted only to serve the poor, the discouraged, the improvident; later, I was promoted to be, at least in a measure, of their fellowship.

IV
MAMIE FAFFELFINGER

The nouveaux pauvres are, I believe, as a rule, fully as awkward with their poverty as the nouveaux riches with their wealth. They have not the true grand manner. They are not a whit more born to the rags than your suddenly prosperous parvenu to the purple. It is difficult to be at ease with them. Their behaviors, their manners, their speech, more often their silences, are forever reminding you of their former mode of living.

For these and other reasons, I willingly pass over those intervening years, when, though distinctly poor, I was unaccustomed, and wore my changed conditions, I do not doubt, awkwardly. I pass on to a later and more fixed season when, thrown wholly now on my own resources, and totally untrained and unfitted for such an emergency, I made shift to support myself, to live meagrely, and to endure what I took to be a well-nigh intolerable poverty.

Poverty is a variable term and much subject to comparison. Some will allow it only to those who have been born to it. To have been always half-starved, these think, and to carry a basket from door to door—that is to be poor. But it is idle to think of cold and hunger to the point of beggary as the only cold and hunger there are. Not alone are there degrees of cold and hunger of the body,—discomfortable and ill-nourished living,—but there are, as well, things which seem to me even more difficult to endure—unsatisfied hunger of the mind and heart and a most cruel and persistent chill of the spirit. The literal-minded may need to see the open sore, the sightless eye, or the starved countenance, before their pity is moved; but he who has ever touched the spiritual values will know—with a tenderness that is mercy—that in one who never asked for pity, one who perhaps even went outwardly gay, there may be hidden hurts borne unflinchingly; intolerable darknesses not complained of; crippled powers which once went proud and free; and a heart and mind which have endured, it may be, starved hours. These are, I believe, some of the most real poverties that the soul may be called on to endure.

Yet, God forbid that, having tasted some of them, I should not bear true witness! There are some hidden springs in these also. Here also, in what you would take to be so dry, so arid a land, there will have been wells and fountains, and locusts and honey for those cut off from their kind. But of these things I would speak later. I wish at present to tell of my further adventures with the poor, when I myself had become more nearly one of them.

Under the conditions I have mentioned my life had of course changed greatly. Most of the old fond bonds were broken; but there were new and even closer ones to be assumed, newer and larger responsibilities to be undertaken.

In every circumstance of our lives lies the stirring knowledge that one's own case, however strange, is far from being singular. There are others besides myself with whom Poverty has taken up its abode; there are others from whose cup Despair has daily drunk; who, looking up from their daily bread, have found Sorrow's eyes forever on them. Those who have known these cup-companions need not be told how the House of Life can be darkened, or how these darker presences occupy the chambers of the mind. Nor need they yet be reminded how all this becomes bearable, even enduringly precious to the heart, if Love but remains, and consents still to sit at the board, and, though with brows bent, still breaks bread with its white hands, and lifts in its unshaken fingers the cup of bitter wine.

We went to live in the deep country, on what had once been a beautiful old estate. The house had not been lived in for years. It still preserved an air of beauty and dignity, but its ancient pride and fitness were turned toward decay. But if, like myself, it had fallen on adversity and evil fortune, that was but the better reason I should understand and love it. Wholly without what the world calls comforts, yet how comforting it was in those chill and cheerless times! Downfallen in the eyes of others, lowered from its proud estate, how I have yet lifted my heart up to it under the stars, and paid it an homage of love and thankfulness not matched, I think, in all its better days.

Our precarious means being entirely dependent on such writing as I could do, it would have been extravagance and bankruptcy for me to assume the domestic duties. There was no one else. I was the only woman of the household. It seemed to me that a working housekeeper might solve the difficulty; one of that variety which lays not so much stress upon wages as upon a home. I found a surprising number with this tendency. In answer to a most modest advertisement, I received sixty-four answers. Those whom, in the course of time, I at last engaged, were in each case women who had seen happier conditions and were by their own affidavits capable of standing anything. But I found them to be, without exception, shrinkingly susceptible to physical discomforts, and of these there were in that old house many.

These women were nouveaux pauvres of a middle-class order and had all the crudities of their condition. Each of them carried with her a remnant of her "better days," as an inveterate shopper carries an out-of-date sample, resolved, yet unable, to find its match. One of them could not forget, and had no mind to let you forget, that her husband had made four thousand a year; another had been to school in Paris; and one always wore rubber gloves, "because," she assured me, "as long as I can have my hands white, I can stand a great deal." Another insisted on the most fluffy and unsubstantial desserts, and thought the rest of the meal mattered little, so long as the finale had a grand air. Another could not endure the odor of onions and fainted at the sight of liver. Yet another, from reverses and humiliations unendurable, had turned Christian Scientist. I learned afterward that she came hoping to convert me to the idea that there is no poverty. I wish I could have spared her the futility.

By and by I abandoned all hope of a working housekeeper. I knew that what I needed was a "general houseworker."

Those who in extremity have sought servants in city employment bureaus need not be told what is too old a tale. When the array of imposing applicants had all declined the discomforts of my home, and the honor of being employed by me, the manager explained, what I was dull not to have known myself, that it might be wise to try some of the employment bureaus in the poorer quarters. I found one finally at the head of the Bowery, and climbed its rickety stairs.

They were a strange and varied lot that I came upon now: weird old flat-footed fairies, given to feathers and elaborate head-dresses, or young heavy Audreys who looked at you out of dull eyes. I explained elaborately the conditions under which they would be called on to live. I omitted nothing, not even the screech-owls, or the night sounds that might or might not be wild cats. They came eagerly or sullenly, according to their dispositions. But apparently none of them had at all grasped what I said. For when they saw the place, and felt the loneliness of which I had so thoroughly warned them, they turned and fled. The house might have been haunted.

Finally I heard that one could engage servants of a certain order from the Charities associations, such as the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor. To one of these I went.

The matron, a full-eyed woman who gave the impression of having to discipline an over-kind heart by an assumption of great severity, questioned me curtly. What surroundings had I to offer? My heart sank, but I went over faithfully the disadvantages—the extreme loneliness of the life, the necessity that those who entered on it should abandon all hope of "movies." "Movies" there were not within twelve miles. There were no conveniences, no department stores, no bargain sales, nothing—only field and forest, stars and dawns and sunsets—nothing!

