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New Chronicles of Rebecca

by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin · English · Gutenberg #1375 · 361,738 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: New Chronicles of Rebecca

Author: Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin


        
Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1375]
                Most recently updated: June 28, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1375

Credits: Produced by Theresa Armao, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA ***


NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA

By Kate Douglas Wiggin




CONTENTS

     First Chronicle
     Jack O'Lantern

     Second Chronicle
     Daughters of Zion

     Third Chronicle
     Rebecca's Thought Book

     Fourth Chronicle
     A Tragedy in Millinery

     Fifth Chronicle
     The Saving of the Colors

     Sixth Chronicle
     The State of Maine Girl

     Seventh Chronicle
     The Little Prophet

     Eighth Chronicle
     Abner Simpson's New Leaf

     Ninth Chronicle
     The Green Isle

     Tenth Chronicle
     Rebecca's Reminiscences

     Eleventh Chronicle
     Abijah the Brave and the Fair Emma Jane


     If thou couldst know thine own sweetness,
       O little one, perfect and sweet,
     Thou wouldst be a child forever;
       Completer, whilst incomplete.

     --Francis Turner Palgrave


First Chronicle. JACK O'LANTERN


I

Miss Miranda Sawyer's old-fashioned garden was the pleasantest spot in
Riverboro on a sunny July morning. The rich color of the brick house
gleamed and glowed through the shade of the elms and maples. Luxuriant
hop-vines clambered up the lightning rods and water spouts, hanging
their delicate clusters here and there in graceful profusion. Woodbine
transformed the old shed and tool house to things of beauty, and the
flower beds themselves were the prettiest and most fragrant in all
the countryside. A row of dahlias ran directly around the garden
spot,--dahlias scarlet, gold, and variegated. In the very centre was a
round plot where the upturned faces of a thousand pansies smiled amid
their leaves, and in the four corners were triangular blocks of sweet
phlox over which the butterflies fluttered unceasingly. In the spaces
between ran a riot of portulaca and nasturtiums, while in the more
regular, shell-bordered beds grew spirea and gillyflowers, mignonette,
marigolds, and clove pinks.

Back of the barn and encroaching on the edge of the hay field was a
grove of sweet clover whose white feathery tips fairly bent under the
assaults of the bees, while banks of aromatic mint and thyme drank
in the sunshine and sent it out again into the summer air, warm, and
deliciously odorous.

The hollyhocks were Miss Sawyer's pride, and they grew in a stately line
beneath the four kitchen windows, their tapering tips set thickly with
gay satin circlets of pink or lavender or crimson.

“They grow something like steeples,” thought little Rebecca Randall, who
was weeding the bed, “and the flat, round flowers are like rosettes; but
steeples wouldn't be studded with rosettes, so if you were writing about
them in a composition you'd have to give up one or the other, and I
think I'll give up the steeples:--

     Gay little hollyhock
     Lifting your head,
     Sweetly rosetted
     Out from your bed.

It's a pity the hollyhock isn't really little, instead of steepling up
to the window top, but I can't say, 'Gay _tall_ hollyhock.'... I might
have it 'Lines to a Hollyhock in May,' for then it would be small; but
oh, no! I forgot; in May it wouldn't be blooming, and it's so pretty
to say that its head is 'sweetly rosetted'... I wish the teacher wasn't
away; she would like 'sweetly rosetted,' and she would like to hear me
recite 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!' that I learned
out of Aunt Jane's Byron; the rolls come booming out of it just like the
waves at the beach.... I could make nice compositions now, everything
is blooming so, and it's so warm and sunny and happy outdoors. Miss
Dearborn told me to write something in my thought book every single day,
and I'll begin this very night when I go to bed.”

Rebecca Rowena Randall, the little niece of the brick-house ladies, and
at present sojourning there for purposes of board, lodging, education,
and incidentally such discipline and chastening as might ultimately
produce moral excellence,--Rebecca Randall had a passion for the rhyme
and rhythm of poetry. From her earliest childhood words had always been
to her what dolls and toys are to other children, and now at twelve she
amused herself with phrases and sentences and images as her schoolmates
played with the pieces of their dissected puzzles. If the heroine of
a story took a “cursory glance” about her “apartment,” Rebecca would
shortly ask her Aunt Jane to take a “cursory glance” at her oversewing
or hemming; if the villain “aided and abetted” someone in committing
a crime, she would before long request the pleasure of “aiding and
abetting” in dishwashing or bedmaking. Sometimes she used the borrowed
phrases unconsciously; sometimes she brought them into the conversation
with an intense sense of pleasure in their harmony or appropriateness;
for a beautiful word or sentence had the same effect upon her
imagination as a fragrant nosegay, a strain of music, or a brilliant
sunset.

“How are you gettin' on, Rebecca Rowena?” called a peremptory voice from
within.

“Pretty good, Aunt Miranda; only I wish flowers would ever come up as
thick as this pigweed and plantain and sorrel. What _makes_ weeds be
thick and flowers be thin?--I just happened to be stopping to think a
minute when you looked out.”

“You think considerable more than you weed, I guess, by appearances. How
many times have you peeked into that humming bird's nest? Why don't you
work all to once and play all to once, like other folks?”

“I don't know,” the child answered, confounded by the question, and
still more by the apparent logic back of it. “I don't know, Aunt
Miranda, but when I'm working outdoors such a Saturday morning as this,
the whole creation just screams to me to stop it and come and play.”

“Well, you needn't go if it does!” responded her aunt sharply. “It don't
scream to me when I'm rollin' out these doughnuts, and it wouldn't to
you if your mind was on your duty.”

Rebecca's little brown hands flew in and out among the weeds as she
thought rebelliously: “Creation _wouldn't_ scream to Aunt Miranda; it
would know she wouldn't come.”

     Scream on, thou bright and gay creation, scream!
       'Tis not Miranda that will hear thy cry!

Oh, such funny, nice things come into my head out here by myself, I do
wish I could run up and put them down in my thought book before I forget
them, but Aunt Miranda wouldn't like me to leave off weeding:--

     Rebecca was weeding the hollyhock bed
     When wonderful thoughts came into her head.
     Her aunt was occupied with the rolling pin
     And the thoughts of her mind were common and thin.

That wouldn't do because it's mean to Aunt Miranda, and anyway it isn't
good. I _must_ crawl under the syringa shade a minute, it's so hot, and
anybody has to stop working once in a while, just to get their breath,
even if they weren't making poetry.

     Rebecca was weeding the hollyhock bed
     When marvelous thoughts came into her head.
     Miranda was wielding the rolling pin
     And thoughts at such times seemed to her as a sin.

How pretty the hollyhock rosettes look from down here on the sweet,
smelly ground!

“Let me see what would go with rosetting. _Aiding and abetting, petting,
hen-setting, fretting,_--there's nothing very nice, but I can make
fretting' do.

     Cheered by Rowena's petting,
     The flowers are rosetting,
     But Aunt Miranda's fretting
     Doth somewhat cloud the day.”

Suddenly the sound of wagon wheels broke the silence and then a voice
called out--a voice that could not wait until the feet that belonged to
it reached the spot: “Miss Saw-_yer!_ Father's got to drive over to North
Riverboro on an errand, and please can Rebecca go, too, as it's Saturday
morning and vacation besides?”

Rebecca sprang out from under the syringa bush, eyes flashing with
delight as only Rebecca's eyes _could_ flash, her face one luminous
circle of joyous anticipation. She clapped her grubby hands, and dancing
up and down, cried: “May I, Aunt Miranda--can I, Aunt Jane--can I, Aunt
Miranda-Jane? I'm more than half through the bed.”

“If you finish your weeding tonight before sundown I s'pose you can go,
so long as Mr. Perkins has been good enough to ask you,” responded Miss
Sawyer reluctantly. “Take off that gingham apron and wash your hands
clean at the pump. You ain't be'n out o' bed but two hours an' your head
looks as rough as if you'd slep' in it. That comes from layin' on the
ground same as a caterpillar. Smooth your hair down with your hands an'
p'r'aps Emma Jane can braid it as you go along the road. Run up and get
your second-best hair ribbon out o' your upper drawer and put on
your shade hat. No, you can't wear your coral chain--jewelry ain't
appropriate in the morning. How long do you cal'late to be gone, Emma
Jane?”

“I don't know. Father's just been sent for to see about a sick woman
over to North Riverboro. She's got to go to the poor farm.”

This fragment of news speedily brought Miss Sawyer, and her sister Jane
as well, to the door, which commanded a view of Mr. Perkins and his
wagon. Mr. Perkins, the father of Rebecca's bosom friend, was primarily
a blacksmith, and secondarily a selectman and an overseer of the poor, a
man therefore possessed of wide and varied information.

“Who is it that's sick?” inquired Miranda.

“A woman over to North Riverboro.”

“What's the trouble?”

“Can't say.”

“Stranger?'

“Yes, and no; she's that wild daughter of old Nate Perry that used to
live up towards Moderation. You remember she ran away to work in the
factory at Milltown and married a do--nothin' fellow by the name o' John
Winslow?”

“Yes; well, where is he? Why don't he take care of her?”

“They ain't worked well in double harness. They've been rovin' round the
country, livin' a month here and a month there wherever they could get
work and house-room. They quarreled a couple o' weeks ago and he left
her. She and the little boy kind o' camped out in an old loggin' cabin
back in the woods and she took in washin' for a spell; then she got
terrible sick and ain't expected to live.”

“Who's been nursing her?” inquired Miss Jane.

“Lizy Ann Dennett, that lives nearest neighbor to the cabin; but I
guess she's tired out bein' good Samaritan. Anyways, she sent word this
mornin' that nobody can't seem to find John Winslow; that there ain't
no relations, and the town's got to be responsible, so I'm goin' over to
see how the land lays. Climb in, Rebecca. You an' Emmy Jane crowd back
on the cushion an' I'll set forrard. That's the trick! Now we're off!”

“Dear, dear!” sighed Jane Sawyer as the sisters walked back into the
brick house. “I remember once seeing Sally Perry at meeting. She was a
handsome girl, and I'm sorry she's come to grief.”

“If she'd kep' on goin' to meetin' an' hadn't looked at the men folks
she might 'a' be'n earnin' an honest livin' this minute,” said Miranda.
“Men folks are at the bottom of everything wrong in this world,” she
continued, unconsciously reversing the verdict of history.

“Then we ought to be a happy and contented community here in Riverboro,”
replied Jane, “as there's six women to one man.”

“If 't was sixteen to one we'd be all the safer,” responded Miranda
grimly, putting the doughnuts in a brown crock in the cellar-way and
slamming the door.


II

The Perkins horse and wagon rumbled along over the dusty country road,
and after a discreet silence, maintained as long as human flesh could
endure, Rebecca remarked sedately:

“It's a sad errand for such a shiny morning, isn't it, Mr. Perkins?”

“Plenty o' trouble in the world, Rebecky, shiny mornin's an' all,” that
good man replied. “If you want a bed to lay on, a roof over your head,
an' food to eat, you've got to work for 'em. If I hadn't 'a' labored
early an' late, learned my trade, an' denied myself when I was young, I
might 'a' be'n a pauper layin' sick in a loggin' cabin, 'stead o' bein'
an overseer o' the poor an' selectman drivin' along to take the pauper
to the poor farm.”

“People that are mortgaged don't have to go to the poor farm, do they,
Mr. Perkins?” asked Rebecca, with a shiver of fear as she remembered her
home farm at Sunnybrook and the debt upon it; a debt which had lain like
a shadow over her childhood.

“Bless your soul, no; not unless they fail to pay up; but Sal Perry an'
her husband hadn't got fur enough along in life to _be_ mortgaged. You
have to own something before you can mortgage it.”

Rebecca's heart bounded as she learned that a mortgage represented a
certain stage in worldly prosperity.

“Well,” she said, sniffing in the fragrance of the new-mown hay and
growing hopeful as she did so; “maybe the sick woman will be better such
a beautiful day, and maybe the husband will come back to make it up and
say he's sorry, and sweet content will reign in the humble habitation
that was once the scene of poverty, grief, and despair. That's how it
came out in a story I'm reading.”

“I hain't noticed that life comes out like stories very much,” responded
the pessimistic blacksmith, who, as Rebecca privately thought, had read
less than half a dozen books in his long and prosperous career.

A drive of three or four miles brought the party to a patch of woodland
where many of the tall pines had been hewn the previous winter. The roof
of a ramshackle hut was outlined against a background of young birches,
and a rough path made in hauling the logs to the main road led directly
to its door.

As they drew near the figure of a woman approached--Mrs. Lizy Ann
Dennett, in a gingham dress, with a calico apron over her head.

“Good morning, Mr. Perkins,” said the woman, who looked tired and
irritable. “I'm real glad you come right over, for she took worse after
I sent you word, and she's dead.”

Dead! The word struck heavily and mysteriously on the children's ears.
Dead! And their young lives, just begun, stretched on and on, all
decked, like hope, in living green. Dead! And all the rest of the world
reveling in strength. Dead! With all the daisies and buttercups waving
in the fields and the men heaping the mown grass into fragrant cocks
or tossing it into heavily laden carts. Dead! With the brooks tinkling
after the summer showers, with the potatoes and corn blossoming, the
birds singing for joy, and every little insect humming and chirping,
adding its note to the blithe chorus of warm, throbbing life.

“I was all alone with her. She passed away suddenly jest about break o'
day,” said Lizy Ann Dennett.

     “Her soul passed upward to its God
       Just at the break of day.”

These words came suddenly into Rebecca's mind from a tiny chamber where
such things were wont to lie quietly until something brought them to the
surface. She could not remember whether she had heard them at a funeral
or read them in the hymn book or made them up “out of her own head,” but
she was so thrilled with the idea of dying just as the dawn was breaking
that she scarcely heard Mrs. Dennett's conversation.

“I sent for Aunt Beulah Day, an' she's be'n here an' laid her out,”
 continued the long suffering Lizy Ann. “She ain't got any folks, an'
John Winslow ain't never had any as far back as I can remember. She
belongs to your town and you'll have to bury her and take care of
Jacky--that's the boy. He's seventeen months old, a bright little
feller, the image o' John, but I can't keep him another day. I'm all
wore out; my own baby's sick, mother's rheumatiz is extry bad, and my
husband's comin' home tonight from his week's work. If he finds a child
o' John Winslow's under his roof I can't say what would happen; you'll
have to take him back with you to the poor farm.”

“I can't take him up there this afternoon,” objected Mr. Perkins.

“Well, then, keep him over Sunday yourself; he's good as a kitten. John
Winslow'll hear o' Sal's death sooner or later, unless he's gone out of
the state altogether, an' when he knows the boy's at the poor farm, I
kind o' think he'll come and claim him. Could you drive me over to the
village to see about the coffin, and would you children be afraid to
stay here alone for a spell?” she asked, turning to the girls.

“Afraid?” they both echoed uncomprehendingly.

Lizy Ann and Mr. Perkins, perceiving that the fear of a dead presence
had not entered the minds of Rebecca or Emma Jane, said nothing, but
drove off together, counseling them not to stray far away from the cabin
and promising to be back in an hour.

There was not a house within sight, either looking up or down the shady
road, and the two girls stood hand in hand, watching the wagon out of
sight; then they sat down quietly under a tree, feeling all at once a
nameless depression hanging over their gay summer-morning spirits.

It was very still in the woods; just the chirp of a grasshopper now
and then, or the note of a bird, or the click of a far-distant mowing
machine.

“We're _watching!_” whispered Emma Jane. “They watched with Gran'pa
Perkins, and there was a great funeral and two ministers. He left two
thousand dollars in the bank and a store full of goods, and a paper
thing you could cut tickets off of twice a year, and they were just like
money.”

“They watched with my little sister Mira, too,” said Rebecca. “You
remember when she died, and I went home to Sunnybrook Farm? It was
winter time, but she was covered with evergreen and white pinks, and
there was singing.”

“There won't be any funeral or ministers or singing here, will there?
Isn't that awful?”

“I s'pose not; and oh, Emma Jane, no flowers either. We might get those
for her if there's nobody else to do it.”

“Would you dare put them on to her?” asked Emma Jane, in a hushed voice.

“I don't know; I can't tell; it makes me shiver, but, of course, we
_could_ do it if we were the only friends she had. Let's look into
the cabin first and be perfectly sure that there aren't any. Are you
afraid?”

“N-no; I guess not. I looked at Gran'pa Perkins, and he was just the
same as ever.”

At the door of the hut Emma Jane's courage suddenly departed. She
held back shuddering and refused either to enter or look in. Rebecca
shuddered too, but kept on, drawn by an insatiable curiosity about life
and death, an overmastering desire to know and feel and understand the
mysteries of existence, a hunger for knowledge and experience at all
hazards and at any cost.

Emma Jane hurried softly away from the felt terrors of the cabin, and
after two or three minutes of utter silence Rebecca issued from the
open door, her sensitive face pale and woe-begone, the ever-ready tears
raining down her cheeks. She ran toward the edge of the wood, sinking
down by Emma Jane's side, and covering her eyes, sobbed with excitement:

“Oh, Emma Jane, she hasn't got a flower, and she's so tired and
sad-looking, as if she'd been hurt and hurt and never had any good
times, and there's a weeny, weeny baby side of her. Oh, I wish I hadn't
gone in!”

Emma Jane blenched for an instant. “Mrs. Dennett never said _there was
two dead ones! Isn't that dreadful?_ But,” she continued, her practical
common sense coming to the rescue, “you've been in once and it's all
over; it won't be so bad when you take in the flowers because you'll
be used to it. The goldenrod hasn't begun to bud, so there's nothing
to pick but daisies. Shall I make a long rope of them, as I did for the
schoolroom?”

“Yes,” said Rebecca, wiping her eyes and still sobbing. “Yes, that's the
prettiest, and if we put it all round her like a frame, the undertaker
couldn't be so cruel as to throw it away, even if she is a pauper,
because it will look so beautiful. From what the Sunday school lessons
say, she's only asleep now, and when she wakes up she'll be in heaven.”

“_There's another place_,” said Emma Jane, in an orthodox and sepulchral
whisper, as she took her ever-present ball of crochet cotton from her
pocket and began to twine the whiteweed blossoms into a rope.

“Oh, well!” Rebecca replied with the easy theology that belonged to her
temperament. “They simply couldn't send her _down there_ with that
little weeny baby. Who'd take care of it? You know page six of the
catechism says the only companions of the wicked after death are their
father the devil and all the other evil angels; it wouldn't be any place
to bring up a baby.”

“Whenever and wherever she wakes up, I hope she won't know that the big
baby is going to the poor farm. I wonder where he is?”

“Perhaps over to Mrs. Dennett's house. She didn't seem sorry a bit, did
she?”

“No, but I suppose she's tired sitting up and nursing a stranger. Mother
wasn't sorry when Gran'pa Perkins died; she couldn't be, for he was
cross all the time and had to be fed like a child. Why _are_ you crying
again, Rebecca?”

“Oh, I don't know, I can't tell, Emma Jane! Only I don't want to die and
have no funeral or singing and nobody sorry for me! I just couldn't bear
it!”

“Neither could I,” Emma Jane responded sympathetically; “but p'r'aps
if we're real good and die young before we have to be fed, they will
be sorry. I do wish you could write some poetry for her as you did for
Alice Robinson's canary bird, only still better, of course, like that
you read me out of your thought book.”

“I could, easy enough,” exclaimed Rebecca, somewhat consoled by the
idea that her rhyming faculty could be of any use in such an emergency.
“Though I don't know but it would be kind of bold to do it. I'm all
puzzled about how people get to heaven after they're buried. I can't
understand it a bit; but if the poetry is on her, what if that should
go, too? And how could I write anything good enough to be read out loud
in heaven?”

“A little piece of paper couldn't get to heaven; it just couldn't,”
 asserted Emma Jane decisively. “It would be all blown to pieces and
dried up. And nobody knows that the angels can read writing, anyway.”

“They must be as educated as we are, and more so, too,” agreed Rebecca.
“They must be more than just dead people, or else why should they have
wings? But I'll go off and write something while you finish the rope;
it's lucky you brought your crochet cotton and I my lead pencil.”

In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written on a
scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma Jane, she said,
preparing to read them aloud: “They're not good; I was afraid your
father'd come back before I finished, and the first verse sounds exactly
like the funeral hymns in the church book. I couldn't call her Sally
Winslow; it didn't seem nice when I didn't know her and she is dead, so
I thought if I said 'friend' it would show she had somebody to be sorry.

     “This friend of ours has died and gone
     From us to heaven to live.
     If she has sinned against Thee, Lord,
     We pray Thee, Lord, forgive.

     “Her husband runneth far away
     And knoweth not she's dead.
     Oh, bring him back--ere tis too late--
     To mourn beside her bed.

     “And if perchance it can't be so,
     Be to the children kind;
     The weeny one that goes with her,
     The other left behind.”

“I think that's perfectly elegant!” exclaimed Emma Jane, kissing Rebecca
fervently. “You are the smartest girl in the whole State of Maine, and
it sounds like a minister's prayer. I wish we could save up and buy a
printing machine. Then I could learn to print what you write and we'd
be partners like father and Bill Moses. Shall you sign it with your name
like we do our school compositions?”

“No,” said Rebecca soberly. “I certainly shan't sign it, not knowing
where it's going or who'll read it. I shall just hide it in the flowers,
and whoever finds it will guess that there wasn't any minister or
singing, or gravestone, or anything, so somebody just did the best they
could.”


