Part 12

The women of well-to-do families had Canton crape shawls and Smyrna silks and Turk satins, for Sabbath-day wear, which somebody had brought home for them. Mantel-pieces were adorned with nautilus and conch-shells, and with branches and fans of coral; and children had foreign curiosities and treasures of the sea for playthings. There was one imported shell that we did not value much, it was so abundant--the freckled univalve they called a "prop." Yet it had a mysterious interest for us little ones. We held it to our ears, and listened for the sound of the waves, which we were told that, it still kept, and always would keep. I remember the time when I thought that the ocean was really imprisoned somewhere within that narrow aperture.

We were accustomed to seeing barrels full of cocoa-nuts rolled about; and there were jars of preserved tropical fruits, tamarinds, ginger-root, and other spicy appetizers, almost as common as barberries and cranberries, in the cupboards of most housekeepers.

I wonder what has become of those many, many little red "guinea-peas" we had to play with! It never seemed as if they really belonged to the vegetable world, notwithstanding their name.

We had foreign coins mixed in with our large copper cents,--all kinds, from the Russian "kopeck" to the "half-penny token" of Great Britain. Those were the days when we had half cents in circulation to make change with. For part of our currency was the old-fashioned "ninepence,"--twelve and a half cents, and the "four pence ha'penny,"--six cents and a quarter. There was a good deal of Old England about us still.

And we had also many living reminders of strange lands across the sea. Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the thimbleberry hedges that bordered the cornfields, as much at home out of doors as within. Java sparrows and canaries and other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny windows into the street, delighting the ears of passing school children long before the robins came. Now and then somebody's pet monkey would escape along the stone walls and shed-roofs, and try to hide from his boy-persecutors by dodging behind a chimney, or by slipping through an open scuttle, to the terror and delight of juveniles whose premises he invaded.

And there were wanderers from foreign countries domesticated in many families, whose swarthy complexions and un-Caucasian features became familiar in our streets,--Mongolians, Africans, and waifs from the Pacific islands, who always were known to us by distinguished names,--Hector and Scipio, and Julius Caesar and Christopher Columbus. Families of black people were scattered about the place, relics of a time when even New England had not freed her slaves. Some of them had belonged in my great-grandfather's family, and they hung about the old homestead at "The Farms" long after they were at liberty to go anywhere they pleased. There was a "Rose" and a "Phillis" among them, who came often to our house to bring luscious high blackberries from the Farms woods, or to do the household washing. They seemed pathetically out of place, although they lived among us on equal terms, respectable and respected.

The pathos of the sea haunted the town, made audible to every ear when a coming northeaster brought the rote of the waves in from the islands across the harbor-bar, with a moaning like that we heard when we listened for it in the shell. Almost every house had its sea-tragedy. Somebody belonging to it had been shipwrecked, or had sailed away one day, and never returned.

Our own part of the bay was so sheltered by its islands that there were seldom any disasters heard of near home, although the names of the two nearest--Great and Little Misery--are said to have originated with a shipwreck so far back in the history of the region that it was never recorded.

But one such calamity happened in my infancy, spoken of always by those who knew its victims in subdued tones;--the wreck of the "Persia." The vessel was returning from the Mediterranean, and in a blinding snow-storm on a wild March night her captain probably mistook one of the Cape Ann light-houses for that on Baker's Island, and steered straight upon the rocks in a lonely cove just outside the cape. In the morning the bodies of her dead crew were found tossing about with her cargo of paper-manufacturers' rags, among the breakers. Her captain and mate were Beverly men, and their funeral from the meeting-house the next Sabbath was an event which long left its solemnity hanging over the town.

We were rather a young nation at this time. The History of the United States could only tell the story of the American Revolution, of the War of 1812, and of the administration of about half a dozen presidents.

Our republicanism was fresh and wide-awake. The edge of George Washington's little hatchet had not yet been worn down to its latter-day dullness; it flashed keenly on our young eyes and ears in the reading books, and through Fourth of July speeches. The Father of his Country had been dead only a little more than a quarter of a century, and General Lafayette was still alive; he had, indeed, passed through our town but a few years before, and had been publicly welcomed under our own elms and lindens. Even babies echoed the names of our two heroes in their prattle.

We had great "training days," when drum and fife took our ears by storm; When the militia and the Light Infantry mustered and marched through the streets to the Common with boys and girls at their heels,--such girls as could get their mother's consent, or the courage to run off without it.(We never could.)But we always managed to get a good look at the show in one way or another.

"Old Election," "'Lection Day" we called it, a lost holiday now, was a general training day, and it came at our most delightful season, the last of May. Lilacs and tulips were in bloom, then; and it was a picturesque fashion of the time for little girls whose parents had no flower-gardens to go around begging a bunch of lilacs, or a tulip or two. My mother always made "'Lection cake" for us on that day. It was nothing but a kind of sweetened bread with a shine of egg-and-molasses on top; but we thought it delicious.

The Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day were the only other holidays that we made much account of, and the former was a far more well behaved festival than it is in modern times. The bells rang without stint, and at morning and noon cannon were fired off. But torpedoes and fire-crackers did not make the highways dangerous;--perhaps they were thought too expensive an amusement. Somebody delivered an oration; there was a good deal said about "this universal Yankee nation"; some rockets went up from Salem in the evening; we watched them from the hill, and then went to bed, feeling that we had been good patriots.

There was always a Fast Day, which I am afraid most of us younger ones regarded merely as a day when we were to eat unlimited quantities of molasses-gingerbread, instead of sitting down to our regular meals.

When I read about Christmas in the English story-books, I wished we could have that beautiful holiday. But our Puritan fathers shook their heads at Christmas.

Our Sabbath-school library books were nearly all English reprints, and many of the story-books were very interesting. I think that most of my favorites were by Mrs. Sherwood. Some of them were about life in India,--"Little Henry and his Bearer," and "Ayah and Lady." Then there were "The Hedge of Thorns;" "Theophilus and Sophia;" "Anna Ross," and a whole series of little English books that I took great delight in.

I had begun to be rather introspective and somewhat unhealthily self-critical, contrasting myself meanwhile with my sister Lida, just a little older, who was my usual playmate, and whom I admired very much for what I could not help seeing,--her unusual sweetness of disposition. I read Mrs. Sherwood's "Infant's Progress," and I made a personal application of it, picturing myself as the naughty, willful "Playful," and my sister Lida as the saintly little "Peace."

This book gave me a morbid, unhappy feeling, while yet it had something of the fascination of the "Pilgrim's Progress," of which it is an imitation. I fancied myself followed about by a fiend-like boy who haunted its pages, called "Inbred-Sin;" and the story implied that there was no such thing as getting rid of him. I began to dislike all boys on his account. There was one who tormented my sister and me--we only knew him by name--by jumping out at us from behind doorways or fences on our way to school, making horrid faces at us. "Inbred-Sin," I was certain, looked just like him; and the two, strangely blended in one hideous presence, were the worst nightmare of my dreams. There was too much reality about that "Inbreed-Sin." I felt that I was acquainted with him. He was the hateful hero of the little allegory, as Satan is of "Paradise Lost."

I liked lessons that came to me through fables and fairy tales, although, in reading Aesop, I invariably skipped the "moral" pinned on at the end, and made one for myself, or else did without.

Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's story of "The Immortal Fountain," in the "Girl's Own Book,"--which it was the joy of my heart to read, although it preached a searching sermon to me,--I applied in the same way that I did the "Infant's Progress." I thought of Lida as the gentle, unselfish Rose, and myself as the ugly Marion. She was patient and obliging, and I felt that I was the reverse. She was considered pretty, and I knew that I was the reverse of that, too. I wondered if Lida really had bathed in the Immortal Fountain, and oh, how I wished I could find the way there! But I feared that trying to do so would be of no use; the fairies would cross their wands to keep me back, and their wings would darken at my approach.

The book that I loved first and best, and lived upon in my childhood, was "Pilgrim's Progress." It was as a story that I cared for it, although I knew that it meant something more,--something that was already going on in my own heart and life. Oh, how I used to wish that I too could start off on a pilgrimage! It would be so much easier than the continual, discouraging struggle to be good!

The lot I most envied was that of the contented Shepherd Boy in the Valley of Humiliation, singing his cheerful songs, and wearing "the herb called Heart's Ease in his bosom"; but all the glorious ups and downs of the "Progress" I would gladly have shared with Christiana and her children, never desiring to turn aside into any "By-Path Meadow" while Mr. Great-Heart led the way, and the Shining Ones came down to meet us along the road. It was one of the necessities of my nature, as a child, to have some one being, real or ideal, man or woman, before whom I inwardly bowed down and worshiped. Mr. Great-Heart was the perfect hero of my imagination. Nobody, in books or out of them, compared with him. I wondered if there were really any Mr. Great-Hearts to be met with among living men.

I remember reading this beloved book once in a snow-storm, and looking up from it out among the white, wandering flakes, with a feeling that they had come down from heaven as its interpreters; that they were trying to tell me, in their airy up-and-down-flight, the story of innumerable souls. I tried to fix my eye on one particular flake, and to follow its course until it touched the earth. But I found that I could not. A little breeze was stirring an the flake seemed to go and return, to descend and then ascend again, as if hastening homeward to the sky, losing itself at last in the airy, infinite throng, and leaving me filled with thoughts of that "great multitude, which no man could number, clothed with white robes," crowding so gloriously into the closing pages of the Bible.

Oh, if I could only be sure that I should some time be one of that invisible company! But the heavens were already beginning to look a great way off. I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,--

"Who are these in bright array?"

and that seemed to bring them nearer again.

The history of the early martyrs, the persecutions of the Waldenses and of the Scotch Covenanters, I read and re-read with longing emulation! Why could not I be a martyr, too? It would be so beautiful to die for the truth as they did, as Jesus did! I did not understand then that He lived and died to show us what life really means, and to give us true life, like His,--the life of love to God with all our hearts, of love to all His human children for His sake;--and that to live this life faithfully is greater even than to die a martyr's death.