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Real Folks

by A. D. T. Whitney · English · Gutenberg #13997 · 510,827 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Real Folks

Author: A. D. T. Whitney


        
Release date: November 9, 2004 [eBook #13997]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13997

Credits: E-text prepared by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REAL FOLKS ***

REAL FOLKS

by

MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY

1893







CONTENTS


      I. THIS WAY, AND THAT
     II. LUCLARION
    III. BY STORY-RAIL: TWENTY-SIX YEARS AN HOUR
     IV. AFTERWARDS IS A LONG TIME
      V. HOW THE NEWS CAME TO HOMESWORTH
     VI. AND
    VII. WAKING UP
   VIII. EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET
     IX. HAZEL'S INSPIRATION
      X. COCKLES AND CRAMBO
     XI. MORE WITCH-WORK
    XII. CRUMBS
   XIII. PIECES OF WORLDS
    XIV. "SESAME; AND LILIES"
     XV. WITH ALL ONE'S MIGHT
    XVI. SWARMING
   XVII. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
  XVIII. ALL AT ONCE
    XIX. INSIDE
     XX. NEIGHBORS AND NEXT OF KIN
    XXI. THE HORSESHOE
   XXII. MORNING GLORIES





I.

THIS WAY, AND THAT.


The parlor blinds were shut, and all the windows of the third-story
rooms were shaded; but the pantry window, looking out on a long low
shed, such as city houses have to keep their wood in and to dry
their clothes upon, was open; and out at this window had come two
little girls, with quiet steps and hushed voices, and carried their
books and crickets to the very further end, establishing themselves
there, where the shade of a tall, round fir tree, planted at the
foot of the yard below, fell across the building of a morning.

"It was prettier down on the bricks," Luclarion had told them. But
they thought otherwise.

"Luclarion doesn't know," said Frank. "People _don't_ know things, I
think. I wonder why, when they've got old, and ought to? It's like
the sea-shore here, I guess, only the stones are all stuck down, and
you mustn't pick up the loose ones either."

Frank touched lightly, as she spoke, the white and black and gray
bits of gravel that covered the flat roof.

"And it smells--like the pine forests!"

The sun was hot and bright upon the fir branches and along the
tar-cemented roof.

"How do you know about sea-shores and pine forests?" asked Laura,
with crushing common sense.

"I don't know; but I do," said Frank.

"You don't know anything but stories and pictures and one tree, and
a little gravel, all stuck down tight."

"I'm glad I've got one tree. And the rest of it,--why listen! It's
in the _word_, Laura. _Forest_. Doesn't that sound like thousands of
them, all fresh and rustling? And Ellen went to the sea-shore, in
that book; and picked up pebbles; and the sea came up to her feet,
just as the air comes up here, and you can't get any farther,"--said
Frank, walking to the very edge and putting one foot out over, while
the wind blew in her face up the long opening between rows of brick
houses of which theirs was in the midst upon one side.

"A great sea!" exclaimed Laura, contemptuously. "With all those
other wood-sheds right out in it, all the way down!"

"Well, there's another side to the sea; and capes, and islands,"
answered Frank, turning back. "Besides, I don't pretend it _is_; I
only think it seems a little bit like it. I'm often put in mind of
things. I don't know why."

"I'll tell you what it is like," said Laura. "It's like the gallery
at church, where the singers stand up in a row, and look down, and
all the people look up at them. I like high places. I like Cecilia,
in the 'Bracelets,' sitting at the top, behind, when her name was
called out for the prize; and 'they all made way, and she was on the
floor in an instant.' I should like to have been Cecilia!"

"Leonora was a great deal the best."

"I know it; but she don't _stand out_."

"Laura! You're just like the Pharisees! You're always wishing for
long clothes and high seats!"

"There ain't any Pharisees, nowadays," said Laura, securely. After
which, of course, there was nothing more to be insisted.

Mrs. Lake, the housekeeper, came to the middle upper window, and
moved the blind a little. Frank and Laura were behind the fir. They
saw her through the branches. She, through the farther thickness of
the tree, did not notice them.

"That was good," said Laura. "She would have beckoned us in. I hate
that forefinger of hers; it's always hushing or beckoning. It's only
two inches long. What makes us have to mind it so?"

"She puts it all into those two inches," answered Frank. "All the
_must_ there is in the house. And then you've got to."

"I wouldn't--if father wasn't sick."

"Laura," said Frank, gravely, "I don't believe father is going to
get well. What do you suppose they're letting us stay at home from
school for?"

"O, that," said Laura, "was because Mrs. Lake didn't have time to
sew the sleeves into your brown dress."

"I could have worn my gingham, Laura. What if he should die pretty
soon? I heard her tell Luclarion that there must be a change before
long. They talk in little bits, Laura, and they say it solemn."

The children were silent for a few minutes. Frank sat looking
through the fir-tree at the far-off flecks of blue.

Mr. Shiere had been ill a long time. They could hardly think, now,
what it would seem again not to have a sick father; and they had had
no mother for several years,--many out of their short remembrance of
life. Mrs. Lake had kept the house, and mended their clothes, and
held up her forefinger at them. Even when Mr. Shiere was well, he
had been a reserved man, much absorbed in business since his wife's
death, he had been a very sad man. He loved his children, but he was
very little with them. Frank and Laura could not feel the shock and
loss that children feel when death comes and robs them suddenly of a
close companionship.

"What do you suppose would happen then?" asked Laura, after awhile.
"We shouldn't be anybody's children."

"Yes, we should," said Frank; "we should be God's.'

"Everybody else is that,--_besides_," said Laura.

"We shall have black silk pantalets again, I suppose,"--she began,
afresh, looking down at her white ones with double crimped
ruffles,--"and Mrs. Gibbs will come in and help, and we shall have
to pipe and overcast."

"O, Laura, how nice it was ever so long ago!" cried Frank, suddenly,
never heeding the pantalets, "when mother sent us out to ask company
to tea,--that pleasant Saturday, you know,--and made lace pelerines
for our dolls while we were gone! It's horrid, when other girls have
mothers, only to have a _housekeeper_! And pretty soon we sha'n't
have anything, only a little corner, away back, that we can't hardly
recollect."

"They'll do something with us; they always do," said Laura,
composedly.

The children of this world, even _as_ children, are wisest in their
generation. Frank believed they would be God's children; she could
not see exactly what was to come of that, though, practically. Laura
knew that people always did something; something would be sure to
be done with them. She was not frightened; she was even a little
curious.

A head came up at the corner of the shed behind them, a pair of
shoulders,--high, square, turned forward; a pair of arms, long
thence to the elbows, as they say women's are who might be good
nurses of children; the hands held on to the sides of the steep
steps that led up from the bricked yard. The young woman's face was
thin and strong; two great, clear, hazel eyes looked straight out,
like arrow shots; it was a clear, undeviating glance; it never
wandered, or searched, or wavered, any more than a sunbeam; it
struck full upon whatever was there; it struck _through_ many things
that were transparent to their quality. She had square, white,
strong teeth, that set together like the faces of a die; they showed
easily when she spoke, but the lips closed over them absolutely and
firmly. Yet they were pleasant lips, and had a smile in them that
never went quite out; it lay in all the muscles of the mouth and
chin; it lay behind, in the living spirit that had moulded to itself
the muscles.

This was Luclarion.

"Your Aunt Oldways and Mrs. Oferr have come. Hurry in!"

Now Mrs. Oldways was only an uncle's wife; Mrs. Oferr was their
father's sister. But Mrs. Oferr was a rich woman who lived in New
York, and who came on grand and potent, with a scarf or a pair of
shoe-bows for each of the children in her big trunk, and a hundred
and one suggestions for their ordering and behavior at her tongue's
end, once a year. Mrs. Oldways lived up in the country, and was
"aunt" to half the neighborhood at home, and turned into an aunt
instantly, wherever she went and found children. If there were no
children, perhaps older folks did not call her by the name, but they
felt the special human kinship that is of no-blood or law, but is
next to motherhood in the spirit.

Mrs. Oferr found the open pantry window, before the children had
got in.

"Out there!" she exclaimed, "in the eyes of all the neighbors in the
circumstances of the family! Who does, or _don't_ look after you?"

"Hearts'-sake!" came up the pleasant tones of Mrs. Oldways from
behind, "how can they help it? There isn't any other out-doors. If
they were down at Homesworth now, there'd be the lilac garden and
the old chestnuts, and the seat under the wall. Poor little souls!"
she added, pitifully, as she lifted them in, and kissed them. "It's
well they can take any comfort. Let 'em have all there is."

Mrs. Oferr drew the blinds, and closed the window.

Frank and Laura remembered the strangeness of that day all their
lives. How they sat, shy and silent, while Luclarion brought in cake
and wine; how Mrs. Oferr sat in the large morocco easy-chair and
took some; and Mrs. Oldways lifted Laura, great girl as she was,
into her lap first, and broke a slice for her; how Mrs. Oldways went
up-stairs to Mrs. Lake, and then down into the kitchen to do
something that was needed; and Mrs. Oferr, after she had visited her
brother, lay down in the spare chamber for a nap, tired with her
long journey from New York, though it had been by boat and cars,
while there was a long staging from Homesworth down to Nashua, on
Mrs. Oldways' route. Mrs. Oldways, however, was "used," she said,
"to stepping round." It was the sitting that had tired her.

How they were told not to go out any more, or to run up and
down-stairs; and how they sat in the front windows, looking out
through the green slats at so much of the street world as they could
see in strips; how they obtained surreptitious bits of bread from
dinner, and opened a bit of the sash, and shoved out crumbs under
the blinds for the pigeons that flew down upon the sidewalk; how
they wondered what kind of a day it was in other houses, where there
were not circumstances in the family, where children played, and
fathers were not ill, but came and went to and from their stores;
and where two aunts had not come, both at once, from great ways off,
to wait for something strange and awful that was likely to befall.

When they were taken in, at bedtime, to kiss their father and say
good-night, there was something portentous in the stillness there;
in the look of the sick man, raised high against the pillows, and
turning his eyes wistfully toward them, with no slightest movement
of the head; in the waiting aspect of all things,--the appearance as
of everybody being to sit up all night except themselves.

Edward Shiere brought his children close to him with the magnetism
of that look; they bent down to receive his kiss and his good-night,
so long and solemn. He had not been in the way of talking to them
about religion in his life. He had only insisted on their truth and
obedience; that was the beginning of all religion. Now it was given
him in the hour of his death what he should speak; and because he
had never said many such words to them before, they fell like the
very touch of the Holy Ghost upon their young spirits now,--

"Love God, and keep His commandments. Good-by."

In the morning, when they woke, Mrs. Lake was in their room, talking
in a low voice with Mrs. Oferr, who stood by an open bureau. They
heard Luclarion dusting down the stairs.

Who was taking care of their father?

They did not ask. In the night, he had been taken care of. It was
morning with him, now, also.

Mrs. Lake and Mrs. Oferr were calculating,--about black pantalets,
and other things.

This story is not with the details of their early orphan life. When
Edward Shiere was buried came family consultations. The two aunts
were the nearest friends. Nobody thought of Mr. Titus Oldways. He
never was counted. He was Mrs. Shiere's uncle,--Aunt Oldways'
uncle-in-law, therefore, and grand-uncle to these children. But
Titus Oldways never took up any family responsibilities; he had been
shy of them all his single, solitary life. He seemed to think he
could not drop them as he could other things, if he did not find
them satisfactory. Besides, what would he know about two young
girls?

He saw the death in the paper, and came to the funeral; then he went
away again to his house in Greenley Street at the far West End, and
to his stiff old housekeeper, Mrs. Froke, who knew his stiff old
ways. And, turning his back on everybody, everybody forgot all about
him. Except as now and then, at intervals of years, there broke out
here or there, at some distant point in some family crisis, a sudden
recollection from which would spring a half suggestion, "Why,
there's Uncle Titus! If he was only,"--or, "if he would only,"--and
there it ended. Much as it might be with a housewife, who says of
some stored-away possession forty times, perhaps, before it ever
turns out available, "Why, there's that old gray taffety! If it were
only green, now!" or, "If there were three or four yards more of
it!"

Uncle Titus was just Uncle Titus, neither more nor less; so Mrs.
Oferr and Aunt Oldways consulted about their own measures and
materials; and never reckoned the old taffety at all. There was
money enough to clothe and educate; little more.

"I will take home _one_," said Mrs. Oferr, distinctly.

So, they were to be separated?

They did not realize what this was, however. They were told of
letters and visits; of sweet country-living, of city sights and
pleasures; of kittens and birds' nests, and the great barns; of
music and dancing lessons, and little parties,--"by-and-by, when it
was proper."

"Let me go to Homesworth," whispered Frank to Aunt Oldways.

Laura gravitated as surely to the streets and shops, and the great
school of young ladies.

"One taken and the other left," quoted Luclarion, over the packing
of the two small trunks.

"We're both going," says Laura, surprised. "_One_ taken? Where?"

"Where the carcass is," answered Luclarion.

"There's one thing you'll have to see to for yourselves. I can't
pack it. It won't go into the trunks."

"What, Luclarion?"

"What your father said to you that night."

They were silent. Presently Frank answered, softly,--"I hope I
shan't forget that."

Laura, the pause once broken, remarked, rather glibly, that she "was
afraid there wouldn't be much chance to recollect things at Aunt
Oferr's."

"She isn't exactly what I call a heavenly-minded woman," said
Luclarion, quietly.

"She is very much _occupied_," replied Laura, grandly taking up the
Oferr style. "She visits a great deal, and she goes out in the
carriage. You have to change your dress every day for dinner, and
I'm to take French lessons."

The absurd little sinner was actually proud of her magnificent
temptations. She was only a child. Men and women never are, of
course.

"I'm afraid it will be pretty hard to remember," repeated Laura,
with condescension.

"_That's_ your stump!"

Luclarion fixed the steadfast arrow of her look straight upon her,
and drew the bow with this twang.




II.

LUCLARION.


How Mrs. Grapp ever came to, was the wonder. Her having the baby was
nothing. Her having the name for it was the astonishment.

Her own name was Lucy; her husband's Luther: that, perhaps,
accounted for the first syllable; afterwards, whether her mind
lapsed off into combinations of such outshining appellatives as
"Clara" and "Marion," or whether Mr. Grapp having played the
clarionet, and wooed her sweetly with it in her youth, had anything
to do with it, cannot be told; but in those prescriptive days of
quiet which followed the domestic advent, the name did somehow grow
together in the fancy of Mrs. Luther; and in due time the life-atom
which had been born indistinguishable into the natural world, was
baptized into the Christian Church as "Luclarion" Grapp.
Thenceforth, and no wonder, it took to itself a very especial
individuality, and became what this story will partly tell.

Marcus Grapp, who had the start of Luclarion in this "meander,"--as
their father called the vale of tears,--by just two years' time, and
was y-_clipped_, by everybody but his mother "Mark,"--in his turn,
as they grew old together, cut his sister down to "Luke." Then
Luther Grapp called them both "The Apostles." And not far wrong;
since if ever the kingdom of heaven does send forth its
Apostles--nay, its little Christs--into the work on earth, in these
days, it is as little children into loving homes.

The Apostles got up early one autumn morning, when Mark was about
six years old, and Luke four. They crept out of their small
trundle-bed in their mother's room adjoining the great kitchen, and
made their way out softly to the warm wide hearth.

There were new shoes, a pair apiece, brought home from the Mills the
night before, set under the little crickets in the corners. These
had got into their dreams, somehow, and into the red rooster's first
halloo from the end room roof, and into the streak of pale daylight
that just stirred and lifted the darkness, and showed doors and
windows, but not yet the blue meeting-houses on the yellow
wall-paper, by which they always knew when it was really morning;
and while Mrs. Grapp was taking that last beguiling nap in which one
is conscious that one means to get up presently, and rests so
sweetly on one's good intentions, letting the hazy mirage of the
day's work that is to be done play along the horizon of dim thoughts
with its unrisen activities,--two little flannel night-gowns were
cuddled in small heaps by the chimney-side, little bare feet were
trying themselves into the new shoes, and lifting themselves up,
crippled with two inches of stout string between the heels.

Then the shoes were turned into spans of horses, and chirruped and
trotted softly into their cricket-stables; and then--what else was
there to do, until the strings were cut, and the flannel night-gowns
taken off?

It was so still out here, in the big, busy, day-time room; it was
like getting back where the world had not begun; surely one must do
something wonderful with the materials all lying round, and such an
opportunity as that.

It was old-time then, when kitchens had fire-places; or rather the
house was chiefly fire-place, in front of and about which was more
or less of kitchen-space. In the deep fire-place lay a huge mound of
gray ashes, a Vesuvius, under which red bowels of fire lay hidden.
In one corner of the chimney leaned an iron bar, used sometimes in
some forgotten, old fashioned way, across dogs or pothooks,--who
knows now? At any rate, there it always was.

Mark, ambitious, put all his little strength to it this morning and
drew it down, carefully, without much clatter, on the hearth. Then
he thought how it would turn red under those ashes, where the big
coals were, and how it would shine and sparkle when he pulled it out
again, like the red-hot, hissing iron Jack-the-Giant-Killer struck
into the one-eyed monster's eye. So he shoved it in; and forgot it
there, while he told Luke--very much twisted and dislocated, and
misjoined--the leading incidents of the giant story; and then lapsed
off, by some queer association, into the Scripture narrative of
Joseph and his brethren, who "pulled his red coat off, and put him
in a _fit_, and left him there."

"And then what?" says Luke.

"Then,--O, my iron's done! See here, Luke!"--and taking it prudently
with the tongs, he pulled back the rod, till the glowing end, a foot
or more of live, palpitating, flamy red, lay out upon the broad open
bricks.

"There, Luke! You daresn't put your foot on _that_!"

Dear little Luke, who wouldn't, at even four years old, be dared!

And dear little white, tender, pink-and-lily foot!

The next instant, a shriek of pain shot through Mrs. Grapp's ears,
and sent her out of her dreams and out of her bed, and with one
single impulse into the kitchen, with her own bare feet, and in her
night-gown.

The little foot had only touched; a dainty, timid, yet most
resolute touch; but the sweet flesh shriveled, and the fierce
anguish ran up every fibre of the baby body, to the very heart and
brain.