III

The tired mother with the “weeny baby” on her arm lay on a long
carpenter's bench, her earthly journey over, and when Rebecca stole
in and placed the flowery garland all along the edge of the rude bier,
death suddenly took on a more gracious and benign aspect. It was only
a child's sympathy and intuition that softened the rigors of the sad
moment, but poor, wild Sal Winslow, in her frame of daisies, looked
as if she were missed a little by an unfriendly world; while the weeny
baby, whose heart had fallen asleep almost as soon as it had learned to
beat, the weeny baby, with Emma Jane's nosegay of buttercups in its tiny
wrinkled hand, smiled as if it might have been loved and longed for and
mourned.

“We've done all we can now without a minister,” whispered Rebecca. “We
could sing, 'God is ever good' out of the Sunday school song book, but
I'm afraid somebody would hear us and think we were gay and happy.
What's that?”

A strange sound broke the stillness; a gurgle, a yawn, a merry little
call. The two girls ran in the direction from which it came, and there,
on an old coat, in a clump of goldenrod bushes, lay a child just waking
from a refreshing nap.

“It's the other baby that Lizy Ann Dennett told about!” cried Emma Jane.

“Isn't he beautiful!” exclaimed Rebecca. “Come straight to me!” and she
stretched out her arms.

The child struggled to its feet, and tottered, wavering, toward the warm
welcome of the voice and eyes. Rebecca was all mother, and her maternal
instincts had been well developed in the large family in which she was
next to the eldest. She had always confessed that there were perhaps a
trifle too many babies at Sunnybrook Farm, but, nevertheless, had she
ever heard it, she would have stood loyally by the Japanese proverb:
“Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters
nothing; more than a treasure of one thousand ryo a baby precious is.”

“You darling thing!” she crooned, as she caught and lifted the child.
“You look just like a Jack-o'-lantern.”

The boy was clad in a yellow cotton dress, very full and stiff. His hair
was of such a bright gold, and so sleek and shiny, that he looked like
a fair, smooth little pumpkin. He had wide blue eyes full of laughter,
a neat little vertical nose, a neat little horizontal mouth with his
few neat little teeth showing very plainly, and on the whole Rebecca's
figure of speech was not so wide of the mark.

“Oh, Emma Jane! Isn't he too lovely to go to the poor farm? If only we
were married we could keep him and say nothing and nobody would know the
difference! Now that the Simpsons have gone away there isn't a single
baby in Riverboro, and only one in Edgewood. It's a perfect shame, but
I can't do anything; you remember Aunt Miranda wouldn't let me have the
Simpson baby when I wanted to borrow her just for one rainy Sunday.”

“My mother won't keep him, so it's no use to ask her; she says most
every day she's glad we're grown up, and she thanks the Lord there
wasn't but two of us.”

“And Mrs. Peter Meserve is too nervous,” Rebecca went on, taking the
village houses in turn; “and Mrs. Robinson is too neat.”

“People don't seem to like any but their own babies,” observed Emma
Jane.

“Well, I can't understand it,” Rebecca answered. “A baby's a baby, I
should think, whose ever it is! Miss Dearborn is coming back Monday;
I wonder if she'd like it? She has nothing to do out of school, and we
could borrow it all the time!”

“I don't think it would seem very genteel for a young lady like Miss
Dearborn, who 'boards round,' to take a baby from place to place,”
 objected Emma Jane.

“Perhaps not,” agreed Rebecca despondently, “but I think if we haven't
got any--any--_private_ babies in Riverboro we ought to have one for the
town, and all have a share in it. We've got a town hall and a town lamp
post and a town watering trough. Things are so uneven! One house like
mine at Sunnybrook, brimful of children, and the very next one empty!
The only way to fix them right would be to let all the babies that ever
are belong to all the grown-up people that ever are,--just divide
them up, you know, if they'd go round. Oh, I have a thought! Don't
you believe Aunt Sarah Cobb would keep him? She carries flowers to the
graveyard every little while, and once she took me with her. There's a
marble cross, and it says: _Sacred to the memory of Sarah Ellen, beloved
child of Sarah and Jeremiah Cobb, aged 17 months_. Why, that's another
reason; Mrs. Dennett says this one is seventeen months. There's five of
us left at the farm without me, but if we were only nearer to Riverboro,
how quick mother would let in one more!”

“We might see what father thinks, and that would settle it,” said Emma
Jane. “Father doesn't think very sudden, but he thinks awful strong. If
we don't bother him, and find a place ourselves for the baby, perhaps
he'll be willing. He's coming now; I hear the wheels.”

Lizy Ann Dennett volunteered to stay and perform the last rites with
the undertaker, and Jack-o'-lantern, with his slender wardrobe tied in
a bandanna handkerchief, was lifted into the wagon by the reluctant Mr.
Perkins, and jubilantly held by Rebecca in her lap. Mr. Perkins drove
off as speedily as possible, being heartily sick of the whole affair,
and thinking wisely that the little girls had already seen and heard
more than enough of the seamy side of life that morning.

Discussion concerning Jack-o'-lantern's future was prudently deferred
for a quarter of an hour, and then Mr. Perkins was mercilessly pelted
with arguments against the choice of the poor farm as a place of
residence for a baby.

“His father is sure to come back some time, Mr. Perkins,” urged Rebecca.
“He couldn't leave this beautiful thing forever; and if Emma Jane and I
can persuade Mrs. Cobb to keep him a little while, would you care?”

No; on reflection Mr. Perkins did not care. He merely wanted a quiet
life and enough time left over from the public service to attend to his
blacksmith's shop; so instead of going home over the same road by which
they came he crossed the bridge into Edgewood and dropped the children
at the long lane which led to the Cobb house.

Mrs. Cobb, “Aunt Sarah” to the whole village, sat by the window looking
for Uncle Jerry, who would soon be seen driving the noon stage to the
post office over the hill. She always had an eye out for Rebecca, too,
for ever since the child had been a passenger on Mr. Cobb's stagecoach,
making the eventful trip from her home farm to the brick house in
Riverboro in his company, she had been a constant visitor and the joy
of the quiet household. Emma Jane, too, was a well-known figure in the
lane, but the strange baby was in the nature of a surprise--a surprise
somewhat modified by the fact that Rebecca was a dramatic personage and
more liable to appear in conjunction with curious outriders, comrades,
and retainers than the ordinary Riverboro child. She had run away from
the too stern discipline of the brick house on one occasion, and had
been persuaded to return by Uncle Jerry. She had escorted a wandering
organ grinder to their door and begged a lodging for him on a rainy
night; so on the whole there was nothing amazing about the coming
procession.

The little party toiled up to the hospitable door, and Mrs. Cobb came
out to meet them.

Rebecca was spokesman. Emma Jane's talent did not lie in eloquent
speech, but it would have been a valiant and a fluent child indeed
who could have usurped Rebecca's privileges and tendencies in this
direction, language being her native element, and words of assorted
sizes springing spontaneously to her lips.

“Aunt Sarah, dear,” she said, plumping Jack-o'-lantern down on the grass
as she pulled his dress over his feet and smoothed his hair becomingly,
“will you please not say a word till I get through--as it's very
important you should know everything before you answer yes or no?
This is a baby named Jacky Winslow, and I think he looks like a
Jack-o'-lantern. His mother has just died over to North Riverboro, all
alone, excepting for Mrs. Lizy Ann Dennett, and there was another little
weeny baby that died with her, and Emma Jane and I put flowers
around them and did the best we could. The father--that's John
Winslow--quarreled with the mother--that was Sal Perry on the Moderation
Road--and ran away and left her. So he doesn't know his wife and the
weeny baby are dead. And the town has got to bury them because they
can't find the father right off quick, and Jacky has got to go to the
poor farm this afternoon. And it seems an awful shame to take him up to
that lonesome place with those old people that can't amuse him, and
if Emma Jane and Alice Robinson and I take most all the care of him we
thought perhaps you and Uncle Jerry would keep him just for a little
while. You've got a cow and a turn-up bedstead, you know,” she hurried
on insinuatingly, “and there's hardly any pleasure as cheap as more
babies where there's ever been any before, for baby carriages and
trundle beds and cradles don't wear out, and there's always clothes
left over from the old baby to begin the new one on. Of course, we can
collect enough things to start Jacky, so he won't be much trouble or
expense; and anyway, he's past the most troublesome age and you won't
have to be up nights with him, and he isn't afraid of anybody or
anything, as you can see by his just sitting there laughing and sucking
his thumb, though he doesn't know what's going to become of him. And
he's just seventeen months old like dear little Sarah Ellen in the
graveyard, and we thought we ought to give you the refusal of him before
he goes to the poor farm, and what do you think about it? Because it's
near my dinner time and Aunt Miranda will keep me in the whole afternoon
if I'm late, and I've got to finish weeding the hollyhock bed before
sundown.”

IV

Mrs. Cobb had enjoyed a considerable period of reflection during this
monologue, and Jacky had not used the time unwisely, offering several
unconscious arguments and suggestions to the matter under discussion;
lurching over on the greensward and righting himself with a chuckle,
kicking his bare feet about in delight at the sunshine and groping for
his toes with arms too short to reach them, the movement involving an
entire upsetting of equilibrium followed by more chuckles.

Coming down the last of the stone steps, Sarah Ellen's mother regarded
the baby with interest and sympathy.

“Poor little mite!” she said; “that doesn't know what he's lost and
what's going to happen to him. Seems to me we might keep him a spell
till we're sure his father's deserted him for good. Want to come to Aunt
Sarah, baby?”

Jack-o'-lantern turned from Rebecca and Emma Jane and regarded the kind
face gravely; then he held out both his hands and Mrs. Cobb, stooping,
gathered him like a harvest. Being lifted into her arms, he at once tore
her spectacles from her nose and laughed aloud. Taking them from him
gently, she put them on again, and set him in the cushioned rocking
chair under the lilac bushes beside the steps. Then she took one of his
soft hands in hers and patted it, and fluttered her fingers like birds
before his eyes, and snapped them like castanets, remembering all the
arts she had lavished upon “Sarah Ellen, aged seventeen months,” years
and years ago.

     Motherless baby and babyless mother,
     Bring them together to love one another.

Rebecca knew nothing of this couplet, but she saw clearly enough that
her case was won.

“The boy must be hungry; when was he fed last?” asked Mrs. Cobb. “Just
stay a second longer while I get him some morning's milk; then you
run home to your dinners and I'll speak to Mr. Cobb this afternoon. Of
course, we can keep the baby for a week or two till we see what happens.
Land! He ain't goin' to be any more trouble than a wax doll! I guess he
ain't been used to much attention, and that kind's always the easiest to
take care of.”

At six o'clock that evening Rebecca and Emma Jane flew up the hill and
down the lane again, waving their hands to the dear old couple who were
waiting for them in the usual place, the back piazza where they had sat
so many summers in a blessed companionship never marred by an unloving
word.

“Where's Jacky?” called Rebecca breathlessly, her voice always
outrunning her feet.

“Go up to my chamber, both of you, if you want to see,” smiled Mrs.
Cobb, “only don't wake him up.”

The girls went softly up the stairs into Aunt Sarah's room. There, in
the turn-up bedstead that had been so long empty, slept Jack-o'-lantern,
in blissful unconsciousness of the doom he had so lately escaped. His
nightgown and pillow case were clean and fragrant with lavender, but
they were both as yellow as saffron, for they had belonged to Sarah
Ellen.

“I wish his mother could see him!” whispered Emma Jane.

“You can't tell; it's all puzzly about heaven, and perhaps she does,”
 said Rebecca, as they turned reluctantly from the fascinating scene and
stole down to the piazza.

It was a beautiful and a happy summer that year, and every day it was
filled with blissful plays and still more blissful duties. On the
Monday after Jack-o'-lantern's arrival in Edgewood Rebecca founded the
Riverboro Aunts Association. The Aunts were Rebecca, Emma Jane, Alice
Robinson, and Minnie Smellie, and each of the first three promised
to labor for and amuse the visiting baby for two days a week, Minnie
Smellie, who lived at some distance from the Cobbs, making herself
responsible for Saturday afternoons.

Minnie Smellie was not a general favorite among the Riverboro girls, and
it was only in an unprecedented burst of magnanimity that they admitted
her into the rites of fellowship, Rebecca hugging herself secretly at
the thought, that as Minnie gave only the leisure time of one day a
week, she could not be called a “full” Aunt. There had been long and
bitter feuds between the two children during Rebecca's first summer in
Riverboro, but since Mrs. Smellie had told her daughter that one more
quarrel would invite a punishment so terrible that it could only be
hinted at vaguely, and Miss Miranda Sawyer had remarked that any niece
of hers who couldn't get along peaceable with the neighbors had better
go back to the seclusion of a farm where there weren't any, hostilities
had been veiled, and a suave and diplomatic relationship had replaced
the former one, which had been wholly primitive, direct, and barbaric.
Still, whenever Minnie Smellie, flaxen-haired, pink-nosed, and
ferret-eyed, indulged in fluent conversation, Rebecca, remembering the
old fairy story, could always see toads hopping out of her mouth. It was
really very unpleasant, because Minnie could never see them herself; and
what was more amazing, Emma Jane perceived nothing of the sort, being
almost as blind, too, to the diamonds that fell continually from
Rebecca's lips; but Emma Jane's strong point was not her imagination.

A shaky perambulator was found in Mrs. Perkins's wonderful attic; shoes
and stockings were furnished by Mrs. Robinson; Miss Jane Sawyer knitted
a blanket and some shirts; Thirza Meserve, though too young for an aunt,
coaxed from her mother some dresses and nightgowns, and was presented
with a green paper certificate allowing her to wheel Jacky up and down
the road for an hour under the superintendence of a full Aunt. Each
girl, under the constitution of the association, could call Jacky “hers”
 for two days in the week, and great, though friendly, was the rivalry
between them, as they washed, ironed, and sewed for their adored nephew.

If Mrs. Cobb had not been the most amiable woman in the world she might
have had difficulty in managing the aunts, but she always had Jacky to
herself the earlier part of the day and after dusk at night.

Meanwhile Jack-o'-lantern grew healthier and heartier and jollier as the
weeks slipped away. Uncle Jerry joined the little company of worshipers
and slaves, and one fear alone stirred in all their hearts; not, as a
sensible and practical person might imagine, the fear that the recreant
father might never return to claim his child, but, on the contrary, that
he _might_ do so!

October came at length with its cheery days and frosty nights, its glory
of crimson leaves and its golden harvest of pumpkins and ripened corn.
Rebecca had been down by the Edgewood side of the river and had come
up across the pastures for a good-night play with Jacky. Her literary
labors had been somewhat interrupted by the joys and responsibilities of
vice-motherhood, and the thought book was less frequently drawn from its
hiding place under the old haymow in the barn chamber.

Mrs. Cobb stood behind the screen door with her face pressed against the
wire netting, and Rebecca could see that she was wiping her eyes.

All at once the child's heart gave one prophetic throb and then stood
still. She was like a harp that vibrated with every wind of emotion,
whether from another's grief or her own.

She looked down the lane, around the curve of the stone wall, red with
woodbine, the lane that would meet the stage road to the station. There,
just mounting the crown of the hill and about to disappear on the other
side, strode a stranger man, big and tall, with a crop of reddish curly
hair showing from under his straw hat. A woman walked by his side, and
perched on his shoulder, wearing his most radiant and triumphant mien,
as joyous in leaving Edgewood as he had been during every hour of his
sojourn there--rode Jack-o'-lantern!

Rebecca gave a cry in which maternal longing and helpless, hopeless
jealousy strove for supremacy. Then, with an impetuous movement she
started to run after the disappearing trio.

Mrs. Cobb opened the door hastily, calling after her, “Rebecca, Rebecca,
come back here! You mustn't follow where you haven't any right to go. If
there'd been anything to say or do, I'd 'a' done it.”

“He's mine! He's mine!” stormed Rebecca. “At least he's yours and mine!”

“He's his father's first of all,” faltered Mrs. Cobb; “don't let's
forget that; and we'd ought to be glad and grateful that John Winslow's
come to his senses an' remembers he's brought a child into the world and
ought to take care of it. Our loss is his gain and it may make a man of
him. Come in, and we'll put things away all neat before your Uncle Jerry
gets home.”

Rebecca sank in a pitiful little heap on Mrs. Cobb's bedroom floor
and sobbed her heart out. “Oh, Aunt Sarah, where shall we get another
Jack-o'-lantern, and how shall I break it to Emma Jane? What if his
father doesn't love him, and what if he forgets to strain the milk or
lets him go without his nap? That's the worst of babies that aren't
private--you have to part with them sooner or later!”

“Sometimes you have to part with your own, too,” said Mrs. Cobb sadly;
and though there were lines of sadness in her face there was neither
rebellion nor repining, as she folded up the sides of the turn-up
bedstead preparatory to banishing it a second time to the attic. “I
shall miss Sarah Ellen now more'n ever. Still, Rebecca, we mustn't feel
to complain. It's the Lord that giveth and the Lord that taketh away:
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”




Second Chronicle. DAUGHTERS OF ZION


I

Abijah Flagg was driving over to Wareham on an errand for old Squire
Winship, whose general chore-boy and farmer's assistant he had been for
some years.

He passed Emma Jane Perkins's house slowly, as he always did. She was
only a little girl of thirteen and he a boy of fifteen or sixteen, but
somehow, for no particular reason, he liked to see the sun shine on her
thick braids of reddish-brown hair. He admired her china-blue eyes too,
and her amiable, friendly expression. He was quite alone in the world,
and he always thought that if he had anybody belonging to him he would
rather have a sister like Emma Jane Perkins than anything else within
the power of Providence to bestow. When she herself suggested this
relationship a few years later he cast it aside with scorn, having
changed his mind in the interval--but that story belongs to another time
and place.

Emma Jane was not to be seen in garden, field, or at the window, and
Abijah turned his gaze to the large brick house that came next on the
other side of the quiet village street. It might have been closed for
a funeral. Neither Miss Miranda nor Miss Jane Sawyer sat at their
respective windows knitting, nor was Rebecca Randall's gypsy face to be
discerned. Ordinarily that will-o'-the wispish little person could be
seen, heard, or felt wherever she was.

“The village must be abed, I guess,” mused Abijah, as he neared the
Robinsons' yellow cottage, where all the blinds were closed and no sign
of life showed on porch or in shed. “No, 't aint, neither,” he thought
again, as his horse crept cautiously down the hill, for from the
direction of the Robinsons' barn chamber there floated out into the air
certain burning sentiments set to the tune of “Antioch.” The words, to a
lad brought up in the orthodox faith, were quite distinguishable:

     “Daughter of Zion, from the dust,
      Exalt thy fallen head!”

Even the most religious youth is stronger on first lines than others,
but Abijah pulled up his horse and waited till he caught another
familiar verse, beginning:

     “Rebuild thy walls, thy bounds enlarge,
      And send thy heralds forth.”

“That's Rebecca carrying the air, and I can hear Emma Jane's alto.”

     “Say to the North,
      Give up thy charge,
      And hold not back, O South,
      And hold not back, O South,” etc.

“Land! ain't they smart, seesawin' up and down in that part they learnt
in singin' school! I wonder what they're actin' out, singin' hymn-tunes
up in the barn chamber? Some o' Rebecca's doins, I'll be bound! Git dap,
Aleck!”

Aleck pursued his serene and steady trot up the hills on the Edgewood
side of the river, till at length he approached the green Common where
the old Tory Hill meeting-house stood, its white paint and green blinds
showing fair and pleasant in the afternoon sun. Both doors were open,
and as Abijah turned into the Wareham road the church melodeon pealed
out the opening bars of the Missionary Hymn, and presently a score of
voices sent the good old tune from the choir-loft out to the dusty road:

     “Shall we whose souls are lighted
     With Wisdom from on high,
     Shall we to men benighted
     The lamp of life deny?”

“Land!” exclaimed Abijah under his breath. “They're at it up here, too!
That explains it all. There's a missionary meeting at the church, and
the girls wa'n't allowed to come so they held one of their own, and I
bate ye it's the liveliest of the two.”

Abijah Flagg's shrewd Yankee guesses were not far from the truth, though
he was not in possession of all the facts. It will be remembered by
those who have been in the way of hearing Rebecca's experiences in
Riverboro, that the Rev. and Mrs. Burch, returned missionaries from the
Far East, together with some of their children, “all born under Syrian
skies,” as they always explained to interested inquirers, spent a day or
two at the brick house, and gave parlor meetings in native costume.

These visitors, coming straight from foreign lands to the little Maine
village, brought with them a nameless enchantment to the children, and
especially to Rebecca, whose imagination always kindled easily. The
romance of that visit had never died in her heart, and among the many
careers that dazzled her youthful vision was that of converting such
Syrian heathen as might continue in idol worship after the Burches'
efforts in their behalf had ceased. She thought at the age of eighteen
she might be suitably equipped for storming some minor citadel of
Mohammedanism; and Mrs. Burch had encouraged her in the idea, not, it is
to be feared, because Rebecca showed any surplus of virtue or Christian
grace, but because her gift of language, her tact and sympathy, and her
musical talent seemed to fit her for the work.

It chanced that the quarterly meeting of the Maine Missionary Society
had been appointed just at the time when a letter from Mrs. Burch to
Miss Jane Sawyer suggested that Rebecca should form a children's branch
in Riverboro. Mrs. Burch's real idea was that the young people should
save their pennies and divert a gentle stream of financial aid into
the parent fund, thus learning early in life to be useful in such work,
either at home or abroad.

The girls themselves, however, read into her letter no such modest
participation in the conversion of the world, and wishing to effect an
organization without delay, they chose an afternoon when every house in
the village was vacant, and seized upon the Robinsons' barn chamber as
the place of meeting.