She lifted explanatory eyebrows, a little displeased, I thought.

"I mean the moral surroundings." Then, at my pause, "I mean, are you yourself a Christian woman?"

This was no Major Lobley. It is certain that she cared not a pin whether I was "saved." She merely had it in mind to do her duty by her flock. It was her duty to see that the poor, whose condition was to be improved, were placed in Christian homes.

Being perhaps the better satisfied on this point, for a rather faltering answer on my part, she sent a mild-eyed assistant for "Mamie Faffelfinger."

She meanwhile explained in a businesslike way that Mamie was a Catholic, brought up in an orphan asylum; her child was not a year old; "the man"—(so the matron designated him curtly)—was not her husband.

"You mean she would wish a home for the child too?"

The full-eyed woman ceased turning her pencil between her thumb and fingers on the desk and gave me an aggressive look.

"Certainly. Most of these people haven't a crust to live on. If you do not wish to employ that kind, there are the employment bureaus."

So they dawned on me like a blessing. These were not parvenu poor who had been to school in Paris, who would insist on unsubstantial desserts. Here were no head-dressy old fairies of questionable powers; these were no exotic fruits of the "gardens of Proserpine"; here was the good salt brine, here the ancient tides of reality—"the surge and thunder of the Odyssey."

Meanwhile the matron was speaking:—

"The man is not her husband. But if you are a Christian, I am sure you have no narrow scruples as to that. He drinks. She is half-starved. I have told her we will get her and the child a place, if she will promise to leave him." She glanced at the open doorway of her tiny office: "Yes, Mamie, come in."

It was then that I first saw Mamie and Anne.

Mamie looked her part. She was pallid, rather pretty; very slight, with a skin of extreme fineness. She had heavy-lidded eyes, that looked to have seen much weeping, and a smile the more pathetic for its great readiness.

As to Anne, a consistent story would require that she should be as pallid as her mother, that her little hand, intent now on her mother's hat-brim, should be a mere kite's claw; and there should have been delicate dark rings under her eyes. But, far from being a kite's claw, the hand on the hat-brim was as plump as ripe fruit, and her cheeks were like smooth apricots perfect with the sun. But, after all, there is no describing Anne. If you will look at the child held in the arms of the Madonna of the Chair and then at the one in the arms of the Sistine Madonna; then, if you will picture a child not quite a year old, who might worthily be the little sister and companion of these, you will have some idea, even though inadequate still, of what Anne was, as she held tight to Mamie's rakish hat-brim and gave me the solemn attention of her eyes.

I went over the requirements. I spoke of the loneliness. Not a town within miles.

"Well, what do you think of that!" Mamie replied. But she was unfeignedly eager to come.

"When could you be ready?"

"Oh, right away," she said. "I've got Anne's clothes here." She glanced at a small paper bundle under one arm.

My good fairy, who pays me occasional visits, prevented my asking her where her own clothes were.

The matron interposed. Mamie could stay right there until I was ready to take her, late that afternoon. Then, when Mamie had gone into the outer room, the matron explained.

"She hasn't any home to go to. He left her and raised money on her furniture. They came and took it. She hasn't even a stick of it."

Tragic as this was, my mind was for the moment intent on something else.

"But she wears a wedding ring!" I said.

The matron pulled a heavy ledger toward her.

"Oh, yes; they all do. They'd go starved, but they'd buy a wedding ring."

She pressed her lips together, shook her head, and began setting down data,—my name, address, occupation, the names of two of my friends,—they must be people of some standing, who could vouch for me; then more as to Mamie, I suppose, in the interest of system and statistics.

I can give you no idea of the comradeship of that journey with Mamie and Anne. Mamie looked delightedly out of the car-window, noting the most trifling points of interest with enthusiasm, and saying every little while, "Well, what do you think of that!" Or she would excitedly point out some speeding bird, or flitting house, or other flying object, to Anne, and Anne would lurch forward to look, her little nose sometimes touching the pane, and then would turn good-naturedly and look at me, with every air of asking me if that probably so-interesting object had managed to escape me also.

When we arrived at the house, Mamie was as cheerful as a sparrow. The room on which flat-footed fairies and dull Audreys had looked with unconcealed contempt or disapproval, she flew to. She settled in it like a bird in her nest, and chirped contentedly to Anne,—

"Oh, Anne, look at the nice bureau! And the washstand! What do you think of that!" Then she turned to me, with that winning comradely smile: "I like bureaus and washstands—furniture, I mean, and things. It makes you think of home." And she drew her hand along the bureau.

I did not know then, but I soon found out, that this was the top and bottom of all her longings, and this the real hunger of her heart,—a hunger starved enough, of course, in all her orphan-asylum years,—a craving for a place of her own.

Mamie talked much of "Bill." He filled her life and days, there could be no doubt. If she swept, it was to his glory. If she scrubbed a floor or kneaded dough, or bent affectionately over the scalloping of a pie-crust, it was certainly for love of him that she lent these her attention. She soon began sending him her weekly earnings. I remonstrated, and suggested that it might be better to save her money against another rainy day. She dusted her hands of flour and began scraping the bread-board, vigorously, with the strength of her whole body. I waited for my reply. At last it came.

"Well, I will say you've been good to me, and Anne loves you—but I think you've got a hard heart."

Secretly I agreed with her. I retrenched and urged her to send only a part of her money, saving the rest for furniture. Of course, I knew by this time that the word "furniture" was to her like magic and a charm.

Meanwhile, fond as she was of Anne and proud of her, Mamie was bent on not spoiling her. She used to put her in a wooden tub in the sunshine on the floor of the kitchen, as Peter Pumpkin-Eater put his wife in the pumpkin shell; and like Peter, there she kept her very well. And Anne, more ingenuous and happier than Diogenes,—for she liked it and crowed if people came into her sunshine,—would stay there perfectly happy and delighted for the greater part of the day, playing with an apple or a potato. I really never saw such a baby.

Meanwhile, although Bill was, it seems, drinking more than ever, with the aid, of course, of Mamie's earnings, Mamie herself contrived to be above fact and experience, and was sure he was actively reforming. In a sense she really lived a charmed life.