"O! O, O!" came the long, pitiful, shivering cries, as the mother
gathered her in her arms.

"What is it? What did you do? How came you to?" And all the while
she moved quickly here and there, to cupboard and press-drawer,
holding the child fast, and picking up as she could with one hand,
cotton wool, and sweet-oil flask, and old linen bits; and so she
bound it up, saying still, every now and again, as all she could
say,--"What _did_ you do? How came you to?"

Till, in a little lull of the fearful smart, as the air was shut
away, and the oil felt momentarily cool upon the ache, Luke answered
her,--

"He hed I dare-hn't, and ho I did!"

"You little fool!"

The rough word was half reaction of relief, that the child could
speak at all, half horrible spasm of all her own motherly nerves
that thrilled through and through with every pang that touched the
little frame, hers also. Mothers never do part bonds with babies
they have borne. Until the day they die, each quiver of their life
goes back straight to the heart beside which it began.

"You Marcus! What did you mean?"

"I meant she darsn't; and she no business to 'a dars't," said Mark,
pale with remorse and fright, but standing up stiff and manful, with
bare common sense, when brought to bay. And then he marched away
into his mother's bedroom, plunged his head down into the clothes,
and cried,--harder than Luclarion.

Nobody wore any new shoes that day; Mark for a punishment,--though
he flouted at the penalty as such, with an, "I guess you'd see me!"
And there were many days before poor little Luclarion could wear any
shoes at all.

The foot got well, however, without hindrance. But Luke was the same
little fool as ever; that was not burnt out. She would never be
"dared" to anything.

They called it "stumps" as they grew older. They played "stumps" all
through the barns and woods and meadows; over walls and rocks, and
rafters and house-roofs. But the burnt foot saved Luke's neck scores
of times, doubtless. Mark remembered it; he never "stumped" her to
any certain hurt, or where he could not lead the way himself.

The mischief they got into and out of is no part of my story; but
one day something happened--things do happen as far back in lives as
that--which gave Luclarion her clew to the world.

They had got into the best parlor,--that sacred place of the New
England farm-house, that is only entered by the high-priests
themselves on solemn festivals, weddings and burials, Thanksgivings
and quiltings; or devoutly, now and then to set the shrine in order,
shut the blinds again, and so depart, leaving it to gather the gloom
and grandeur that things and places and people do when they are good
for nothing else.

The children had been left alone; for their mother had gone to a
sewing society, and Grashy, the girl, was up-stairs in her
kitchen-chamber-bedroom, with a nail over the door-latch to keep
them out while she "fixed over" her best gown.

"Le's play Lake Ontario," says Marcus.

Now Lake Ontario, however they had pitched upon it, stood with them
for all the waters that are upon the face of the earth, and all the
confusion and peril of them. To play it, they turned the room into
one vast shipwreck, of upset and piled up chairs, stools, boxes,
buckets, and what else they could lay hands on; and among and over
them they navigated their difficult and hilarious way. By no means
were they to touch the floor; that was the Lake,--that were to
drown.

It was Columbus sometimes; sometimes it was Captain Cook; to-day, it
was no less than Jason sailing after the golden fleece.

Out of odd volumes in the garret, and out of "best books" taken down
from the secretary in the "settin'-room," and put into their hands,
with charges, of a Sunday, to keep them still, they had got these
things, jumbled into strange far-off and near fantasies in their
childish minds. "Lake Ontario" included and connected all.

"I'll tell you what it is," said Marcus, tumbling up against the
parlor door and an idea at once. "In here!"

"What?" asked Luke, breathless, without looking up, and paddling
with the shovel, from an inverted rocking-chair.

"The golden thing! Hush!"

At this moment Grashy came into the kitchen, took a little tin
kettle from a nail over the dresser, and her sun-bonnet from another
behind the door, and made her way through the apartment as well as
she could for bristling chair-legs, with exemplary placidity. She
was used to "Lake Ontario."

"Don't get into any mischief, you Apostles," was her injunction.
"I'm goin' down to Miss Ruddock's for some 'east."

"Good,"; says Mark, the instant the door was shut "Now this is
Colchis, and I'm going in."

He pronounced it much like "cold-cheese," and it never occurred to
him that he was naming any unusual or ancient locality. There was a
"Jason" in the Mills Village. He kept a grocer's shop. Colchis might
be close by for all he knew; out beyond the wall, perhaps, among the
old barrels. Children _place_ all they read or hear about, or even
all they imagine, within a very limited horizon. They cannot go
beyond their world. Why should they? Neither could those very
venerable ancients.

"'Tain't," says Luclarion, with unbeguiled practicality. "It's just
ma's best parlor, and you mustn't."

It was the "mustn't" that was the whole of it. If Mark had asserted
that the back kitchen, or the cellar-way closet was Colchis, she
would have indorsed it with enthusiasm, and followed on like a loyal
Argonaut, as she was. But her imagination here was prepossessed.
Nothing in old fable could be more environed with awe and mystery
than this best parlor.

"And, besides," said Luclarion, "I don't care for the golden
fleece; I'm tired of it. Let's play something else."

"I'll tell you what there is in here," persisted Mark. "There's two
enchanted children. I've seen 'em!"

"Just as though," said Luke contemptuously. "Ma ain't a witch."

"Tain't ma. She don't know. They ain't visible to her. _She_ thinks
it's nothing but the best parlor. But it opens out, right into the
witch country,--not for her. 'Twill if we go. See if it don't."

He had got hold of her now; Luclarion could not resist that.
Anything might be true of that wonderful best room, after all. It
was the farthest Euxine, the witch-land, everything, to them.

So Mark turned the latch and they crept in

"We must open a shutter," Mark said, groping his way.

"Grashy will be back," suggested Luke, fearfully.

"Guess so!" said Mark. "She ain't got coaxed to take her sun-bonnet
off yet, an' it'll take her ninety-'leven hours to get it on again."

He had let in the light now from the south window.

The red carpet on the floor; the high sofa of figured hair-cloth,
with brass-headed nails, and brass rosettes in the ends of the hard,
cylinder pillows; the tall, carved cupboard press, its doors and
drawers glittering with hanging brass handles; right opposite the
door by which they had come in, the large, leaning mirror,
gilt--garnished with grooved and beaded rim and an eagle and
ball-chains over the top,--all this, opening right in from the
familiar every-day kitchen and their Lake Ontario,--it certainly
meant something that such a place should be. It meant a great deal
more than sixteen feet square could hold, and what it really was did
not stop short at the gray-and-crimson stenciled walls.

The two were all alone in it; perhaps they had never been all alone
in it before. I think, notwithstanding their mischief and
enterprise, they never had.

And deep in the mirror, face to face with them, coming down, it
seemed, the red slant of an inner and more brilliant floor, they saw
two other little figures. Their own they knew, really, but elsewhere
they never saw their own figures entire. There was not another
looking-glass in the house that was more than two feet long, and
they were all hung up so high!

"There!" whispered Mark. "There they are, and they can't get out."

"Of course they can't," said sensible Luclarion.

"If we only knew the right thing to say, or do, they might," said
Mark. "It's that they're waiting for, you see. They always do. It's
like the sleeping beauty Grashy told us."

"Then they've got to wait a hundred years," said Luke.

"Who knows when they began?"

"They do everything that we do," said Luclarion, her imagination
kindling, but as under protest. "If we could jump in perhaps they
would jump out."

"We might jump _at_ 'em," said Marcus. "Jest get 'em going, and
may-be they'd jump over. Le's try."

So they set up two chairs from Lake Ontario in the kitchen doorway,
to jump from; but they could only jump to the middle round of the
carpet, and who could expect that the shadow children should be
beguiled by that into a leap over bounds? They only came to the
middle round of _their_ carpet.

"We must go nearer; we must set the chairs in the middle, and jump
close. Jest _shave_, you know," said Marcus.

"O, I'm afraid," said Luclarion.

"I'll tell you what! Le's _run_ and jump! Clear from the other side
of the kitchen, you know. Then they'll have to run too, and may-be
they can't stop."

So they picked up chairs and made a path, and ran from across the
broad kitchen into the parlor doorway, quite on to the middle round
of the carpet, and then with great leaps came down bodily upon the
floor close in front of the large glass that, leaned over them, with
two little fallen figures in it, rolling aside quickly also, over
the slanting red carpet.

But, O dear what did it?

Had the time come, anyhow, for the old string to part its last
fibre, that held the mirror tilting from the wall,--or was it the
crash of a completed spell?

There came a snap,--a strain,--as some nails or screws that held it
otherwise gave way before the forward pressing weight, and down,
flat-face upon the floor, between the children, covering them with
fragments of splintered glass and gilded wood,--eagle, ball-chains,
and all,--that whole magnificence and mystery lay prostrate.

Behind, where it had been, was a blank, brown-stained cobwebbed
wall, thrown up harsh and sudden against them, making the room
small, and all the enchanted chamber, with its red slanting carpet,
and its far reflected corners, gone.

The house hushed up again after that terrible noise, and stood just
the same as ever. When a thing like that happens, it tells its own
story, just once, and then it is over. _People_ are different. They
keep talking.

There was Grashy to come home. She had not got there in time to hear
the house tell it. She must learn it from the children. Why?

"Because they knew," Luclarion said. "Because, then, they could not
wait and let it be found out."

"We never touched it," said Mark.

"We jumped," said Luke.

"We couldn't help it, if _that_ did it. S'posin' we'd jumped in the
kitchen, or--the--flat-irons had tumbled down,--or anything? That
old string was all wore out."

"Well, we was here, and we jumped; and we know."

"We was here, of course; and of course we couldn't help knowing,
with all that slam-bang. Why, it almost upset Lake Ontario! We can
tell how it slammed, and how we thought the house was coming down. I
did."

"And how we were in the best parlor, and how we jumped," reiterated
Luclarion, slowly. "Marcus, it's a stump!"

They were out in the middle of Lake Ontario now, sitting right down
underneath the wrecks, upon the floor; that is, under water, without
ever thinking of it. The parlor door was shut, with all that
disaster and dismay behind it.

"Go ahead, then!" said Marcus, and he laid himself back desperately
on the floor. "There's Grashy!"

"Sakes and patience!" ejaculated Grashy, merrily, coming in.
"They're drownded,--dead, both of 'em; down to the bottom of Lake
Ontariah!"

"No we ain't," said Luclarion, quietly. "It isn't Lake Ontario now.
It's nothing but a clutter. But there's an awful thing in the best
parlor, and we don't know whether we did it or not. We were in
there, and we jumped."

Grashy went straight to the parlor door, and opened it. She looked
in, turned pale, and said "'Lection!"

That is a word the women have, up in the country, for solemn
surprise, or exceeding emergency, or dire confusion. I do not know
whether it is derived from religion or politics. It denotes a vital
crisis, either way, and your hands full. Perhaps it had the
theological association in Grashy's mind, for the next thing she
said was, "My soul!"

"Do you know what that's a sign of, you children?"

"Sign the old thing was rotten," said Marcus, rather sullenly.

"Wish that was all," said Grashy, her lips white yet. "Hope there
mayn't nothin' dreadful happen in this house before the year's out.
It's wuss'n thirteen at the table."

"Do you s'pose we did it?" asked Luke, anxiously.

"Where was you when it tumbled?"

"Right in front of it. But we were rolling away. _We_ tumbled."

"'Twould er come down the fust jar, anyway, if a door had slammed.
The string's cut right through," said Grashy, looking at the two
ends sticking up stiff and straight from the top fragment of the
frame. "But the mercy is you war'n't smashed yourselves to bits and
flinders. Think o'that!"

"Do you s'pose ma'll think of that?" asked Luclarion.

"Well--yes; but it may make her kinder madder,--just at first, you
know. Between you and me and the lookin'-glass, you see,--well, yer
ma is a pretty strong-feelin' woman," said Grashy, reflectively.
"'Fi was you I wouldn't say nothin' about it. What's the use? _I_
shan't."

"It's a stump," repeated Luclarion, sadly, but in very resolute
earnest.

Grashy stared.

"Well, if you ain't the curiousest young one, Luke Grapp!" said she,
only half comprehending.

When Mrs. Grapp came home, Luclarion went into her bedroom after
her, and told her the whole story. Mrs. Grapp went into the parlor,
viewed the scene of calamity, took in the sense of loss and narrowly
escaped danger, laid the whole weight of them upon the disobedience
to be dealt with, and just as she had said, "You little fool!" out
of the very shock of her own distress when Luke had burned her baby
foot, she turned back now, took the two children up-stairs in
silence, gave them each a good old orthodox whipping, and tucked
them into their beds.

They slept one on each side of the great kitchen-chamber.

"Mark," whispered Luke, tenderly, after Mrs. Grapp's step had died
away down the stairs. "How do you feel?"

"Hot!" said Mark. "How do you?"

"You ain't mad with me, be you?"

"No."

"Then I feel real cleared up and comfortable. But it _was_ a stump,
wasn't it?"

       *       *       *       *       *

From that time forward, Luclarion Grapp had got her light to go by.
She understood life. It was "stumps" all through. The Lord set them,
and let them; she found that out afterward, when she was older, and
"experienced religion." I think she was mistaken in the dates,
though; it was _recognition_, this later thing; the experience was
away back,--at Lake Ontario.

It was a stump when her father died, and her mother had to manage
the farm, and she to help her. The mortgage they had to work off was
a stump; but faith and Luclarion's dairy did it. It was a stump when
Marcus wanted to go to college, and they undertook that, after the
mortgage. It was a stump when Adam Burge wanted her to marry him,
and go and live in the long red cottage at Side Hill, and she could
not go till they had got through with helping Marcus. It was a
terrible stump when Adam Burge married Persis Cone instead, and she
had to live on and bear it. It was a stump when her mother died, and
the farm was sold.

Marcus married; he never knew; he had a belles-lettres professorship
in a new college up in D----. He would not take a cent of the farm
money; he had had his share long ago; the four thousand dollars
were invested for Luke. He did the best he could, and all he knew;
but human creatures can never pay each other back. Only God can do
that, either way.

Luclarion did not stay in ----. There were too few there now, and
too many. She came down to Boston. Her two hundred and eighty
dollars a year was very good, as far as it went, but it would not
keep her idle; neither did she wish to live idle. She learned
dress-making; she had taste and knack; she was doing well; she
enjoyed going about from house to house for her days' work, and then
coming back to her snug room at night, and her cup of tea and her
book.

Then it turned out that so much sewing was not good for her; her
health was threatened; she had been used to farm work and "all
out-doors." It was a "stump" again. That was all she called it; she
did not talk piously about a "cross." What difference did it make?
There is another word, also, for "cross" in Hebrew.

Luclarion came at last to live with Mrs. Edward Shiere. And in that
household, at eight and twenty, we have just found her.




III.

BY STORY-RAIL: TWENTY-SIX YEARS AN HOUR.


Laura Shiere did not think much about the "stump," when, in her dark
gray merino travelling dress, and her black ribbons, nicely
appointed, as Mrs. Oferr's niece should be, down to her black kid
gloves and broad-hemmed pocket-handkerchief, and little black straw
travelling-basket (for morocco bags were not yet in those days), she
stepped into the train with her aunt at the Providence Station, on
her way to Stonington and New York.

The world seemed easily laid out before her. She was like a cousin
in a story-book, going to arrive presently at a new home, and begin
a new life, in which she would be very interesting to herself and to
those about her. She felt rather important, too, with her money
independence--there being really "property" of hers to be spoken of
as she had heard it of late. She had her mother's diamond ring on
her third finger, and was comfortably conscious of it when she drew
off her left-hand glove. Laura Shiere's nature had only been
stirred, as yet, a very little below the surface, and the surface
rippled pleasantly in the sunlight that was breaking forth from the
brief clouds.

Among the disreputable and vociferous crowd of New York hack
drivers, that swarmed upon the pier as the _Massachusetts_ glided
into her dock, it was good to see that subduedly respectable and
consciously private and superior man in the drab overcoat and the
nice gloves and boots, who came forward and touched his hat to Mrs.
Oferr, took her shawl and basket, and led the way, among the
aggravated public menials, to a handsome private carriage waiting on
the street.

"All well at home, David?" asked Mrs. Oferr.

"All well, ma'am, thank you," replied David.

And another man sat upon the box, in another drab coat, and touched
_his_ hat; and when they reached Waverley Place and alighted, Mrs.
Oferr had something to say to him of certain directions, and
addressed him as "Moses."

It was very grand and wonderful to order "David" and "Moses" about.
Laura felt as if her aunt were something only a little less than
"Michael with the sword." Laura had a susceptibility for dignities;
she appreciated, as we have seen out upon the wood-shed, "high
places, and all the people looking up."

David and Moses were brothers, she found out; she supposed that was
the reason they dressed alike, in drab coats; as she and Frank used
to wear their red merinos, and their blue ginghams. A little spasm
did come up in her throat for a minute, as she thought of the old
frocks and the old times already dropped so far behind; but Alice
and Geraldine Oferr met her the next instant on the broad staircase
at the back of the marble-paved hall, looking slight and delicate,
and princess-like, in the grand space built about them for their
lives to move in; and in the distance and magnificence of it all,
the faint little momentary image of Frank faded away.

She went up with them out of the great square hall, over the stately
staircase, past the open doors of drawing-rooms and library,
stretching back in a long suite, with the conservatory gleaming
green from the far end over the garden, up the second stairway to
the floor where their rooms were; bedrooms and nursery,--this last
called so still, though the great, airy front-room was the place
used now for their books and amusements as growing young
ladies,--all leading one into another around the skylighted upper
hall, into which the sunshine came streaked with amber and violet
from the richly colored glass. She had a little side apartment given
to her for her own, with a recessed window, in which were blossoming
plants just set there from the conservatory; opposite stood a white,
low bed in a curtained alcove, and beyond was a dressing-closet.
Laura thought she should not be able to sleep there at all for a
night or two, for the beauty of it and the good time she should be
having.

At that same moment Frank and her Aunt Oldways were getting down
from the stage that had brought them over from Ipsley, where they
slept after their day's journey from Boston,--at the doorstone of
the low, broad-roofed, wide-built, roomy old farm-house in
Homesworth.