Rebecca, Alice Robinson, Emma Jane Perkins, Candace Milliken, and Persis
Watson, each with her hymn book, had climbed the ladder leading to
the haymow a half hour before Abijah Flagg had heard the strains
of “Daughters of Zion” floating out to the road. Rebecca, being an
executive person, had carried, besides her hymn book, a silver call-bell
and pencil and paper. An animated discussion regarding one of two
names for the society, The Junior Heralds or The Daughters of Zion,
had resulted in a unanimous vote for the latter, and Rebecca had been
elected president at an early stage of the meeting. She had modestly
suggested that Alice Robinson, as the granddaughter of a missionary to
China, would be much more eligible.

“No,” said Alice, with entire good nature, “whoever is _elected_
president, you _will_ be, Rebecca--you're that kind--so you might as well
have the honor; I'd just as lieves be secretary, anyway.”

“If you should want me to be treasurer, I could be, as well as not,”
 said Persis Watson suggestively; “for you know my father keeps china
banks at his store--ones that will hold as much as two dollars if you
will let them. I think he'd give us one if I happen to be treasurer.”

The three principal officers were thus elected at one fell swoop
and with an entire absence of that red tape which commonly renders
organization so tiresome, Candace Milliken suggesting that perhaps she'd
better be vice-president, as Emma Jane Perkins was always so bashful.

“We ought to have more members,” she reminded the other girls, “but if
we had invited them the first day they'd have all wanted to be officers,
especially Minnie Smellie, so it's just as well not to ask them till
another time. Is Thirza Meserve too little to join?”

“I can't think why anybody named Meserve should have called a baby
Thirza,” said Rebecca, somewhat out of order, though the meeting was
carried on with small recognition of parliamentary laws. “It always
makes me want to say:

     Thirza Meserver
     Heaven preserve her!
     Thirza Meserver
     Do we deserve her?

She's little, but she's sweet, and absolutely without guile. I think we
ought to have her.”

“Is 'guile' the same as guilt?” inquired Emma Jane Perkins.

“Yes,” the president answered; “exactly the same, except one is written
and the other spoken language.” (Rebecca was rather good at imbibing
information, and a master hand at imparting it!) “Written language is
for poems and graduations and occasions like this--kind of like a best
Sunday-go-to-meeting dress that you wouldn't like to go blueberrying in
for fear of getting it spotted.”

“I'd just as lieves get 'guile' spotted as not,” affirmed the
unimaginative Emma Jane. “I think it's an awful foolish word; but now
we're all named and our officers elected, what do we do first? It's
easy enough for Mary and Martha Burch; they just play at missionarying
because their folks work at it, same as Living and I used to make
believe be blacksmiths when we were little.”

“It must be nicer missionarying in those foreign places,” said Persis,
“because on 'Afric's shores and India's plains and other spots where
Satan reigns' (that's father's favorite hymn) there's always a heathen
bowing down to wood and stone. You can take away his idols if he'll let
you and give him a bible and the beginning's all made. But who'll we
begin on? Jethro Small?”

“Oh, he's entirely too dirty, and foolish besides!” exclaimed Candace.
“Why not Ethan Hunt? He swears dreadfully.”

“He lives on nuts and is a hermit, and it's a mile to his camp through
the thick woods; my mother'll never let me go there,” objected Alice.
“There's Uncle Tut Judson.”

“He's too old; he's most a hundred and deaf as a post,” complained Emma
Jane. “Besides, his married daughter is a Sabbath-school teacher--why
doesn't she teach him to behave? I can't think of anybody just right to
start on!”

“Don't talk like that, Emma Jane,” and Rebecca's tone had a tinge of
reproof in it. “We are a copperated body named the Daughters of Zion,
and, of course, we've got to find something to do. Foreigners are the
easiest; there's a Scotch family at North Riverboro, an English one in
Edgewood, and one Cuban man at Millkin's Mills.”

“Haven't foreigners got any religion of their own?” inquired Persis
curiously.

“Ye-es, I s'pose so; kind of a one; but foreigners' religions are never
right--ours is the only good one.” This was from Candace, the deacon's
daughter.

“I do think it must be dreadful, being born with a religion and growing
up with it, and then finding out it's no use and all your time wasted!”
 Here Rebecca sighed, chewed a straw, and looked troubled.

“Well, that's your punishment for being a heathen,” retorted Candace,
who had been brought up strictly.

“But I can't for the life of me see how you can help being a heathen if
you're born in Africa,” persisted Persis, who was well named.

“You can't.” Rebecca was clear on this point. “I had that all out with
Mrs. Burch when she was visiting Aunt Miranda. She says they can't help
being heathen, but if there's a single mission station in the whole of
Africa, they're accountable if they don't go there and get saved.”

“Are there plenty of stages and railroads?” asked Alice; “because there
must be dreadfully long distances, and what if they couldn't pay the
fare?”

“That part of it is so dreadfully puzzly we mustn't talk about it,
please,” said Rebecca, her sensitive face quivering with the force of
the problem. Poor little soul! She did not realize that her superiors
in age and intellect had spent many a sleepless night over that same
“accountability of the heathen.”

“It's too bad the Simpsons have moved away,” said Candace. “It's so
seldom you can find a real big wicked family like that to save, with
only Clara Belle and Susan good in it.”

“And numbers count for so much,” continued Alice. “My grandmother says
if missionaries can't convert about so many in a year the Board advises
them to come back to America and take up some other work.”

“I know,” Rebecca corroborated; “and it's the same with revivalists. At
the Centennial picnic at North Riverboro, a revivalist sat opposite to
Mr. Ladd and Aunt Jane and me, and he was telling about his wonderful
success in Bangor last winter. He'd converted a hundred and thirty in
a month, he said, or about four and a third a day. I had just finished
fractions, so I asked Mr. Ladd how the third of a man could be
converted. He laughed and said it was just the other way; that the man
was a third converted. Then he explained that if you were trying to
convince a person of his sin on a Monday, and couldn't quite finish by
sundown, perhaps you wouldn't want to sit up all night with him, and
perhaps he wouldn't want you to; so you'd begin again on Tuesday, and
you couldn't say just which day he was converted, because it would be
two thirds on Monday and one third on Tuesday.”

“Mr. Ladd is always making fun, and the Board couldn't expect any great
things of us girls, new beginners,” suggested Emma Jane, who was being
constantly warned against tautology by her teacher. “I think it's awful
rude, anyway, to go right out and try to convert your neighbors; but if
you borrow a horse and go to Edgewood Lower Corner, or Milliken's Mills,
I s'pose that makes it Foreign Missions.”

“Would we each go alone or wait upon them with a committee, as they did
when they asked Deacon Tuttle for a contribution for the new hearse?”
 asked Persis.

“Oh! We must go alone,” decided Rebecca; “it would be much more refined
and delicate. Aunt Miranda says that one man alone could never get
a subscription from Deacon Tuttle, and that's the reason they sent a
committee. But it seems to me Mrs. Burch couldn't mean for us to try
and convert people when we're none of us even church members, except
Candace. I think all we can do is to persuade them to go to meeting and
Sabbath school, or give money for the hearse, or the new horse sheds.
Now let's all think quietly for a minute or two who's the very most
heathenish and reperrehensiblest person in Riverboro.”

After a very brief period of silence the words “Jacob Moody” fell from
all lips with entire accord.

“You are right,” said the president tersely; “and after singing hymn
number two hundred seventy four, to be found on the sixty-sixth page,
we will take up the question of persuading Mr. Moody to attend divine
service or the minister's Bible class, he not having been in the
meeting-house for lo! these many years.

     'Daughter of Zion, the power that hath saved thee
     Extolled with the harp and the timbrel should be.'

“Sing without reading, if you please, omitting the second stanza. Hymn
two seventy four, to be found on the sixty-sixth page of the new hymn
book or on page thirty two of Emma Jane Perkins's old one.”

II

It is doubtful if the Rev. Mr. Burch had ever found in Syria a person
more difficult to persuade than the already “gospel-hardened” Jacob
Moody of Riverboro.

Tall, gaunt, swarthy, black-bearded--his masses of grizzled, uncombed
hair and the red scar across his nose and cheek added to his sinister
appearance. His tumble-down house stood on a rocky bit of land back of
the Sawyer pasture, and the acres of his farm stretched out on all sides
of it. He lived alone, ate alone, plowed, planted, sowed, harvested
alone, and was more than willing to die alone, “unwept, unhonored, and
unsung.” The road that bordered upon his fields was comparatively little
used by any one, and notwithstanding the fact that it was thickly set
with chokecherry trees and blackberry bushes it had been for years
practically deserted by the children. Jacob's Red Astrakhan and Granny
Garland trees hung thick with apples, but no Riverboro or Edgewood boy
stole them; for terrifying accounts of the fate that had overtaken one
urchin in times agone had been handed along from boy to boy, protecting
the Moody fruit far better than any police patrol.

Perhaps no circumstances could have extenuated the old man's surly
manners or his lack of all citizenly graces and virtues; but his
neighbors commonly rebuked his present way of living and forgot the
troubled past that had brought it about: the sharp-tongued wife, the
unloving and disloyal sons, the daughter's hapless fate, and all the
other sorry tricks that fortune had played upon him--at least that was
the way in which he had always regarded his disappointments and griefs.

This, then, was the personage whose moral rehabilitation was to be
accomplished by the Daughters of Zion. But how?

“Who will volunteer to visit Mr. Moody?” blandly asked the president.

_Visit Mr. Moody!_ It was a wonder the roof of the barn chamber did not
fall; it did, indeed echo the words and in some way make them sound more
grim and satirical.

“Nobody'll volunteer, Rebecca Rowena Randall, and you know it,” said
Emma Jane.

“Why don't we draw lots, when none of us wants to speak to him and yet
one of us must?”

This suggestion fell from Persis Watson, who had been pale and
thoughtful ever since the first mention of Jacob Moody. (She was fond of
Granny Garlands; she had once met Jacob; and, as to what befell, well,
we all have our secret tragedies!)

“Wouldn't it be wicked to settle it that way?”

“It's gamblers that draw lots.”

“People did it in the Bible ever so often.”

“It doesn't seem nice for a missionary meeting.”

These remarks fell all together upon the president's bewildered ear the
while (as she always said in compositions)--“the while” she was trying
to adjust the ethics of this unexpected and difficult dilemma.

“It is a very puzzly question,” she said thoughtfully. “I could ask Aunt
Jane if we had time, but I suppose we haven't. It doesn't seem nice to
draw lots, and yet how can we settle it without? We know we mean right,
and perhaps it will be. Alice, take this paper and tear off five narrow
pieces, all different lengths.”

At this moment a voice from a distance floated up to the haymow--a voice
saying plaintively: “Will you let me play with you, girls? Huldah has
gone to ride, and I'm all alone.”

It was the voice of the absolutely-without-guile Thirza Meserve, and it
came at an opportune moment.

“If she is going to be a member,” said Persis, “why not let her come up
and hold the lots? She'd be real honest and not favor anybody.”

It seemed an excellent idea, and was followed up so quickly that
scarcely three minutes ensued before the guileless one was holding the
five scraps in her hot little palm, laboriously changing their places
again and again until they looked exactly alike and all rather soiled
and wilted.

“Come, girls, draw!” commanded the president. “Thirza, you mustn't chew
gum at a missionary meeting, it isn't polite nor holy. Take it out and
stick it somewhere till the exercises are over.”

The five Daughters of Zion approached the spot so charged with fate, and
extended their trembling hands one by one. Then after a moment's silent
clutch of their papers they drew nearer to one another and compared
them.

Emma Jane Perkins had drawn the short one, becoming thus the destined
instrument for Jacob Moody's conversion to a more seemly manner of life!

She looked about her despairingly, as if to seek some painless and
respectable method of self-destruction.

“Do let's draw over again,” she pleaded. “I'm the worst of all of us.
I'm sure to make a mess of it till I kind o' get trained in.”

Rebecca's heart sank at this frank confession, which only corroborated
her own fears.

“I'm sorry, Emmy, dear,” she said, “but our only excuse for drawing lots
at all would be to have it sacred. We must think of it as a kind of a
sign, almost like God speaking to Moses in the burning bush.”

“Oh, I _wish_ there was a burning bush right here!” cried the distracted
and recalcitrant missionary. “How quick I'd step into it without even
stopping to take off my garnet ring!”

“Don't be such a scare-cat, Emma Jane!” exclaimed Candace bracingly.
“Jacob Moody can't kill you, even if he has an awful temper. Trot right
along now before you get more frightened. Shall we go cross lots with
her, Rebecca, and wait at the pasture gate? Then whatever happens Alice
can put it down in the minutes of the meeting.”

In these terrible crises of life time gallops with such incredible
velocity that it seemed to Emma Jane only a breath before she was being
dragged through the fields by the other Daughters of Zion, the guileless
little Thirza panting in the rear.

At the entrance to the pasture Rebecca gave her an impassioned embrace,
and whispering, “_Whatever you do, be careful how you lead up_,” lifted
off the top rail and pushed her through the bars. Then the girls turned
their backs reluctantly on the pathetic figure, and each sought a tree
under whose friendly shade she could watch, and perhaps pray, until the
missionary should return from her field of labor.

Alice Robinson, whose compositions were always marked 96 or 97,--100
symbolizing such perfection as could be attained in the mortal world of
Riverboro,--Alice, not only Daughter, but Scribe of Zion, sharpened her
pencil and wrote a few well-chosen words of introduction, to be used
when the records of the afternoon had been made by Emma Jane Perkins and
Jacob Moody.

Rebecca's heart beat tumultuously under her gingham dress. She felt
that a drama was being enacted, and though unfortunately she was not the
central figure, she had at least a modest part in it. The short lot had
not fallen to the properest Daughter, that she quite realized; yet would
any one of them succeed in winning Jacob Moody's attention, in
engaging him in pleasant conversation, and finally in bringing him to
a realization of his mistaken way of life? She doubted, but at the same
moment her spirits rose at the thought of the difficulties involved in
the undertaking.

Difficulties always spurred Rebecca on, but they daunted poor Emma Jane,
who had no little thrills of excitement and wonder and fear and longing
to sustain her lagging soul. That her interview was to be entered as
“minutes” by a secretary seemed to her the last straw. Her blue eyes
looked lighter than usual and had the glaze of china saucers; her
usually pink cheeks were pale, but she pressed on, determined to be
a faithful Daughter of Zion, and above all to be worthy of Rebecca's
admiration and respect.

“Rebecca can do anything,” she thought, with enthusiastic loyalty, “and
I mustn't be any stupider than I can help, or she'll choose one of
the other girls for her most intimate friend.” So, mustering all her
courage, she turned into Jacob Moody's dooryard, where he was chopping
wood.

“It's a pleasant afternoon, Mr. Moody,” she said in a polite but hoarse
whisper, Rebecca's words, “_Lead up! Lead up!_” ringing in clarion tones
through her brain.

Jacob Moody looked at her curiously. “Good enough, I guess,” he growled;
“but I don't never have time to look at afternoons.”

Emma Jane seated herself timorously on the end of a large log near the
chopping block, supposing that Jacob, like other hosts, would pause in
his tasks and chat.

“The block is kind of like an idol,” she thought; “I wish I could take
it away from him, and then perhaps he'd talk.”

At this moment Jacob raised his axe and came down on the block with such
a stunning blow that Emma Jane fairly leaped into the air.

“You'd better look out, Sissy, or you'll git chips in the eye!” said
Moody, grimly going on with his work.

The Daughter of Zion sent up a silent prayer for inspiration, but none
came, and she sat silent, giving nervous jumps in spite of herself
whenever the axe fell upon the log Jacob was cutting.

Finally, the host became tired of his dumb visitor, and leaning on
his axe he said, “Look here, Sis, what have you come for? What's your
errant? Do you want apples? Or cider? Or what? Speak out, or _git_ out,
one or t'other.”

Emma Jane, who had wrung her handkerchief into a clammy ball, gave it
a last despairing wrench, and faltered: “Wouldn't you like--hadn't you
better--don't you think you'd ought to be more constant at meeting and
Sabbath school?”

Jacob's axe almost dropped from his nerveless hand, and he regarded
the Daughter of Zion with unspeakable rage and disdain. Then, the blood
mounting in his face, he gathered himself together, and shouted: “You
take yourself off that log and out o' this dooryard double-quick, you
imperdent sanct'omus young one! You just let me ketch Bill Perkins'
child trying to teach me where I shall go, at my age! Scuttle, I tell
ye! And if I see your pious cantin' little mug inside my fence ag'in on
sech a business I'll chase ye down the hill or set the dog on ye!
_Scoot, I tell ye!_”

Emma Jane obeyed orders summarily, taking herself off the log, out the
dooryard, and otherwise scuttling and scooting down the hill at a pace
never contemplated even by Jacob Moody, who stood regarding her flying
heels with a sardonic grin.

Down she stumbled, the tears coursing over her cheeks and mingling with
the dust of her flight; blighted hope, shame, fear, rage, all tearing
her bosom in turn, till with a hysterical shriek she fell over the bars
and into Rebecca's arms outstretched to receive her. The other Daughters
wiped her eyes and supported her almost fainting form, while Thirza,
thoroughly frightened, burst into sympathetic tears, and refused to be
comforted.

No questions were asked, for it was felt by all parties that Emma Jane's
demeanor was answering them before they could be framed.

“He threatened to set the dog on me!” she wailed presently, when, as
they neared the Sawyer pasture, she was able to control her voice. “He
called me a pious, cantin' young one, and said he'd chase me out o' the
dooryard if I ever came again! And he'll tell my father--I know he will,
for he hates him like poison.”

All at once the adult point of view dawned upon Rebecca. She never
saw it until it was too obvious to be ignored. Had they done wrong in
interviewing Jacob Moody? Would Aunt Miranda be angry, as well as Mr.
Perkins?

“Why was he so dreadful, Emmy?” she questioned tenderly. “What did you
say first? How did you lead up to it?”

Emma Jane sobbed more convulsively, and wiped her nose and eyes
impartially as she tried to think.

“I guess I never led up at all; not a mite. I didn't know what you
meant. I was sent on an errant, and I went and done it the best I could!
(Emma Jane's grammar always lapsed in moments of excitement.) And then
Jake roared at me like Squire Winship's bull.... And he called my face
a mug.... You shut up that secretary book, Alice Robinson! If you write
down a single word I'll never speak to you again.... And I don't want to
be a 'member' another minute for fear of drawing another short lot. I've
got enough of the Daughters or Zion to last me the rest o' my life! I
don't care who goes to meetin' and who don't.”

The girls were at the Perkins's gate by this time, and Emma Jane went
sadly into the empty house to remove all traces of the tragedy from her
person before her mother should come home from the church.

The others wended their way slowly down the street, feeling that their
promising missionary branch had died almost as soon as it had budded.

“Goodby,” said Rebecca, swallowing lumps of disappointment and chagrin
as she saw the whole inspiring plan break and vanish into thin air like
an iridescent bubble. “It's all over and we won't ever try it again.
I'm going in to do overcasting as hard as I can, because I hate that the
worst. Aunt Jane must write to Mrs. Burch that we don't want to be
home missionaries. Perhaps we're not big enough, anyway. I'm perfectly
certain it's nicer to convert people when they're yellow or brown or
any color but white; and I believe it must be easier to save their souls
than it is to make them go to meeting.”




Third Chronicle. REBECCA'S THOUGHT BOOK


I

The “Sawyer girls'” barn still had its haymow in Rebecca's time,
although the hay was a dozen years old or more, and, in the opinion of
the occasional visiting horse, sadly juiceless and wanting in flavor.
It still sheltered, too, old Deacon Israel Sawyer's carryall and
mowing-machine, with his pung, his sleigh, and a dozen other survivals
of an earlier era, when the broad acres of the brick house went to make
one of the finest farms in Riverboro.

There were no horses or cows in the stalls nowadays; no pig grunting
comfortably of future spare ribs in the sty; no hens to peck the plants
in the cherished garden patch. The Sawyer girls were getting on in
years, and, mindful that care once killed a cat, they ordered their
lives with the view of escaping that particular doom, at least, and
succeeded fairly well until Rebecca's advent made existence a trifle
more sensational.

Once a month for years upon years, Miss Miranda and Miss Jane had put
towels over their heads and made a solemn visit to the barn, taking off
the enameled cloth coverings (occasionally called “emmanuel covers” in
Riverboro), dusting the ancient implements, and sometimes sweeping
the heaviest of the cobwebs from the corners, or giving a brush to the
floor.

Deacon Israel's tottering ladder still stood in its accustomed place,
propped against the haymow, and the heavenly stairway leading to eternal
glory scarcely looked fairer to Jacob of old than this to Rebecca. By
means of its dusty rounds she mounted, mounted, mounted far away
from time and care and maiden aunts, far away from childish tasks
and childish troubles, to the barn chamber, a place so full of golden
dreams, happy reveries, and vague longings, that, as her little brown
hands clung to the sides of the ladder and her feet trod the rounds
cautiously in her ascent, her heart almost stopped beating in the sheer
joy of anticipation.

Once having gained the heights, the next thing was to unlatch the heavy
doors and give them a gentle swing outward. Then, oh, ever new Paradise!
Then, oh, ever lovely green and growing world! For Rebecca had that
something in her soul that

     “Gives to seas and sunset skies
      The unspent beauty of surprise.”

At the top of Guide Board hill she could see Alice Robinson's barn with
its shining weather vane, a huge burnished fish that swam with the wind
and foretold the day to all Riverboro. The meadow, with its sunny
slopes stretching up to the pine woods, was sometimes a flowing sheet
of shimmering grass, sometimes--when daisies and buttercups were
blooming--a vision of white and gold. Sometimes the shorn stubble would
be dotted with “the happy hills of hay,” and a little later the rock
maple on the edge of the pines would stand out like a golden ball
against the green; its neighbor, the sugar maple, glowing beside it,
brave in scarlet.