It seemed that Fate and fact could deal her no blow which would finally affect her. She knew Bill's failings better than the matron, by a great deal; but if you suppose that these could spoil the pure romance of life for her, or invalidate her dream of a home and furniture of her own, cushioned chairs owned and sat upon by the reformed Bill and herself, you are much mistaken.

She was a firm believer in miracles. "I know you don't believe in them," she would say; "but at the Orphan Asylum there was a statue of Saint Stephen that used to turn around over night, it really did, if it was pleased with what you did."

Like so many of her class, Mamie had an incorrigible tendency toward rumor. Knowledge comes not to these by laborious delving of their own, but appears to be delivered to them out of the air as by bird auguries, and by all manner of unauthenticated hearsay infinitely rather to be trusted than fact. I take this to be in their case a survival of what was believed, in ancient times, to be speech with Divinity. However it may shock the modern mind to read of the Almighty giving out to Moses, not merely the majestic laws graven on tables of stone, but commands and detail and measurement of great exactness as to the stuff and manner of fashioning and trimming the High Priest's breeches, to the minds of Mamie and her class there would be in this little that was shocking, they themselves believing and delighting in Divine collaboration in even the most homely matters.

Anne wore on a string about her neck a little square of Canton flannel which in the course of many months had become extremely grimy. I suggested as tactfully as I could that this was not in keeping with the laws of health, and might be, with a view to germs, a positive danger to Anne.

Mamie smiled happily, indulgently.

"That's just where you're wrong! It's to protect her from danger—specially danger by drowning!"

Once I suggested that, if I were she, I would not feed Anne burned bread-crusts.

"Oh, but they say they're good for a baby; they say they're splendid for the digestion."

Useless to argue. She had always heard so. "They" said so.

So it is that knowledge comes to them, not laboriously, as does our own, but by easy rumor, floating hearsay; and wisdom is brought to them without effort of their own, as viands to a king. They are fed by ravens. Their gourd grows overnight. Messengers still come and go between heaven and earth to instruct them. There is not required of them, the laboring class, that slavish mental toil exacted of the world's great intellects. Angels and ministers of grace, however they may have abandoned the wise, do still, it seems, defend them. They have only to be of a listening mind and a believing heart, and they shall know what is good for digestion, and what will save their children from drowning.

Mamie, further, was able to maintain a remarkable equilibrium between respectful service as a servant and what might have been the gracious democracy of a ruler. She taught Anne to call me "Honey," and had it as a surprise for me one morning. I will not deny that it was a surprise. But if you think that so sweet an appellation in Anne's bird-like voice, her golden head leaning over into the sunshine as she heard my step, seemed to me to be lacking in dignity, then you and I are of contrary opinions.

One day, when Mamie was dusting where hung a Fra Lippo Madonna, Anne pointed a fat finger at it, demanding, "Honey?"

Mamie did not even pause.

"No," she said briskly, "that's not Honey. That's Lord and Lord's mawma."

V
THE LURE OF THE "CHIFFONEER"

One day, Mamie came to me, her face beaming.

"I want to do the right thing, so I'm going to give you a whole month's notice. Bill has rented some rooms. What do you think of that!"

I told her gently, but firmly, what I suspected concerning it.

She brought out his letter for proof.

"He's to pay for the rooms, and I'm to send him the money for the furniture. He'll get whatever kind I like. You've always been kind to me," she added, "but I think you've got a hard heart as to Bill."

Well, perhaps I had.

The month passed very happily. As his letters came, she would tell me what he had bought.

"It's a bureau with a marble top,—secondhand, Second Avenue,—but as good as new. Besides, some people would rather have antiques. And I do like bureaus!"

Then it would be a table that set her singing her queer ragtime songs. Once there came word of three cushioned chairs. One letter announced a looking-glass. And once, as I went into the kitchen suddenly, there was Mamie, one arm above her head, the other holding her skirt, dancing for Anne to see, and to Anne's inexpressible wonder and delight. She sat there in her tub, leaning forward, beaming, fascinated, and holding tight to its sides as though we might all be personages in a fairy-tale, and she and the tub might any moment fly away.

At sight of me, Mamie stopped, flushing pink as a rose, apologetic, but unfeignedly happy.

"I couldn't help it! He's bought me a chiffoneer!"

A moment later, as I passed through the hall, I could hear Mamie singing, "And she's going back to her Daddy, and her home, home, home!"—to some impromptu rigmarole tune of her own.

Soon after this she took the train to the nearest town and came back laden with packages—all manner of cheap household stuff picked up at the five-and-ten-cent store. It occurred to me that she might as well have a small empty trunk of mine that there was in the attic. She was delighted with the gift, and wore the key of it on a chain around her neck.

"I'd rather have that key than a locket!" she said, putting her hand over it affectionately. It was so that she repaid you tenfold. "It's wonderful," she would say, every little while, in joyful anticipation, "having your own home!"

For myself, despite many unmitigated realities, I could not help feeling that I was living in something of a wonder story. Who knew but that, with those extraordinary powers of hers, which so readily rose above fact, who knew but that she might rub that key some day as Aladdin his lamp, and turn us all into triumphant heroes and heroines.

Mamie did not forget, as I said good-bye to her in the big city terminal where I finally left them, to give me parting advice, sisterly sympathy:—

"Now, don't you go and get discouraged. I know you've had troubles. Well, I've had trouble enough, too. You just keep right on, and hold your head high. There's no telling what'll come to them that holds their heads high. Look at me!"

I looked at her and could have felt convinced. Then we said our good-byes, and away they went. The last I saw of them in the crowd was Anne's hand still waving loyally to me over Mamie's shoulder quite a long time after her eyes had lost me.

I missed them exceedingly; and the blue-birds of that second spring hardly made up to me for the absence of Anne's birdlike voice. The new maid, Margaret, was interesting enough, but no one could ever quite take the place of those others.

With all this in mind, you will realize with what a sinking of the heart I found that there was more than Mamie to be missed. There could be no doubt in the matter, for there had been no outsider in the house at all of late; therefore it could be due to no other magic than hers that there was a grievous lessening of my scant stores of household belongings—sheets and pillow-cases, towels and a pair of blankets, napkins and, I think, a table-cloth, and some muffin-rings and kitchen conveniences, and I do not know what else.