Right in the edge of the town it stood, its fields stretching over
the south slope of green hills in sunny uplands, and down in meadowy
richness to the wild, hidden, sequestered river-side, where the
brown water ran through a narrow, rocky valley,--Swift River they
called it. There are a great many Swift Rivers in New England. It
was only a vehement little tributary of a larger stream, beside
which lay larger towns; it was doing no work for the world,
apparently, at present; there were no mills, except a little
grist-mill to which the farmers brought their corn, cuddled among
the rocks and wild birches and alders, at a turn where the road came
down, and half a dozen planks made a bit of a bridge.

"O, what beautiful places!" cried Frank, as they crossed the little
bridge, and glanced either way into a green, gray, silvery vista of
shrubs and rocks, and rushing water, with the white spires of
meadow-sweet and the pink hardback, and the first bright plumes of
the golden rod nodding and shining against the shade,--as they
passed the head of a narrow, grassy lane, trod by cows' feet, and
smelling of their milky breaths, and the sweetness of hay-barns,--as
they came up, at length, over the long slope of turf that carpeted
the way, as for a bride's feet, from the roadside to the very
threshold. She looked along the low, treble-piled garden wall, too,
and out to the open sheds, deep with pine chips; and upon the broad
brown house-roof, with its long, gradual decline, till its eaves
were within reach of a child's fingers from the ground; and her
quick eye took in facilities.

"O, if Laura could see this! After the old shed-top in Brier Street,
and the one tree!"

But Laura had got what the shed-top stood for with her; it was
Frank who had hearkened to whole forests in the stir of the one
brick-rooted fir. To that which each child had, it was already
given.

In a week or two Frank wrote Laura a letter. It was an old-fashioned
letter, you know; a big sheet, written close, four pages,
all but the middle of the last page, which was left for the
"superscription." Then it was folded, the first leaf turned down
twice, lengthwise; then the two ends laid over, toward each other;
then the last doubling, or rather trebling, across; and the open
edge slipped over the folds. A wafer sealed it, and a thimble
pressed it,--and there were twenty-five cents postage to pay. That
was a letter in the old times, when Laura and Frank Shiere were
little girls. And this was that letter:--

     DEAR LAURA,--We got here safe, Aunt Oldways and I, a week ago
     last Saturday, and it is _beautiful_. There is a green
     lane,--almost everybody has a green lane,--and the cows go up
     and down, and the swallows build in the barn-eaves. They fly
     out at sundown, and fill all the sky up. It is like the specks
     we used to watch in the sunshine when it came in across the
     kitchen, and they danced up and down and through and away, and
     seemed to be live things; only we couldn't tell, you know, what
     they were, or if they really did know how good it was. But
     these are big and real, and you can see their wings, and you
     know what they mean by it. I guess it is all the same thing,
     only some things are little and some are big. You can see the
     stars here, too,--such a sky full. And that is all the same
     again.

     There are beautiful roofs and walls here. I guess you would
     think you were high up! Harett and I go up from under the
     cheese-room windows right over the whole house, and we sit on
     the peak by the chimney. Harett is Mrs. Dillon's girl. Not the
     girl that lives with her,--her daughter. But the girls that
     live with people are daughters here. Somebody's else, I mean.
     They are all alike. I suppose her name is Harriet, but they all
     call her Harett. I don't like to ask her for fear she should
     think I thought they didn't know how to pronounce.

     I go to school with Harett; up to the West District. We carry
     brown bread and butter, and doughnuts, and cheese, and
     apple-pie in tin pails, for luncheon. Don't you remember the
     brown cupboard in Aunt Oldways' kitchen, how sagey, and
     doughnutty, and good it always smelt? It smells just so now,
     and everything tastes just the same.

     There is a great rock under an oak tree half way up to school,
     by the side of the road. We always stop there to rest, coming
     home. Three of the girls come the same way as far as that, and
     we always save some of our dinner to eat up there, and we tell
     stories. I tell them about dancing-school, and the time we went
     to the theatre to see "Cinderella," and going shopping with
     mother, and our little tea-parties, and the Dutch dolls we made
     up in the long front chamber. O, _don't_ you remember, Laura?
     What different pieces we have got into our remembrances
     already! I feel as if I was making patchwork. Some-time,
     may-be, I shall tell somebody about living _here_. Well, they
     will be beautiful stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to
     live in. You will see when you come next summer.

     There is an apple tree down in the south orchard that bends
     just like a horse's back. Then the branches come up over your
     head and shade you. We ride there, and we sit and eat summer
     apples there. Little rosy apples with dark streaks in them all
     warm with the sun. You can't think what a smell they have, just
     like pinks and spice boxes. Why don't they keep a little way
     off from each other in cities, and so have room for apple
     trees? I don't see why they need to crowd so. I hate to think
     of you all shut up tight when I am let right out into green
     grass, and blue sky, and apple orchards. That puts me in mind
     of something! Zebiah Jane, Aunt Oldways' girl, always washes
     her face in the morning at the pump-basin out in the back
     dooryard, just like the ducks. She says she can't spatter round
     in a room; she wants all creation for a slop-bowl. I feel as if
     we had all creation for everything up here. But I can't put all
     creation in a letter if I try. _That_ would spatter dreadfully.

     I expect a long letter from you every day now. But I don't see
     what you will make it out of. I think I have got all the
     _things_ and you won't have anything left but the _words_. I am
     sure you don't sit out on the wood-shed at Aunt Oferr's, and I
     don't believe you pound stones and bricks, and make colors. Do
     you know when we rubbed our new shoes with pounded stone and
     made them gray?

     I never told you about Luclarion. She came up as soon as the
     things were all sent off, and she lives at the minister's.
     Where she used to live is only two miles from here, but other
     people live there now, and it is built on to and painted straw
     color, with a green door.

                  Your affectionate sister,
                                FRANCES SHIERE.


When Laura's letter came this was it:--

     DEAR FRANK,--I received your kind letter a week ago, but we
     have been very busy having a dressmaker and doing all our fall
     shopping, and I have not had time to answer it before. We shall
     begin to go to school next week, for the vacations are over,
     and then I shall have ever so much studying to do. I am to take
     lessons on the piano, too, and shall have to practice two hours
     a day. In the winter we shall have dancing-school and
     practicing parties. Aunt has had a new bonnet made for me. She
     did not like the plain black silk one. This is of _gros
     d'Afrique_, with little bands and cordings round the crown and
     front; and I have a dress of _gros d'Afrique_, too, trimmed
     with double folds piped on. For every-day I have a new black
     _mousseline_ with white clover leaves on it, and an all-black
     French chally to wear to dinner. I don't wear my black and
     white calico at all. Next summer aunt means to have me wear
     white almost all the time, with lavender and violet ribbons. I
     shall have a white muslin with three skirts and a black sash to
     wear to parties and to Public Saturdays, next winter. They have
     Public Saturdays at dancing-school every three weeks. But only
     the parents and relations can come. Alice and Geraldine dance
     the shawl-dance with Helena Pomeroy, with crimson and white
     Canton crape scarfs. They have showed me some of it at home.
     Aunt Oferr says I shall learn the _gavotte_.

     Aunt Oferr's house is splendid. The drawing-room is full of
     sofas, and divans, and ottomans, and a _causeuse_, a little
     S-shaped seat for two people. Everything is covered with blue
     velvet, and there are blue silk curtains to the windows, and
     great looking-glasses between, that you can see all down into
     through rooms and rooms, as if there were a hundred of them. Do
     you remember the story Luclarion used to tell us of when she
     and her brother Mark were little children and used to play that
     the looking-glass-things were real, and that two children lived
     in them, in the other room, and how we used to make believe too
     in the slanting chimney glass? You could make believe it here
     with _forty_ children. But I don't make believe much now. There
     is such a lot that is real, and it is all so grown up. It would
     seem so silly to have such plays, you know. I can't help
     thinking the things that come into my head though, and it seems
     sometimes just like a piece of a story, when I walk into the
     drawing-room all alone, just before company comes, with my
     _gros d'Afrique_ on, and my puffed lace collar, and my hair
     tied back with long new black ribbons. It all goes through my
     head just how I look coming in, and how grand it is, and what
     the words would be in a book about it, and I seem to act a
     little bit, just to myself as if I were a girl in a story, and
     it seems to say, "And Laura walked up the long drawing-room and
     took a book bound in crimson morocco from the white marble pier
     table and sat down upon the velvet ottoman in the balcony
     window." But what happened then it never tells. I suppose it
     will by and by. I am getting used to it all, though; it isn't
     so _awfully_ splendid as it was at first.

     I forgot to tell you that my new bonnet flares a great deal,
     and that I have white lace quilling round the face with little
     black dotty things in it on stems. They don't wear those close
     cottage bonnets now. And aunt has had my dresses made longer
     and my pantalettes shorter, so that they hardly show at all.
     She says I shall soon wear long dresses, I am getting so tall.
     Alice wears them now, and her feet look so pretty, and she has
     such pretty slippers: little French purple ones, and sometimes
     dark green, and sometimes beautiful light gray, to go with
     different dresses. I don't care for anything but the slippers,
     but I _should_ like such ones as hers. Aunt says I can't, of
     course, as long as I wear black, but I can have purple ones
     next summer to wear with my white dresses. That will be when I
     come to see you.

     I am afraid you will think this is a very _wearing_ kind of a
     letter, there are so many 'wears' in it. I have been reading it
     over so far, but I can't put in any other word.

                  Your affectionate sister,
                                   LAURA SHIERE.

     P.S. Aunt Oferr says Laura Shiere is such a good sounding name.
     It doesn't seem at all common. I am glad of it. I should hate
     to be common.

I do not think I shall give you any more of it just here than these
two letters tell. We are not going through all Frank and Laura's
story. That with which we have especially to do lies on beyond. But
it takes its roots in this, as all stories take their roots far back
and underneath.

Two years after, Laura was in Homesworth for her second summer visit
at the farm. It was convenient, while the Oferrs were at Saratoga.
Mrs. Oferr was very much occupied now, of course, with introducing
her own daughters. A year or two later, she meant to give Laura a
season at the Springs. "All in turn, my dear, and good time," she
said.

The winter before, Frank had been a few weeks in New York. But it
tired her dreadfully, she said. She liked the theatres and the
concerts, and walking out and seeing the shops. But there was "no
place to get out of it into." It didn't seem as if she ever really
got home and took off her things. She told Laura it was like that
first old letter of hers; it was just "wearing," all the time.

Laura laughed. "But how can you live _without_ wearing?" said she.

Frank stood by, wondering, while Laura unpacked her trunks that
morning after her second arrival at Aunt Oldways'. She had done now
even with the simplicity of white and violet, and her wardrobe
blossomed out like the flush of a summer garden.

She unfolded a rose-colored muslin, with little raised embroidered
spots, and threw it over the bed.

"Where _will_ you wear that, up here?" asked Frank, in pure
bewilderment.

"Why, I wear it to church, with my white Swiss mantle," answered
Laura. "Or taking tea, or anything. I've a black silk _visite_ for
cool days. That looks nice with it. And see here,--I've a pink
sunshade. They don't have them much yet, even in New York. Mr.
Pemberton Oferr brought these home from Paris, for Gerry and Alice,
and me. Gerry's is blue. See! it tips back." And Laura set the dashy
little thing with its head on one side, and held it up coquettishly.

"They used them in carriages in Paris, he said, and in St.
Petersburg, driving out on the Nevskoi Prospekt."

"But where are your common things?"

"Down at the bottom; I haven't come to them. They were put in first,
because they would bear squeezing. I've two French calicoes, with
pattern trimmings; and a lilac jaconet, with ruffles, open down the
front."

Laura wore long dresses now; and open wrappers were the height of
the style.

Laura astonished Homesworth the first Sunday of this visit, with her
rose-colored toilet. Bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds
and a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted over two
starched petticoats; even her pink belt had gay little borders of
tiny buds and leaves, and her fan had a pink tassel.

"They're the things I wear; why shouldn't I?" she said to Frank's
remonstrance.

"But up here!" said Frank. "It would seem nicer to wear
something--stiller."

So it would; a few years afterward Laura herself would have seen
that it was more elegant; though Laura Shiere was always rather
given to doing the utmost--in apparel--that the occasion tolerated.
Fashions grew stiller in years after. But this June Sunday,
somewhere in the last thirties or the first forties, she went into
the village church like an Aurora, and the village long remembered
the resplendence. Frank had on a white cambric dress, with a real
rose in the bosom, cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her
"cottage straw" was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed over the
crown.

"Do you feel any better?" asked Aunt Oldways of Laura, when they
came home to the country tea-dinner.

"Better--how?" asked Laura, in surprise.

"After all that 'wear' and _stare_," said Aunt Oldways, quietly.

Aunt Oldways might have been astonished, but she was by no means
awestruck, evidently; and Aunt Oldways generally spoke her mind.

Somehow, with Laura Shiere, pink was pinker, and ribbons were more
rustling than with most people. Upon some quiet unconscious folks,
silk makes no spread, and color little show; with Laura every gleam
told, every fibre asserted itself. It was the live Aurora, bristling
and tingling to its farthest electric point. She did not toss or
flaunt, either; she had learned better of Signor Pirotti how to
carry herself; but she was in conscious _rapport_ with every thing
and stitch she had about her. Some persons only put clothes on to
their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put them on to their
souls.

Laura Shiere came up to Homesworth three years later, with something
more wonderful than a pink embossed muslin:--she had a lover.

Mrs. Oferr and her daughters were on their way to the mountains;
Laura was to be left with the Oldways. Grant Ledwith accompanied
them all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to Boston.

"I can't think of anything but that pink sunshade she used to carry
round canted all to one side over her shoulder," said Aunt Oldways,
looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went
away. Laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly
little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel,
leaning on Grant Ledwith's arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh,
graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with,
and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of
eternity that she called her life. Mr. Ledwith was not so much a man
who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had "got a beau."

She had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told
Frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people
wore ever so many skirts now, at a time. She had been to a party a
little while ago where she wore _seven_.

There were deep French embroidery bands around some of these white
skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses. Geraldine Oferr
was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid; Gerry had a
white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace veil. She had three dozen
of everything, right through. They had gone to housekeeping up town,
in West Sixteenth Street. Frank would have to come to New York next
winter, or in the spring, to be _her_ bridesmaid; then she would
see; then--who knew!

Frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in Homesworth
among the hills; she had not "seen," but she had her own little
secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet
which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill
from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that "Who"
_didn't_ know.

Laura waited a year for Grant Ledwith's salary to be raised to
marrying point; he was in a wholesale woolen house in Boston; he was
a handsome fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address,--capital,
this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up to two thousand
dollars within that twelvemonth. Upon this, in the spring, they
married; took a house in Filbert Street, down by the river, and set
up their little gods. These were: a sprinkle of black walnut and
brocatelle in the drawing-room, a Sheffield-plate tea-service, and a
crimson-and-giltedged dinner set that Mrs. Oferr gave them; twilled
turkey-red curtains, that looked like thibet, in the best chamber;
and the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses, and whatever
corresponded to them on the bride-groom's part, in their wardrobes.
All that was left of Laura's money, and all that was given them by
Grant Ledwith's father, and Mr. Titus Oldways' astounding present of
three hundred dollars, without note or comment,--the first reminder
they had had of him since Edward Shiere's funeral, "and goodness
knew how he heard anything now," Aunt Oferr said,--had gone to this
outfit. But they were well set up and started in the world; so
everybody said, and so they, taking the world into their young,
confident hands for a plaything, not knowing it for the perilous
loaded shell it is, thought, merrily, themselves.

Up in Homesworth people did not have to wait for two thousand dollar
salaries. They would not get them if they did.

Oliver Ripwinkley, the minister's son, finished his medical studies
and city hospital practice that year, and came back, as he had
always said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor. Old
Doctor Parrish, the parson's friend of fifty years, with no child of
his own, kept the place for Oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned
saddle-bags in the garret the very day the young man came home. He
was there to be "called in," however, and with this backing, and the
perforce of there being nobody else, young Doctor Ripwinkley had ten
patients within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing
himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man who "appeared to
know pretty well what he was about."

So that when he gave further proof of the same, by asking, within
the week that followed, the prettiest girl in Homesworth, Frances
Shiere, to come and begin the world with him at Mile Hill village,
nobody, not even Frank herself, was astonished.

She bought three new gowns, a shawl, a black silk mantle, and a
straw bonnet. She made six each of every pretty white garment that a
woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in September, they took
their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded little corner
room in the old "Rankin house;" a bigger place than they really
wanted yet, and not all to be used at first; but rented
"reasonable," central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they
hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad sidegreen of the
village street, and running back, with its field and meadow
belongings, away to the foot of great, gray, sheltering Mile Hill.

And the vast, solemn globe, heedless of what lit here or there upon
its breadth, or took up this or that life in its little freckling
cities, or between the imperceptible foldings of its hills,--only
carrying way-passengers for the centuries,--went plunging on its
track, around and around, and swept them all, a score of times,
through its summer and its winter solstices.




IV.

AFTERWARDS IS A LONG TIME.


Old Mr. Marmaduke Wharne had come down from Outledge, in the
mountains, on his way home to New York. He had stopped in Boston to
attend to some affairs of his own,--if one can call them so, since
Marmaduke Wharne never had any "own" affairs that did not chiefly
concern, to their advantage, somebody else,--in which his friend Mr.
Titus Oldways was interested, not personally, but Wharne fashion.
Now, reader, you know something about Mr. Titus Oldways, which up to
this moment, only God, and Marmaduke Wharne, and Rachel Froke, who
kept Mr. Oldways' house, and wore a Friend's drab dress and white
cap, and said "Titus," and "Marmaduke" to the two old gentlemen, and
"thee" and "thou" to everybody,--have ever known. In a general way
and relation, I mean; separate persons knew particular things; but
each separate person thought the particular thing he knew to be a
whimsical exception.