It was on one of these autumn days with a wintry nip in the air that
Adam Ladd (Rebecca's favorite “Mr. Aladdin”), after searching for her in
field and garden, suddenly noticed the open doors of the barn chamber,
and called to her. At the sound of his voice she dropped her precious
diary, and flew to the edge of the haymow. He never forgot the vision
of the startled little poetess, book in one mittened hand, pencil in
the other, dark hair all ruffled, with the picturesque addition of an
occasional glade of straw, her cheeks crimson, her eyes shining.

“A Sappho in mittens!” he cried laughingly, and at her eager question
told her to look up the unknown lady in the school encyclopedia, when
she was admitted to the Female Seminary at Wareham.

Now, all being ready, Rebecca went to a corner of the haymow, and
withdrew a thick blank-book with mottled covers. Out of her gingham
apron pocket came a pencil, a bit of rubber, and some pieces of brown
paper; then she seated herself gravely on the floor, and drew an
inverted soapbox nearer to her for a table.

The book was reverently opened, and there was a serious reading of the
extracts already carefully copied therein. Most of them were apparently
to the writer's liking, for dimples of pleasure showed themselves now
and then, and smiles of obvious delight played about her face; but
once in a while there was a knitting of the brows and a sigh of
discouragement, showing that the artist in the child was not wholly
satisfied.

Then came the crucial moment when the budding author was supposedly to
be racked with the throes of composition; but seemingly there were
no throes. Other girls could wield the darning or crochet or knitting
needle, and send the tatting shuttle through loops of the finest cotton;
hemstitch, oversew, braid hair in thirteen strands, but the pencil was
never obedient in their fingers, and the pen and ink-pot were a horror
from early childhood to the end of time.

Not so with Rebecca; her pencil moved as easily as her tongue, and no
more striking simile could possibly be used. Her handwriting was not
Spencerian; she had neither time, nor patience, it is to be feared,
for copybook methods, and her unformed characters were frequently the
despair of her teachers; but write she could, write she would, write she
must and did, in season and out; from the time she made pothooks at six,
till now, writing was the easiest of all possible tasks; to be indulged
in as solace and balm when the terrors of examples in least common
multiple threatened to dethrone the reason, or the rules of grammar
loomed huge and unconquerable in the near horizon.

As to spelling, it came to her in the main by free grace, and not by
training, and though she slipped at times from the beaten path, her
extraordinary ear and good visual memory kept her from many or flagrant
mistakes. It was her intention, especially when saying her prayers at
night, to look up all doubtful words in her small dictionary, before
copying her Thoughts into the sacred book for the inspiration
of posterity; but when genius burned with a brilliant flame, and
particularly when she was in the barn and the dictionary in the house,
impulse as usual carried the day.

There sits Rebecca, then, in the open door of the Sawyers barn
chamber--the sunset door. How many a time had her grandfather, the good
deacon, sat just underneath in his tipped-back chair, when Mrs. Israel's
temper was uncertain, and the serenity of the barn was in comforting
contrast to his own fireside!

The open doors swinging out to the peaceful landscape, the solace of the
pipe, not allowed in the “settin'-room”--how beautifully these simple
agents have ministered to the family peace in days agone! “If I hadn't
had my barn and my store _both_, I couldn't never have lived in holy
matrimony with Maryliza!” once said Mr. Watson feelingly.

But the deacon, looking on his waving grass fields, his tasseling corn
and his timber lands, bright and honest as were his eyes, never saw
such visions as Rebecca. The child, transplanted from her home farm at
Sunnybrook, from the care of the overworked but easy-going mother, and
the companionship of the scantily fed, scantily clothed, happy-go-lucky
brothers and sisters--she had indeed fallen on shady days in Riverboro.
The blinds were closed in every room of the house but two, and the same
might have been said of Miss Miranda's mind and heart, though Miss
Jane had a few windows opening to the sun, and Rebecca already had her
unconscious hand on several others. Brickhouse rules were rigid and many
for a little creature so full of life, but Rebecca's gay spirit could
not be pinioned in a strait jacket for long at a time; it escaped
somehow and winged its merry way into the sunshine and free air; if she
were not allowed to sing in the orchard, like the wild bird she was, she
could still sing in the cage, like the canary.

II

If you had opened the carefully guarded volume with the mottled covers,
you would first have seen a wonderful title page, constructed apparently
on the same lines as an obituary, or the inscription on a tombstone,
save for the quantity and variety of information contained in it. Much
of the matter would seem to the captious critic better adapted to the
body of the book than to the title page, but Rebecca was apparently
anxious that the principal personages in her chronicle should be well
described at the outset.

She seems to have had a conviction that heredity plays its part in the
evolution of genius, and her belief that the world will be inspired
by the possession of her Thoughts is too artless to be offensive. She
evidently has respect for rich material confided to her teacher, and
one can imagine Miss Dearborn's woe had she been confronted by Rebecca's
chosen literary executor and bidden to deliver certain “Valuable Poetry
and Thoughts,” the property of posterity “unless carelessly destroyed.”

                             THOUGHT BOOK
                                  of 
                        Rebecca Rowena Randall 
                               Really of 
                            Sunnybrook Farm
                           But temporily of 
                      The Brick House Riverboro.
               Own niece of Miss Miranda and Jane Sawyer
     Second of seven children of her father, Mr. L. D. M. Randall
       (Now at rest in Temperance cemmetary and there will be a 
       monument as soon as we pay off the mortgage on the farm)
                Also of her mother Mrs. Aurelia Randall

              In case of Death the best of these Thoughts
                  May be printed in my Remerniscences
          For the Sunday School Library at Temperance, Maine
                   Which needs more books fearfully
                              And I hereby
               Will and Testament them to Mr. Adam Ladd
                 Who bought 300 cakes of soap from me
                       And thus secured a premium
                     A Greatly Needed Banquet Lamp
                     For my friends the Simpsons.
                  He is the only one that incourages
                     My writing Remerniscences and
                     My teacher Miss Dearborn will
                Have much valuable Poetry and Thoughts
               To give him unless carelessly destroyed.

                The pictures are by the same hand that
                          Wrote the Thoughts.

_It is not now decided whether Rebecca Rowena Randall will be a painter
or an author, but after her death it will be known which she has been,
if any._

                              FINIS.

From the title page, with its wealth of detail, and its unnecessary and
irrelevant information, the book ripples on like a brook, and to the
weary reader of problem novels it may have something of the brook's
refreshing quality.

OUR DIARIES

May, 187--

All the girls are keeping a diary because Miss Dearborn was very much
ashamed when the school trustees told her that most of the girls' and
all of the boys' compositions were disgraceful, and must be improved
upon next term. She asked the boys to write letters to her once a week
instead of keeping a diary, which they thought was girlish like playing
with dolls. The boys thought it was dreadful to have to write letters
every seven days, but she told them it was not half as bad for them as
it was for her who had to read them.

To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book
(written just like that, with capitals). I have thoughts that I never
can use unless I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep
your thoughts to yourself. Aunt Jane lets me tell her some, but does not
like my queer ones and my true thoughts are mostly queer. Emma Jane does
not mind hearing them now and then, and that is my only chance.

If Miss Dearborn does not like the name Thought Book I will call it
Remerniscences (written just like that with a capital R). Remerniscences
are things you remember about yourself and write down in case you should
die. Aunt Jane doesn't like to read any other kind of books but just
lives of interesting dead people and she says that is what Longfellow
(who was born in the state of Maine and we should be very proud of it
and try to write like him) meant in his poem:

     “Lives of great men all remind us
     We should make our lives sublime,
     And departing, leave behind us
     Footprints on the sands of time.”

I know what this means because when Emma Jane and I went to the beach
with Uncle Jerry Cobb we ran along the wet sand and looked at the shapes
our boots made, just as if they were stamped in wax. Emma Jane turns in
her left foot (splayfoot the boys call it, which is not polite) and Seth
Strout had just patched one of my shoes and it all came out in the sand
pictures. When I learned The Psalm of Life for Friday afternoon speaking
I thought I shouldn't like to leave a patched footprint, nor have Emma
Jane's look crooked on the sands of time, and right away I thought Oh!
What a splendid thought for my Thought Book when Aunt Jane buys me a
fifteen-cent one over to Watson's store.

* * * * *


REMERNISCENCES

June, 187--

I told Aunt Jane I was going to begin my Remerniscences, and she says
I am full young, but I reminded her that Candace Milliken's sister died
when she was ten, leaving no footprints whatever, and if I should die
suddenly who would write down my Remerniscences? Aunt Miranda says the
sun and moon would rise and set just the same, and it was no matter if
they didn't get written down, and to go up attic and find her piece-bag;
but I said it would, as there was only one of everybody in the world,
and nobody else could do their remerniscensing for them. If I should die
tonight I know not who would describe me right. Miss Dearborn would
say one thing and brother John another. Emma Jane would try to do me
justice, but has no words; and I am glad Aunt Miranda never takes the
pen in hand.

My dictionary is so small it has not many genteel words in it, and I
cannot find how to spell Remerniscences, but I remember from the cover
of Aunt Jane's book that there was an “s” and a “c” close together in
the middle of it, which I thought foolish and not needful.

All the girls like their dairies very much, but Minnie Smellie got Alice
Robinson's where she had hid it under the school wood pile and read
it all through. She said it was no worse than reading anybody's
composition, but we told her it was just like peeking through a keyhole,
or listening at a window, or opening a bureau drawer. She said she
didn't look at it that way, and I told her that unless her eyes got
unscealed she would never leave any kind of a sublime footprint on
the sands of time. I told her a diary was very sacred as you generally
poured your deepest feelings into it expecting nobody to look at it but
yourself and your indulgent heavenly Father who seeeth all things.

Of course it would not hurt Persis Watson to show her diary because she
has not a sacred plan and this is the way it goes, for she reads it out
loud to us:

“Arose at six this morning--(you always arise in a diary but you say
get up when you talk about it). Ate breakfast at half past six. Had soda
biscuits, coffee, fish hash and doughnuts. Wiped the dishes, fed the
hens and made my bed before school. Had a good arithmetic lesson, but
went down two in spelling. At half past four played hide and coop in the
Sawyer pasture. Fed hens and went to bed at eight.”

She says she can't put in what doesn't happen, but as I don't think her
diary is interesting she will ask her mother to have meat hash instead
of fish, with pie when the doughnuts give out, and she will feed the
hens before breakfast to make a change. We are all going now to try and
make something happen every single day so the diaries won't be so dull
and the footprints so common.

* * * * *


AN UNCOMMON THOUGHT

July 187--

We dug up our rosecakes today, and that gave me a good Remerniscence.
The way you make rose cakes is, you take the leaves of full blown roses
and mix them with a little cinnamon and as much brown sugar as they
will give you, which is never half enough except Persis Watson, whose
affectionate parents let her go to the barrel in their store. Then you
do up little bits like sedlitz powders, first in soft paper and then
in brown, and bury them in the ground and let them stay as long as you
possibly can hold out; then dig them up and eat them. Emma Jane and
I stick up little signs over the holes in the ground with the date we
buried them and when they'll be done enough to dig up, but we can never
wait. When Aunt Jane saw us she said it was the first thing for children
to learn,--not to be impatient,--so when I went to the barn chamber I
made a poem.

                    IMPATIENCE

     We dug our rose cakes up oh! all too soon. 
     'Twas in the orchard just at noon.
     'Twas in a bright July forenoon.
     'Twas in the sunny afternoon.
     'Twas underneath the harvest moon.

It was not that way at all; it was a foggy morning before school, and I
should think poets could never possibly get to heaven, for it is so hard
to stick to the truth when you are writing poetry. Emma Jane thinks it
is nobody's business when we dug the rosecakes up. I like the line about
the harvest moon best, but it would give a wrong idea of our lives and
characters to the people that read my Thoughts, for they would think we
were up late nights, so I have fixed it like this:

                    IMPATIENCE

     We dug our rose cakes up oh! all too soon,
     We thought their sweetness would be such a boon.
     We ne'er suspicioned they would not be done
     After three days of autumn wind and sun.
     Why did we from the earth our treasures draw?
     'Twas not for fear that rat or mole might naw,
     An aged aunt doth say impatience was the reason,
     She says that youth is ever out of season.

That is just as Aunt Jane said it, and it gave me the thought for the
poem which is rather uncommon.

* * * * *


A DREADFUL QUESTION

September, 187--

_Which has been the most Benefercent Influence on Character--Punishment
or Reward?_

This truly dreadful question was given us by Dr. Moses when he visited
school today. He is a School Committee; not a whole one but I do not
know the singular number of him. He told us we could ask our families
what they thought, though he would rather we wouldn't, but we must write
our own words and he would hear them next week.

After he went out and shut the door the scholars were all plunged in
gloom and you could have heard a pin drop. Alice Robinson cried and
borrowed my handkerchief, and the boys looked as if the schoolhouse had
been struck by lightning. The worst of all was poor Miss Dearborn, who
will lose her place if she does not make us better scholars soon, for
Dr. Moses has a daughter all ready to put right in to the school and she
can board at home and save all her wages. Libby Moses is her name.

Miss Dearborn stared out the window, and her mouth and chin shook like
Alice Robinson's, for she knew, ah! all too well, what the coming week
would bring forth.

Then I raised my hand for permission to speak, and stood up and said:
“Miss Dearborn, don't you mind! Just explain to us what 'benefercent'
means and we'll write something real interesting; for all of us know
what punishment is, and have seen others get rewards, and it is not so
bad a subject as some.” And Dick Carter whispered, “_Good on your head,
Rebecca!_” which meant he was sorry for her too, and would try his best,
but has no words.

Then teacher smiled and said benefercent meant good or healthy for
anybody, and would all rise who thought punishment made the best
scholars and men and women; and everybody sat stock still.

And then she asked all to stand who believed that rewards produced the
finest results, and there was a mighty sound like unto the rushing of
waters, but really was our feet scraping the floor, and the scholars
stood up, and it looked like an army, though it was only nineteen,
because of the strong belief that was in them. Then Miss Dearborn
laughed and said she was thankful for every whipping she had when
she was a child, and Living Perkins said perhaps we hadn't got to the
thankful age, or perhaps her father hadn't used a strap, and she said
oh! no, it was her mother with the open hand; and Dick Carter said he
wouldn't call that punishment, and Sam Simpson said so too.

I am going to write about the subject in my Thought Book first, and when
I make it into a composition, I can leave out anything about the family
or not genteel, as there is much to relate about punishment not pleasant
or nice and hardly polite.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

PUNISHMENT

Punishment is a very puzzly thing, but I believe in it when really
deserved, only when I punish myself it does not always turn out well.
When I leaned over the new bridge, and got my dress all paint, and Aunt
Sarah Cobb couldn't get it out, I had to wear it spotted for six
months which hurt my pride, but was right. I stayed at home from Alice
Robinson's birthday party for a punishment, and went to the circus
next day instead, but Alice's parties are very cold and stiff, as Mrs.
Robinson makes the boys stand on newspapers if they come inside the
door, and the blinds are always shut, and Mrs. Robinson tells me how bad
her liver complaint is this year. So I thought, to pay for the circus
and a few other things, I ought to get more punishment, and I threw my
pink parasol down the well, as the mothers in the missionary books throw
their infants to the crocodiles in the Ganges river. But it got stuck
in the chain that holds the bucket, and Aunt Miranda had to get Abijah
Flagg to take out all the broken bits before we could bring up water.

I punished myself this way because Aunt Miranda said that unless I
improved I would be nothing but a Burden and a Blight.

There was an old man used to go by our farm carrying a lot of broken
chairs to bottom, and mother used to say--“Poor man! His back is too
weak for such a burden!” and I used to take him out a doughnut, and this
is the part I want to go into the Remerniscences. Once I told him we
were sorry the chairs were so heavy, and he said _They didn't seem so
heavy when he had et the doughnut_. This does not mean that the doughnut
was heavier than the chairs which is what brother John said, but it is a
beautiful thought and shows how the human race should have sympathy, and
help bear burdens.

I know about a Blight, for there was a dreadful east wind over at our
farm that destroyed all the little young crops just out of the ground,
and the farmers called it the Blight. And I would rather be hail, sleet,
frost, or snow than a Blight, which is mean and secret, and which is the
reason I threw away the dearest thing on earth to me, the pink parasol
that Miss Ross brought me from Paris, France. I have also wrapped up my
bead purse in three papers and put it away marked not to be opened till
after my death unless needed for a party.

     I must not be Burden, I must not be Blight,
     The angels in heaven would weep at the sight.

 * * * * *

REWARDS

A good way to find out which has the most benefercent effect would be to
try rewards on myself this next week and write my composition the very
last day, when I see how my character is. It is hard to find rewards for
yourself, but perhaps Aunt Jane and some of the girls would each give
me one to help out. I could carry my bead purse to school every day,
or wear my coral chain a little while before I go to sleep at night. I
could read Cora or the Sorrows of a Doctor's Wife a little oftener, but
that's all the rewards I can think of. I fear Aunt Miranda would say
they are wicked but oh! if they should turn out benefercent how glad and
joyful life would be to me! A sweet and beautiful character, beloved
by my teacher and schoolmates, admired and petted by my aunts and
neighbors, yet carrying my bead purse constantly, with perhaps my best
hat on Wednesday afternoons, as well as Sundays!

* * * * *

A GREAT SHOCK

The reason why Alice Robinson could not play was, she was being punished
for breaking her mother's blue platter. Just before supper my story
being finished I went up Guide Board hill to see how she was bearing
up and she spoke to me from her window. She said she did not mind being
punished because she hadn't been for a long time, and she hoped it would
help her with her composition. She thought it would give her thoughts,
and tomorrow's the last day for her to have any. This gave me a good
idea and I told her to call her father up and beg him to beat her
violently. It would hurt, I said, but perhaps none of the other girls
would have a punishment like that, and her composition would be all
different and splendid. I would borrow Aunt Miranda's witchhayzel and
pour it on her wounds like the Samaritan in the Bible.

I went up again after supper with Dick Carter to see how it turned out.
Alice came to the window and Dick threw up a note tied to a stick. I
had written: “_Demand your punishment to the full. be brave like
Dolores' mother in the_ Martyrs of Spain.”

She threw down an answer, and it was: “_You just be like Dolores' mother
yourself if you're so smart!_” Then she stamped away from the window and
my feelings were hurt, but Dick said perhaps she was hungry, and that
made her cross. And as Dick and I turned to go out of the yard we looked
back and I saw something I can never forget. (The Great Shock) Mrs.
Robinson was out behind the barn feeding the turkies. Mr. Robinson
came softly out of the side door in the orchard and looking everywheres
around he stepped to the wire closet and took out a saucer of cold beans
with a pickled beet on top, and a big piece of blueberry pie. Then he
crept up the back stairs and we could see Alice open her door and take
in the supper.

Oh! What will become of her composition, and how can she tell anything
of the benefercent effects of punishment, when she is locked up by
one parent, and fed by the other? I have forgiven her for the way she
snapped me up for, of course, you couldn't beg your father to beat you
when he was bringing you blueberry pie. Mrs. Robinson makes a kind that
leaks out a thick purple juice into the plate and needs a spoon and
blacks your mouth, but is heavenly.

* * * * *

A DREAM

The week is almost up and very soon Dr. Moses will drive up to the
school house like Elijah in the chariot and come in to hear us read.
There is a good deal of sickness among us. Some of the boys are not able
to come to school just now, but hope to be about again by Monday, when
Dr. Moses goes away to a convention. It is a very hard composition to
write, somehow. Last night I dreamed that the river was ink and I kept
dipping into it and writing with a penstalk made of a young pine tree. I
sliced great slabs of marble off the side of one of the White Mountains,
the one you see when going to meeting, and wrote on those. Then I threw
them all into the falls, not being good enough for Dr. Moses.

Dick Carter had a splendid boy to stay over Sunday. He makes the real
newspaper named The Pilot published by the boys at Wareham Academy. He
says when he talks about himself in writing he calls himself “we,” and
it sounds much more like print, besides conscealing him more.

Example: Our hair was measured this morning and has grown two inches
since last time.... We have a loose tooth that troubles us very much...
Our inkspot that we made by negligence on our only white petticoat we
have been able to remove with lemon and milk. Some of our petticoat came
out with the spot.

I shall try it in my composition sometime, for of course I shall write
for the Pilot when I go to Wareham Seminary. Uncle Jerry Cobb says that
I shall, and thinks that in four years I might rise to be editor if they
ever have girls.

I have never been more good than since I have been rewarding myself
steady, even to asking Aunt Miranda kindly to offer me a company jelly
tart, not because I was hungry, but for an experement I was trying, and
would explain to her sometime.

She said she never thought it was wise to experement with your stomach,
and I said, with a queer thrilling look, it was not my stomach but my
soul, that was being tried. Then she gave me the tart and walked away
all puzzled and nervous.

The new minister has asked me to come and see him any Saturday afternoon
as he writes poetry himself, but I would rather not ask him about this
composition.

Ministers never believe in rewards, and it is useless to hope that they
will. We had the wrath of God four times in sermons this last summer,
but God cannot be angry all the time,--nobody could, especially in
summer; Mr. Baxter is different and calls his wife dear which is lovely
and the first time I ever heard it in Riverboro. Mrs. Baxter is another
kind of people too, from those that live in Temperance. I like to
watch her in meeting and see her listen to her husband who is young and
handsome for a minister; it gives me very queer and uncommon feelings,
when they look at each other, which they always do when not otherwise
engaged.