Little bits of reality came drifting back to me—the key kept so faithfully always around her neck; my own gift of the trunk; and the sentiment—say now, if you like, the sentimentality—with which I had noted the fact that even that rather small trunk was too large for her poor belongings.

Then suddenly, the whole episode read to me like an Uncle Remus "Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit" tale, and I was not too discouraged to laugh—as the "Little Boy" is recorded always to have done—at the turn of the story, at the inevitable triumph of the cleverer of the two.

Yet for Mamie's sake, not to speak of my own, such an ending was not to be permitted. I had asked her to come to see me in town on one of the days of the week that I was always there, and to be sure to bring Anne to see me. She had assured me that she would, and that she would never forget me. Now I knew it would be necessary, rather, for me to go and find her. I rehearsed the scene mentally. I meant to tell her that she could keep all the things she had stolen. (Let them remain in the manner of coals of fire in her trunk!) I would first reduce her to powder in a solemn and serious manner, and then strew her upon the winds of my righteous indignation! She whom I had treated with unfailing kindness! She whom in sickness I had nursed! She whose many faults had been forgiven her, and in whom I had placed trust! She!—

Strangely enough, she did come to see me, that very next day I was in town. She seemed eager to get to me; nervous, too, like one whipped of her conscience. I felt my heart suddenly softening, and as quickly hardened it. I really had not expected quick penitence of her, but even so, she must take the full punishment of my disapproval. There is a duty we owe in such matters. I would make nothing easy for her.

She sat down heavily, then suddenly put her hand over quickly on mine. I made no sign. Not even that should move me. Then in a hoarse whisper, a really hoarse whisper, almost a moan, she said,—

"Oh, how shall I tell you? How shall I tell you?"

Stony pause. I looked coldly at her. It seemed, for a moment, that the irresistible force really had met the immovable body. Then all at once, she put her head down on her arm, sobbed, and spoke.

"There wasn't any bureau! There wasn't any chiffoneer! There wasn't even any rooms!"

An instant of time swirled past. Then I knew, as of old, that the power of the poor is an irresistible force, never—never—not even by the immovable body of our strongest determinations, to be withstood. My own iron resolves I saw converted suddenly into the flimsiest fiction—rent gossamer floating wide.

Oh! Oh! I could have put my face in my hands and wept. All her dreams gone! All her hopes! her pride! her cherished plans! her money! her faith—everything! How small the theft of a few pillow-cases and towels looked now that, at Fate's hands, she, poor thing, had had all this stolen from her! This was no time to reduce her to powder, when she was already reduced to floods of tears and I by no means far from the verge of them.

The story is too obvious to tell. Mamie's miracle had failed. The unreformable Bill had not reformed. But neither,—I hasten to add,—neither, it seems, was Mamie's ineradicable desire for a home eradicated. I have mentioned before my belief that Fate cannot finally affect the people of this extraordinary class. I believe them all to have been plunged more effectually than Achilles in some protective flood.

Mamie, with the help of the perpetually severe, perpetually tender-hearted matron, went out to work again. But there may be those who would be more interested to know what I did with my resolves, my righteous indignation, and, above all, with my conscience. As to my conscience, I cleared that. I wrote to the matron, warning her that in assigning Mamie to any place, it should be remembered that, valuable as Mamie was in many ways, she had a light-fingered tendency to collect household goods. From my later knowledge, I believe that the matron may have smiled at the ingenuousness of that. It might readily be thought superfluous to warn the expert physicist that water does not run up-hill.

As to my righteous indignation, it may seem to you a poor thing, but it never came back. Somehow I never quite forgot the grip of Mamie's hand on mine that day, and her hoarse voice as it announced the total ruin of her hopes; or the memory, by contrast, of her little singing dance before Anne at a happier season, with Anne leaning forward holding delightedly to the sides of the tub.

He is not apt to be the most severe in correction who has suffered much discipline at the hands of Fate. It should be remembered by the unrelenting and conscientious disciplinarian who judges me, that I had seen the ruin of some of my own hopes. Joys that I had planned for full as eagerly as Mamie, delights that I had reared on more likely foundations, had been swept away, and almost as suddenly. I am entering here on no philosophy, I am merely stating facts; and I may as well confess that I took comfort in the thought, that, though the bureau, the washstand and the "chiffoneer" had fallen in the general ruin, Mamie still had the sheets, the pillow-cases, the towels, the muffin-rings, and the rest. It was even turning out a little like a fairy-tale after all, for I really now wanted her to have these, and in view of my own very meagre circumstances and my duties to others, I could not with a clear conscience have afforded to give them to her. She, as with a magic foresight, had contrived to relieve me of all embarrassment.

Meanwhile, I heard nothing more of Mamie. Then one day, I had this letter from her (I omit the independent spelling):—

"I thought I'd write to tell you that Anne has a good Papa. He's a farmer. I'm married again." (Since she was not married before, the "again" may refer to a second wedding ring.) "He's got a nice house. Do come and see me." (Here followed very careful directions.) "I'd like you to see our animals. We've got five chickens, one rooster, a cat and a dog. He had a house already furnished. It's good furnished too. The bed has got shams on the pillows."

It was not long after this that I had a letter from an old aunt of Mamie's, of whom Mamie had several times spoken to me, and to whom she used sometimes to write. The aunt said that, though she had always been too poor to do anything for Mamie, still she took an interest in her. She knew I had been good to her. If it wasn't too much trouble, would I write and tell her how Mamie was, or would I send her her address if she was not with me.

I wrote her with a good deal of pleasure that Mamie was happily married (I did not quibble at the word) to a well-to-do farmer; that she had a nicely furnished house, some animals, and that her husband loved Anne devotedly; and I gave the desired address.

Then I wrote to Mamie and sent her her aunt's letter; and I told her that I thought it would be a kindness if she would write to the old lady.

In reply I had the following: "I know you meant to be kind. But I'm sorry you wrote to my aunt. It wasn't my aunt at all. It was Bill."

Here also—I know it well—fact is less satisfactory than romance. There should, no doubt, be the telling scene of a sequel. I never saw Mamie again, however, and the unfocused waving of a fat, lovely little hand in that crowded terminal is my last memory of Anne.