Mr. Oldways did not belong to any church: but he had an English
Prayer-book under his Bible on his study table, and Baxter and
Fenelon and à Kempis and "Wesley's Hymns," and Swedenborg's "Heaven
and Hell" and "Arcana Celestia," and Lowell's "Sir Launfal," and
Dickens's "Christmas Carol," all on the same set of shelves,--that
held, he told Marmaduke, his religion; or as much of it as he could
get together. And he had this woman, who was a Friend, and who
walked by the Inner Light, and in outer charity, if ever a woman
did, to keep his house. "For," said he, "the blessed truth is, that
the Word of God is in the world. Alive in it. When you know that,
and wherever you can get hold of his souls, then and there you've
got your religion,--a piece at a time. To prove and sort your
pieces, and to straighten the tangle you might otherwise get into,
there's _this_," and he laid his hand down on the Four Gospels,
bound in white morocco, with a silver cross upon the cover,--a
volume that no earthly creature, again, knew of, save Titus and
Marmaduke and Rachel Froke, who laid it into a drawer when she swept
and dusted, and placed it between the crimson folds of its quilted
silken wrapper when she had finished, burnishing the silver cross
gently with a scrap of chamois leather cut from a clean piece every
time. There was nothing else delicate and exquisite in all the plain
and grim establishment; and the crimson wrapper was comfortably
worn, and nobody would notice it, lying on the table there, with an
almanac, a directory, the big, open Worcester's Dictionary, and the
scattered pamphlets and newspapers of the day.

Out in the world, Titus Oldways went about with visor down.

He gave to no fairs nor public charities; "let them get all they
could that way, it wasn't his way," he said to Rachel Froke. The
world thought he gave nothing, either of purse or life.

There was a plan they had together,--he and Marmaduke Wharne,--this
girls' story-book will not hold the details nor the idea of
it,--about a farm they owned, and people working it that could go
nowhere else to work anything; and a mill-privilege that might be
utilized and expanded, to make--not money so much as safe and honest
human life by way of making money; and they sat and talked this plan
over, and settled its arrangements, in the days that Marmaduke
Wharne was staying on in Boston, waiting for his other friend, Miss
Craydocke, who had taken the River Road down from Outledge, and so
come round by Z----, where she was staying a few days with the
Goldthwaites and the Inglesides. Miss Craydocke had a share or two
in the farm and in the mill.

And now, Titus Oldways wanted to know of Marmaduke Wharne what he
was to do for Afterwards.

It was a question that had puzzled and troubled him. Afterwards.

"While I live," he said, "I will do what I can, and _as_ I can. I
will hand over my doing, and the wherewith, to no society or
corporation. I'll pay no salaries nor circumlocutions. Neither will
I--afterwards. And how is my money going to work on?"

"_Your_ money?"

"Well,--God's money."

"How did it work when it came to you?"

Mr. Oldways was silent.

"He chose to send it to you. He made it in the order of things that
it should come to you. You began, yourself, to work for money. You
did not understand, then, that the money would be from God and was
for Him."

"He made me understand."

"Yes. He looked out for that part of it too. He can look out for it
again. His word shall not return unto him void."

"He has given me this, though, to pass on; and I will not put it
into a machine. I want to give some living soul a body for its
living. Dead charities are dead. It's of no use to will it to you,
Marmaduke; I'm as likely to stay on, perhaps, as you are."

"And the youngest life might drop, the day after your own. You can't
take it out of God's hand."

"I must either let it go by law, or will it--here and there. I know
enough whom it would help; but I want to invest, not spend it; to
invest it in a life--or lives--that will carry it on from where I
leave it. How shall I know?"

"He giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him," quoted Marmaduke Wharne,
thoughtfully. "I am English, you know, Oldways; I can't help
reverencing the claims of next of kin. Unless one is plainly shown
otherwise, it seems the appointment. How can we set aside his ways
until He clearly points us out his own exception?"

"My 'next' are two women whom I don't know, my niece's children. She
died thirty years ago."

"Perhaps you ought to know them."

"I know _about_ them; I've kept the run; but I've held clear of
family. They didn't need me, and I had no right to put it into their
heads they did, unless I fully meant"--

He broke off.

"They're like everybody else, Wharne; neither better nor worse, I
dare say; but the world is full of just such women. How do I know
this money would be well in their hands--even for themselves?"

"Find out."

"One of 'em was brought up by an Oferr woman!"

The tone in which he _commonized_ the name to a satiric general
term, is not to be written down, and needed not to be interpreted.

"The other is well enough," he went on, "and contented enough.
A doctor's widow, with a little property, a farm and two
children,--her older ones died very young,--up in New Hampshire. I
might spoil _her_; and the other,--well, you see as I said, I _don't
know_."

"Find out," said Marmaduke Wharne, again.

"People are not found out till they are tried."

"Try 'em!"

Mr. Oldways had been sitting with his head bent, thoughtfully, his
eyes looking down, his hands on the two stiff, old-fashioned arms of
his chair. At this last spondaic response from Marmaduke, he lifted
his eyes and eyebrows,--not his head,--and raised himself slightly
with his two hands pressing on the chair arms; the keen glance and
the half-movement were impulsively toward his friend.

"Eh?" said he.

"Try 'em," repeated Marmaduke Wharne. "Give God's way a chance."

Mr. Oldways, seated back in his chair again, looked at him intently;
made a little vibration, as it were, with his body, that moved his
head up and down almost imperceptibly, with a kind of gradual
assenting apprehension, and kept utterly silent.

So, their talk being palpably over for this time, Marmaduke Wharne
got up presently to go. They nodded at each other, friendlily, as he
looked back from the door.

Left alone, Mr. Titus Oldways turned in his swivel-chair, around to
his desk beside which he was sitting.

"Next of kin?" he repeated to himself. "God's way?--Well! Afterwards
is a long time. A man must give it up somewhere. Everything escheats
to the king at last."

And he took a pen in his hand and wrote a letter.




V.

HOW THE NEWS CAME TO HOMESWORTH.


"I wish I lived in the city, and had a best friend," said Hazel
Ripwinkley to Diana, as they sat together on the long, red, sloping
kitchen roof under the arches of the willow-tree, hemming towels for
their afternoon "stent." They did this because their mother sat on
the shed roof under the fir, when she was a child, and had told them
of it. Imagination is so much greater than fact, that these
children, who had now all that little Frank Shiere had dreamed of
with the tar smell and the gravel stones and the one tree,--who
might run free in the wide woods and up the breezy hillsides,--liked
best of all to get out on the kitchen roof and play "old times," and
go back into their mother's dream.

"I wish I lived in a block of houses, and could see across the
corner into my best friend's room when she got up in the morning!"

"And could have that party!" said Diana.

"Think of the clean, smooth streets, with red sidewalks, and people
living all along, door after door! I like things set in rows, and
people having places, like the desks at school. Why, you've got to
go way round Sand Hill to get to Elizabeth Ann Dorridon's. I should
like to go up steps, and ring bells!"

"I don't know," said Diana, slowly. "I think birds that build little
nests about anywhere in the cunning, separate places, in the woods,
or among the bushes, have the best time."

"Birds, Dine! It ain't birds, it's people! What has that to do with
it?"

"I mean I think nests are better than martin-boxes."

"Let's go in and get her to tell us that story. She's in the round
room."

The round room was a half ellipse, running in against the curve of
the staircase. It was a bit of a place, with the window at one end,
and the bow at the other. It had been Doctor Ripwinkley's office,
and Mrs. Ripwinkley sat there with her work on summer afternoons.
The door opened out, close at the front, upon a great flat stone in
an angle, where was also entrance into the hall by the house-door,
at the right hand. The door of the office stood open, and across the
stone one could look down, between a range of lilac bushes and the
parlor windows, through a green door-yard into the street.

"Now, Mother Frank, tell us about the party!"

They called her "Mother Frank" when they wished to be particularly
coaxing. They had taken up their father's name for her, with their
own prefix, when they were very little ones, before he went away and
left nobody to call her Frank, every day, any more.

"That same little old story? Won't you ever be tired of it,--you
great girls?" asked the mother; for she had told it to them ever
since they were six and eight years old.

"Yes! No, never!" said the children.

For how _should_ they outgrow it? It was a sunny little bit out of
their mother's own child-life. We shall go back to smaller things,
one day, maybe, and find them yet more beautiful. It is the _going_
back, together.

"The same old way?"

"Yes; the very same old way."

"We had little open-work straw hats and muslin pelisses,--your Aunt
Laura and I,"--began Mrs. Ripwinkley, as she had begun all those
scores of times before. "Mother put them on for us,--she dressed us
just alike, always,--and told us to take each other's hands, and go
up Brier and down Hickory streets, and stop at all the houses that
she named, and that we knew; and we were to give her love and
compliments, and ask the mothers in each house,--Mrs. Dayton, and
Mrs. Holridge (she lived up the long steps), and Mrs. Waldow, and
the rest of them, to let Caroline and Grace and Fanny and Susan, and
the rest of _them_, come at four o'clock, to spend the afternoon and
take tea, if it was convenient."

"O, mother!" said Hazel, "you didn't say that when you _asked_
people, you know."

"O, no!" said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "That was when we went to stop a
little while ourselves, without being asked. Well, it was to please
to let them come. And all the ladies were at home, because it was
only ten o'clock; and they all sent their love and compliments, and
they were much obliged, and the little girls would be very happy.

"It was a warm June day; up Brier Street was a steep walk; down
Hickory we were glad to keep on the shady side, and thought it was
nice that Mrs. Bemys and Mrs. Waldow lived there. The strings of our
hats were very moist and clinging when we got home, and Laura had a
blue mark under her chin from the green ribbon.

"Mother was in her room, in her white dimity morning gown, with
little bows up the front, the ends trimmed with cambric edging. She
took off our hats and our pelisses,--the tight little sleeves came
off wrong side out,--sponged our faces with cool water, and brushed
out Laura's curls. That was the only difference between us. I
hadn't any curls, and my hair had to be kept cropped. Then she went
to her upper bureau drawer and took out two little paper boxes.

"'Something has come for Blanche and Clorinda, since you have been
gone,' she said, smiling. 'I suppose you have been shopping?' We
took the paper boxes, laughing back at her with a happy
understanding. We were used to these little plays of mother's, and
she couldn't really surprise us with her kindnesses. We went and sat
down in the window-seat, and opened them as deliberately and in as
grown-up a way as we could. Inside them were two little lace
pelerines lined with rose-colored silk. The boxes had a faint smell
of musk. The things were so much better for coming in boxes! Mother
knew that.

"Well, we dressed our dolls, and it was a great long sunshiny
forenoon. Mother and Luclarion had done something in the kitchen,
and there was a smell of sweet baking in the house. Every now and
then we sniffed, and looked at each other, and at mother, and
laughed. After dinner we had on our white French calicoes with blue
sprigs, and mother said she should take a little nap, and we might
go into the parlor and be ready for our company. She always let us
receive our own company ourselves at first. And exactly at four
o'clock the door-bell rang, and they began to come.

"Caroline and Fanny Dayton had on white cambric dresses, and green
kid slippers. That was being very much dressed, indeed. Lucy Waldow
wore a pink lawn, and Grace Holridge a buff French print. Susan
Bemys said her little sister couldn't come because they couldn't
find her best shoes. Her mother thought she had thrown them out of
the window.

"When they all got there we began to play 'Lady Fair;' and we had
just got all the 'lady fairs,' one after another, into our ring, and
were dancing and singing up and down and round and round, when the
door opened and mother walked in.

"We always thought our mother was the prettiest of any of the girls'
mothers. She had such bright shining hair, and she put it up with
shell combs into such little curly puffs. And she never seemed fussy
or old, but she came in among us with such a beautiful, smiling way,
as if she knew beforehand that it was all right, and there was no
danger of any mischief, or that we shouldn't behave well, but she
only wanted to see the good time. That day she had on a white muslin
dress with little purple flowers on it, and a bow of purple ribbon
right in the side of her hair. She had a little piece of fine work
in her hand, and after she had spoken to all the little girls and
asked them how their mothers were, she went and sat down in one of
the front windows, and made little scollops and eyelets. I remember
her long ivory stiletto, with a loop of green ribbon through the
head of it, and the sharp, tiny, big-bowed scissors that lay in her
lap, and the bright, tapering silver thimble on her finger.

"Pretty soon the door opened again, softly; a tray appeared, with
Hannah behind it. On the tray were little glass saucers with
confectionery in them; old-fashioned confectionery,--gibraltars, and
colored caraways, and cockles with mottoes. We were in the middle of
'So says the Grand Mufti,' and Grace Holridge was the Grand Mufti.
Hannah went up to her first, as she stood there alone, and Grace
took a saucer and held it up before the row of us, and said, '_Thus_
says the Grand Mufti!' and then she bit a red gibraltar, and
everybody laughed. She did it so quickly and so prettily, putting
it right into the play. It was good of her not to say, '_So_ says
the Grand Mufti.' At least we thought so then, though Susan Bemys
said it would have been funnier.

"We had a great many plays in those days, and it took a long
afternoon to get through with them. We had not begun to wonder what
we should do next, when tea time came, and we went down into the
basement room. It wasn't tea, though; it was milk in little clear,
pink mugs, some that mother only had out for our parties, and cold
water in crimped-edge glasses, and little biscuits, and
sponge-cakes, and small round pound-cakes frosted. These were what
had smelt so good in the morning.

"We stood round the table; there was not room for all of us to sit,
and mother helped us, and Hannah passed things round. Susan Bemys
took cake three times, and Lucy Waldow opened her eyes wide, and
Fanny Dayton touched me softly under the table.

"After tea mother played and sung some little songs to us; and then
she played the 'Fisher's Hornpipe' and 'Money Musk,' and we danced a
little contra-dance. The girls did not all know cotillons, and some
of them had not begun to go to dancing-school. Father came home and
had his tea after we had done ours, and then he came up into the
parlor and watched us dancing. Mr. Dayton came in, too. At about
half past eight some of the other fathers called, and some of the
mothers sent their girls, and everybody was fetched away. It was
nine o'clock when Laura and I went to bed, and we couldn't go to
sleep until after the clock struck ten, for thinking and saying what
a beautiful time we had had, and anticipating how the girls would
talk it all over next day at school. That," said Mrs. Ripwinkley,
when she had finished, "was the kind of a party we used to have in
Boston when I was a little girl. I don't know what the little girls
have now."

"Boston!" said Luclarion, catching the last words as she came in,
with her pink cape bonnet on, from the Homesworth variety and
finding store, and post-office. "You'll talk them children off to
Boston, finally, Mrs. Ripwinkley! Nothing ever tugs so at one end,
but there's something tugging at the other; and there's never a hint
nor a hearing to anybody, that something more doesn't turn up
concerning it. Here's a letter, Mrs. Ripwinkley!"

Mrs. Ripwinkley took it with some surprise. It was not her sister's
handwriting nor Mr. Ledwith's, on the cover; and she rarely had a
letter from them that was posted in Boston, now. They had been
living at a place out of town for several years. Mrs. Ledwith knew
better than to give her letters to her husband for posting. They got
lost in his big wallet, and stayed there till they grew old.

Who should write to Mrs. Ripwinkley, after all these years, from
Boston?

She looked up at Luclarion, and smiled. "It didn't take a Solomon,"
said she, pointing to the postmark.

"No, nor yet a black smooch, with only four letters plain, on an
invelup. 'Taint that, it's the drift of things. Those girls have got
Boston in their minds as hard and fast as they've got heaven; and I
mistrust mightily they'll get there first somehow!"

The girls were out of hearing, as she said this; they had got their
story, and gone back to their red roof and their willow tree.

"Why, Luclarion!" exclaimed Mrs. Ripwinkley, as she drew out and
unfolded the letter sheet. "It's from Uncle Titus Oldways."

"Then he ain't dead," remarked Luclarion, and went away into the
kitchen.

     "MY DEAR FRANCES,--I am seventy-eight years old. It is time I
     got acquainted with some of my relations. I've had other work
     to do in the world heretofore (at least I thought I had), and
     so, I believe, have they. But I have a wish now to get you and
     your sister to come and live nearer to me, that we may find out
     whether we really are anything to each other or not. It seems
     natural, I suppose, that we might be; but kinship doesn't all
     run in the veins.

     "I do not ask you to do this with reference to any possible
     intentions of mine that might concern you after my death; my
     wish is to do what is right by you, in return for your
     consenting to my pleasure in the matter, while I am alive. It
     will cost you more to live in Boston than where you do now, and
     I have no business to expect you to break up and come to a new
     home unless I can make it an object to you in some way. You can
     do some things for your children here that you could not do in
     Homesworth. I will give you two thousand dollars a year to live
     on, and secure the same to you if I die. I have a house here in
     Aspen Street, not far from where I live myself, which I will
     give to either of you that it may suit. That you can settle
     between you when you come. It is rather a large house, and Mrs.
     Ledwith's family is larger, I think, than yours. The estate is
     worth ten thousand dollars, and I will give the same sum to the
     one who prefers, to put into a house elsewhere. I wish you to
     reckon this as all you are ever to expect from me, except the
     regard I am willing to believe I may come to have for you. I
     shall look to hear from you by the end of the week.

                "I remain, yours truly,

                           "TITUS OLDWAYS."

"Luclarion!" cried Mrs. Ripwinkley, with excitement, "come here and
help me think!"

"Only four days to make my mind up in," she said again, when
Luclarion had read the letter through.

Luclarion folded it and gave it back.

"It won't take God four days to think," she answered quietly; "and
you can ask _Him_ in four minutes. You and I can talk afterwards."
And Luclarion got up and went away a second time into the kitchen.

That night, after Diana and Hazel were gone to bed, their mother and
Luclarion Grapp had some last words about it, sitting by the
white-scoured kitchen table, where Luclarion had just done mixing
bread and covered it away for rising. Mrs. Ripwinkley was apt to
come out and talk things over at this time of the kneading. She
could get more from Luclarion then than at any other opportunity.
Perhaps that was because Miss Grapp could not walk off from the
bread-trough; or it might be that there was some sympathy between
the mixing of her flour and yeast into a sweet and lively
perfection, and the bringing of her mental leaven wholesomely to
bear.

"It looks as if it were meant, Luclarion," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, at
last. "And just think what it will be for the children."

"I guess it's meant fast enough," replied Luclarion. "But as for
what it will be for the children,--why, that's according to what you
all make of it. And that's the stump."

Luclarion Grapp was fifty-four years old; but her views of life were
precisely the same that they had been at twenty-eight.




VI.

AND.


There is a piece of Z----, just over the river, that they call
"And."

It began among the school-girls; Barbara Holabird had christened it,
with the shrewdness and mischief of fourteen years old. She said the
"and-so-forths" lived there.