She has different clothes from anybody else. Aunt Miranda says you must
think only of two things: will your dress keep you warm and will it wear
well and there is nobody in the world to know how I love pink and red
and how I hate drab and green and how I never wear my hat with the
black and yellow porkupine quills without wishing it would blow into the
river.

     Whene'er I take my walks abroad
     How many quills I see.
     But as they are not porkupines
     They never come to me.


COMPOSITION

_Which has the most Benefercent Effect on the Character, Punishment or
Reward?_

By Rebecca Rowena Randall

(This copy not corrected by Miss Dearborn yet.)

We find ourselves very puzzled in approaching this truly great and
national question though we have tried very ernestly to understand it,
so as to show how wisely and wonderfully our dear teacher guides the
youthful mind, it being her wish that our composition class shall long
be remembered in Riverboro Centre.

We would say first of all that punishment seems more benefercently
needed by boys than girls. Boys' sins are very violent, like stealing
fruit, profane language, playing truant, fighting, breaking windows, and
killing innocent little flies and bugs. If these were not taken out of
them early in life it would be impossible for them to become like our
martyred president, Abraham Lincoln.

Although we have asked everybody on our street, they think boys' sins
can only be whipped out of them with a switch or strap, which makes
us feel very sad, as boys when not sinning the dreadful sins mentioned
above seem just as good as girls, and never cry when switched, and say
it does not hurt much.

We now approach girls, which we know better, being one. Girls seem
better than boys because their sins are not so noisy and showy. They
can disobey their parents and aunts, whisper in silent hour, cheat in
lessons, say angry things to their schoolmates, tell lies, be sulky and
lazy, but all these can be conducted quite ladylike and genteel, and
nobody wants to strap girls because their skins are tender and get black
and blue very easily.

Punishments make one very unhappy and rewards very happy, and one would
think when one is happy one would behave the best. We were acquainted
with a girl who gave herself rewards every day for a week, and it seemed
to make her as lovely a character as one could wish; but perhaps if one
went on for years giving rewards to onesself one would become selfish.
One cannot tell, one can only fear.

If a dog kills a sheep we should whip him straight away, and on the very
spot where he can see the sheep, or he will not know what we mean, and
may forget and kill another. The same is true of the human race. We must
be firm and patient in punishing, no matter how much we love the one who
has done wrong, and how hungry she is. It does no good to whip a person
with one hand and offer her a pickled beet with the other. This confuses
her mind, and she may grow up not knowing right from wrong. (The
striking example of the pickled beet was removed from the essay by the
refined but ruthless Miss Dearborn, who strove patiently, but vainly, to
keep such vulgar images out of her pupils' literary efforts.)

We now respectfully approach the Holy Bible and the people in the Bible
were punished the whole time, and that would seem to make it right.
Everybody says Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth; but we think ourself,
that the Lord is a better punisher than we are, and knows better how and
when to do it having attended to it ever since the year B.C. while
the human race could not know about it till 1492 A.D., which is when
Columbus discovered America.

We do not believe we can find out all about this truly great and
national subject till we get to heaven, where the human race, strapped
and unstrapped, if any, can meet together and laying down their harps
discuss how they got there.

And we would gently advise boys to be more quiet and genteel in conduct
and try rewards to see how they would work. Rewards are not all like
the little rosebud merit cards we receive on Fridays, and which boys
sometimes tear up and fling scornfully to the breeze when they get
outside, but girls preserve carefully in an envelope.

Some rewards are great and glorious, for boys can get to be governor or
school trustee or road commissioner or president, while girls can only
be wife and mother. But all of us can have the ornament of a meek and
lowly spirit, especially girls, who have more use for it than boys.

R.R.R.

* * * * *


STORIES AND PEOPLE

October, 187--

There are people in books and people in Riverboro, and they are not the
same kind. They never talk of chargers and palfreys in the village, nor
say How oft and Methinks, and if a Scotchman out of Rob Roy should come
to Riverboro and want to marry one of us girls we could not understand
him unless he made motions; though Huldah Meserve says if a nobleman of
high degree should ask her to be his,--one of vast estates with serfs at
his bidding,--she would be able to guess his meaning in any language.

Uncle Jerry Cobb thinks that Riverboro people would not make a story,
but I know that some of them would.

Jack-o'-lantern, though only a baby, was just like a real story if
anybody had written a piece about him: How his mother was dead and his
father ran away and Emma Jane and I got Aunt Sarah Cobb to keep him so
Mr. Perkins wouldn't take him to the poor farm; and about our lovely
times with him that summer, and our dreadful loss when his father
remembered him in the fall and came to take him away; and how Aunt Sarah
carried the trundle bed up attic again and Emma Jane and I heard her
crying and stole away.

Mrs. Peter Meserve says Grandpa Sawyer was a wonderful hand at stories
before his spirit was broken by grandmother. She says he was the life
of the store and tavern when he was a young man, though generally sober,
and she thinks I take after him, because I like compositions better than
all the other lessons; but mother says I take after father, who always
could say everything nicely whether he had anything to say or not; so
methinks I should be grateful to both of them. They are what is called
ancestors and much depends upon whether you have them or not. The
Simpsons have not any at all. Aunt Miranda says the reason everybody
is so prosperous around here is because their ancestors were all first
settlers and raised on burnt ground. This should make us very proud.

Methinks and methought are splendid words for compositions. Miss
Dearborn likes them very much, but Alice and I never bring them in to
suit her. Methought means the same as I thought, but sounds better.
Example: If you are telling a dream you had about your aged aunt:

     Methought I heard her say
     My child you have so useful been
     You need not sew today.

This is a good example one way, but too unlikely, woe is me!

This afternoon I was walking over to the store to buy molasses, and as
I came off the bridge and turned up the hill, I saw lots and lots of
heelprints in the side of the road, heelprints with little spike holes
in them.

“Oh! The river drivers have come from up country,” I thought, “and
they'll be breaking the jam at our falls tomorrow.” I looked everywhere
about and not a man did I see, but still I knew I was not mistaken for
the heelprints could not lie. All the way over and back I thought about
it, though unfortunately forgetting the molasses, and Alice Robinson
not being able to come out, I took playtime to write a story. It is
the first grown-up one I ever did, and is intended to be like Cora the
Doctor's Wife, not like a school composition. It is written for Mr. Adam
Ladd, and people like him who live in Boston, and is the printed kind
you get money for, to pay off a mortgage.

* * * * *

LANCELOT OR THE PARTED LOVERS

A beautiful village maiden was betrothed to a stallwart river driver,
but they had high and bitter words and parted, he to weep into the
crystal stream as he drove his logs, and she to sigh and moan as she
went about her round of household tasks.

At eventide the maiden was wont to lean over the bridge and her tears
also fell into the foaming stream; so, though the two unhappy lovers did
not know it, the river was their friend, the only one to whom they told
their secrets and wept into.

The months crept on and it was the next July when the maiden was passing
over the bridge and up the hill. Suddenly she spied footprints on the
sands of time.

“The river drivers have come again!” she cried, putting her hand to
her side for she had a slight heart trouble like Cora and Mrs. Peter
Meserve, that doesn't kill.

“They _have_ come indeed; _especially one you know_,” said a voice, and
out from the alder bushes sprung Lancelot Littlefield, for that was the
lover's name and it was none other than he. His hair was curly and like
living gold. His shirt, white of flannel, was new and dry, and of a
handsome color, and as the maiden looked at him she could think of
nought but a fairy prince.

“Forgive,” she mermered, stretching out her waisted hands.

“Nay, sweet,” he replied. “'Tis I should say that to you,” and bending
gracefully on one knee he kissed the hem of her dress. It was a rich
pink gingham check, ellaborately ornamented with white tape trimming.

Clasping each other to the heart like Cora and the Doctor, they stood
there for a long while, till they heard the rumble of wheels on the
bridge and knew they must disentangle.

The wheels came nearer and verily! it was the maiden's father.

“Can I wed with your fair daughter this very moon,” asked Lancelot, who
will not be called his whole name again in this story.

“You may,” said the father, “for lo! she has been ready and waiting for
many months.” This he said not noting how he was shaming the maiden,
whose name was Linda Rowenetta.

Then and there the nuptial day was appointed and when it came, the
marriage knot was tied upon the river bank where first they met; the
river bank where they had parted in anger, and where they had again
scealeld their vows and clasped each other to the heart. And it was very
low water that summer, and the river always thought it was because no
tears dropped into it but so many smiles that like sunshine they dried
it up.

R.R.R.

Finis

* * * * *


CAREERS

November, 187--

Long ago when I used to watch Miss Ross painting the old mill at
Sunnybrook I thought I would be a painter, for Miss Ross went to Paris
France where she bought my bead purse and pink parasol and I thought
I would like to see a street with beautiful bright-colored things
sparkling and hanging in the store windows.

Then when the missionaries from Syria came to stay at the brick house
Mrs. Burch said that after I had experienced religion I must learn music
and train my voice and go out to heathen lands and save souls, so I
thought that would be my career. But we girls tried to have a branch and
be home missionaries and it did not work well. Emma Jane's father would
not let her have her birthday party when he found out what she had done
and Aunt Jane sent me up to Jake Moody's to tell him we did not mean
to be rude when we asked him to go to meeting more often. He said all
right, but just let him catch that little dough-faced Perkins young one
in his yard once more and she'd have reason to remember the call, which
was just as rude and impolite as our trying to lead him to a purer and a
better life.

Then Uncle Jerry and Mr. Aladdin and Miss Dearborn liked my
compositions, and I thought I'd better be a writer, for I must be
something the minute I'm seventeen, or how shall we ever get the
mortgage off the farm? But even that hope is taken away from me now,
for Uncle Jerry made fun of my story Lancelot Or The Parted Lovers and I
have decided to be a teacher like Miss Dearborn.


The pathetic announcement of a change in the career and life purposes of
Rebecca was brought about by her reading the grown-up story to Mr. and
Mrs. Jeremiah Cobb after supper in the orchard. Uncle Jerry was the
person who had maintained all along that Riverboro people would not make
a story; and Lancelot or The Parted Lovers was intended to refute that
assertion at once and forever; an assertion which Rebecca regarded
(quite truly) as untenable, though why she certainly never could have
explained. Unfortunately Lancelot was a poor missionary, quite unfitted
for the high achievements to which he was destined by the youthful
novelist, and Uncle Jerry, though a stage-driver and no reading man, at
once perceived the flabbiness and transparency of the Parted Lovers the
moment they were held up to his inspection.

“You see Riverboro people _will_ make a story!” asserted Rebecca
triumphantly as she finished her reading and folded the paper. “And it
all came from my noticing the river drivers' tracks by the roadside, and
wondering about them; and wondering always makes stories; the minister
says so.”

“Ye-es,” allowed Uncle Jerry reflectively, tipping his chair back
against the apple tree and forcing his slow mind to violent and
instantaneous action, for Rebecca was his pride and joy; a person, in
his opinion, of superhuman talent, one therefore to be “whittled into
shape” if occasion demanded.

“It's a Riverboro story, sure enough, because you've got the river
and the bridge and the hill and the drivers all right there in it; but
there's something awful queer 'bout it; the folks don't act Riverboro,
and don't talk Riverboro, cordin' to my notions. I call it a reg'lar
book story.”

“But,” objected Rebecca, “the people in Cinderella didn't act like us,
and you thought that was a beautiful story when I told it to you.”

“I know,” replied Uncle Jerry, gaining eloquence in the heat of
argument. “They didn't act like us, but 't any rate they acted like
'emselves! Somehow they was all of a piece. Cinderella was a little too
good, mebbe, and the sisters was most too thunderin' bad to live on the
face o' the earth, and that fayry old lady that kep' the punkin' coach
up her sleeve--well, anyhow, you jest believe that punkin' coach, rats,
mice, and all, when you're hearin' 'bout it, 'fore ever you stop to
think it ain't so.

“I don' know how tis, but the folks in that Cinderella story seem to
match together somehow; they're all pow'ful onlikely--the prince feller
with the glass slipper, and the hull bunch; but jest the same you kind
o' gulp 'em all down in a lump. But land, Rebecky, nobody'd swaller that
there village maiden o' your'n, and as for what's-his-name Littlefield,
that come out o' them bushes, such a feller never 'd 'a' be'n _in_
bushes! No, Rebecky, you're the smartest little critter there is in this
township, and you beat your Uncle Jerry all holler when it comes to
usin' a lead pencil, but I say that ain't no true Riverboro story! Look
at the way they talk! What was that 'bout being _'betrothed'?_”

“Betrothed is a genteel word for engaged to be married,” explained the
crushed and chastened author; and it was fortunate the doting old man
did not notice her eyes in the twilight, or he might have known that
tears were not far away.

“Well, that's all right, then; I'm as ignorant as Cooper's cow when
it comes to the dictionary. How about what's-his-name callin' the girl
'Naysweet'?”

“I thought myself that sounded foolish,:” confessed Rebecca; “but it's
what the Doctor calls Cora when he tries to persuade her not to quarrel
with his mother who comes to live with them. I know they don't say it in
Riverboro or Temperance, but I thought perhaps it was Boston talk.”

“Well, it ain't!” asserted Mr. Cobb decisively. “I've druv Boston men
up in the stage from Milltown many's the time, and none of 'em ever
said Naysweet to me, nor nothin'like it. They talked like folks, every
mother's son of 'em! If I'd 'a' had that what's-his-name on the
'hurricane deck' o' the stage and he tried any naysweetin' on me, I'd
'a' pitched him into the cornfield, side o' the road. I guess you ain't
growed up enough for that kind of a story, Rebecky, for your poetry
can't be beat in York County, that's sure, and your compositions are
good enough to read out loud in town meetin' any day!”

Rebecca brightened up a little and bade the old couple her usual
affectionate good night, but she descended the hill in a saddened mood.
When she reached the bridge the sun, a ball of red fire, was setting
behind Squire Bean's woods. As she looked, it shone full on the broad,
still bosom of the river, and for one perfect instant the trees on the
shores were reflected, all swimming in a sea of pink. Leaning over the
rail, she watched the light fade from crimson to carmine, from carmine
to rose, from rose to amber, and from amber to gray. Then withdrawing
Lancelot or the Parted Lovers from her apron pocket, she tore the pages
into bits and dropped them into the water below with a sigh.

“Uncle Jerry never said a word about the ending!” she thought; “and that
was so nice!”

And she was right; but while Uncle Jerry was an illuminating critic when
it came to the actions and language of his Riverboro neighbors, he had
no power to direct the young mariner when she “followed the gleam,” and
used her imagination.

OUR SECRET SOCIETY

November, 187--

Our Secret society has just had a splendid picnic in Candace Milliken's
barn.

Our name is the B.O.S.S., and not a single boy in the village has been
able to guess it. It means Braid Over Shoulder Society, and that is the
sign. All the members wear one of their braids over the right shoulder
in front; the president's tied with red ribbon (I am the president) and
all the rest tied with blue.

To attract the attention of another member when in company or at a
public place we take the braid between the thumb and little finger and
stand carelessly on one leg. This is the Secret Signal and the password
is Sobb (B.O.S.S. spelled backwards) which was my idea and is thought
rather uncommon.

One of the rules of the B.O.S.S. is that any member may be required to
tell her besetting sin at any meeting, if asked to do so by a majority
of the members.

This was Candace Milliken's idea and much opposed by everybody, but when
it came to a vote so many of the girls were afraid of offending Candace
that they agreed because there was nobody else's father and mother
who would let us picnic in their barn and use their plow, harrow,
grindstone, sleigh, carryall, pung, sled, and wheelbarrow, which we did
and injured hardly anything.

They asked me to tell my besetting sin at the very first meeting, and it
nearly killed me to do it because it is such a common greedy one. It is
that I can't bear to call the other girls when I have found a thick spot
when we are out berrying in the summer time.

After I confessed, which made me dreadfully ashamed, every one of the
girls seemed surprised and said they had never noticed that one but had
each thought of something very different that I would be sure to think
was my besetting sin. Then Emma Jane said that rather than tell hers she
would resign from the Society and miss the picnic. So it made so
much trouble that Candace gave up. We struck out the rule from the
constitution and I had told my sin for nothing.

The reason we named ourselves the B.O.S.S. is that Minnie Smellie has
had her head shaved after scarlet fever and has no braid, so she can't
be a member.

I don't want her for a member but I can't be happy thinking she will
feel slighted, and it takes away half the pleasure of belonging to the
Society myself and being president.

That, I think, is the principal trouble about doing mean and unkind
things; that you can't do wrong and feel right, or be bad and feel good.
If you only could you could do anything that came into your mind yet
always be happy.

Minnie Smellie spoils everything she comes into but I suppose we
other girls must either have our hair shaved and call ourselves The
Baldheadians or let her be some kind of a special officer in the
B.O.S.S.

She might be the B.I.T.U.D. member (Braid in the Upper Drawer), for
there is where Mrs. Smellie keeps it now that it is cut off.

WINTER THOUGHTS

March, 187--

It is not such a cold day for March and I am up in the barn chamber with
my coat and hood on and Aunt Jane's waterproof and my mittens.

After I do three pages I am going to hide away this book in the haymow
till spring.

Perhaps they get made into icicles on the way but I do not seem to have
any thoughts in the winter time. The barn chamber is full of thoughts in
warm weather. The sky gives them to me, and the trees and flowers, and
the birds, and the river; but now it is always gray and nipping, the
branches are bare and the river is frozen.

It is too cold to write in my bedroom but while we still kept an open
fire I had a few thoughts, but now there is an air-tight stove in the
dining room where we sit, and we seem so close together, Aunt Miranda,
Aunt Jane and I that I don't like to write in my book for fear they will
ask me to read out loud my secret thoughts.

I have just read over the first part of my Thought Book and I have
outgrown it all, just exactly as I have outgrown my last year's drab
cashmere.

It is very queer how anybody can change so fast in a few months, but I
remember that Emma Jane's cat had kittens the day my book was bought at
Watson's store. Mrs. Perkins kept the prettiest white one, Abijah Flagg
drowning all the others.

It seems strange to me that cats will go on having kittens when they
know what becomes of them! We were very sad about it, but Mrs. Perkins
said it was the way of the world and how things had to be.

I cannot help being glad that they do not do the same with children, or
John and Jenny Mira Mark and me would all have had stones tied to our
necks and been dropped into the deepest part of Sunny Brook, for Hannah
and Fanny are the only truly handsome ones in the family.

Mrs. Perkins says I dress up well, but never being dressed up it does
not matter much. At least they didn't wait to dress up the kittens to
see how they would improve, before drowning them, but decided right
away.

Emma Jane's kitten that was born the same day this book was is now quite
an old cat who knows the way of the world herself, and how things have
to be, for she has had one batch of kittens drowned already.

So perhaps it is not strange that my Thought Book seems so babyish and
foolish to me when I think of all I have gone through and the millions
of things I have learned, and how much better I spell than I did ten
months ago.

My fingers are cold through the mittens, so good-bye dear Thought Book,
friend of my childhood, now so far far behind me!

I will hide you in the haymow where you'll be warm and cosy all the long
winter and where nobody can find you again in the summer time but your
affectionate author,

Rebecca Rowena Randall.




Fourth Chronicle. A TRAGEDY IN MILLINERY


I

Emma Jane Perkins's new winter dress was a blue and green Scotch plaid
poplin, trimmed with narrow green velvet-ribbon and steel nail-heads.
She had a gray jacket of thick furry cloth with large steel buttons
up the front, a pair of green kid gloves, and a gray felt hat with an
encircling band of bright green feathers. The band began in front with
a bird's head and ended behind with a bird's tail, and angels could have
desired no more beautiful toilette. That was her opinion, and it was
shared to the full by Rebecca.

But Emma Jane, as Rebecca had once described her to Mr. Adam Ladd, was
a rich blacksmith's daughter, and she, Rebecca, was a little half-orphan
from a mortgaged farm “up Temperance way,” dependent upon her spinster
aunts for board, clothes, and schooling. Scotch plaid poplins were
manifestly not for her, but dark-colored woolen stuffs were, and
mittens, and last winter's coats and furs.

And how about hats? Was there hope in store for her there? she wondered,
as she walked home from the Perkins house, full of admiration for Emma
Jane's winter outfit, and loyally trying to keep that admiration free
from wicked envy. Her red-winged black hat was her second best, and
although it was shabby she still liked it, but it would never do for
church, even in Aunt Miranda's strange and never-to-be-comprehended
views of suitable raiment.

There was a brown felt turban in existence, if one could call it
existence when it had been rained on, snowed on, and hailed on for two
seasons; but the trimmings had at any rate perished quite off the face
of the earth, that was one comfort!

Emma Jane had said, rather indiscreetly, that at the village milliner's
at Milliken's Mills there was a perfectly elegant pink breast to be had,
a breast that began in a perfectly elegant solferino and terminated in a
perfectly elegant magenta; two colors much in vogue at that time. If
the old brown hat was to be her portion yet another winter, would Aunt
Miranda conceal its deficiencies from a carping world beneath the shaded
solferino breast? _Would_ she, that was the question?

Filled with these perplexing thoughts, Rebecca entered the brick house,
hung up her hood in the entry, and went into the dining-room.

Miss Jane was not there, but Aunt Miranda sat by the window with her lap
full of sewing things, and a chair piled with pasteboard boxes by her
side. In one hand was the ancient, battered, brown felt turban, and in
the other were the orange and black porcupine quills from Rebecca's last
summer's hat; from the hat of the summer before that, and the summer
before that, and so on back to prehistoric ages of which her childish
memory kept no specific record, though she was sure that Temperance and
Riverboro society did. Truly a sight to chill the blood of any eager
young dreamer who had been looking at gayer plumage!