You who read this may be in some uneasiness as to Mamie. I confess that I am not. I cannot forget the angels of grace that do undoubtedly attend on such. If you will simply review what I have told you, I think you will see that we need not be too anxious. One who can set aside social customs and laws which the less privileged of us do not dare to ignore; who can be married without clerk or benefit of clergy—rather, after the manner of the owl and the pussy-cat, by the mere procuring of a ring; who can protect her child from drowning by a canton-flannel charm; improve health and digestion by a diet of burned bread-crusts; rise above all fact and experience as successfully as if she were a witch on a broomstick; and preserve her faith unspoiled, despite the most blasting circumstances; who hob-nobs on such easy terms with the Deity, and who can speak of her whom the poets prefer to name "Star of the Deep," and the devout, "Queen of Heaven," as the Deity's "Maw-ma"; one who can, like a prestidigitateur, by a mere turn of the hand, make your conscientious resolves vanish—and draw pity out of the place where solemn indignation should have been, as magicians rabbits out of a silk hat; who can carry off your much needed linen, and have it look like a favor.—Need we worry about such a one? Need Pharaoh, having seen the wonders, be anxious, do you think, as to how the departed children of Israel would be maintained in the desert places where he would so easily have perished?

But lest you should, nevertheless, have Mamie's welfare at heart, and should entertain, with some misgivings, thought of what may have become of Anne, there are yet other signs and wonders of which I shall ask to be allowed to speak.

VI
MARGARET

Margaret, Mamie's successor, was a woman in the middle forties. There were little shadowy modelings in her brow which made you think of the smooth hollows of a shell. She gave one the impression of something cast up from the sea and dragged back into it many times. She came of a large family, and although her people had treated her badly (according to her own story), she took pride nevertheless in speaking of them. "Me brother Pat," I may say, was never spoken of without her head going up. She had a taste for distinction, and pride of race was strong in her. She was a born teller of tales. One of the best was of a wake to which she was taken as a child.

"It was a grrrand wake! The folk from all arroond were there! And they'd baked meats such as you'd have only in the rrrichest houses here. I was eight year old. I went with me brother Pat. The dead man had been a mean old man, savin' and hoardin', not spendin', even for the poor. They do say the dead'll come back if ye worry them enough; and it's likely it worried him something terrible to see all that spendin' of his money, and all the neighbor folk he hated so, crowded so close in his room and the dhrrrink goin' round. Anyway, however be it, as I was lookin' at him from my corner, all eyes, for I'd never seen a dead man before, God save us! up he rose from the dead, right among all the candles, upsettin' some of them; and he screamed, yes, screamed, too, like he'd just escaped from hell, with the devil's fingers still hot on him! Some went by the windys, some by the door. Five got broken legs gettin' out, and the priest, God save us! fell down dead, and him a good man, too!"

This was but a small piece of ore from a rich mine. Give her but the chance—she had a story for every occasion.

She went on a tour of inspection when she had been with us a few hours. I felt sure that the beauty and meaning of the old run-down place, of necessity hid from the profane, would never be lost on one of her keen and psychic temperament. She came back glowing, and I thought really reverent.

"Oh, it's a noble place," she said. "You can see plainer nor your eyes, it's been lived in by the gentility! Look at them gables and them chimneys! That house has the air of a grand lady, ma'am, sittin' quiet with her hands folded. And them elms, too, like the grand slow wavin' of a fan. Them parlors with their long windys have got the air of havin' seen folk. Me brother Pat worked for a place like this once." This with her head up and looking all round. "There's a rich squire lived here at the least,"—with her eyes narrowed shrewdly and her head nodding, I can give you no idea how knowingly. "Yes; and belike maybe a lord. And there were ladies (seems I can see them, God save me!) and little childer, I'll give warrant, little childer that knew how to behave themselves in the like of these rooms. Don't it look dreamin' now, ma'am? Wouldn't you say it was thinkin'?" This with her head on one side, listening, it seemed, for the unseen presences to go by. By and by she brightened, and came back to the present:—

"There's but one thing about it all I don't like, ma'am. It's the way ye keep your pig. A sty way off from Christian fellowship is no place to keep a pig. They're the childer of God, the way we are. We kept our own, ma'am, in the old country as clean as your hand, so we could have it friendly in the kitchen with us. I'm fond of animals, ma'am—the puir things that can't talk!"

Besides her great fondness for animals Margaret had an extraordinary understanding of them. She had a way of talking with bird and beast that lent reality to the legends of St. Francis. The "Sermon to the Birds" is no more intimate, nor that to the fishes more appropriate, than the daily admonitions she gave the pig, the counsel she tendered the chickens, to which they listened with grave attention, the pig as if hypnotized, his two fore feet planted stolidly, his eyes fixed upon her; the chickens with their heads turned consideringly, now on this side now on the other, and with little guttural comments of question or approval. The wolf reputed to have put his paw in the saint's hand seemed infinitely less legendary to me after I had seen the pig, released from his pen, follow her to the kitchen stoop, and, with manners as gentlemanly as he could counterfeit, eat out of a pan she held for him. When he had finished, she offered him her hand, as if to pledge him to further good manners; and he made a clumsy pawing motion and managed with her help to get a hoof into her palm. She gave it a grave shake and released it.

"You're improvin'," was all she said; while the pig, delighted, no doubt, with his new accomplishment, took to his four feet, with squeals of delight, around the corner of the house.

One day there came from about her person a strange chirping, a trifle muffled, like the chirping of a tiny chicken. She absolutely ignored it. She held her head stiff and high, as she was wont to do when she served us or when she referred to "me brother Pat." But when she saw that the day could not after all be carried by a mere haughty ignoring of facts, she spoke.

"Poor little uneducated abandoned fowl, ma'am, to cry out against its own interests! I'm sorry, but I couldn't leave it in the cold. So, for the love of its mother and God's mother, I'm carryin' it in me bosom to keep it warm. And I'd think you'd be offended if I didn't believe you're a follower of Him that carried the lambs there too!"

It was in such ways that she left you no argument, disarmed all objection, and pursued her own way and predilections, as the saints, the poor, and other chosen of the Lord have, I believe, always done.

Loyalty was, perhaps, the largest part of her code; but it was based rather on the assumption that you were hers than that she was yours. Guests came seldom to that old house; but the welcome she gave them when they did come was a thing to warm the heart.