It was a little supplementary neighborhood; an after-growth, coming
up with the railroad improvements, when they got a freight station
established on that side for the East Z---- mills. "After Z----,
what should it be but 'And?'" Barbara Holabird wanted to know. The
people who lived there called it East Square; but what difference
did that make?

It was two miles Boston-ward from Z---- centre, where the down
trains stopped first; that was five minutes gained in the time
between it and the city. Land was cheap at first, and sure to come
up in value; so there were some streets laid out at right angles,
and a lot of houses put up after a pattern, as if they had all been
turned out of blanc-mange moulds, and there was "East Square." Then
people began by-and-by to build for themselves, and a little variety
and a good deal of ambition came in. They had got to French roofs
now; this was just before the day of the multitudinous little paper
collar-boxes with beveled covers, that are set down everywhere now,
and look as if they could be lifted up by the chimneys, any time,
and be carried off with a thumb and finger. Two and a half story
houses, Mansarded, looked grand; and the East Square people thought
nothing slight of themselves, though the "old places" and the real
Z---- families were all over on West Hill.

Mrs. Megilp boarded in And for the summer.

"Since Oswald had been in business she couldn't go far from the
cars, you know; and Oswald had a boat on the river, and he and
Glossy enjoyed that so much. Besides, she had friends in Z----,
which made it pleasant; and she was tired, for her part, of crowds
and fashion. All she wanted was a quiet country place. She knew the
Goldthwaites and the Haddens; she had met them one year at
Jefferson."

Mrs. Megilp had found out that she could get larger rooms in And
than she could have at the mountains or the sea-shore, and at half
the price; but this she did not mention. Yet there was nothing
shabby in it, except her carefully _not_ mentioning it.

Mrs. Megilp was Mrs. Grant Ledwith's chief intimate and counselor.
She was a good deal the elder; that was why it was mutually
advantageous. Grant Ledwith was one of the out-in-the-world,
up-to-the-times men of the day; the day in which everything is
going, and everybody that is in active life has, somehow or other,
all that is going. Grant Ledwith got a good salary, an inflated
currency salary; and he spent it all. His daughters were growing up,
and they were stylish and pretty; Mrs. Megilp took a great interest
in Agatha and Florence Ledwith, and was always urging their mother
to "do them justice." "Agatha and Florence were girls who had a
right to every advantage." Mrs. Megilp was almost old enough to be
Laura Ledwith's mother; she had great experience, and knowledge of
the world; and she sat behind Laura's conscience and drove it tandem
with her inclination.

Per contra, it was nice for Mrs. Megilp, who was a widow, and whose
income did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to have
friends who lived like the Ledwiths, and who always made her
welcome; it was a good thing for Glossy to be so fond of Agatha and
Florence, and to have them so fond of her. "She needed young
society," her mother said. One reason that Glossy Megilp needed
young society might be in the fact that she herself was twenty-six.

Mrs. Megilp had advised the Ledwiths to buy a house in Z----. "It
was just far enough not to be suburban, but to have a society of its
own; and there _was_ excellent society in Z----, everybody knew.
Boston was hard work, nowadays; the distances were getting to be so
great." Up to the West and South Ends,--the material distances,--she
meant to be understood to say; but there was an inner sense to Mrs.
Megilp's utterances, also.

"One might as well be quite out of town; and then it was always
something, even in such city connection as one might care to keep
up, to hail from a well-recognized social independency; to belong to
Z---- was a standing, always. It wasn't like going to Forest Dell,
or Lakegrove, or Bellair; cheap little got-up places with fancy
names, that were strung out on the railroads like French gilt beads
on a chain."

But for all that, Mrs. Ledwith had only got into "And;" and Mrs.
Megilp knew it.

Laura did not realize it much; she had bowing and speaking
acquaintance with the Haddens and the Hendees, and even with the
Marchbankses, over on West Hill; and the Goldthwaites and the
Holabirds, down in the town, she knew very well. She did not care to
come much nearer; she did not want to be bound by any very
stringent and exclusive social limits; it was a bother to keep up
to all the demands of such a small, old-established set. Mrs. Hendee
would not notice, far less be impressed by the advent of her
new-style Brussels carpet with a border, or her full, fresh,
Nottingham lace curtains, or the new covering of her drawing-room
set with cuir-colored terry. Mrs. Tom Friske and Mrs. Philgry, down
here at East Square, would run in, and appreciate, and admire, and
talk it all over, and go away perhaps breaking the tenth commandment
amiably in their hearts.

Mrs. Ledwith's nerves had extended since we saw her as a girl; they
did not then go beyond the floating ends of her blue or rose-colored
ribbons, or, at furthest, the tip of her jaunty laced sunshade; now
they ramified,--for life still grows in some direction,--to her
chairs, and her china, and her curtains, and her ruffled
pillow-shams. Also, savingly, to her children's "suits," and party
dresses, and pic-nic hats, and double button gloves. Savingly; for
there is a leaven of grace in mother-care, even though it be
expended upon these. Her friend, Mrs. Inchdeepe, in Helvellyn Park,
with whom she dined when she went shopping in Boston, had _nothing_
but her modern improvements and her furniture. "My house is my
life," she used to say, going round with a Canton crape duster,
touching tenderly carvings and inlayings and gildings.

Mrs. Megilp was spending the day with Laura Ledwith; Glossy was gone
to town, and thence down to the sea-shore, with some friends.

Mrs. Megilp spent a good many days with Laura. She had large, bright
rooms at her boarding-house, but then she had very gristly veal pies
and thin tapioca puddings for dinner; and Mrs. Megilp's constitution
required something more generous. She was apt to happen in at this
season, when Laura had potted pigeons. A little bird told her; a
dozen little birds, I mean, with their legs tied together in a
bunch; for she could see the market wagon from her window, when it
turned up Mr. Ledwith's avenue.

Laura had always the claret pitcher on her dinner table, too; and
claret and water, well-sugared, went deliciously with the savory
stew.

They were up-stairs now, in Laura's chamber; the bed and sofa were
covered with silk and millinery; Laura was looking over the girls'
"fall things;" there was a smell of sweet marjoram and thyme and
cloves, and general richness coming up from the kitchen; there was a
bland sense of the goodness of Providence in Mrs. Megilp's--no, not
heart, for her heart was not very hungry; but in her eyes and
nostrils.

She was advising Mrs. Ledwith to take Desire and Helena's two green
silks and make them over into one for Helena.

"You can get two whole back breadths then, by piecing it up under
the sash; and you _can't_ have all those gores again; they are quite
done with. Everybody puts in whole breadths now. There's just as
much difference in the _way_ of goring a skirt, as there is between
gores and straight selvages."

"They do hang well, though; they have such a nice slope."

"Yes,--but the stripes and the seams! Those tell the story six rods
off; and then there _must_ be sashes, or postillions, or something;
they don't make anything without them; there isn't any finish to a
round waist unless you have something behind."

"They wore belts last year, and I bought those expensive gilt
buckles. I'm sure they used to look sweetly. But there! a fashion
doesn't last nowadays while you're putting a thing on and walking
out of the house!"

"And don't put in more than three plaits," pursued Mrs. Megilp,
intent on the fate of the green silks. "Everything is gathered; you
see that is what requires the sashes; round waists and gathers have
a queer look without."

"If you once begin to alter, you've got to make all over," said Mrs.
Ledwith, a little fractiously, putting the scissors in with
unwilling fingers. She knew there was a good four days' work before
her, and she was quick with her needle, too.

"Never mind; the making over doesn't cost anything; you turn off
work so easily; and then you've got a really stylish thing."

"But with all the ripping and remodelling, I don't get time to turn
round, myself, and _live_! It is all fall work, and spring work, and
summer work and winter work. One drive rushes pell-mell right over
another. There isn't time enough to make things and have them; the
good of them, I mean."

"The girls get it; we have to live in our children," said Mrs.
Megilp, self-renouncingly. "I can never rest until Glossy is
provided with everything; and you know, Laura, I _am_ obliged to
contrive."

Mrs. Megilp and her daughter Glaucia spent about a thousand dollars
a year, between them, on their dress. In these days, this is a
limited allowance--for the Megilps. But Mrs. Megilp was a woman of
strict pecuniary principle; the other fifteen hundred must pay all
the rest; she submitted cheerfully to the Divine allotment, and
punctually made the two ends meet. She will have this to show, when
the Lord of these servants cometh and reckoneth with them, and that
man who has been also in narrow circumstances, brings his nicely
kept talent out of his napkin.

Desire Ledwith, a girl of sixteen, spoke suddenly from a corner
where she sat with a book,--

"I do wonder who '_they_' are, mamma!"

"Who?" said Mrs. Ledwith, half rising from her chair, and letting
some breadths of silk slide down upon the floor from her lap, as she
glanced anxiously from the window down the avenue. She did not want
any company this morning.

"Not that, mamma; I don't mean anybody coming. The 'theys' that
wear, and don't wear, things; the theys you have to be just like,
and keep ripping and piecing for."

"You absurd child!" exclaimed Mrs. Ledwith, pettishly. "To make me
spill a whole lapful of work for that! They? Why, everybody, of
course."

"Everybody complains of them, though. Jean Friske says her mother is
all discouraged and worn out. There isn't a thing they had last year
that won't have to be made over this, because they put in a breadth
more behind, and they only gore side seams. And they don't wear
black capes or cloth sacks any more with all kinds of dresses; you
must have suits, clear through. It seems to me 'they' is a nuisance.
And if it's everybody, we must be part of it. Why doesn't somebody
stop?"

"Desire, I wish you'd put away your book, and help, instead of
asking silly questions. You can't make the world over, with 'why
don'ts?'"

"I'll _rip_," said Desire, with a slight emphasis; putting her book
down, and coming over for a skirt and a pair of scissors. "But you
know I'm no good at putting together again. And about making the
world over, I don't know but that might be as easy as making over
all its clothes, I'd as lief try, of the two."

Desire was never cross or disagreeable; she was only
"impracticable," her mother said. "And besides that, she didn't know
what she really did want. She was born hungry and asking, with those
sharp little eyes, and her mouth always open while she was a baby.
'It was a sign,' the nurse said, when she was three weeks old. And
then the other sign,--that she should have to be called 'Desire!'"

Mrs. Megilp--for Mrs. Megilp had been in office as long ago as
that--had suggested ways of getting over or around the difficulty,
when Aunt Desire had stipulated to have the baby named for her, and
had made certain persuasive conditions.

"There's the pretty French turn you might give it,--'Desirée.' Only
one more 'e,' and an accent. That is so sweet, and graceful, and
distinguished!"

"But Aunt Desire won't have the name twisted. It is to be real,
plain Desire, or not at all."

Mrs. Megilp had shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, of course it can be that, to christen by, and marry by, and
be buried by. But between whiles,--people pick up names,--you'll
see!"

Mrs. Megilp began to call her "Daisy" when she was two years old.
Nobody could help what Mrs. Megilp took a fancy to call her by way
of endearment, of course; and Daisy she was growing to be in the
family, when one day, at seven years old, she heard Mrs. Megilp say
to her mother,--

"I don't see but that you've all got your _Desire_, after all. The
old lady is satisfied; and away up there in Hanover, what can it
signify to her? The child is 'Daisy,' practically, now, as long as
she lives."

The sharp, eager little gray eyes, so close together in the high,
delicate head, glanced up quickly at speaker and hearer.

"What old lady, mamma, away up in Hanover?"

"Your Aunt Desire, Daisy, whom you were named for. She lives in
Hanover. You are to go and see her there, this summer."

"Will she call me Daisy?"

The little difficulty suggested in this question had singularly
never occurred to Mrs. Ledwith before. Miss Desire Ledwith never
came down to Boston; there was no danger at home.

"No. She is old-fashioned, and doesn't like pet names. She will call
you Desire. That is your name, you know."

"Would it signify if she thought you called me Daisy?" asked the
child frowning half absently over her doll, whose arm she was
struggling to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own
manufacture.

"Well, perhaps she might not exactly understand. People always went
by their names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody does.
She was very particular about having you called for her, and you
_are_, you know. I always write 'Desire Ledwith' in all your books,
and--well, I always _shall_ write it so, and so will you. But you
can be Daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as Florence
is Flossie."

"No, I can't," said the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and
dropping her doll. "Aunt Desire, away up in Hanover, is thinking all
the time that there is a little Desire Ledwith growing up down here.
I don't mean to have her cheated. I'm going to went by my name, as
she did. Don't call me Daisy any more, all of you; for I shan't
come!"

The gray eyes sparkled; the whole little face scintillated, as it
were. Desire Ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when
something quick and strong shone through it, it was as if somewhere
behind it there had been struck fire.

She was true to that through all the years after; going to school
with Mabels and Ethels and Graces and Ediths,--not a girl she knew
but had a pretty modern name,--and they all wondering at that stiff
little "Desire" of hers that she would go by. When she was twelve
years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and left her a gold
watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand
in her room,--a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and
twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.

Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day
after that. Desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other
reply in her face, or else.

"You might please your mother now, I think," said Mrs. Megilp.
"There is no old lady to be troubled by it."

"A promise isn't ever dead, Mrs. Megilp," said Desire, briefly. "I
shall keep our words."

"After all," Mrs. Megilp said privately to the mother, "there is
something quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name. I
don't know that it isn't good taste in the child. Everybody
understands that it was a condition, and an inheritance."

Mrs. Megilp had taken care of that. She was watchful for the small
impressions she could make in behalf of her particular friends. She
carried about with her a little social circumference in which all
was preëminently as it should be.

But,--as I would say if you could not see it for yourself--this is
a digression. We will go back again.

"If it were any use!" said Desire, shaking out the deep plaits as
she unfastened them from the band. "But you're only a piece of
everybody after all. You haven't anything really new or particular
to yourself, when you've done. And it takes up so much time. Last
year, this was so pretty! _Isn't_ anything actually pretty in
itself, or can't they settle what it is? I should think they had
been at it long enough."

"Fashions never were so graceful as they are this minute," said Mrs.
Megilp. "Of course it is art, like everything else, and progress.
The world is getting educated to a higher refinement in it, every
day. Why, it's duty, child!" she continued, exaltedly. "Think what
the world would be if nobody cared. We ought to make life beautiful.
It's meant to be. There's not only no virtue in ugliness, but almost
no virtue _with_ it, I think. People are more polite and
good-natured when they are well dressed and comfortable."

"_That's_ dress, too, though," said Desire, sententiously. "You've
got to stay at home four days, and rip, and be tired, and cross, and
tried-on-to, and have no chance to do anything else, before you can
put it all on and go out and be good-natured and bland, and help put
the beautiful face on the world, _one_ day. I don't believe it's
political economy."

"Everybody doesn't have to do it for themselves. Really, when I hear
people blamed for dress and elegance,--why, the very ones who have
the most of it are those who sacrifice the least time to it. They
just go and order what they want, and there's the end of it. When it
comes home, they put it on, and it might as well be a flounced silk
as a plain calico."

"But we _do_ have to think, Mrs. Megilp. And work and worry. And
then we _can't_ turn right round in the things we know every stitch
of and have bothered over from beginning to end, and just be lilies
of the field!"

"A great many people do have to wash their own dishes, and sweep,
and scour; but that is no reason it ought not to be done. I always
thought it was rather a pity that was said, _just so_," Mrs. Megilp
proceeded, with a mild deprecation of the Scripture. "There _is_
toiling and spinning; and will be to the end of time, for some of
us."

"There's cauliflower brought for dinner, Mrs. Ledwith," said
Christina, the parlor girl, coming in. "And Hannah says it won't go
with the pigeons. Will she put it on the ice for to-morrow?"

"I suppose so," said Mrs. Ledwith, absently, considering a breadth
that had a little hitch in it. "Though what we shall have to-morrow
I'm sure I don't know," she added, rousing up. "I wish Mr. Ledwith
wouldn't send home the first thing he sees, without any reference."

"And here's the milkman's bill, and a letter," continued Christina,
laying them down on a chair beside her mistress, and then departing.

Great things come into life so easily, when they do come, right
alongside of milk-bills and cabbages! And yet one may wait so long
sometimes for anything to happen _but_ cabbages!

The letter was in a very broad, thick envelope, and sealed with wax.

Mrs. Ledwith looked at it curiously before she opened it. She
did not receive many letters. She had very little time for
correspondence. It was addressed to "Mrs. Laura Ledwith." That
was odd and unusual, too.

Mrs. Megilp glanced at her over the tortoise-shell rims of her
eye-glasses, but sat very quiet, lest she should delay the opening.
She would like to know what could be in that very business-like
looking despatch, and Laura would be sure to tell her. It must be
something pretty positive, one way or another; it was no
common-place negative communication. Laura might have had property
left her. Mrs. Megilp always thought of possibilities like that.

When Laura Ledwith had unfolded the large commercial sheet, and
glanced down the open lines of square, upright characters, whose
purport could be taken in at sight, like print, she turned very red
with a sudden excitement. Then all the color dropped away, and there
was nothing in her face but blank, pale, intense surprise.

"It is a most _won_derful thing!" said she, at last, slowly; and her
breath came like a gasp with her words. "My great-uncle, Mr.
Oldways."

She spoke those four words as if from them Mrs. Megilp could
understand everything.

Mrs. Megilp thought she did.

"Ah! Gone?" she asked, pathetically.

"Gone! No, indeed!" said Mrs. Ledwith. "He wrote the letter. He
wants me to _come_; me, and all of us,--to Boston, to live; and to
get acquainted with him."

"My dear," said Mrs. Megilp, with the promptness and benignity of a
Christian apostle, "it's your duty to go."

"And he offers me a house, and two thousand dollars a year."

"My dear," said Mrs. Megilp, "it is _emphatically_ your duty to go."

All at once something strange came over Laura Ledwith. She crumpled
the letter tight in her hands with a clutch of quick excitement, and
began to choke with a little sob, and to laugh at the same time.

"Don't give way!" cried Mrs. Megilp, coming to her and giving her a
little shake and a slap. "If you do once you will again, and you're
_not_ hystericky!"

"He's sent for Frank, too. Frank and I will be together again in
dear old Boston! But--we can't be children and sit on the shed any
more; and--it _isn't_ dear old Boston, either!"

And then Laura gave right up, and had a good cry for five minutes.
After that she felt better, and asked Mrs. Megilp how she thought a
house in Spiller Street would do.