Miss Sawyer glanced up for a second with a satisfied expression and then
bent her eyes again upon her work.

“If I was going to buy a hat trimming,” she said, “I couldn't select
anything better or more economical than these quills! Your mother had
them when she was married, and you wore them the day you come to the
brick house from the farm; and I said to myself then that they looked
kind of outlandish, but I've grown to like 'em now I've got used to 'em.
You've been here for goin' on two years and they've hardly be'n out
o'wear, summer or winter, more'n a month to a time! I declare they do
beat all for service! It don't seem as if your mother could 'a' chose
'em,--Aurelia was always such a poor buyer! The black spills are 'bout
as good as new, but the orange ones are gittin' a little mite faded and
shabby. I wonder if I couldn't dip all of 'em in shoe blackin'? It seems
real queer to put a porcupine into hat trimmin', though I declare I
don't know jest what the animiles are like, it's be'n so long sence
I looked at the pictures of 'em in a geography. I always thought their
quills stood out straight and angry, but these kind o' curls round some
at the ends, and that makes 'em stand the wind better. How do you like
'em on the brown felt?” she asked, inclining her head in a
discriminating attitude and poising them awkwardly on the hat with her
work-stained hand.

How did she like them on the brown felt indeed?

Miss Sawyer had not been looking at Rebecca, but the child's eyes were
flashing, her bosom heaving, and her cheeks glowing with sudden rage
and despair. All at once something happened. She forgot that she was
speaking to an older person; forgot that she was dependent; forgot
everything but her disappointment at losing the solferino breast,
remembering nothing but the enchanting, dazzling beauty of Emma Jane
Perkins's winter outfit; and suddenly, quite without warning, she burst
into a torrent of protest.

“I will _not_ wear those hateful porcupine quills again this winter! I
will not! It's wicked, _wicked_ to expect me to! Oh! How I wish there
never had been any porcupines in the world, or that all of them had died
before silly, hateful people ever thought of trimming hat with them!
They curl round and tickle my ear! They blow against my cheek and sting
it like needles! They do look outlandish, you said so yourself a minute
ago. Nobody ever had any but only just me! The only porcupine was made
into the only quills for me and nobody else! I wish instead of sticking
_out_ of the nasty beasts, that they stuck _into_ them, same as they do
into my cheek! I suffer, suffer, suffer, wearing them and hating them,
and they will last forever and forever, and when I'm dead and can't help
myself, somebody'll rip them out of my last year's hat and stick them
on my head, and I'll be buried in them! Well, when _I_ am buried _they_
will be, that's one good thing! Oh, if I ever have a child I'll let her
choose her own feathers and not make her wear ugly things like pigs'
bristles and porcupine quills!”

With this lengthy tirade Rebecca vanished like a meteor, through the
door and down the street, while Miranda Sawyer gasped for breath, and
prayed to Heaven to help her understand such human whirlwinds as this
Randall niece of hers.

This was at three o'clock, and at half-past three Rebecca was kneeling
on the rag carpet with her head in her aunt's apron, sobbing her
contrition.

“Oh! Aunt Miranda, do forgive me if you can. It's the only time I've
been bad for months! You know it is! You know you said last week I
hadn't been any trouble lately. Something broke inside of me and came
tumbling out of my mouth in ugly words! The porcupine quills make me
feel just as a bull does when he sees a red cloth; nobody understands
how I suffer with them!”

Miranda Sawyer had learned a few lessons in the last two years, lessons
which were making her (at least on her “good days”) a trifle kinder, and
at any rate a juster woman than she used to be. When she alighted on the
wrong side of her four-poster in the morning, or felt an extra touch of
rheumatism, she was still grim and unyielding; but sometimes a curious
sort of melting process seemed to go on within her, when her whole bony
structure softened, and her eyes grew less vitreous. At such moments
Rebecca used to feel as if a superincumbent iron pot had been lifted off
her head, allowing her to breath freely and enjoy the sunshine.

“Well,” she said finally, after staring first at Rebecca and then at the
porcupine quills, as if to gain some insight into the situation, “well,
I never, sence I was born int' the world, heerd such a speech as you've
spoke, an' I guess there probably never was one. You'd better tell the
minister what you said and see what he thinks of his prize Sunday-school
scholar. But I'm too old and tired to scold and fuss, and try to train
you same as I did at first. You can punish yourself this time, like
you used to. Go fire something down the well, same as you did your pink
parasol! You've apologized and we won't say no more about it today, but
I expect you to show by extry good conduct how sorry you be! You care
altogether too much about your looks and your clothes for a child, and
you've got a temper that'll certainly land you in state's prison some o'
these days!”

Rebecca wiped her eyes and laughed aloud. “No, no, Aunt Miranda, it
won't, really! That wasn't temper; I don't get angry with _people_; but
only, once in a long while, with things; like those,--cover them up
quick before I begin again! I'm all right! Shower's over, sun's out!”

Miss Miranda looked at her searchingly and uncomprehendingly. Rebecca's
state of mind came perilously near to disease, she thought.

“Have you seen me buyin' any new bunnits, or your Aunt Jane?” she asked
cuttingly. “Is there any particular reason why you should dress better
than your elders? You might as well know that we're short of cash just
now, your Aunt Jane and me, and have no intention of riggin' you out
like a Milltown fact'ry girl.”

“Oh-h!” cried Rebecca, the quick tears starting again to her eyes and
the color fading out of her cheeks, as she scrambled up from her knees
to a seat on the sofa beside her aunt. “Oh-h! How ashamed I am! Quick,
sew those quills on to the brown turban while I'm good! If I can't stand
them I'll make a neat little gingham bag and slip over them!”

And so the matter ended, not as it customarily did, with cold words on
Miss Miranda's part and bitter feelings on Rebecca's, but with a gleam
of mutual understanding.

Mrs. Cobb, who was a master hand at coloring, dipped the offending
quills in brown dye and left them to soak in it all night, not only
making them a nice warm color, but somewhat weakening their rocky
spines, so that they were not quite as rampantly hideous as before, in
Rebecca's opinion.

Then Mrs. Perkins went to her bandbox in the attic and gave Miss
Dearborn some pale blue velvet, with which she bound the brim of the
brown turban and made a wonderful rosette, out of which the porcupine's
defensive armor sprang, buoyantly and gallantly, like the plume of Henry
of Navarre.

Rebecca was resigned, if not greatly comforted, but she had grace enough
to conceal her feelings, now that she knew economy was at the root
of some of her aunt's decrees in matters of dress; and she managed to
forget the solferino breast, save in sleep, where a vision of it had a
way of appearing to her, dangling from the ceiling, and dazzling her
so with its rich color that she used to hope the milliner would sell it
that she might never be tempted with it when she passed the shop window.

One day, not long afterward, Miss Miranda borrowed Mr. Perkins's horse
and wagon and took Rebecca with her on a drive to Union, to see about
some sausage meat and head cheese. She intended to call on Mrs. Cobb,
order a load of pine wood from Mr. Strout on the way, and leave some
rags for a rug with old Mrs. Pease, so that the journey could be made
as profitable as possible, consistent with the loss of time and the wear
and tear on her second-best black dress.

The red-winged black hat was forcibly removed from Rebecca's head just
before starting, and the nightmare turban substituted.

“You might as well begin to wear it first as last,” remarked Miranda,
while Jane stood in the side door and sympathized secretly with Rebecca.

“I will!” said Rebecca, ramming the stiff turban down on her head with a
vindictive grimace, and snapping the elastic under her long braids; “but
it makes me think of what Mr. Robinson said when the minister told him
his mother-in-law would ride in the same buggy with him at his wife's
funeral.”

“I can't see how any speech of Mr. Robinson's, made years an' years ago,
can have anything to do with wearin' your turban down to Union,” said
Miranda, settling the lap robe over her knees.

“Well, it can; because he said: Have it that way, then, but it'll spile
the hull blamed trip for me!'”

Jane closed the door suddenly, partly because she experienced a desire
to smile (a desire she had not felt for years before Rebecca came to
the brick house to live), and partly because she had no wish to overhear
what her sister would say when she took in the full significance of
Rebecca's anecdote, which was a favorite one with Mr. Perkins.

It was a cold blustering day with a high wind that promised to bring an
early fall of snow. The trees were stripped bare of leaves, the
ground was hard, and the wagon wheels rattled noisily over the
thank-you-ma'ams.

“I'm glad I wore my Paisley shawl over my cloak,” said Miranda. “Be you
warm enough, Rebecca? Tie that white rigolette tighter round your neck.
The wind fairly blows through my bones. I most wish 't we'd waited till
a pleasanter day, for this Union road is all up hill or down, and we
shan't get over the ground fast, it's so rough. Don't forget, when you
go into Scott's, to say I want all the trimmin's when they send me the
pork, for mebbe I can try out a little mite o' lard. The last load o'
pine's gone turrible quick; I must see if 'Bijah Flagg can't get us some
cut-rounds at the mills, when he hauls for Squire Bean next time. Keep
your mind on your drivin', Rebecca, and don't look at the trees and the
sky so much. It's the same sky and same trees that have been here right
along. Go awful slow down this hill and walk the hoss over Cook's Brook
bridge, for I always suspicion it's goin' to break down under me, an' I
shouldn't want to be dropped into that fast runnin' water this cold day.
It'll be froze stiff by this time next week. Hadn't you better get out
and lead”--

The rest of the sentence was very possibly not vital, but at any rate
it was never completed, for in the middle of the bridge a fierce gale
of wind took Miss Miranda's Paisley shawl and blew it over her head. The
long heavy ends whirled in opposite directions and wrapped themselves
tightly about her wavering bonnet. Rebecca had the whip and the reins,
and in trying to rescue her struggling aunt could not steady her own
hat, which was suddenly torn from her head and tossed against the bridge
rail, where it trembled and flapped for an instant.

“My hat! Oh! Aunt Miranda, my hateful hat!” cried Rebecca, never
remembering at the instant how often she had prayed that the “fretful
porcupine” might some time vanish in this violent manner, since it
refused to die a natural death.

She had already stopped the horse, so, giving her aunt's shawl one last
desperate twitch, she slipped out between the wagon wheels, and darted
in the direction of the hated object, the loss of which had dignified it
with a temporary value and importance.

The stiff brown turban rose in the air, then dropped and flew along the
bridge; Rebecca pursued; it danced along and stuck between two of the
railings; Rebecca flew after it, her long braids floating in the wind.

“Come back! Come back! Don't leave me alone with the team. I won't have
it! Come back, and leave your hat!”

Miranda had at length extricated herself from the submerging shawl, but
she was so blinded by the wind, and so confused that she did not measure
the financial loss involved in her commands.

Rebecca heard, but her spirit being in arms, she made one more mad
scramble for the vagrant hat, which now seemed possessed with an evil
spirit, for it flew back and forth, and bounded here and there, like
a living thing, finally distinguishing itself by blowing between the
horse's front and hind legs, Rebecca trying to circumvent it by going
around the wagon, and meeting it on the other side.

It was no use; as she darted from behind the wheels the wind gave the
hat an extra whirl, and scurrying in the opposite direction it soared
above the bridge rail and disappeared into the rapid water below.

“Get in again!” cried Miranda, holding on her bonnet. “You done your
best and it can't be helped, I only wish't I'd let you wear your black
hat as you wanted to; and I wish't we'd never come such a day! The shawl
has broke the stems of the velvet geraniums in my bonnet, and the wind
has blowed away my shawl pin and my back comb. I'd like to give up and
turn right back this minute, but I don't like to borrer Perkins's hoss
again this month. When we get up in the woods you can smooth your hair
down and tie the rigolette over your head and settle what's left of my
bonnet; it'll be an expensive errant, this will!”

 * * * * *

II

It was not till next morning that Rebecca's heart really began its song
of thanksgiving. Her Aunt Miranda announced at breakfast, that as Mrs.
Perkins was going to Milliken's Mills, Rebecca might go too, and buy a
serviceable hat.

“You mustn't pay over two dollars and a half, and you mustn't get the
pink bird without Mrs. Perkins says, and the milliner says, that it
won't fade nor moult. Don't buy a light-colored felt because you'll get
sick of it in two or three years same as you did the brown one. I always
liked the shape of the brown one, and you'll never get another trimmin'
that'll wear like them quills.”

“I hope not!” thought Rebecca.

“If you had put your elastic under your chin, same as you used to, and
not worn it behind because you think it's more grown-up an' fash'onable,
the wind never'd 'a' took the hat off your head, and you wouldn't 'a'
lost it; but the mischief's done and you can go right over to Mis'
Perkins now, so you won't miss her nor keep her waitin'. The two dollars
and a half is in an envelope side o' the clock.”

Rebecca swallowed the last spoonful of picked-up codfish on her plate,
wiped her lips, and rose from her chair happier than the seraphs in
Paradise.

The porcupine quills had disappeared from her life, and without any
fault or violence on her part. She was wholly innocent and virtuous, but
nevertheless she was going to have a new hat with the solferino breast,
should the adored object prove, under rigorous examination, to be
practically indestructible.

     “Whene'er I take my walks abroad,
       How many hats I'll see;
     But if they're trimmed with hedgehog quills
       They'll not belong to me!”

So she improvised, secretly and ecstatically, as she went towards the
side entry.

“There's 'Bijah Flagg drivin' in,” said Miss Miranda, going to the
window. “Step out and see what he's got, Jane; some passel from the
Squire, I guess. It's a paper bag and it may be a punkin, though he
wouldn't wrop up a punkin, come to think of it! Shet the dinin' room
door, Jane; it's turrible drafty. Make haste, for the Squire's hoss
never stan's still a minute 'cept when he's goin'!”

Abijah Flagg alighted and approached the side door with a grin.

“Guess what I've got for ye, Rebecky?”

No throb of prophetic soul warned Rebecca of her approaching doom.

“Nodhead apples?” she sparkled, looking as bright and rosy and
satin-skinned as an apple herself.

“No; guess again.”

“A flowering geranium?”

“Guess again!”

“Nuts? Oh! I can't, Bijah; I'm just going to Milliken's Mills on an
errand, and I'm afraid of missing Mrs. Perkins. Show me quick! Is it
really for me, or for Aunt Miranda?”

“Reely for you, I guess!” and he opened the large brown paper bag and
drew from it the remains of a water-soaked hat!

They _were_ remains, but there was no doubt of their nature and substance.
They had clearly been a hat in the past, and one could even suppose
that, when resuscitated, they might again assume their original form in
some near and happy future.

Miss Miranda, full of curiosity, joined the group in the side entry at
this dramatic moment.

“Well, I never!” she exclaimed. “Where, and how under the canopy, did
you ever?”

“I was working on the dam at Union Falls yesterday,” chuckled Abijah,
with a pleased glance at each of the trio in turn, “an' I seen this
little bunnit skippin' over the water jest as Becky does over the road.
It's shaped kind o' like a boat, an' gorry, ef it wa'nt sailin' jest
like a boat! 'Where hev I seen that kind of a bristlin' plume?' thinks
I.”

(“Where indeed!” thought Rebecca stormily.)

“Then it come to me that I'd drove that plume to school and drove it to
meetin' an' drove it to the Fair an' drove it most everywheres on Becky.
So I reached out a pole an' ketched it 'fore it got in amongst the logs
an' come to any damage, an' here it is! The hat's passed in its checks,
I guess; looks kind as if a wet elephant had stepped on it; but the
plume's 'bout's good as new! I reely fetched the hat beck for the sake
o' the plume.”

“It was real good of you, 'Bijah, an' we're all of us obliged to you,”
 said Miranda, as she poised the hat on one hand and turned it slowly
with the other.

“Well, I do say,” she exclaimed, “and I guess I've said it before, that
of all the wearing' plumes that ever I see, that one's the wearin'est!
Seems though it just wouldn't give up. Look at the way it's held Mis'
Cobb's dye; it's about as brown's when it went int' the water.”

“Dyed, but not a mite dead,” grinned Abijah, who was somewhat celebrated
for his puns.

“And I declare,” Miranda continued, “when you think o' the fuss they
make about ostriches, killin' 'em off by hundreds for the sake o' their
feathers that'll string out and spoil in one hard rainstorm,--an' all
the time lettin' useful porcupines run round with their quills on, why
I can't hardly understand it, without milliners have found out jest
how good they do last, an' so they won't use 'em for trimmin'. 'Bijah's
right; the hat ain't no more use, Rebecca, but you can buy you another
this mornin'--any color or shape you fancy--an' have Miss Morton sew
these brown quills on to it with some kind of a buckle or a bow, jest
to hide the roots. Then you'll be fixed for another season, thanks to
'Bijah.”

Uncle Jerry and Aunt Sarah Cobb were made acquainted before very long
with the part that destiny, or Abijah Flagg, had played in Rebecca's
affairs, for, accompanied by the teacher, she walked to the old stage
driver's that same afternoon. Taking off her new hat with the venerable
trimming, she laid it somewhat ostentatiously upside down on the kitchen
table and left the room, dimpling a little more than usual.

Uncle Jerry rose from his seat, and, crossing the room, looked curiously
into the hat and found that a circular paper lining was neatly pinned
in the crown, and that it bore these lines, which were read aloud with
great effect by Miss Dearborn, and with her approval were copied in the
Thought Book for the benefit of posterity:

     “It was the bristling porcupine,
       As he stood on his native heath,
     He said, 'I'll pluck me some immortelles
       And make me up a wreath. 
     For tho' I may not live myself
       To more than a hundred and ten,
     My quills will last till crack of doom,
       And maybe after then.
     They can be colored blue or green
       Or orange, brown, or red,
     But often as they may be dyed
       They never will be dead.'
     And so the bristling porcupine
       As he stood on his native heath,
     Said, 'I think I'll pluck me some immortelles
       And make me up a wreath.'

                                         R.R.R.”




Fifth Chronicle. THE SAVING OF THE COLORS


I

Even when Rebecca had left school, having attained the great age of
seventeen and therefore able to look back over a past incredibly long
and full, she still reckoned time not by years, but by certain important
occurrences.

There was the year her father died; the year she left Sunnybrook Farm to
come to her aunts in Riverboro; the year Sister Hannah became engaged;
the year little Mira died; the year Abijah Flagg ceased to be Squire
Bean's chore-boy, and astounded Riverboro by departing for Limerick
Academy in search of an education; and finally the year of her
graduation, which, to the mind of seventeen, seems rather the
culmination than the beginning of existence.

Between these epoch-making events certain other happenings stood out in
bold relief against the gray of dull daily life.

There was the day she first met her friend of friends, “Mr. Aladdin,”
 and the later, even more radiant one when he gave her the coral
necklace. There was the day the Simpson family moved away from Riverboro
under a cloud, and she kissed Clara Belle fervently at the cross-roads,
telling her that she would always be faithful. There was the visit of
the Syrian missionaries to the brick house. That was a bright, romantic
memory, as strange and brilliant as the wonderful little birds' wings
and breasts that the strangers brought from the Far East. She remembered
the moment they asked her to choose some for herself, and the rapture
with which she stroked the beautiful things as they lay on the black
haircloth sofa. Then there was the coming of the new minister, for
though many were tried only one was chosen; and finally there was the
flag-raising, a festivity that thrilled Riverboro and Edgewood society
from centre to circumference, a festivity that took place just before
she entered the Female Seminary at Wareham and said good-by to kind Miss
Dearborn and the village school.

There must have been other flag-raisings in history,--even the persons
most interested in this particular one would grudgingly have allowed
that much,--but it would have seemed to them improbable that any such
flag-raising as theirs, either in magnitude of conception or brilliancy
of actual performance, could twice glorify the same century. Of some
pageants it is tacitly admitted that there can be no duplicates, and the
flag-raising at Riverboro Centre was one of these; so that it is small
wonder if Rebecca chose it as one of the important dates in her personal
almanac.

The new minister's wife was the being, under Providence, who had
conceived the germinal idea of the flag.

At this time the parish had almost settled down to the trembling belief
that they were united on a pastor. In the earlier time a minister was
chosen for life, and if he had faults, which was a probably enough
contingency, and if his congregation had any, which is within the bounds
of possibility, each bore with the other (not quite without friction),
as old-fashioned husbands and wives once did, before the easy way out of
the difficulty was discovered, or at least before it was popularized.

The faithful old parson had died after thirty years' preaching,
and perhaps the newer methods had begun to creep in, for it seemed
impossible to suit the two communities most interested in the choice.

The Rev. Mr. Davis, for example, was a spirited preacher, but persisted
in keeping two horses in the parsonage stable, and in exchanging
them whenever he could get faster ones. As a parochial visitor he was
incomparable, dashing from house to house with such speed that he could
cover the parish in a single afternoon. This sporting tendency, which
would never have been remarked in a British parson, was frowned upon in
a New England village, and Deacon Milliken told Mr. Davis, when giving
him what he alluded to as his “walking papers,” that they didn't want
the Edgewood church run by hoss power!

The next candidate pleased Edgewood, where morning preaching was held,
but the other parish, which had afternoon service, declined to accept
him because he wore a wig--an ill-matched, crookedly applied wig.

Number three was eloquent but given to gesticulation, and Mrs. Jere
Burbank, the president of the Dorcas Society, who sat in a front pew,
said she couldn't bear to see a preacher scramble round the pulpit hot
Sundays.