She assumed a devoted possession of me and my affairs. When these fared ill, she was as Babylon desolated; when they went comparatively well, she was overjoyed, her step lightened, her head went up; she was as a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid. But it was toward those whom she took to be my enemies that she really shone. By shrewd guesses and by dint of a few downright questions, she figured out that a deal of sorrow and calamity had come to me through the selfishness of others. That was enough for her! Might the Lord smite them! Might a murrain seize them and their cattle!

"But they have no cattle, Margaret! They live in a very large city."

(It was always a temptation to see how she would right herself.)

"Then may devastation befittin' them fall on their basements and their battlements! May their balustrades burst and a sign of pestilence be put upon their door-sills! And—now God forgive me—whenever He's willin' to take them—for it's He would know what to do with them,"—this with a fierce knowing nod,—"He has my willin'ness they should go! I'd think it a fairer earth without them, and I'd greet the sun the friendlier in the morn'n' for knowin' he'd not set his bright eye on them."

Many batter-cakes were stirred to rounded periods of this sort, and omelettes beaten the stiffer for her indignation.

Once it came to her in a roundabout way that illness had fallen upon one of these whom for my sake she despised. She looked shrewdly at something at a very long distance, invisible to any but herself, winked one eye very deliberately, with incredible calculation; then nodded her head slowly, like a witch or sibyl.

"What did I tell ye! The currrse is beginnin' to work!"

Funny as it was, there was something awful in it too.

"But, Margaret, I don't wish them any ill. I don't believe people make others suffer like that if they are in their right minds. Perhaps they think they are doing right."

"Of courrrse they do! If they ever could think they were wrong, there'd be salvation for them! But you see how clear it is that they're doomed to destruction!"

"It's slow waitin' on the Lord," she said one day wearily. "And oh, it's meself would like to stir them up a little cake befittin' them!"

I know she thought me a weakling as to hate. But for the insuperable difficulty of several centuries, I believe she would have left me, to ally herself with the Borgias.

When she had been with me some time, she had a serious illness. She had been subject to periodical attacks of the kind, it seems, since her girlhood.

"I didn't tell you," she said simply, "for if I had, ye wouldn't have engaged me; and I liked the looks of ye." Then, triumphantly, "Nor was I mistaken."

This was the beginning of a system of appeals, searching and frequent, which yet never took the direct form of appeal.

"It's I can't be sayin' how I love this old house," she would say irrelevantly one day; and the next, "Me brother Pat has been very kind to me at times—at times!"—here a slow wink and nod at the invisible,—"but it's not your own, God save me, that'll do for you in misfortune! No, ma'am, it's not your own!"

She began giving me little presents, a lace collar first. I insisted that I would rather she kept it herself.

"God save us! And all you've done for me!" Her tone was almost despair. "And you wouldn't let me do that for you! A bit of a lace collar!"

The next time it was a strange mosaic cross; and the next, a queerly contrived egg-beater; again, a very fine and beautiful handkerchief—all of these produced from her trunk. She always had some ingenious tale of how she had come by them.

Meanwhile her attacks were becoming more frequent. At such times she was like one possessed by some spirit. Her mind would wander suddenly, always to her childhood and the Green Isle. She would be calling the cows home at evening, or talking to the pig. When the "spirit" left her, she would be trembling and almost helpless for days, and needed much care.

When she was well enough for me to leave her, I went to see her doctor and her people. The first suggested the almshouse: the others thought that they were not called on to keep her unless she would agree to do exactly as they bade her do, and would renounce her proud ways.

Of course I kept her with me. There are extravagances of poverty which may be allowed, as well as of wealth. Something, too, must be conceded to the spirit of adventure and recklessness. It may be at this crossroads that the provident will bid me adieu. I am sorry to lose their company, for, despite their lesser distinction and certain plebeian tendencies, I like the provident. But before they determine to depart, I may be allowed to wonder whether they have ever been in such close relation with the poor as I was then. Have they ever felt the persistent appeal of a Margaret, I wonder, or seen her eyes go twenty times a day to them as to one who held her fate in their keeping? I think perhaps they will not have over-heard her say to the pig in a moment of half-gay thankfulness, "Arrah! God save us! are ye glad as ye should be ye're with people that have got a heart?" Or perhaps the provident will scarcely have been vouchsafed a terrible understanding, as I had at that time, of the dark possibilities of life, or have known what it was to wonder where the next meals would come from.

"But," argue the provident, "could she not have gone to her people?" Which, being interpreted, means: "Should she not have taken thankfully the grudged and conditioned charity, with dominion, offered her by those in more fortunate circumstances?"

And to that I answer, "If you think so, then I can only judge that you know little 'how salt is the bread of others and how steep their stairs'; and I can but refer you to one who has spoken immortally of these matters."

One day, when she had been ill for more than a week, I told her that she might stay on with me and be cared for, and have a certain very moderate wage, and do only such little light work as she felt able to, all the heavier being taken over by a stronger woman.

She pricked her head up and spoke from a white pillow, equal to fate once more:—

"Now, God save us! If it isn't always good that be growin' out of evil! I'll be yer housekeeper! And who'll ye have for a cook? 'Tis I'll be keepin' the keys of things! Bring along the cook! Black or white, I don't care. I kin manage her!" (This threateningly.)

This was alarming, but I counted upon inspiration and ingenuity when the time came.

I found a West India darky, whose condition also needed improving. She was a fine type. She might have walked out of the jungles of Africa; magnificently powerful, a little old. She was as irrevocably Protestant as Margaret was Catholic. I urged each of them privately to remember that they were both the Lord's children and therefore sisters. Augusta accepted this in solemn religious spirit,—such a speech on my part bound her to me forever,—but Margaret took it with a chip on her shoulder.

"She can call herself a Christian if she likes, but it is an insult to the Lord, for she's nothin' better nor a heathen! Black like that!"

"But, Margaret, you said you would not object to a black woman."

"No, ma'am, nor I don't!" said Margaret, veering swiftly after her own manner; "it's her pink lips I can't shtand."

This was the beginning of their warfare; which, not inconsistently, was made infinitely more bitter by Augusta's fixed resolve to be a Christian.