But she couldn't rip any more of those breadths that morning.

Agatha and Florence came in from some calls at the Goldthwaites and
the Haddens, and the news was told, and they had their bonnets to
take off, and the dinner-bell rang, and the smell of the spicy
pigeon-stew came up the stairs, all together. And they went down,
talking fast; and one said "house," and another "carpets," and
another "music and German;" and Desire, trailing a breadth of green
silk in her hand that she had never let go since the letter was
read, cried out, "oratorios!" And nobody quite knew what they were
going down stairs for, or had presence of mind to realize the
pigeons, or help each other or themselves properly, when they got
there! Except Mrs. Megilp, who was polite and hospitable to them
all, and picked two birds in the most composed and elegant manner.

When the dessert was put upon the table, and Christina, confusedly
enlightened as to the family excitement, and excessively curious,
had gone away into the kitchen, Mrs. Ledwith said to Mrs. Megilp,--

"I'm not sure I should fancy Spiller Street, after all; it's a sort
of a corner. Westmoreland Street or Helvellyn Park might be nice. I
know people down that way,--Mrs. Inchdeepe."

"Mrs. Inchdeepe isn't exactly 'people,'" said Mrs. Megilp, in a
quiet way that implied more than grammar. "Don't get into 'And' in
Boston, Laura!--With such an addition to your income, and what your
uncle gives you toward a house, I don't see why you might not think
of Republic Avenue."

"We shall have plenty of thinking to do about everything," said
Laura.

"Mamma," said Agatha, insinuatingly, "I'm thinking, already; about
that rose-pink paper for my room. I'm glad now I didn't have it
here."

Agatha had been restless for white lace, and rose-pink, and a
Brussels carpet ever since her friend Zarah Thoole had come home
from Europe and furnished a morning-room.

All this time Mr. Grant Ledwith, quite unconscious of the impending
changes with which his family were so far advanced in imagination,
was busy among bales and samples in Devonshire Street. It got to be
an old story by the time the seven o'clock train was in, and he
reached home. It was almost as if it had all happened a year ago,
and they had been waiting for him to come home from Australia.

There was so much to explain to him that it was really hard to make
him understand, and to bring him up to the point from which they
could go on together.




VII.

WAKING UP.


The Ledwiths took apartments in Boston for a month. They packed away
the furniture they wanted to keep for upper rooms, in the attics of
their house at Z----. They had an auction of all the furniture of
their drawing-room, dining-room, library, and first floor of
sleeping-rooms. Then they were to let their house. Meanwhile, one
was to be fixed upon and fitted up in Boston. In all this Mrs.
Megilp advised, invaluably.

"It's of no use to move things," she said. "Three removes are as bad
as a fire; and nothing ever fits in to new places. Old wine and new
bottles, you know! Clear all off with a country auction. Everybody
comes, and they all fight for everything. Things bring more than
their original cost. Then you've nothing to do but order according
to your taste."

Mr. Oldways had invited both his nieces to his own house on their
arrival. But here again Mrs. Megilp advised,--so judiciously.

"There are too many of you; it would be a positive infliction. And
then you'll have all your running about and planning and calculating
to do, and the good old gentleman would think he had pulled half
Boston down about his ears. Your sister can go there; it would be
only generous and thoughtful to give way to her. There are only
three of them, and they are strange, you know, to every thing, and
wouldn't know which way to turn. I can put you in the way of rooms
at the Bellevue, exactly the thing, for a hundred and fifty a
month. No servants, you see; meals at the restaurant, and very good,
too. The Wedringtons are to give them up unexpectedly; going to
Europe; poor Mrs. Wedrington is so out of health. And about the
house; don't decide in a hurry; see what your uncle says, and your
sister. It's very likely she'll prefer the Aspen Street house; and
it _would_ be out of the way for you. Still it is not to be
_refused_, you know; of course it is very desirable in many
respects; roomy, old-fashioned, and a garden. I think your sister
will like those things; they're what she has been used to. If she
does, why it's all comfortably settled, and nobody refuses. It is so
ungracious to appear to object; a gift horse, you know."

"Not to be refused; only by no means to be taken; masterly
inactivity till somebody else is hooked; and then somebody else is
to be grateful for the preference. I wish Mrs. Megilp wouldn't shine
things up so; and that mother wouldn't go to her to black all her
boots!"

Desire said this in secret, indignant discomfort, to Helena, the
fourth in the family, her chum-sister. Helena did very well to talk
to; she heard anything; then she pranced round the room and chaffed
the canary.

"Chee! chee! chee! chiddle, iddle, iddle, iddle, e-e-ee! Where do
you keep all your noise and your breath? You're great, aren't you?
You do that to spite people that have to work up one note at a time.
You don't take it in away down under your belt, do you? You're not
particular about that. You don't know much, after all. You don't
know _how_ you do it. You aren't learning of Madame Caroletti. And
you haven't learned two quarters, any way. You were only just born
last spring. Set up! Tr-r-r-r-e-e-ee! I can do that myself. I don't
believe you've got an octave in you. Poh!"

Mrs. Ripwinkley came down from the country with a bonnet on that
had a crown, and with not a particle of a chignon. When she was
married, twenty-five years before, she wore a French twist,--her
hair turned up in waves from her neck as prettily as it did away
from her forehead,--and two thick coiled loops were knotted and
fastened gracefully at the top. She had kept on twisting her hair
so, all these years; and the rippling folds turned naturally under
her fingers into their places. The color was bright still, and it
had not thinned. Over her brows it parted richly, with no fuzz or
crimp; but a sweet natural wreathing look that made her face young.
Mrs. Ledwith had done hers over slate-pencils till she had burned it
off; and now tied on a friz, that came low down, for fashion's sake,
and left visible only a little bunch of puckers between her eyebrows
and the crowsfeet at the corners. The back of her head was weighted
down by an immense excrescence in a bag. Behind her ears were bare
places. Mrs. Ledwith began to look old-young. And a woman cannot get
into a worse stage of looks than that. Still, she was a showy
woman--a good exponent of the reigning style; and she was
handsome--she and her millinery--of an evening, or in the street.

When I began that last paragraph I meant to tell you what else Mrs.
Ripwinkley brought with her, down out of the country and the old
times; but hair takes up a deal of room. She brought down all her
dear old furniture. That is, it came after her in boxes, when she
had made up her mind to take the Aspen Street house.

"Why, that's the sofa Oliver used to lie down on when he came home
tired from his patients, and that's the rocking-chair I nursed my
babies in; and this is the old oak table we've sat round three times
a day, the family of us growing and thinning, as the time went on,
all through these years. It's like a communion table, now, Laura. Of
course such things had to come."

This was what she answered, when Laura ejaculated her amazement at
her having brought "old Homesworth truck" to Boston.

"You see it isn't the walls that make the home; we can go away from
them and not break our hearts, so long as our own goes with us. The
little things that we have used, and that have grown around us with
our living,--they are all of living that we can handle and hold on
to; and if I went to Spitzbergen, I should take as many of them as I
could."

The Aspen Street house just suited Mrs. Ripwinkley, and Diana, and
Hazel.

In the first place, it was wooden; built side to the street, so that
you went up a little paved walk, in a shade of trees, to get to the
door; and then the yard, on the right hand side as you came in, was
laid out in narrow walks between borders of blossoming plants. There
were vines against the brick end of the next building,--creepers and
morning-glories, and white and scarlet runners; and a little
martin-box was set upon a pole in the still, farther corner.

The rooms of the house were low, but large; and some of the windows
had twelve-paned sashes,--twenty-four to a window. Mrs. Ripwinkley
was charmed with these also. They were like the windows at Mile
Hill.

Mrs. Ledwith, although greatly relieved by her sister's prompt
decision for the house which she did _not_ want, felt it in her
conscience to remonstrate a little.

"You have just come down from the mountains, Frank, after your
twenty-five years' sleep; you've seen nothing by and by you will
think differently. This house is fearfully old-fashioned,
_fearfully_; and it's away down here on the wrong side of the hill.
You can never get up over Summit Street from here."

"We are used to hills, and walking."

"But I mean--that isn't all. There are other things you won't be
able to get over. You'll never shake off Aspen Street dust,--you nor
the children."

"I don't think it is dusty. It is quiet, and sheltered, and clean. I
like it ever so much," said Mrs. Ripwinkley.

"O, dear, you don't understand in the least! It's wicked to let you
go on so! You poor, dear, simple little old soul!"

"Never mind," said Mrs. Megilp. "It's all well enough for the
present. It pleases the old gentleman, you know; and after all he's
done, he ought to be pleased. One of you should certainly be in his
neighborhood. _He_ has been here from time immemorial; and any place
grows respectable by staying in it long enough--from _choice_.
Nobody will wonder at Mrs. Ripwinkley's coming here at his request.
And when she _does_ move, you see, she will know exactly what she is
about."

"I almost doubt if she ever _will_ know what she is about," said
Laura.

"In that case,--well,"--said Mrs. Megilp, and stopped, because it
really was not in the least needful to say more.

Mrs. Megilp felt it judicious, for many reasons, that Mrs.
Ripwinkley should he hidden away for awhile, to get that mountain
sleep out of her eyes, if it should prove possible; just as we rub
old metal with oil and put it by till the rust comes off.

The Ledwiths decided upon a house in Shubarton Place that would not
seem quite like taking old Uncle Titus's money and rushing away
with it as far as city limits would allow; and Laura really did wish
to have the comfort of her sister's society, in a cozy way, of
mornings, up in her room; that was her chief idea about it. There
were a good many times and things in which she scarcely expected
much companionship from Frank. She would not have said even to
herself, that Frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and
good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her
of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her
Bath-brick polishing out on the public promenade.

They began by going together to the carpet stores and the paper
warehouses; but they ended in detailing themselves for separate
work; their ideas clashed ridiculously, and perpetually confused
each other. Frank remembered loyally her old brown sofa and chairs;
she would not have gay colors to put them out of countenance; for
even if she re-covered them, she said they should have the same old
homey complexion. So she chose a fair, soft buff, with a pattern of
brown leaves, for her parlor paper; Mrs. Ledwith, meanwhile,
plunging headlong into glories of crimson and garnet and gold.
Agatha had her blush pink, in panels, with heart-of-rose borders,
set on with delicate gilt beadings; you would have thought she was
going to put herself up, in a fancy-box, like a French _mouchoir_ or
a _bonbon_.

"Why _don't_ you put your old brown things all together in an
up-stairs room, and call it Mile Hill? You could keep it for old
times' sake, and sit there mornings; the house is big enough; and
then have furniture like other people's in the parlor?"

"You see it wouldn't be _me_." said Mrs. Ripwinkley, simply.

"They keep saying it 'looks,' and 'it looks,'" said Diana to her
mother, at home. "Why must everything _look_ somehow?"

"And every_body_, too," said Hazel. "Why, when we meet any one in
the street that Agatha and Florence know, the minute they have gone
by they say, 'She didn't look well to-day,' or, 'How pretty she did
look in that new hat!' And after the great party they went to at
that Miss Hitchler's, they never told a word about it except how
girls 'looked.' I wonder what they _did_, or where the good time
was. Seems to me people ain't living,--they are only just looking;
or _is_ this the same old Boston that you told about, and where are
the real folks, mother?"

"We shall find them," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, cheerily; "and the real
of these, too, when the outsides are settled. In the meantime, we'll
make our house say, and not look. Say something true, of course.
Things won't say anything else, you see; if you try to make them,
they don't speak out; they only stand in a dumb show and make
faces."

"That's looking!" said Hazel. "Now I know."

"How those children do grow!" said Mrs. Ripwinkley, as they went off
together. "Two months ago they were sitting out on the kitchen roof,
and coming to me to hear the old stories!"

"Transplantin'," said Luclarion. "That's done it."

At twelve and fourteen, Hazel and Diana could be simple as
birds,--simpler yet, as human children waiting for all things,--in
their country life and their little dreams of the world. Two months'
contact with people and things in a great city had started the life
that was in them, so that it showed what manner of growth it was to
be of.

And little Hazel Ripwinkley had got hold already of the small end of
a very large problem.

But she could not make it out that this was the same old Boston
that her mother had told about, or where the nice neighbors were
that would be likely to have little tea-parties for their children.




VIII.

EAVESDROPPING IN ASPEN STREET.


Some of the old builders,--not the _very_ old ones, for they built
nothing but rope-walks down behind the hill,--but some of those who
began to go northwest from the State House to live, made a pleasant
group of streets down there on the level stretching away to the
river, and called them by fresh, fragrant, country-suggesting
names. Names of trees and fields and gardens, fruits and blossoms;
and they built houses with gardens around them. In between the
blocks were deep, shady places; and the smell of flowers was tossed
back and forth by summer winds between the walls. Some nice old
people stayed on there, and a few of their descendants stay on there
still, though they are built in closely now, for the most part, and
coarse, common things have much intruded, and Summit Street
overshadows them with its palaces.

Here and there a wooden house, set back a little, like this of the
Ripwinkleys in Aspen Street, gives you a feeling of Boston in the
far back times, as you go by; and here and there, if you could get
into the life of the neighborhood, you might perhaps find a
household keeping itself almost untouched with change, though there
has been such a rush and surge for years up and over into the newer
and prouder places.

At any rate, Titus Oldways lived here in Greenley Street; and he
owned the Aspen Street house, and another over in Meadow Place, and
another in Field Court. He meant to stretch his control over them as
long as he could, and keep them for families; therefore he valued
them at such rates as they would bring for dwellings; he would not
sell or lease them for any kind of "improvements;" he would not have
their little door-yards choked up, or their larger garden spaces
destroyed, while he could help it.

Round in Orchard Street lived Miss Craydocke. She was away again,
now, staying a little while with the Josselyns in New York. Uncle
Titus told Mrs. Ripwinkley that when Miss Craydocke came back it
would be a neighborhood, and they could go round; now it was only
back and forth between them and him and Rachel Froke. There were
other people, too, but they would be longer finding them out.
"You'll know Miss Craydocke as soon as you see her; she is one of
those you always seem to have seen before."

Now Uncle Titus would not have said this to everybody; not even if
everybody had been his niece, and had come to live beside him.

Orchard Street is wide and sunny and pleasant; the river air comes
over it and makes it sweet; and Miss Craydocke's is a big, generous
house, of which she only uses a very little part herself, because
she lets the rest to nice people who want pleasant rooms and can't
afford to pay much rent; an old gentleman who has had a hard time in
the world, but has kept himself a gentleman through it all, and his
little cheery old lady-wife who puts her round glasses on and
stitches away at fine women's under-garments and flannel
embroideries, to keep things even, have the two very best rooms; and
a clergyman's widow, who copies for lawyers, and writes little
stories for children, has another; and two orphan sisters who keep
school have another; and Miss Craydocke calls her house the Beehive,
and buzzes up and down in it, and out and in, on little "seeing-to"
errands of care and kindness all day long, as never any queen-bee
did in any beehive before, but in a way that makes her more truly
queen than any sitting in the middle cell of state to be fed on
royal jelly. Behind the Beehive, is a garden, as there should be;
great patches of lily-of-the valley grow there that Miss Craydocke
ties up bunches from in the spring and gives away to little
children, and carries into all the sick rooms she knows of, and the
poor places. I always think of those lilies of the valley when I
think of Miss Craydocke. It seems somehow as if they were blooming
about her all the year through; and so they are, perhaps, invisibly.
The other flowers come in their season; the crocuses have been done
with first of all; the gay tulips and the snowballs have made the
children glad when they stopped at the gate and got them, going to
school. Miss Craydocke is always out in her garden at school-time.
By and by there are the tall white lilies, standing cool and serene
in the July heats; then Miss Craydocke is away at the mountains,
pressing ferns and drying grasses for winter parlors; but there is
somebody on duty at the garden dispensary always, and there are
flower-pensioners who know they may come in and take the gracious
toll.

Late in the autumn, the nasturtiums and verbenas and marigolds are
bright; and the asters quill themselves into the biggest globes they
can, of white and purple and rose, as if it were to make the last
glory the best, and to do the very utmost of the year. Then the
chrysanthemums go into the house and bloom there for Christmas-time.

There is nothing else like Miss Craydocke's house and garden, I do
believe, in all the city of the Three Hills. It is none too big for
her, left alone with it, the last of her family; the world is none
too big for her; she is glad to know it is all there. She has a use
for everything as fast as it comes, and a work to do for everybody,
as fast as she finds them out. And everybody,--almost,--catches it
as she goes along, and around her there is always springing up a
busy and a spreading crystallizing of shining and blessed elements.
The world is none too big for her, or for any such, of course,
because,--it has been told why better than I can tell it,--because
"ten times one is always ten."

It was a gray, gusty morning. It had not set in to rain
continuously; but the wind wrung handfuls of drops suddenly from the
clouds, and flung them against the panes and into the wayfarers'
faces.

Over in the house opposite the Ripwinkley's, at the second story
windows, sat two busy young persons. Hazel, sitting at her window,
in "mother's room," where each had a corner, could see across; and
had got into the way of innocent watching. Up in Homesworth, she had
used to watch the robins in the elm-trees; here, there was human
life, in little human nests, all about her.

"It's the same thing, mother," she would say, "isn't it, now? Don't
you remember in that book of the 'New England Housekeeper,' that you
used to have, what the woman said about the human nature of the
beans? It's in beans, and birds, and bird's nests; and folks, and
folks' nests. It don't make much difference. It's just snugness, and
getting along. And it's so nice to see!"

Hazel put her elbows up on the window-sill, and looked straight over
into that opposite room, undisguisedly.

The young man, in one window, said to his sister in the other, at
the same moment,--

"Our company's come! There's that bright little girl again!"

And the sister said, "Well, it's pretty much all the company we can
take in! She brings her own seat and her own window; and she doesn't
interrupt. It's just the kind for us, Kentie!"

"She's writing,--copying something,--music, it looks like; see it
there, set up against the shutter. She always goes out with a music
roll in her hand. I wonder whether she gives or takes?" said Diana,
stopping on her way to her own seat to look out over Hazel's
shoulder.

"Both, I guess," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "Most people do. Why don't
you put your flowers in the window, Hazel?"

"Why, so I will!"