Number four, a genial, handsome man, gifted in prayer, was found to be
a Democrat. The congregation was overwhelmingly Republican in its
politics, and perceived something ludicrous, if not positively
blasphemous, in a Democrat preaching the gospel. (“Ananias and
Beelzebub'll be candidatin' here, first thing we know!” exclaimed the
outraged Republican nominee for district attorney.)

Number five had a feeble-minded child, which the hiring committee
prophesied, would always be standing in the parsonage front yard, making
talk for the other denominations.

Number six was the Rev. Judson Baxter, the present incumbent; and he
was voted to be as near perfection as a minister can be in this finite
world. His young wife had a small income of her own, a distinct and
unusual advantage, and the subscription committee hoped that they might
not be eternally driving over the country to get somebody's fifty cents
that had been over-due for eight months, but might take their onerous
duties a little more easily.

“It does seem as if our ministers were the poorest lot!” complained Mrs.
Robinson. “If their salary is two months behindhand they begin to be
nervous! Seems as though they might lay up a little before they come
here, and not live from hand to mouth so! The Baxters seem quite
different, and I only hope they won't get wasteful and run into debt.
They say she keeps the parlor blinds open 'bout half the time, and the
room is lit up so often evenin's that the neighbors think her and Mr.
Baxter must set in there. It don't seem hardly as if it could be so, but
Mrs. Buzzell says 'tis, and she says we might as well say good-by to the
parlor carpet, which is church property, for the Baxters are living all
over it!”

This criticism was the only discordant note in the chorus of praise, and
the people gradually grew accustomed to the open blinds and the overused
parlor carpet, which was just completing its twenty-fifth year of honest
service.

Mrs. Baxter communicated her patriotic idea of a new flag to the Dorcas
Society, proposing that the women should cut and make it themselves.

“It may not be quite as good as those manufactured in the large cities,”
 she said, “but we shall be proud to see our home-made flag flying in the
breeze, and it will mean all the more to the young voters growing up, to
remember that their mothers made it with their own hands.”

“How would it do to let some of the girls help?” modestly asked Miss
Dearborn, the Riverboro teacher. “We might choose the best sewers and
let them put in at least a few stitches, so that they can feel they have
a share in it.”

“Just the thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Baxter. “We can cut the stripes and sew
them together, and after we have basted on the white stars the girls can
apply them to the blue ground. We must have it ready for the campaign
rally, and we couldn't christen it at a better time than in this
presidential year.”

II

In this way the great enterprise was started, and day by day the
preparations went forward in the two villages.

The boys, as future voters and fighters, demanded an active share in
the proceedings, and were organized by Squire Bean into a fife and drum
corps, so that by day and night martial but most inharmonious music woke
the echoes, and deafened mothers felt their patriotism oozing out at the
soles of their shoes.

Dick Carter was made captain, for his grandfather had a gold medal
given him by Queen Victoria for rescuing three hundred and twenty-six
passengers from a sinking British vessel. Riverboro thought it high time
to pay some graceful tribute to Great Britain in return for her handsome
conduct to Captain Nahum Carter, and human imagination could contrive
nothing more impressive than a vicarious share in the flag raising.

Living Perkins tried to be happy in the ranks, for he was offered no
official position, principally, Mrs. Smellie observed, because “his
father's war record wa'n't clean.” “Oh, yes! Jim Perkins went to the
war,” she continued. “He hid out behind the hencoop when they was
draftin', but they found him and took him along. He got into one battle,
too, somehow or 'nother, but he run away from it. He was allers
cautious, Jim was; if he ever see trouble of any kind comin' towards
him, he was out o' sight 'fore it got a chance to light. He said eight
dollars a month, without bounty, wouldn't pay _him_ to stop bullets for.
He wouldn't fight a skeeter, Jim wouldn't, but land! we ain't to war all
the time, and he's a good neighbor and a good blacksmith.”

Miss Dearborn was to be Columbia and the older girls of the two schools
were to be the States. Such trade in muslins and red, white, and blue
ribbons had never been known since “Watson kep' store,” and the number
of brief white petticoats hanging out to bleach would have caused the
passing stranger to imagine Riverboro a continual dancing school.

Juvenile virtue, both male and female, reached an almost impossible
height, for parents had only to lift a finger and say, “you shan't go
to the flag raising!” and the refractory spirit at once armed itself for
new struggles toward the perfect life.

Mr. Jeremiah Cobb had consented to impersonate Uncle Sam, and was to
drive Columbia and the States to the “raising” on the top of his own
stage. Meantime the boys were drilling, the ladies were cutting and
basting and stitching, and the girls were sewing on stars; for the
starry part of the spangled banner was to remain with each of them in
turn until she had performed her share of the work.

It was felt by one and all a fine and splendid service indeed to help
in the making of the flag, and if Rebecca was proud to be of the chosen
ones, so was her Aunt Jane Sawyer, who had taught her all her delicate
stitches.

On a long-looked-for afternoon in August the minister's wife drove up
to the brick house door, and handed out the great piece of bunting to
Rebecca, who received it in her arms with as much solemnity as if it had
been a child awaiting baptismal rites.

“I'm so glad!” she sighed happily. “I thought it would never come my
turn!”

“You should have had it a week ago, but Huldah Meserve upset the ink
bottle over her star, and we had to baste on another one. You are the
last, though, and then we shall sew the stars and stripes together, and
Seth Strout will get the top ready for hanging. Just think, it won't
be many days before you children will be pulling the rope with all your
strength, the band will be playing, the men will be cheering, and the
new flag will go higher and higher, till the red, white, and blue shows
against the sky!”

Rebecca's eyes fairly blazed. “Shall I 'fell on' my star, or buttonhole
it?” she asked.

“Look at all the others and make the most beautiful stitches you can,
that's all. It is your star, you know, and you can even imagine it is
your state, and try and have it the best of all. If everybody else
is trying to do the same thing with her state, that will make a great
country, won't it?”

Rebecca's eyes spoke glad confirmation of the idea. “My star, my state!”
 she repeated joyously. “Oh, Mrs. Baxter, I'll make such fine stitches
you'll think the white grew out of the blue!”

The new minister's wife looked pleased to see her spark kindle a flame
in the young heart. “You can sew so much of yourself into your star,”
 she went on in the glad voice that made her so winsome, “that when you
are an old lady you can put on your specs and find it among all the
others. Good-by! Come up to the parsonage Saturday afternoon; Mr. Baxter
wants to see you.”

“Judson, help that dear little genius of a Rebecca all you can!” she
said that night, when they were cosily talking in their parlor and
living “all over” the parish carpet. “I don't know what she may, or may
not, come to, some day; I only wish she were ours! If you could have
seen her clasp the flag tight in her arms and put her cheek against it,
and watched the tears of feeling start in her eyes when I told her
that her star was her state! I kept whispering to myself, 'Covet not thy
neighbor's child!'”

Daily at four o'clock Rebecca scrubbed her hands almost to the bone,
brushed her hair, and otherwise prepared herself in body, mind, and
spirit for the consecrated labor of sewing on her star. All the time
that her needle cautiously, conscientiously formed the tiny stitches she
was making rhymes “in her head,” her favorite achievement being this:

     “Your star, my star, all our stars together,
        They make the dear old banner proud
      To float in the bright fall weather.”

There was much discussion as to which of the girls should impersonate
the State of Maine, for that was felt to be the highest honor in the
gift of the committee.

Alice Robinson was the prettiest child in the village, but she was very
shy and by no means a general favorite.

Minnie Smellie possessed the handsomest dress and a pair of white
slippers and open-work stockings that nearly carried the day. Still, as
Miss Delia Weeks well said, she was so stupid that if she should
suck her thumb in the very middle of the exercises nobody'd be a dite
surprised!

Huldah Meserve was next voted upon, and the fact that if she were not
chosen her father might withdraw his subscription to the brass band fund
was a matter for grave consideration.

“I kind o' hate to have such a giggler for the State of Maine; let her
be the Goddess of Liberty,” proposed Mrs. Burbank, whose patriotism was
more local than national.

“How would Rebecca Randall do for Maine, and let her speak some of her
verses?” suggested the new minister's wife, who, could she have had her
way, would have given all the prominent parts to Rebecca, from Uncle Sam
down.

So, beauty, fashion, and wealth having been tried and found wanting, the
committee discussed the claims of talent, and it transpired that to
the awe-stricken Rebecca fell the chief plum in the pudding. It was a
tribute to her gifts that there was no jealousy or envy among the other
girls; they readily conceded her special fitness for the role.

Her life had not been pressed down full to the brim of pleasures, and
she had a sort of distrust of joy in the bud. Not until she saw it in
full radiance of bloom did she dare embrace it. She had never read
any verse but Byron, Felicia Hemans, bits of “Paradise Lost,” and the
selections in the school readers, but she would have agreed heartily
with the poet who said:

     “Not by appointment do we meet delight
      And joy; they heed not our expectancy;
      But round some corner in the streets of life
      They on a sudden clasp us with a smile.”

For many nights before the raising, when she went to her bed she said to
herself, after she had finished her prayers: “It can't be true that I'm
chosen for the State of Maine! It just _can't_ be true! Nobody could be
good _enough_, but oh, I'll try to be as good as I can! To be going to
Wareham Seminary next week and to be the State of Maine too! Oh! I must
pray _hard_ to God to keep me meek and humble!”

III

The flag was to be raised on a Tuesday, and on the previous Sunday it
became known to the children that Clara Belle Simpson was coming back
from Acreville, coming to live with Mrs. Fogg and take care of the
baby, called by the neighborhood boys “the Fogg horn,” on account of his
excellent voice production.

Clara Belle was one of Miss Dearborn's original flock, and if she
were left wholly out of the festivities she would be the only girl of
suitable age to be thus slighted; it seemed clear to the juvenile mind,
therefore, that neither she nor her descendants would ever recover from
such a blow. But, under all the circumstances, would she be allowed to
join in the procession? Even Rebecca, the optimistic, feared not,
and the committee confirmed her fears by saying that Abner Simpson's
daughter certainly could not take any prominent part in the ceremony,
but they hoped that Mrs. Fogg would allow her to witness it.

When Abner Simpson, urged by the town authorities, took his wife and
seven children away from Riverboro to Acreville, just over the border in
the next county, Riverboro went to bed leaving its barn and shed doors
unfastened, and drew long breaths of gratitude to Providence.

Of most winning disposition and genial manners, Mr. Simpson had not
that instinctive comprehension of property rights which renders a man a
valuable citizen.

Squire Bean was his nearest neighbor, and he conceived the novel idea
of paying Simpson five dollars a year not to steal from him, a method
occasionally used in the Highlands in the early days.

The bargain was struck, and adhered to religiously for a twelve-month,
but on the second of January Mr. Simpson announced the verbal contract
as formally broken.

“I didn't know what I was doin' when I made it, Squire,” he urged.
“In the first place, it's a slur on my reputation and an injury to my
self-respect. Secondly, it's a nervous strain on me; and thirdly, five
dollars don't pay me!”

Squire Bean was so struck with the unique and convincing nature of
these arguments that he could scarcely restrain his admiration, and he
confessed to himself afterward, that unless Simpson's mental attitude
could be changed he was perhaps a fitter subject for medical science
than the state prison.

Abner was a most unusual thief, and conducted his operations with a tact
and neighborly consideration none too common in the profession. He would
never steal a man's scythe in haying-time, nor his fur lap-robe in the
coldest of the winter. The picking of a lock offered no attractions
to him; “he wa'n't no burglar,” he would have scornfully asserted. A
strange horse and wagon hitched by the roadside was the most flagrant
of his thefts; but it was the small things--the hatchet or axe on the
chopping-block, the tin pans sunning at the side door, a stray garment
bleaching on the grass, a hoe, rake, shovel, or a bag of early potatoes,
that tempted him most sorely; and these appealed to him not so much for
their intrinsic value as because they were so excellently adapted to
swapping. The swapping was really the enjoyable part of the procedure,
the theft was only a sad but necessary preliminary; for if Abner
himself had been a man of sufficient property to carry on his business
operations independently, it is doubtful if he would have helped himself
so freely to his neighbor's goods.

Riverboro regretted the loss of Mrs. Simpson, who was useful in
scrubbing, cleaning, and washing, and was thought to exercise some
influence over her predatory spouse. There was a story of their early
married life, when they had a farm; a story to the effect that Mrs.
Simpson always rode on every load of hay that her husband took to
Milltown, with the view of keeping him sober through the day. After he
turned out of the country road and approached the metropolis, it was
said that he used to bury the docile lady in the load. He would then
drive on to the scales, have the weight of the hay entered in the
buyer's book, take his horses to the stable for feed and water, and when
a favorable opportunity offered he would assist the hot and panting Mrs.
Simpson out of the side or back of the rack, and gallantly brush the
straw from her person. For this reason it was always asserted that Abner
Simpson sold his wife every time he went to Milltown, but the story was
never fully substantiated, and at all events it was the only suspected
blot on meek Mrs. Simpson's personal reputation.

As for the Simpson children, they were missed chiefly as familiar
figures by the roadside; but Rebecca honestly loved Clara Belle,
notwithstanding her Aunt Miranda's opposition to the intimacy. Rebecca's
“taste for low company” was a source of continual anxiety to her aunt.

“Anything that's human flesh is good enough for her!” Miranda groaned to
Jane. “She'll ride with the rag-sack-and-bottle peddler just as quick as
she would with the minister; she always sets beside the St. Vitus' dance
young one at Sabbath school; and she's forever riggin' and onriggin'
that dirty Simpson baby! She reminds me of a puppy that'll always go to
everybody that'll have him!”


It was thought very creditable to Mrs. Fogg that she sent for Clara
Belle to live with her and go to school part of the year.

“She'll be useful” said Mrs. Fogg, “and she'll be out of her father's
way, and so keep honest; though she's so awful hombly I've no fears for
her. A girl with her red hair, freckles, and cross-eyes can't fall into
no kind of sin, I don't believe.”

Mrs. Fogg requested that Clara Belle should be started on her journey
from Acreville by train and come the rest of the way by stage, and she
was disturbed to receive word on Sunday that Mr. Simpson had borrowed a
“good roader” from a new acquaintance, and would himself drive the girl
from Acreville to Riverboro, a distance of thirty-five miles. That he
would arrive in their vicinity on the very night before the flag-raising
was thought by Riverboro to be a public misfortune, and several
residents hastily determined to deny themselves a sight of the
festivities and remain watchfully on their own premises.

On Monday afternoon the children were rehearsing their songs at the
meeting-house. As Rebecca came out on the broad wooden steps she watched
Mrs. Peter Meserve's buggy out of sight, for in front, wrapped in a
cotton sheet, lay the previous flag. After a few chattering good-bys
and weather prophecies with the other girls, she started on her homeward
walk, dropping in at the parsonage to read her verses to the minister.

He welcomed her gladly as she removed her white cotton gloves (hastily
slipped on outside the door, for ceremony) and pushed back the funny hat
with the yellow and black porcupine quills--the hat with which she made
her first appearance in Riverboro society.

“You've heard the beginning, Mr. Baxter; now will you please tell me if
you like the last verse?” she asked, taking out her paper. “I've only
read it to Alice Robinson, and I think perhaps she can never be a poet,
though she's a splendid writer. Last year when she was twelve she wrote
a birthday poem to herself, and she made 'natal' rhyme with 'Milton,'
which, of course, it wouldn't. I remember every verse ended:

     'This is my day so natal
     And I will follow Milton.'

Another one of hers was written just because she couldn't help it, she
said. This was it:

     'Let me to the hills away,
        Give me pen and paper;
      I'll write until the earth will sway
        The story of my Maker.'”

The minister could scarcely refrain from smiling, but he controlled
himself that he might lose none of Rebecca's quaint observations.
When she was perfectly at ease, unwatched and uncriticised, she was a
marvelous companion.

“The name of the poem is going to be 'My Star,'” she continued, “and Mrs.
Baxter gave me all the ideas, but somehow there's a kind of magicness
when they get into poetry, don't you think so?” (Rebecca always talked
to grown people as if she were their age, or, a more subtle and truer
distinction, as if they were hers.)

“It has often been so remarked, in different words,” agreed the
minister.

“Mrs. Baxter said that each star was a state, and if each state did its
best we should have a splendid country. Then once she said that we ought
to be glad the war is over and the States are all at peace together; and
I thought Columbia must be glad, too, for Miss Dearborn says she's
the mother of all the States. So I'm going to have it end like this: I
didn't write it, I just sewed it while I was working on my star:

     For it's your star, my star, all the stars together,
       That make our country's flag so proud
     To float in the bright fall weather.
     Northern stars, Southern stars, stars of the East and West,
       Side by side they lie at peace
     On the dear flag's mother-breast.”

“'Oh! many are the poets that are sown by Nature,'” thought the
minister, quoting Wordsworth to himself. “And I wonder what becomes of
them! That's a pretty idea, little Rebecca, and I don't know whether
you or my wife ought to have the more praise. What made you think of the
stars lying on the flag's 'mother-breast'? Where did you get that word?”

“Why” (and the young poet looked rather puzzled), “that's the way it is;
the flag is the whole country--the mother--and the stars are the states.
The stars had to lie somewhere: '_lap_' nor '_arms_' wouldn't sound well
with 'West,' so, of course, I said '_breast_,'” Rebecca answered, with
some surprise at the question; and the minister put his hand under her
chin and kissed her softly on the forehead when he said good-by at the
door.

IV

Rebecca walked rapidly along in the gathering twilight, thinking of the
eventful morrow.

As she approached the turning on the left called the old Milltown
road, she saw a white horse and wagon, driven by a man with a rakish,
flapping, Panama hat, come rapidly around the turn and disappear over
the long hills leading down to the falls. There was no mistaking him;
there never was another Abner Simpson, with his lean height, his bushy
reddish hair, the gay cock of his hat, and the long piratical, upturned
mustaches, which the boys used to say were used as hat-racks by the
Simpson children at night. The old Milltown road ran past Mrs. Fogg's
house, so he must have left Clara Belle there, and Rebecca's heart
glowed to think that her poor little friend need not miss the raising.

She began to run now, fearful of being late for supper, and covered the
ground to the falls in a brief time. As she crossed the bridge she again
saw Abner Simpson's team, drawn up at the watering trough.

Coming a little nearer, with the view of inquiring for the family, her
quick eye caught sight of something unexpected. A gust of wind blew up
a corner of a linen lap-robe in the back of the wagon, and underneath
it she distinctly saw the white-sheeted bundle that held the flag; the
bundle with a tiny, tiny spot of red bunting peeping out at one corner.
It is true she had eaten, slept, dreamed red, white, and blue for weeks,
but there was no mistaking the evidence of her senses; the idolized
flag, longed for, worked for, sewed for, that flag was in the back of
Abner Simpson's wagon, and if so, what would become of the raising?

Acting on blind impulse, she ran toward the watering-trough, calling out
in her clear treble: “Mr. Simpson! Oh, Mr. Simpson, will you let me ride
a piece with you and hear all about Clara Belle? I'm going part way over
to the Centre on an errand.” (So she was; a most important errand,--to
recover the flag of her country at present in the hands of the foe!)

Mr. Simpson turned round in his seat and cried heartily, “Certain sure I
will!” for he liked the fair sex, young and old, and Rebecca had always
been a prime favorite with him. “Climb right in! How's everybody? Glad
to see ye! The folks talk 'bout ye from sun-up to sun-down, and Clara
Belle can't hardly wait for a sight of ye!”

Rebecca scrambled up, trembling and pale with excitement. She did not in
the least know what was going to happen, but she was sure that the flag,
when in the enemy's country, must be at least a little safer with the
State of Maine sitting on top of it!

Mr. Simpson began a long monologue about Acreville, the house he lived
in, the pond in front of it, Mrs. Simpson's health, and various items of
news about the children, varied by reports of his personal misfortunes.
He put no questions, and asked no replies, so this gave the
inexperienced soldier a few seconds to plan a campaign. There were
three houses to pass; the Browns' at the corner, the Millikens', and the
Robinsons' on the brow of the hill. If Mr. Robinson were in the front
yard she might tell Mr. Simpson she wanted to call there and ask Mr.
Robinson to hold the horse's head while she got out of the wagon.
Then she might fly to the back before Mr. Simpson could realize the
situation, and dragging out the precious bundle, sit on it hard, while
Mr. Robinson settled the matter of ownership with Mr. Simpson.

This was feasible, but it meant a quarrel between the two men, who held
an ancient grudge against each other, and Mr. Simpson was a valiant
fighter as the various sheriffs who had attempted to arrest him could
cordially testify. It also meant that everybody in the village would
hear of the incident and poor Clara Belle be branded again as the child
of a thief.

Another idea danced into her excited brain; such a clever one she could
hardly believe it hers. She might call Mr. Robinson to the wagon, and
when he came close to the wheels she might say, “all of a sudden”:
“Please take the flag out of the back of the wagon, Mr. Robinson. We
have brought it here for you to keep overnight.” Mr. Simpson might be
so surprised that he would give up his prize rather than be suspected of
stealing.

But as they neared the Robinsons' house there was not a sign of life
to be seen; so the last plan, ingenious though it was, was perforce
abandoned.

The road now lay between thick pine woods with no dwelling in sight.
It was growing dusk and Rebecca was driving along the lonely way with a
person who was generally called Slippery Simpson.

Not a thought of fear crossed her mind, save the fear of bungling in
her diplomacy, and so losing the flag. She knew Mr. Simpson well, and a
pleasanter man was seldom to be met. She recalled an afternoon when he
came home and surprised the whole school playing the Revolutionary War
in his helter-skelter dooryard, and the way in which he had joined the
British forces and impersonated General Burgoyne had greatly endeared
him to her. The only difficulty was to find proper words for her
delicate mission, for, of course, if Mr. Simpson's anger were aroused,
he would politely push her out of the wagon and drive away with the
flag. Perhaps if she led the conversation in the right direction an
opportunity would present itself. She well remembered how Emma Jane
Perkins had failed to convert Jacob Moody, simply because she failed to
“lead up” to the delicate question of his manner of life. Clearing her
throat nervously, she began:

“Is it likely to be fair tomorrow?”