Augusta had a predilection for hymns, one in particular, whose refrain could be heard wailing and poignant and confident at odd moments:—

Oh, what a Father, oh, what a Friend!
He will be with you unto the end.
Oh, what a Father, oh, what a Friend!
He will be with you unto the end.

Margaret, like most of those of her creed, had a small opinion of hymn-singing, and haughtily indulged in none of it. Moreover, she had in very strong essence that secure sense of election and special grace common with some of her faith. Let others attend mere temples and mitigated meeting-houses, and presume to call them churches if they like; let others take dark risks of undoctrinal salvation! Such spiritual vagabondage must by contrast give but the greater assurance of security to those elected since the beginning—a peculiar and a chosen people. It can be seen, therefore, how Augusta's confident appropriation of the Deity, with her reiterated boast of friendly intimacy, wore upon this daughter of antique distinctions and ancient privileges.

There was, of course, soon established a strongly vicious circle; for, when Margaret became excessively trying and difficult to deal with, Augusta would console and fortify herself with the reassurances of this particular refrain; whereas, at the same time, this particular refrain having the effect of rousing Margaret to still worse and worse moods, these, in turn, made the consolations of the refrain even more than ever indispensable to Augusta.

I do not know, I am sure, what would have been the final result of it all save for the pig. When Margaret's limit of endurance was reached, she would come out of the house, sometimes with her hands over her ears, and make off at a kind of trot in the direction of the pig's habitat. There, I am inclined to believe, she was able, after her own manner, to find consolation and assuagement in her unrivaled place in his affections, as well as in the friendly, grave, and undivided attention which he always gave her.

Impossible as Margaret was, I could see that her appealing and lovable qualities played on Augusta as they had long played on me.

"The poor afflicted soul!" said Augusta; "look at the poor thin temples. You don't know, ma'am, how I pray for her every night!"

Margaret, passing by unexpectedly, over-heard this and cried out,—

"Oh, God save us! Then I am lost! The Lord will abandon me now for sure! He'll never forgive me such company! That's the wurst yet!"

Then she went off for another of her long conversations with the pig. When she came back she was in a changed mood.

"Don't mind what I say," she said to me. "If God can forgive me, I don't know I'm sure, why you can't!" Then she put a rosy-cheeked apple beside Augusta. "And I think you'll find this pleasant to the taste."

Remembering the Borgias, I should have been loath to taste it; but Augusta bit into it with immediate Christian forgiveness. Yet late that afternoon the wind had shifted again into the old quarter. Happening to go into the woodshed, I found Augusta there crying.

"What in the world is the matter, Augusta?" I asked.

"I'm crying," she said, anticipating Shaw and Androcles, "because I'm a Christian and I can't strike her!"

She raised her old bloodshot eyes, not to me, but to heaven. I have seen the same look in the eyes of an old dog teased by a pert mongrel, and crippled and rendered helpless by rheumatism as was Augusta by her Christianity.

It was Margaret herself at last, who announced that she would be obliged to leave me. She spoke with a dignity which she had held over, I suppose, from regal years submerged but not forgotten.

"It's I will have to be goin'; I've stayed as long as I can. I've stood a great deal,—for ye'll stand a terrible lot for them ye're fond of,—and I've been terrible fond of you, more than of me own—and am to this day. But I can't honest say it's of your deserving! There's a sayin' that we love best them that mistreat us most, and I'm for thinkin' it may be true. I'd have stayed to help you, but I must be havin' some thought of meself! Though you've treated me as I wouldn't treat me own,"—this tellingly,—"and asked me to live under the roof with one of them the Lord has abandoned, yet I've a kindly feelin' in me heart still for ye, and if ye were in need and ye'd come to me, maybe I wouldn't say ye nay—I don't know. I'm a forgivin' disposition, more than is for me own good, God knows! I've hated yer enemies and doomed them to desthruction!"

I patted her hand good-bye between two perfectly well-balanced desires to laugh and to cry. She was so funny, so incredible, so bent, since the foundation of the world, on proving herself right and everybody else wrong. She was not Margaret, merely, whom chance and trouble had brought into my path—she was a very piece of humanity, decked out in unaccustomed bonnet and unlikely feather, best petticoat and a grand pair of black kid gloves—humanity, the ancient, the amusing, the faulty, the incredible, the pathetic, the endeared. And it was as that that she rode away in the funny old jolting farm wagon, her chin in the air, her eyes glancing around haughtily, scanning the old place she had loved and clung to, but scanning it scornfully now, as if she had never laid eyes on it before, and were saying, "Ye puir thing!—with yer air of delapidation! Who—God save us—are you?"

I went back into the kitchen and caught Augusta wiping her eyes with her apron, and was not altogether gay myself—while Margaret jolted away fiercely, our two scalps at her belt.

"You mustn't worry too much about her, ma'am," said Augusta soothingly; "the Lord is her friend, and He'll take care of her."

From incontrovertible precedent I felt sure that He would, with a sureness I had never had as to my own less considerable destiny.

All this was some years ago. By a curious chance,—which has the air of being something more considerable,—it was while I was writing these very paragraphs about Margaret that I had a letter from her, the first since she rode away. It was very characteristic, written in a scrawly and benevolent hand:—

"Will you please let me hear, ma'am, whether you're dead or alive. I've had you on my mind, and for six weeks I can't sleep night or day for thinking of you.

"Your old servant,
"Margaret."

Let no one tell me that this is mere coincidence. New proof it is, to one who has long dealt with the poor, of strange powers of which they are possessed. Here is a sister, I tell you,—"plainer nor your eyes,"—to the old blind man, who used to come tap-tap, tap-tapping up the shadowy stairs and into the nursery for the penny I had withheld.

Margaret had come back also. Useless to suppose that I could hide from her in the silence and shadows of the intervening years. She had with her shrewd eye found me out. She had come, like the blind man, not to exact money of me, no; but like a witch disembodied, and through the mail, she had come to levy a more precious tax—to collect as of old the old sympathetic affection; the old toll I had paid her so often before; the tribute she had demanded and received times without number—not for labors rendered, no, nor for accountable values received, but rather by a kind of royal prerogative. Indeed, I take it to be a thing proved, to which this is but slight additional testimony, that these are, how much more than kings,—and it would seem by the grace of God,—sovereigns and rulers over us.