They were a great bunch of snowy white and deep crimson asters, with
green ivy leaves, in a tall gray glass vase. Rachel Froke had just
brought them in from Miss Craydocke's garden.

"They're looking, mother! Only I do think it's half too bad! That
girl seems as if she would almost reach across after them. Perhaps
they came from the country, and haven't had any flowers."

"Thee might take them over some," said Mrs. Froke, simply.

"O, I shouldn't dare! There are other people in the house, and I
don't know their names, or anything. I wish I could, though."

"I can," said Rachel Froke. "Thee'll grow tall enough to step over
pebbles one of these days. Never mind; I'll fetch thee more
to-morrow; and thee'll let the vase go for a while? Likely they've
nothing better than a tumbler."

Rachel Froke went down the stairs, and out along the paved walk,
into the street. She stopped an instant on the curb-stone before she
crossed, and looked up at those second story windows. Hazel watched
her. She held up the vase slightly with one hand, nodding her little
gray bonnet kindly, and beckoned with the other.

The young girl started from her seat.

In another minute Hazel saw them together in the doorway.

There was a blush and a smile, and an eager brightness in the face,
and a quick speaking thanks, that one could read without hearing,
from the parted lips, on the one side, and the quiet, unflutterable
gray bonnet calmly horizontal on the other; and then the door was
shut, and Rachel Froke was crossing the damp pavement again.

"I'm so glad Aspen Street is narrow!" said Hazel. "I should hate to
be way off out of sight of people. What did you say to her, Mrs.
Froke?" she asked, as the Friend reentered. Hazel could by no means
take the awful liberty of "Rachel."

"I said the young girl, Hazel Ripwinkley, being from the country,
knew how good flowers were to strangers in the town, and that she
thought they might be strange, and might like some."

Hazel flushed all up. At that same instant, a gentle nod and smile
came across from window to window, and she flushed more, till the
tears sprung with the shy, glad excitement, as she returned it and
then shrunk away.

"And she said, 'Thank her, with Dorris Kincaid's love,'" proceeded
Rachel Froke.

"O, _mother_!" exclaimed Hazel. "And you did it all, right off so,
Mrs. Froke. I don't see how grown up people dare, and know how!"

Up the stairs ran quick feet in little clattering heeled boots.
Desire Ledwith, with a purple waterproof on, came in.

"I couldn't stay at home to-day," she said, "I wanted to be where
it was all-togetherish. It never is at our house. Now it's set up,
they don't do anything with it."

"That's because it '_looks_'--so elegant," said Hazel, catching
herself up in dismay.

"It's because it's the crust, I think," said Desire. "Puff paste,
like an oyster patty; and they haven't got anything cooked yet for
the middle. I wonder when they will. I had a call yesterday, all to
myself," she went on, with a sudden change of tone and topic.
"Agatha was hopping and I wouldn't tell her what I said, or how I
behaved. That new parlor girl of ours thinks we're all or any of us
'Miss Ledwith,' mamma included, and so she let him in. He had on
lavender pantaloons and a waxed moustache."

"The rain is just pouring down!" said Diana, at the garden window.

"Yes; I'm caught. That's what I meant," said Desire. "You've got to
keep me all day, now. How will you get home, Mrs. Froke? Or won't
you have to stay, too?"

"Thee may call me Rachel, Desire Ledwith, if thee pleases. I like it
better. I am no mistress. And for getting home, it is but just round
the corner. But there is no need yet. I came for an hour, to sit
here with friend Frances. And my hour is not yet up."

"I'm glad of that, for there is something I want you to tell me. I
haven't quite got at it myself, yet; so as to ask, I mean. Wait a
minute!" And she put her elbows up on her knees, and held her thumbs
against her ears, and her fingers across her forehead; sitting
squarely opposite the window to which she had drawn up her chair
beside Diane, and looking intently at the driving streams that
rushed and ran down against the glass.

"I was sitting in the bay-window at home, when it began this
morning; that made me think. All the world dripping wet, and I just
put there dry and safe in the middle of the storm, shut up behind
those great clear panes and tight sashes. How they did have to
contrive, and work, before there were such places made for people!
What if they had got into their first scratchy little houses, and
sat behind the logs as we do behind glass windows and thought, as I
was thinking, how nice it was just to be covered up from the rain?
Is it all finished now? Hasn't anybody got to contrive anything
more? And who's going to do it--and everything. And what are we good
for,--just _we_,--to come and expect it all, modern-improved! I
don't think much of our place among things, do you, Mrs.
Froke?--There, I believe that's it, as near as I can!'"

"Why does thee ask me, Desire?"

"I don't know. I don't know any whys or what fors. 'Behold we know
not anything,'--Tennyson and I! But you seem so--pacified--I suppose
I thought you must have settled most things in your mind."

"Every builder--every little joiner--did his piece,--thought his
thought out, I think likely. There's no little groove or moulding or
fitting or finish, but is a bit of somebody's living; and life
grows, going on. We've all got our piece to do," said Rachel.

"I asked Mrs. Mig," Desire pursued, "and she said some people's part
was to buy and employ and encourage; and that spending money helps
all the world; and then she put another cushion to her back, and
went on tatting."

"Perhaps it does--in spite of the world," said Rachel Froke,
quietly.

"But I guess nobody is to sit by and _only_ encourage; God has
given out no such portion as that, I do believe. We can encourage
each other, and every one do his own piece too."

"I didn't really suppose Mrs. Mig knew," said Desire, demurely. "She
never began at the bottom of anything. She only finishes off. She
buys pattern worsted work, and fills it in. That's what she's doing
now, when she don't tat; a great bunch of white lilies, grounding it
with olive. It's lovely; but I'd rather have made the lilies. She'll
give it to mother, and then Glossy will come and spend the winter
with us. Mrs. Mig is going to Nassau with a sick friend; she's
awfully useful--for little overseeings and general touchings up,
after all the hard part is done. Mrs. Mig's sick friends always have
nurses and waiting maids--Mrs. F---- Rachel! Do you know, I haven't
got any piece!"

"No, I don't know; nor does thee either, yet," said Rachel Froke.

       *       *       *       *       *

"It's all such bosh!" said Kenneth Kincaid, flinging down a handful
of papers. "I've no right, I solemnly think, to help such stuff out
into the world! A man can't take hold anywhere, it seems, without
smutting his fingers!"

Kenneth Kincaid was correcting proof for a publisher. What he had to
work on this morning was the first chapters of a flimsy novel.

"It isn't even confectionery," said he. "It's terra alba and
cochineal. And when it comes to the sensation, it will be benzine
for whiskey. Real things are bad enough, for the most part, in this
world; but when it comes to sham fictions and adulterated poisons,
Dorris, I'd rather help bake bread, if it were an honest loaf, or
make strong shoes for laboring men!"

"You don't always get things like that," said Dorris. "And you know
you're not responsible. Why will you torment yourself so?"

"I was so determined not to do anything but genuine work; work that
the world wanted; and to have it come down to this!"

"Only for a time, while you are waiting."

"Yes; people must eat while they are waiting; that's the--devil of
it! I'm not swearing, Dorris, dear; it came truly into my head, that
minute, about the Temptation in the Wilderness." Kenneth's voice was
reverent, saying this; and there was an earnest thought in his face.

"You'll never like anything heartily but your Sunday work."

"That's what keeps me here. My week-day work might be wanted
somewhere else. And perhaps I ought to go. There's Sunday work
everywhere."

"If you've found one half, hold on to it;" said Dorris. "The other
can't be far off."

"I suppose there are a score or two of young architects in this
city, waiting for a name or a chance to make one, as I am. If it
isn't here for all of them, somebody has got to quit."

"And somebody has got to hold on," repeated Dorris. "You are morbid,
Kent, about this 'work of the world.'"

"It's overdone, everywhere. Fifth wheels trying to hitch on to every
coach. I'd rather be the one wheel of a barrow."

"The Lord is Wheelwright, and Builder," said Dorris, very simply.
"You _are_ a wheel, and He has made you; He'll find an axle for you
and put you on; and you shall go about his business, so that you
shall wonder to remember that you were ever leaning up against a
wall. Do you know, Kentie, life seems to me like the game we used
to play at home in the twilight. When we shut our eyes and let each
other lead us, until we did not know where we were going, or in what
place we should come out. I should not care to walk up a broad path
with my eyes wide open, now. I'd rather feel the leading. To-morrow
always makes a turn. It's beautiful! People don't know, who _never_
shut their eyes!"

Kenneth had taken up a newspaper.

"The pretenses at doing! The dodges and go-betweens that make a sham
work between every two real ones! There's hardly a true business
carried on, and if there is, you don't know where or which. Look at
the advertisements. Why, they cheat with their very tops and faces!
See this man who puts in big capitals: 'Lost! $5,000! $1,000
reward!' and then tells you, in small type, that five thousand
dollars are lost every year by breaking glass and china, that his
cement will mend! What business has he to cry 'Wolf!' to the
hindrance of the next man who may have a real wolf to catch? And
what business has the printer, whom the next man will pay to
advertise his loss, to help on a lie like this beforehand? I'm only
twenty-six years old, Dorris, and I'm getting ashamed of the world!"

"Don't grow hard, Kenneth. 'The Son of Man came not to condemn the
world, but to save it.' Let's each try to save our little piece!"

We are listening across the street, you see; between the windows in
the rain; it is strange what chords one catches that do not catch
each other, and were never planned to be played together,--by the
_players_.

Kenneth Kincaid's father Robert had been a ship-builder. When
shipping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid's
building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children
little beside their education, which he thanked God was secured, and
a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten
in the crowd of young and forward ones, and in the strife and
scramble of a new business growth.

Between college and technical studies Kenneth had been to the war.
After that he had a chance to make a fortune in Wall Street. His
father's brother, James, offered to take him in with him to buy and
sell stocks and gold, to watch the market, to touch little unseen
springs, to put the difference into his own pocket every time the
tide of value shifted, or could be made to seem to shift. He might
have been one of James R. Kincaid and Company. He would have none of
it. He told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that he had
not come back from fighting to--well, there he stopped, for he could
not fling the truth in his uncle's face; he said there were things
he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and if nobody
wanted them of him he would learn something else that was needed. So
with what was left to his share from his father's little remnant of
property, he had two years at the Technological School, and here he
was in Boston waiting. You can see what he meant by real work, and
how deep his theories and distinctions lay. You can see that it
might be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to take up
the world on these terms now, in this year of our Lord eighteen
hundred and sixty-nine.

Over the way Desire Ledwith was beginning again, after a pause in
which we have made our little chassée.

"I know a girl," she said, "who has got a studio. And she talks
about art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and she runs
about to see pictures, and she copies things, and she has little
plaster legs and toes and things hanging round everywhere. She
thinks it is something great; but it's only Mig, after all.
Everything is. Florence Migs into music. And I won't Mig, if I never
do anything. I'm come here this morning to darn stockings." And she
pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of stockings and a
great white ball of darning cotton and a wooden egg.

"There is always one thing that is real," said Mrs. Ripwinkley,
gently, "and that shows the way surely to all the rest."

"I know what you mean," said Desire, "of course; but they've mixed
that all up too, like everything else, so that you don't know where
it is. Glossy Megilp has a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her
eyelashes and goes to church. We've all been baptized, and we've
learned the Lord's Prayer, and we're all Christians. What is there
more about it? I wish, sometimes, they had let it all alone. I think
they vaccinated us with religion, Aunt Frank, for fear we should
take it the natural way."

"Thee is restless," said Rachel Froke, tying on her gray cloak. "And
to make us so is oftentimes the first thing the Lord does for us. It
was the first thing He did for the world. Then He said, 'Let there
be light!' In the meantime, thee is right; just darn thy stockings."
And Rachel went.

They had a nice morning, after that, "leaving frets alone," as Diana
said. Diana Ripwinkley was happy in things just as they were. If the
sun shone, she rejoiced in the glory; if the rain fell, it shut her
in sweetly to the heart of home, and the outside world grew fragrant
for her breathing. There was never anything in her day that she
could spare out of it, and there were no holes in the hours either.
"Whether she was most bird or bee, it was hard to tell," her mother
said of her; from the time she used to sweep and dust her garret
baby-house along the big beams in the old house at Homesworth, and
make little cheeses, and set them to press in wooden pill-boxes from
which she had punched the bottoms out, till now, that she began to
take upon herself the daily freshening of the new parlors in Aspen
Street, and had long lessons of geometry to learn, whose dry
demonstrations she set to odd little improvised recitatives of
music, and chanted over while she ran up and down putting away clean
linen for her mother, that Luclarion brought up from the wash.

As for Hazel, she was only another variation upon the same sweet
nature. There was more of outgo and enterprise with her. Diana made
the thing or the place pleasant that she was in or doing. Hazel
sought out new and blessed inventions. "There was always something
coming to the child that wouldn't ever have come to no one else,"
Luclarion said. "And besides that, she was a real 'Witch Hazel;' she
could tell where the springs were, and what's more, where they
warn't."

Luclarion Grapp would never have pleaded guilty to "dropping into
poetry" in any light whatsoever; but what she meant by this was not
exactly according to the letter, as one may easily see.




IX.

HAZEL'S INSPIRATION.


What was the use of "looking," unless things were looked at? Mrs.
Ledwith found at the end of the winter that she ought to give a
party. Not a general one; Mrs. Ledwith always said "not a general
one," as if it were an exception, whereas she knew better than ever
to undertake a general party; her list would be _too_ general, and
heterogeneous. It would simply be a physical, as well as a social,
impossibility. She knew quantities of people separately and very
cordially, in her easy have-a-good-time-when-you-can style, that she
could by no means mix, or even gather together. She picked up
acquaintances on summer journeys, she accepted civilities wherever
she might be, she asked everybody to her house who took a fancy to
her, or would admire her establishment, and if she had had a spring
cleaning or a new carpeting, or a furbishing up in any way, the next
thing was always to light up and play it off,--to try it on to
somebody. What were houses for? And there was always somebody who
ought to be paid attention to; somebody staying with a friend, or a
couple just engaged, or if nothing else, it was her turn to have the
sewing-society; and so her rooms got aired. Of course she had to air
them now! The drawing-room, with its apricot and coffee-brown
furnishings, was lovely in the evening, and the crimson and garnet
in the dining-room was rich and cozy, and set off brilliantly her
show of silver and cut-glass; and then, there was the new, real,
sea-green China.

So the party was had. There were some people in town from New York;
she invited them and about a hundred more. The house lit up
beautifully; the only pity was that Mrs. Ledwith could not wear her
favorite and most becoming colors, buff and chestnut, because she
had taken that family of tints for her furniture; but she found a
lovely shade of violet that would hold by gas-light, and she wore
black Fayal lace with it, and white roses upon her hair. Mrs.
Treweek was enchanted with the brown and apricot drawing-room, and
wondered where on earth they had got that particular shade, for "my
dear! she had ransacked Paris for hangings in just that perfect,
soft, ripe color that she had in her mind and never could hit upon."
Mrs. MacMichael had pushed the grapes back upon her plate to examine
the pattern of the bit of china, and had said how lovely the
coloring was, with the purple and pale green of the fruit. And these
things, and a few more like them, were the residuum of the whole,
and Laura Ledwith was satisfied.

Afterward, "while they were in the way of it," Florence had a little
_musicale_; and the first season in Shubarton Place was over.

It turned out, however, as it did in the old rhyme,--they shod the
horse, and shod the mare, and let the little colt go bare. Helena
was disgusted because she could not have a "German."

"We shall have to be careful, now that we have fairly settled down,"
said Laura to her sister; "for every bit of Grant's salary will have
been taken up with this winter's expenses. But one wants to begin
right, and after that one can go on moderately. I'm good at
contriving, Frank; only give me something to contrive with."

"Isn't it a responsibility," Frank ventured, "to think what we shall
contrive _for_?"

"Of course," returned Mrs. Ledwith, glibly. "And my first duty is
to my children. I don't mean to encourage them to reckless
extravagance; as Mrs. Megilp says, there's always a limit; but it's
one's duty to make life beautiful, and one can't do too much for
home. I want my children to be satisfied with theirs, and I want to
cultivate their tastes and accustom them to society. I can't do
_everything_ for them; they will dress on three hundred a year
apiece, Agatha and Florence; and I can assure you it needs
management to accomplish that, in these days!"

Mrs. Ripwinkley laughed, gently.

"It would require management with us to get rid of that, upon
ourselves."

"O, my dear, don't I tell you continually, you haven't waked up yet?
Just rub your eyes a while longer,--or let the girls do it for
you,--and you'll see! Why, I know of girls,--girls whose mothers
have limited incomes, too,--who have been kept plain, actually
_plain_, all their school days, but who must have now six and eight
hundred a year to go into society with. And really I wouldn't
undertake it for less, myself, if I expected to keep up with
everything. But I must treat mine all alike, and we must be
contented with what we have. There's Helena, now, crazy for a young
party; but I couldn't think of it. Young parties are ten times worse
than old ones; there's really no _end_ to the expense, with the
German, and everything. Helena will have to wait; and yet,--of
course, if I could, it is desirable, almost necessary; acquaintances
begin in the school-room,--society, indeed; and a great deal would
depend upon it. The truth is, you're no sooner born, now-a-days,
than you have to begin to keep up; or else--you're dropped out."

"O, Laura! do you remember the dear little parties our mother used
to make for us? From four till half-past eight, with games, and tea
at six, and the fathers looking in?"

"And cockles, and mottoes, and printed cambric dresses, and milk and
water! Where are the children, do you suppose, you dear old Frau Van
Winkle, that would come to such a party now?"

"Children must be born simple, as they were then. There's nothing my
girls would like better, even at their age, than to help at just
such a party. It is a dream of theirs. Why shouldn't somebody do it,
just to show how good it is?"

"You can lead a horse to water, you know, Frank, but you can't make
him drink. And the colts are forty times worse. I believe you might
get some of the mothers together for an ancient tea-drink, just in
the name of old association; but the _babies_ would all turn up
their new-fashioned little noses."

"O, dear!" sighed Frau Van Winkle. "I wish I knew people!"

"By the time you do, you'll know the reason why, and be like all the
rest."