“Guess so; clear as a bell. What's on foot; a picnic?”

“No; we're to have a grand flag-raising!” (“That is,” she thought, “if
we have any flag to raise!”)

“That so? Where?”

“The three villages are to club together and have a rally, and raise
the flag at the Centre. There'll be a brass band, and speakers, and the
Mayor of Portland, and the man that will be governor if he's elected,
and a dinner in the Grange Hall, and we girls are chosen to raise the
flag.”

“I want to know! That'll be grand, won't it?” (Still not a sign of
consciousness on the part of Abner.)

“I hope Mrs. Fogg will take Clara Belle, for it will be splendid to look
at! Mr. Cobb is going to be Uncle Sam and drive us on the stage. Miss
Dearborn--Clara Belle's old teacher, you know--is going to be Columbia;
the girls will be the States of the Union, and oh, Mr. Simpson, I am the
one to be the State of Maine!” (This was not altogether to the point,
but a piece of information impossible to conceal.)

Mr. Simpson flourished the whipstock and gave a loud, hearty laugh. Then
he turned in his seat and regarded Rebecca curiously. “You're kind o'
small, hain't ye, for so big a state as this one?” he asked.

“Any of us would be too small,” replied Rebecca with dignity, “but the
committee asked me, and I am going to try hard to do well.”

The tragic thought that there might be no occasion for anybody to do
anything, well or ill, suddenly overcame her here, and putting her
hand on Mr. Simpson's sleeve, she attacked the subject practically and
courageously.

“Oh, Mr. Simpson, dear Mr. Simpson, it's such a mortifying subject I
can't bear to say anything about it, but please give us back our flag!
Don't, _don't_ take it over to Acreville, Mr. Simpson! We've worked so
long to make it, and it was so hard getting the money for the bunting!
Wait a minute, please; don't be angry, and don't say no just yet, till
I explain more. It'll be so dreadful for everybody to get there tomorrow
morning and find no flag to raise, and the band and the mayor all
disappointed, and the children crying, with their muslin dresses all
bought for nothing! O dear Mr. Simpson, please don't take our flag away
from us!”

The apparently astonished Abner pulled his mustaches and exclaimed: “But
I don't know what you're drivin' at! Who's got yer flag? _I_ hain't!”

Could duplicity, deceit, and infamy go any further, Rebecca wondered,
and her soul filling with righteous wrath, she cast discretion to the
winds and spoke a little more plainly, bending her great swimming eyes
on the now embarrassed Abner, who looked like an angle-worm, wriggling
on a pin.

“Mr. Simpson, how can you say that, when I saw the flag in the back of
your wagon myself, when you stopped to water the horse? It's wicked of
you to take it, and I cannot bear it!” (Her voice broke now, for a doubt
of Mr. Simpson's yielding suddenly darkened her mind.) “If you keep it,
you'll have to keep me, for I won't be parted from it! I can't fight
like the boys, but I can pinch and scratch, and I _will_ scratch, just
like a panther--I'll lie right down on my star and not move, if I starve
to death!”

“Look here, hold your hosses 'n' don't cry till you git something to cry
for!” grumbled the outraged Abner, to whom a clue had just come; and
leaning over the wagon-back he caught hold of a corner of white sheet
and dragged up the bundle, scooping off Rebecca's hat in the process,
and almost burying her in bunting.

She caught the treasure passionately to her heart and stifled her sobs
in it, while Abner exclaimed: “I swan to man, if that hain't a flag!
Well, in that case you're good 'n' welcome to it! Land! I seen that
bundle lyin' in the middle o' the road and I says to myself, that's
somebody's washin' and I'd better pick it up and leave it at the
post-office to be claimed; 'n' all the time it was a flag!”

This was a Simpsonian version of the matter, the fact being that a
white-covered bundle lying on the Meserves' front steps had attracted
his practiced eye, and slipping in at the open gate he had swiftly and
deftly removed it to his wagon on general principles; thinking if it
were clean clothes it would be extremely useful, and in any event there
was no good in passing by something flung into your very arms, so to
speak. He had had no leisure to examine the bundle, and indeed took
little interest in it. Probably he stole it simply from force of habit,
and because there was nothing else in sight to steal, everybody's
premises being preternaturally tidy and empty, almost as if his visit
had been expected!

Rebecca was a practical child, and it seemed to her almost impossible
that so heavy a bundle should fall out of Mrs. Meserve's buggy and not
be noticed; but she hoped that Mr. Simpson was telling the truth, and
she was too glad and grateful to doubt anyone at the moment.

“Thank you, thank you ever so much, Mr. Simpson. You're the nicest,
kindest, politest man I ever knew, and the girls will be so pleased you
gave us back the flag, and so will the Dorcas Society; they'll be sure
to write you a letter of thanks; they always do.”

“Tell 'em not to bother 'bout any thanks,” said Simpson, beaming
virtuously. “But land! I'm glad 'twas me that happened to see that
bundle in the road and take the trouble to pick it up.” (“Jest to think
of it's bein' a flag!” he thought; “if ever there was a pesky, wuthless
thing to trade off, 'twould be a great, gormin' flag like that!”)

“Can I get out now, please?” asked Rebecca. “I want to go back, for Mrs.
Meserve will be dreadfully nervous when she finds out she dropped the
flag, and she has heart trouble.”

“No, you don't,” objected Mr. Simpson gallantly, turning the horse. “Do
you think I'd let a little creeter like you lug that great heavy bundle?
I hain't got time to go back to Meserve's, but I'll take you to the
corner and dump you there, flag 'n' all, and you can get some o' the
men-folks to carry it the rest o' the way. You'll wear it out, huggin'
it so!”

“I helped make it and I adore it!” said Rebecca, who was in a
high-pitched and grandiloquent mood. “Why don't _you_ like it? It's your
country's flag.”

Simpson smiled an indulgent smile and looked a trifle bored at these
frequent appeals to his extremely rusty higher feelings.

“I don' know's I've got any partic'lar int'rest in the country,” he
remarked languidly. “I know I don't owe nothin' to it, nor own nothin'
in it!”

“You own a star on the flag, same as everybody,” argued Rebecca, who had
been feeding on patriotism for a month; “and you own a state, too, like
all of us!”

“Land! I wish't I did! or even a quarter section!” sighed Mr. Simpson,
feeling somehow a little more poverty-stricken and discouraged than
usual.

As they approached the corner and the watering-trough where four
cross-roads met, the whole neighborhood seemed to be in evidence,
and Mr. Simpson suddenly regretted his chivalrous escort of Rebecca;
especially when, as he neared the group, an excited lady, wringing her
hands, turned out to be Mrs. Peter Meserve, accompanied by Huldah, the
Browns, Mrs. Milliken, Abijah Flagg, and Miss Dearborn.

“Do you know anything about the new flag, Rebecca?” shrieked Mrs.
Meserve, too agitated, at the moment, to notice the child's companion.

“It's right here in my lap, all safe,” responded Rebecca joyously.

“You careless, meddlesome young one, to take it off my steps where
I left it just long enough to go round to the back and hunt up my
door-key! You've given me a fit of sickness with my weak heart, and what
business was it of yours? I believe you think you _own_ the flag! Hand
it over to me this minute!”

Rebecca was climbing down during this torrent of language, but as she
turned she flashed one look of knowledge at the false Simpson, a look
that went through him from head to foot, as if it were carried by
electricity.

He had not deceived her after all, owing to the angry chatter of Mrs.
Meserve. He had been handcuffed twice in his life, but no sheriff had
ever discomfited him so thoroughly as this child. Fury mounted to his
brain, and as soon as she was safely out from between the wheels he
stood up in the wagon and flung the flag out in the road in the midst of
the excited group.

“Take it, you pious, passimonious, cheese-parin', hair-splittin',
back-bitin', flag-raisin' crew!” he roared. “Rebecca never took the
flag; I found it in the road, I say!”

“You never, no such a thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Meserve. “You found it on
the doorsteps in my garden!”

“Mebbe 'twas your garden, but it was so chock full o' weeds I _thought_
'twas the road,” retorted Abner. “I vow I wouldn't 'a' given the old
rag back to one o' _you_, not if you begged me on your bended knees! But
Rebecca's a friend o' my folks and can do with her flag's she's a mind
to, and the rest o' ye can go to thunder--'n' stay there, for all I
care!”

So saying, he made a sharp turn, gave the gaunt white horse a lash and
disappeared in a cloud of dust, before the astonished Mr. Brown, the
only man in the party, had a thought of detaining him.

“I'm sorry I spoke so quick, Rebecca,” said Mrs. Meserve, greatly
mortified at the situation. “But don't you believe a word that lyin'
critter said! He did steal it off my doorstep, and how did you come to
be ridin' and consortin' with him! I believe it would kill your Aunt
Miranda if she should hear about it!”

The little school-teacher put a sheltering arm round Rebecca as Mr.
Brown picked up the flag and dusted and folded it.

“I'm willing she should hear about it,” Rebecca answered. “I didn't do
anything to be ashamed of! I saw the flag in the back of Mr. Simpson's
wagon and I just followed it. There weren't any men or any Dorcases to
take care of it and so it fell to me! You wouldn't have had me let it
out of my sight, would you, and we going to raise it tomorrow morning?”

“Rebecca's perfectly right, Mrs. Meserve!” said Miss Dearborn proudly.
“And it's lucky there was somebody quick-witted enough to 'ride and
consort' with Mr. Simpson! I don't know what the village will think, but
seems to me the town clerk might write down in his book, '_This day the
State of Maine saved the flag!_'”




Sixth Chronicle. THE STATE O' MAINE GIRL


I

The foregoing episode, if narrated in a romance, would undoubtedly have
been called “The Saving of the Colors,” but at the nightly conversazione
in Watson's store it was alluded to as the way little Becky Randall got
the flag away from Slippery Simpson.

Dramatic as it was, it passed into the limbo of half-forgotten things
in Rebecca's mind, its brief importance submerged in the glories of the
next day.

There was a painful prelude to these glories. Alice Robinson came to
spend the night with Rebecca, and when the bedroom door closed upon the
two girls, Alice announced her intention of “doing up” Rebecca's front
hair in leads and rags, and braiding the back in six tight, wetted
braids.

Rebecca demurred. Alice persisted.

“Your hair is so long and thick and dark and straight,” she said, “that
you'll look like an Injun!”

“I am the State of Maine; it all belonged to the Indians once,” Rebecca
remarked gloomily, for she was curiously shy about discussing her
personal appearance.

“And your wreath of little pine-cones won't set decent without crimps,”
 continued Alice.

Rebecca glanced in the cracked looking-glass and met what she considered
an accusing lack of beauty, a sight that always either saddened or
enraged her according to circumstances; then she sat down resignedly
and began to help Alice in the philanthropic work of making the State of
Maine fit to be seen at the raising.

Neither of the girls was an expert hairdresser, and at the end of an
hour, when the sixth braid was tied, and Rebecca had given one last
shuddering look in the mirror, both were ready to weep with fatigue.

The candle was blown out and Alice soon went to sleep, but Rebecca
tossed on her pillow, its goose-feathered softness all dented by the
cruel lead knobs and the knots of twisted rags. She slipped out of bed
and walked to and fro, holding her aching head with both hands. Finally
she leaned on the window-sill, watching the still weather-vane on
Alice's barn and breathing in the fragrance of the ripening apples,
until her restlessness subsided under the clear starry beauty of the
night.

At six in the morning the girls were out of bed, for Alice could hardly
wait until Rebecca's hair was taken down, she was so eager to see the
result of her labors.

The leads and rags were painfully removed, together with much hair, the
operation being punctuated by a series of squeaks, squeals, and shrieks
on the part of Rebecca and a series of warnings from Alice, who wished
the preliminaries to be kept secret from the aunts, that they might the
more fully appreciate the radiant result.

Then came the unbraiding, and then--dramatic moment--the “combing out;”
 a difficult, not to say impossible process, in which the hairs that had
resisted the earlier stages almost gave up the ghost.

The long front strands had been wound up from various angles and by
various methods, so that, when released, they assumed the strangest,
most obstinate, most unexpected attitudes. When the comb was dragged
through the last braid, the wild, tortured, electric hairs following,
and then rebounding from it in a bristling, snarling tangle.
Massachusetts gave one encompassing glance at the State o' Maine's head,
and announced her intention of going home to breakfast! She was deeply
grieved at the result of her attempted beautifying, but she felt that
meeting Miss Miranda Sawyer at the morning meal would not mend matters
in the least, so slipping out of the side door, she ran up Guide Board
hill as fast as her legs could carry her.

The State o' Maine, deserted and somewhat unnerved, sat down before the
glass and attacked her hair doggedly and with set lips, working over it
until Miss Jane called her to breakfast; then, with a boldness born
of despair, she entered the dining room, where her aunts were already
seated at table. To “draw fire” she whistled, a forbidden joy, which
only attracted more attention, instead of diverting it. There was a
moment of silence after the grotesque figure was fully taken in; then
came a moan from Jane and a groan from Miranda.

“What have you done to yourself?” asked Miranda sternly.

“Made an effort to be beautiful and failed!” jauntily replied Rebecca,
but she was too miserable to keep up the fiction. “Oh, Aunt Miranda,
don't scold. I'm so unhappy! Alice and I rolled up my hair to curl it
for the raising. She said it was so straight I looked like an Indian!”

“Mebbe you did,” vigorously agreed Miranda, “but 't any rate you looked
like a Christian Injun, 'n' now you look like a heathen Injun; that's
all the difference I can see. What can we do with her, Jane, between
this and nine o'clock?”

“We'll all go out to the pump just as soon as we're through breakfast,”
 answered Jane soothingly. “We can accomplish consid'rable with water and
force.”

Rebecca nibbled her corn-cake, her tearful eyes cast on her plate and
her chin quivering.

“Don't you cry and red your eyes up,” chided Miranda quite kindly; “the
minute you've eat enough run up and get your brush and comb and meet us
at the back door.”

“I wouldn't care myself how bad I looked,” said Rebecca, “but I can't
bear to be so homely that I shame the State of Maine!”

Oh, what an hour followed this plaint! Did any aspirant for literary
or dramatic honors ever pass to fame through such an antechamber of
horrors? Did poet of the day ever have his head so maltreated? To be
dipped in the rain-water tub, soused again and again; to be held under
the spout and pumped on; to be rubbed furiously with rough roller
towels; to be dried with hot flannels! And is it not well-nigh
incredible that at the close of such an hour the ends of the long hair
should still stand out straight, the braids having been turned up two
inches by Alice, and tied hard in that position with linen thread?

“Get out the skirt-board, Jane,” cried Miranda, to whom opposition
served as a tonic, “and move that flat-iron on to the front o' the
stove. Rebecca, set down in that low chair beside the board, and Jane,
you spread out her hair on it and cover it up with brown paper. Don't
cringe, Rebecca; the worst's over, and you've borne up real good! I'll
be careful not to pull your hair nor scorch you, and oh, _how_ I'd like
to have Alice Robinson acrost my knee and a good strip o' shingle in my
right hand! There, you're all ironed out and your Aunt Jane can put on
your white dress and braid your hair up again good and tight. Perhaps
you won't be the hombliest of the states, after all; but when I see you
comin' in to breakfast I said to myself: I guess if Maine looked like
that, it wouldn't never 'a' been admitted into the Union!'”

When Uncle Sam and the stagecoach drew up to the brick house with a
grand swing and a flourish, the goddess of Liberty and most of the
States were already in their places on the “harricane deck.”

Words fail to describe the gallant bearing of the horses, their
headstalls gayly trimmed and their harnesses dotted with little flags.
The stage windows were hung in bunting, and from within beamed Columbia,
looking out from the bright frame as if proud of her freight of loyal
children. Patriotic streamers floated from whip, from dash-board and
from rumble, and the effect of the whole was something to stimulate the
most phlegmatic voter.

Rebecca came out on the steps and Aunt Jane brought a chair to assist in
the ascent. Miss Dearborn peeped from the window, and gave a despairing
look at her favorite.

What had happened to her? Who had dressed her? Had her head been put
through a wringing-machine? Why were her eyes red and swollen? Miss
Dearborn determined to take her behind the trees in the pine grove
and give her some finishing touches; touches that her skillful fingers
fairly itched to bestow.

The stage started, and as the roadside pageant grew gayer and gayer,
Rebecca began to brighten and look prettier, for most of her beautifying
came from within. The people, walking, driving, or standing on
their doorsteps, cheered Uncle Sam's coach with its freight of
gossamer-muslined, fluttering-ribboned girls, and just behind, the
gorgeously decorated haycart, driven by Abijah Flagg, bearing the jolly
but inharmonious fife-and-drum corps.

Was ever such a golden day! Such crystal air! Such mellow sunshine! Such
a merry Uncle Sam!

The stage drew up at an appointed spot near a pine grove, and while the
crowd was gathering, the children waited for the hour to arrive when
they should march to the platform; the hour toward which they seemed to
have been moving since the dawn of creation.

As soon as possible Miss Dearborn whispered to Rebecca: “Come behind the
trees with me; I want to make you prettier!”

Rebecca thought she had suffered enough from that process already during
the last twelve hours, but she put out an obedient hand and the two
withdrew.

Now Miss Dearborn was, I fear, a very indifferent teacher. Dr. Moses
always said so, and Libbie Moses, who wanted her school, said it was
a pity she hadn't enjoyed more social advantages in her youth. Libbie
herself had taken music lessons in Portland; and spent a night at the
Profile House in the White Mountains, and had visited her sister in
Lowell, Massachusetts. These experiences gave her, in her own mind, and
in the mind of her intimate friends, a horizon so boundless that her
view of smaller, humbler matters was a trifle distorted.

Miss Dearborn's stock in trade was small, her principal virtues being
devotion to children and ability to gain their love, and a power of
evolving a schoolroom order so natural, cheery, serene, and peaceful
that it gave the beholder a certain sense of being in a district heaven.
She was poor in arithmetic and weak in geometry, but if you gave her a
rose, a bit of ribbon, and a seven-by-nine looking-glass she could make
herself as pretty as a pink in two minutes.

Safely sheltered behind the pines, Miss Dearborn began to practice
mysterious feminine arts. She flew at Rebecca's tight braids, opened
the strands and rebraided them loosely; bit and tore the red, white,
and blue ribbon in two and tied the braids separately. Then with nimble
fingers she pulled out little tendrils of hair behind the ears and
around the nape of the neck. After a glance of acute disapproval
directed at the stiff balloon skirt she knelt on the ground and gave
a strenuous embrace to Rebecca's knees, murmuring, between her hugs,
“Starch must be cheap at the brick house!”

This particular line of beauty attained, there ensued great pinchings of
ruffles, her fingers that could never hold a ferrule nor snap children's
ears being incomparable fluting-irons.

Next the sash was scornfully untied and tightened to suggest something
resembling a waist. The chastened bows that had been squat, dowdy,
spiritless, were given tweaks, flirts, bracing little pokes and dabs,
till, acknowledging a master hand, they stood up, piquant, pert, smart,
alert!

Pride of bearing was now infused into the flattened lace at the neck,
and a pin (removed at some sacrifice from her own toilette) was darned
in at the back to prevent any cowardly lapsing. The short white cotton
gloves that called attention to the tanned wrist and arms were stripped
off and put in her own pocket. Then the wreath of pine-cones was
adjusted at a heretofore unimagined angle, the hair was pulled softly
into a fluffy frame, and finally, as she met Rebecca's grateful eyes
she gave her two approving, triumphant kisses. In a second the sensitive
face lighted into happiness; pleased dimples appeared in the cheeks, the
kissed mouth was as red as a rose, and the little fright that had walked
behind the pine-tree stepped out on the other side Rebecca the lovely.

As to the relative value of Miss Dearborn's accomplishments, the
decision must be left to the gentle reader; but though it is certain
that children should be properly grounded in mathematics, no heart of
flesh could bear to hear Miss Dearborn's methods vilified who had seen
her patting, pulling, squeezing Rebecca from ugliness into beauty.

The young superintendent of district schools was a witness of the scene,
and when later he noted the children surrounding Columbia as bees
a honeysuckle, he observed to Dr. Moses: “She may not be much of a
teacher, but I think she'd be considerable of a wife!” and subsequent
events proved that he meant what he said!

II

Now all was ready; the moment of fate was absolutely at hand; the
fife-and-drum corps led the way and the States followed; but what
actually happened Rebecca never knew; she lived through the hours in a
waking dream. Every little detail was a facet of light that reflected
sparkles, and among them all she was fairly dazzled. The brass band
played inspiring strains; the mayor spoke eloquently on great themes;
the people cheered; then the rope on which so much depended was put into
the children's hands, they applied superhuman strength to their task,
and the flag mounted, mounted, smoothly and slowly, and slowly unwound
and stretched itself until its splendid size and beauty were revealed
against the maples and pines and blue New England sky.

Then after cheers upon cheers and after a patriotic chorus by the church
choirs, the State of Maine mounted the platform, vaguely conscious
that she was to recite a poem, though for the life of her she could not
remember a single word.

“Speak up loud and clear, Rebecky,” whispered Uncle Sam in the front
row, but she could scarcely hear her own voice when, tremblingly, she
began her first line. After that she gathered strength and the poem
“said itself,” while the dream

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