But there is still further testimony, of another order, which I feel called on to bear.

VII
MARGHARETTA

When we first went to live in the country, in the old house of which I have written, we had a sufficiently large task merely to make the house itself livable. But as time went on, we attempted to do a very little farming.

How greatly did this broaden and extend my experience as to the poor! There were the boys from ten to sixteen who came (again, these were those whose condition needed improving) to do work on the farm for the summers: Joseph, the Hebrew, who from his long and elaborate prayers should have been at least a priest of the Temple; Lester, so practised in picking locks and purloining that it was sheer waste of genius to place him in a home like ours, where jewelry and other returns for his skill were so slender. He did the best he could with the circumstances, but how meagre they were, after all!

There was the little girl, too, who could dance and recite and sing ragtime, having done so in vaudeville. Our home offered her neither audience nor stage, nor was there a footlight in the house. And there was the young Apollo, who at the least could have shepherded the sheep of Admetus; we had no sheep—only one cow.

Then there was Ernest, capable of really heroic devotion. How far did our possibilities fall short of his gifts! I did not engage him—he engaged me. I was setting out the disadvantages as usual, when he blurted out generously, "I like you, and I am going to take this position!" He was blond, German, of the perfectly good-natured type, and of heroic proportions. But, like the ancient heroes of his race, he was fond of the cup that both cheers and inebriates. I used to remonstrate with him and received always one answer, given stubbornly: "You know I'd jump in the river for you!"

I tried my best to show him that what was desirable was, not that he should fling himself into the river, only that he should refrain from the cup! Useless, useless! He wanted a more royal opportunity. To be sober, trustworthy, honorable, daily dependable—these were too trifling! Give him something worthy of his powers! The unlikely and surprising were pleasing to his temperament. He would how generously neglect his work to bring home from the field rabbits, which he shot with an old muzzle-loader, requiring days of toil before it could be got to work at all. Once he produced a pheasant. Lacking the Nemean lion, he butchered a pig, and smoked the pork for me, by an incredibly laborious method, under two barrels, one on top of the other. He hewed down trees with terrible strokes, and built me with Herculean effort a corn-crib of gigantic size to hold a handful of corn he had raised.

All these things, while I appreciated them, left his grave fault uncorrected. But to rebuke him on this score was to quarrel with Hercules for some trifling mistake in his spinning. "You know I would jump in the river for you!" he would reiterate.

There really is something ample in their conceptions of life which goes beyond our small bickerings as to honor and honesty. There is a largeness about them which makes our code look small indeed.

After Ernest's departure, another came for a few months, who had surprising resources. He made a practice of bringing me gifts from I do not know where—strawberries, asparagus, and other delicacies, given him presumably, and for the most part, by gardeners of gentlemen's estates in the outlying land—"friends of his."

I suggested, with misgivings as to ethics, that I ought to pay for these things; but he smiled benevolently, as a king on a subject, and with a manner as bounteous. I had the impression that the world was his.

In the face of his generosities, I felt my behaviors to be feeble and inadequate. These were bounties of a kind to which I was unaccustomed and parvenu, I who had none of the ancient quarterings which would have entitled me to such gratuities; I who had been brought up to the deplorably plebeian idea that one must pay for what one takes.

These are occasions, when, frankly, I am at a loss how to deport myself. I do not know the behaviors befitting. My etiquette does not go so far; and Chesterfield, who covers so many points, stops short of this: he says nothing on the subject.

Oh, royal ways! Oh, fine prerogatives! What hope have I, who am but descended from the founders of a mere country, from men who fought and poured out their blood rather than pay for what they did not receive—what hope is there that I shall ever attain to that gracious and lordly company which receives, as a right, that for which it does not pay!

I have named but a few of these princely characters and their deportments; but remembering them all and weighing all their values, I believe that "the brightest jewel in my crown wad" still be—Margharetta.

I have never been entirely certain that Margharetta was not descended from the Bourbons. Her husband was in jail for theft, and was a poet. "I will show you some of his poetry," she promised me in the first five minutes of my acquaintance with her. "Some of my friends say he is as great a poet as Shakespeare."

Like Marie Antoinette, she had three children. Her husband's misfortune had made it necessary to put these under the care of others. She talked of them incessantly, and assured me that no heart could bleed like a mother's.

As we drove up from the station, she looked all about her, with the air of a Siddons.

"Wouldn't Ethel enjoy this scenery!" she remarked, still very grand, but almost awed, it seemed. "She's such a poetic child!" (Ethel was the oldest, a little girl of ten.) "And these trees!" she said solemnly, as we entered the grave lordly shadows of the hemlocks. "Wouldn't Richard enjoy them, now!" (Richard was the Dauphin, aged six.)

When we at last got to the house, and she entered the kitchen in her grand manner, it seemed to grow large—as the lintels and chambers of the Greeks are said to have done when the gods visited them. The walls seemed to widen out, and the pans and kettles took on a shining stateliness. I have difficulty when writing of her to keep myself to fact, so gracious, so spacious, was her manner. I know, for instance, that her dresses all dipped a little at the back, yet I have the greatest temptation to say she wore a court train, so much was that the enlarging impression that she at all times conveyed. She was the most dominating personality, I believe, that I have ever known. Like a French verb, she seemed to cover and account for all possibilities. She reminded you of the infinitive, the subjunctive, the future, the indicative, the plus-que-parfait. Entering the dining-room, her handsome hands bearing—always a little aloft—the corned beef or pot roast that should have been a peacock at the very least, she conveyed, silently, time and tense and person, passive and active: "I am"; "let us love"; "let us have"; "thou hast"; "I have not"; "if I had!"

Early in her career, I asked her what desserts she could make.

She turned her full Bourbon eyes on me. She had no need to lift her head: it was constitutionally, structurally high.

"I can't make any," she said, with firmness and finality. "We bought all our desserts at the delicatessen."

So, without anger, only with dignity, she managed to put me in my place.

Added to the many unconscious appeals that Margharetta was forever making to me, she finally made a direct one. Informing me once more that no heart could bleed like a mother's, she begged to be allowed to have, if it were only one of her children with her, the little girl aged ten. I consented, and went myself to fetch her.