Hazel Ripwinkley went to Mrs. Hilman's school, with her cousin
Helena. That was because the school was a thoroughly good one; the
best her mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors
in Dorset Street, and there were girls there who came from palaces
west of the Common, in the grand avenues and the ABC streets; nor
did Hazel wear her best gray and black velvet suit for every day,
though the rich colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes,
and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long green baize
covered tables look like gardenplots with beds of bloom, and quite
extinguished with their brilliancy the quiet, one skirted brown
merino that she brushed and folded every night, and put on with
fresh linen cuffs and collar every morning.

"It is an idiosyncrasy of Aunt Frances," Helena explained, with the
grandest phrase she could pick out of her "Synonymes," to cow down
those who "wondered."

Privately, Helena held long lamentations with Hazel, going to and
fro, about the party that she could not have.

"I'm actually ashamed to go to school. There isn't a girl there, who
can pretend to have anything, that hasn't had some kind of a company
this winter. I've been to them all, and I feel real mean,--sneaky.
What's 'next year?' Mamma puts me off with that. Poh? Next year
they'll all begin again. You can't skip birthdays."

"I'll tell you what!" said Hazel, suddenly, inspired by much the
same idea that had occurred to Mrs. Ripwinkley; "I mean to ask my
mother to let _me_ have a party!"

"You! Down in Aspen Street! Don't, for pity's sake, Hazel!"

"I don't believe but what it could be done over again!" said Hazel,
irrelevantly, intent upon her own thought.

"It couldn't be done _once_! For gracious grandmother's sake, don't
think of it!" cried the little world-woman of thirteen.

"It's gracious grandmother's sake that made me think of it," said
Hazel, laughing. "The way she used to do."

"Why don't you ask them to help you hunt up old Noah, and all get
back into the ark, pigeons and all?"

"Well, I guess they had pretty nice times there, any how; and if
another big rain comes, perhaps they'll have to!"

Hazel did not intend her full meaning; but there is many a faint,
small prophecy hid under a clover-leaf.

Hazel did not let go things; her little witch-wand, once pointed,
held its divining angle with the might of magic until somebody broke
ground.

"It's awful!" Helena declared to her mother and sisters, with tears
of consternation. "And she wants me to go round with her and carry
'compliments!' It'll never be got over,--never! I wish I could go
away to boarding-school!"

For Mrs. Ripwinkley had made up her unsophisticated mind to try this
thing; to put this grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the
seethe and glitter of little Boston, and find out what it would
decompose or precipitate. For was not she a mother, testing the
world's chalice for her children? What did she care for the hiss and
the bubble, if they came?

She was wider awake than Mrs. Ledwith knew; perhaps they who come
down from the mountain heights of long seclusion can measure the
world's paces and changes better than they who have been hurried in
the midst of them, on and on, or round and round.

Worst of all, old Uncle Titus took it up.

It was funny,--or it would have been funny, reader, if anybody but
you and I and Rachel Froke knew exactly how,--to watch Uncle Titus
as he kept his quiet eye on all these things,--the things that he
had set going,--and read their revelations; sheltered, disguised,
under a character that the world had chosen to put upon him, like
Haroun Alraschid in the merchant's cloak.

They took their tea with him,--the two families,--every Sunday
night. Agatha Ledwith "filled him in" a pair of slippers that very
first Christmas; he sat there in the corner with his old leather
ones on, when they came, and left them, for the most part, to their
own mutual entertainment, until the tea was ready. It was a sort of
family exchange; all the plans and topics came up, particularly on
the Ledwith side, for Mrs. Ripwinkley was a good listener, and Laura
a good talker; and the fun,--that you and I and Rachel Froke could
guess,--yes, and a good deal of unsuspected earnest, also,--was all
there behind the old gentleman's "Christian Age," as over brief
mentions of sermons, or words about books, or little brevities of
family inquiries and household news, broke small floods of
excitement like water over pebbles, as Laura and her daughters
discussed and argued volubly the matching and the flouncing of a
silk, or the new flowering and higher pitching of a bonnet,--since
"they are wearing everything all on the top, you know, and mine
looks terribly meek;" or else descanted diffusely on the
unaccountableness of the somebodies not having called, or the bother
and forwardness of the some-other-bodies who had, and the
eighty-three visits that were left on the list to be paid, and
"never being able to take a day to sit down for anything."

"What is it all for?" Mrs. Ripwinkley would ask, over again, the
same old burden of the world's weariness falling upon her from her
sister's life, and making her feel as if it were her business to
clear it away somehow.

"Why, to live!" Mrs. Ledwith would reply. "You've got it all to do,
you see."

"But I don't really see, Laura, where the living comes in."

Laura opens her eyes.

"_Slang_?" says she. "Where did you get hold of that?"

"Is it slang? I'm sure I don't know. I mean it."

"Well, you _are_ the funniest! You don't _catch_ anything. Even a
by-word must come first-hand from you, and mean something!"

"It seems to me such a hard-working, getting-ready-to-be, and then
not being. There's no place left for it,--because it's all place."

"Gracious me, Frank! If you are going to sift everything so, and get
back of everything! I can't live in metaphysics: I have to live in
the things themselves, amongst other people."

"But isn't it scene and costume, a good deal of it, without the
play? It may be that I don't understand, because I have not got into
the heart of your city life; but what comes of the parties, for
instance? The grand question, beforehand, is about wearing, and then
there's a retrospection of what was worn, and how people looked. It
seems to be all surface. I should think they might almost send in
their best gowns, or perhaps a photograph,--if photographs ever were
becoming,--as they do visiting cards."

"Aunt Frank," said Desire, "I don't believe the 'heart of city life'
is in the parties, or the parlors. I believe there's a great lot of
us knocking round amongst the dry goods and the furniture that never
get any further. People must be _living_, somewhere, _behind_ the
fixings. But there are so many people, nowadays, that have never
quite got fixed!"

"You might live all your days here," said Mrs. Ledwith to her
sister, passing over Desire, "and never get into the heart of it,
for that matter, unless you were born into it. I don't care so much,
for my part. I know plenty of nice people, and I like to have things
nice about me, and to have a pleasant time, and to let my children
enjoy themselves. The 'heart,' if the truth was known, is a
dreadful still place. I'm satisfied."

Uncle Titus's paper was folded across the middle; just then he
reversed the lower half; that brought the printing upside down; but
he went on reading all the same.

"_I_'m going to have a real party," said Hazel, "a real,
gracious-grandmother party; just such as you and mother had, Aunt
Laura, when you were little."

Her Aunt Laura laughed good-naturedly.

"I guess you'll have to go round and knock up the grandmothers to
come to it, then," said she. "You'd better make it a fancy dress
affair at once, and then it will be accounted for."

"No; I'm going round to invite; and they are to come at four, and
take tea at six; and they're just to wear their afternoon dresses;
and Miss Craydocke is coming at any rate; and she knows all the old
plays, and lots of new ones; and she is going to show how."

"I'm coming, too," said Uncle Titus, over his newspaper, with his
eyes over his glasses.

"That's good," said Hazel, simply, least surprised of any of the
conclave.

"And you'll have to play the muffin man. 'O, don't you know,'"--she
began to sing, and danced two little steps toward Mr. Oldways. "O, I
forgot it was Sunday!" she said, suddenly stopping.

"Not much wonder," said Uncle Titus. "And not much matter. _Your_
Sunday's good enough."

And then he turned his paper right side up; but, before he began
really to read again, he swung half round toward them in his
swivel-chair, and said,--

"Leave the sugar-plums to me, Hazel; I'll come early and bring 'em
in my pocket."

"It's the first thing he's taken the slightest notice of, or
interest in, that any one of us has been doing," said Agatha
Ledwith, with a spice of momentary indignation, as they walked along
Bridgeley Street to take the car.

For Uncle Titus had not come to the Ledwith party. "He never went
visiting, and he hadn't any best coat," he told Laura, in verbal
reply to the invitation that had come written on a square satin
sheet, once folded, in an envelope with a big monogram.

"It's of no consequence," said Mrs. Ledwith, "any way. Only a
child's play."

"But it will be, mother; you don't know," said Helena. "She's going
right in everywhere, with that ridiculous little invitation; to the
Ashburnes and the Geoffreys, and all! She hasn't the least idea of
any difference; and just think what the girls will say, and how they
will stare, and laugh! I wish she wasn't my cousin!"

"Helena!"

Mrs. Ledwith spoke with real displeasure; for she was good-natured
and affectionate in her way; and her worldly ambitions were rather
wide than high, as we have seen.

"Well, I can't help it; you don't know, mother," Helena repeated.
"It's horrid to go to school with all those stiffies, that don't
care a snap for you, and only laugh."

"Laughing is vulgar," said Agatha. If any indirect question were
ever thrown upon the family position, Agatha immediately began
expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one who had attained.

"It is only half-way people who laugh," she said. "Ada Geoffrey and
Lilian Ashburne never laugh--_at_ anybody--I am sure."

"No, they don't; not right out. They're awfully polite. But you can
feel it, underneath. They have a way of keeping so still, when you
know they would laugh if they did anything."

"Well, they'll neither laugh nor keep still, about this. You need
not be concerned. They'll just not go, and that will be the end of
it."

Agatha Ledwith was mistaken. She had been mistaken about two things
to-night. The other was when she had said that this was the first
time Uncle Oldways had noticed or been interested in anything they
did.




X.

COCKLES AND CRAMBO.


Hazel Ripwinkley put on her nankeen sack and skirt, and her little
round, brown straw hat. For May had come, and almost gone, and it
was a day of early summer warmth.

Hazel's dress was not a "suit;" it had been made and worn two
summers before suits were thought of; yet it suited very well, as
people's things are apt to do, after all, who do not trouble
themselves about minutiæ of fashion, and so get no particular
antediluvian marks upon them that show when the flood subsides.

Her mother knew some things that Hazel did not. Mrs. Ripwinkley, if
she had been asleep for five and twenty years, had lost none of her
perceptive faculties in the trance. But she did not hamper her child
with any doubts; she let her go on her simple way, under the shield
of her simplicity, to test this world that she had come into, for
herself.

Hazel had written down her little list of the girls' names that she
would like to ask; and Mrs. Ripwinkley looked at it with a smile.
There was Ada Geoffrey, the banker's daughter, and Lilian Ashburne,
the professor's,--heiresses each, of double lines of birth and
wealth. She could remember how, in her childhood, the old names
sounded, with the respect that was in men's tones when they were
spoken; and underneath were Lois James and Katie Kilburnie, children
of a printer and a hatter. They had all been chosen for their purely
personal qualities. A child, let alone, chooses as an angel chooses.

It remained to be seen how they would come together.

At the very head, in large, fair letters, was,--

          "MISS CRAYDOCKE."

Down at the bottom, she had just added,--

          "MR. KINCAID AND DORRIS."

"For, if I have _some_ grown folks, mother, perhaps I ought to have
_other_ grown folks,--'to keep the balance true.' Besides, Mr.
Kincaid and Dorris always like the _little_ nice times."

From the day when Dorris Kincaid had come over with the gray glass
vase and her repeated thanks, when the flowers had done their
ministry and faded, there had been little simple courtesies, each
way, between the opposite houses; and once Kenneth and his sister
had taken tea with the Ripwinkleys, and they had played "crambo"
and "consequences" in the evening. The real little game of
"consequences," of which this present friendliness was a link, was
going on all the time, though they did not stop to read the lines as
they folded them down, and "what the world said" was not one of the
items in their scheme of it at all.

It would have been something worth while to have followed Hazel as
she went her rounds, asking quietly at each house to see Mrs. This
or That, "as she had a message;" and being shown, like a little
representative of an almost extinct period, up into the parlor, or
the dressing-room of each lady, and giving her quaint errand.

"I am Hazel Ripwinkley," she would say, "and my mother sends her
compliments, and would like to have Lilian,"--or whoever
else,--"come at four o'clock to-day, and spend the afternoon and
take tea. I'm to have a little party such as she used to have, and
nobody is to be much dressed up, and we are only to play games."

"Why, that is charming!" cried Mrs. Ashburne; for the feeling of
her own sweet early days, and the old B---- Square house, came over
her as she heard the words. "It is Lilian's music afternoon; but
never mind; give my kind compliments to your mother, and she will be
very happy to come."

And Mrs. Ashburne stooped down and kissed Hazel, when she went away.

She stood in the deep carved stone entrance-way to Mrs. Geoffrey's
house, in the same fearless, Red Riding Hood fashion, just as she
would have waited in any little country porch up in Homesworth,
where she had need indeed to knock.

Not a whit dismayed was she either, when the tall manservant opened
to her, and admitted her into the square, high, marble-paved hall,
out of which great doors were set wide into rooms rich and quiet
with noble adorning and soft shading,--where pictures made such a
magic upon the walls, and books were piled from floor to ceiling;
and where her little figure was lost as she went in, and she
hesitated to take a seat anywhere, lest she should be quite hidden
in some great arm-chair or sofa corner, and Mrs. Geoffrey should not
see her when she came down.

So, as the lady entered, there she was, upright and waiting, on her
two feet, in her nankeen dress, just within the library doors, with
her face turned toward the staircase.

"I am Hazel Ripwinkley," she began; as if she had said, I am
Pease-blossom or Mustard-seed; "I go to school with Ada." And went
on, then, with her compliments and her party. And at the end she
said, very simply,--

"Miss Craydocke is coming, and she knows the games."

"Miss Craydocke, of Orchard Street? And where do you live?"

"In Aspen Street, close by, in Uncle Oldways' house. We haven't
lived there very long,--only this winter; before that we always
lived in Homesworth."

"And Homesworth is in the country? Don't you miss that?"

"Yes; but Aspen Street isn't very bad; we've got a garden. Besides,
we like streets and neighbors."

Then she added,--for her little witch-stick felt spiritually the
quality of what she spoke to,--"Wouldn't Mr. Geoffrey come for Ada
in the evening?"

"I haven't the least doubt he would!" said Mrs. Geoffrey, her face
all alive with exquisite and kindly amusement, and catching the
spirit of the thing from the inimitable simplicity before her, such
as never, she did believe, had walked into anybody's house before,
in this place and generation, and was no more to be snubbed than a
flower or a breeze or an angel.

It was a piece of Witch Hazel's witchery, or inspiration, that she
named Miss Craydocke; for Miss Craydocke was an old, dear friend of
Mrs. Geoffrey's, in that "heart of things" behind the fashions,
where the kingdom is growing up. But of course Hazel could not have
known that; something in the lady's face just made her think of the
same thing in Miss Craydocke's, and so she spoke, forgetting to
explain, nor wondering in the very least, when she was met with
knowledge.

It was all divining, though, from the beginning to the end. That was
what took her into these homes, rather than to a score of other
places up and down the self-same streets, where, if she had got in
at all, she would have met strange, lofty stares, and freezing
"thank you's," and "engagements."

"I've found the real folks, mother, and they're all coming!" she
cried, joyfully, running in where Mrs. Ripwinkley was setting little
vases and baskets about on shelf and table, between the white,
plain, muslin draperies of the long parlor windows. In vases and
baskets were sweet May flowers; bunches of deep-hued, rich-scented
violets, stars of blue and white periwinkle, and Miss Craydocke's
lilies of the valley in their tall, cool leaves; each kind gathered
by itself in clusters and handfuls. Inside the wide, open fireplace,
behind the high brass fender and the shining andirons, was a
"chimney flower pot," country fashion, of green lilac boughs,--not
blossoms,--and woodbine sprays, and crimson and white tulips. The
room was fair and fragrant, and the windows were wide open upon
vines and grass.

"It looks like you, mother, just as Mrs. Geoffrey's house looks like
her. Houses ought to look like people, I think."

"There's your surprise, children. We shouldn't be doing it right
without a surprise, you know."

And the surprise was not dolls' pelerines, but books. "Little Women"
was one, which sent Diana and Hazel off for a delicious two hours'
read up in their own room until dinner.

After dinner, Miss Craydocke came, in her purple and white striped
mohair and her white lace neckerchief; and at three o'clock Uncle
Titus walked in, with his coat pockets so bulgy and rustling and
odorous of peppermint and sassafras, that it was no use to pretend
to wait and be unconscious, but a pure mercy to unload him so that
he might be able to sit down.

Nobody knows to this day where he got them; he must have ordered
them somewhere, one would think, long enough before to have special
moulds and implements made; but there were large, beautiful
cockles,--not of the old flour-paste sort, but of clear, sparkling
sugar, rose-color, and amber, and white, with little slips of tinted
paper tucked within, and these printed delicately with pretty rhymes
and couplets, from real poets; things to be truly treasured, yet
simple, for children's apprehension, and fancy, and fun. And there
were "Salem gibraltars," such as we only get out of Essex County now
and then, for a big charitable Fair, when Salem and everywhere else
gets its spirit up to send its best and most especial; and there
were toys and devices in sugar--flowers and animals, hats, bonnets,
and boots, apples, and cucumbers,--such as Diana and Hazel, and even
Desire and Helena had never seen before.

"It isn't quite fair," said good Miss Craydocke. "We were to go back
to the old, simple fashions of things; and here you are beginning
over again already with sumptuous inventions. It's the very way it
came about before, till it was all spoilt."

"No," said Uncle Titus, stoutly. "It's only 'Old _and_ New,'--the
very selfsame good old notions brought to a little modern
perfection. They're not French flummery, either; and there's not a
drop of gin, or a flavor of prussic acid, or any other abominable
chemical, in one of those contrivances. They're as innocent as they
look; good honest mint and spice and checkerberry and lemon and
rose. I know the man that made 'em!"

Helena Ledwith began to think that the first person, singular or
plural, might have a good time; but that awful third! Helena's
"they" was as potent and tremendous as her mother's.

"It's nice," she said to Hazel; "but they don't have inch things. I
never saw them at a party. And they don't play games; they always
dance. And it's broad, hot daylight; and--you haven't asked a single
boy!"

"Why, I don't know any! Only Jimmy Scarup; and I guess he'd rather
play ball, and break windows!"

"Jimmy Scarup!" And Helena turned away, hopeless of Hazel's
comprehending.

But "they" came; and "they" turned right into "we."

It was not a party; it was something altogether fresh and new; the
house was a new, beautiful place; it was like the country. And Aspen
Street, when you got down there, was so still and shady and sweet
smelling and pleasant. They experienced the delight of finding out
something.

Miss Craydocke and Hazel set them at it,--their good time; they had
planned it all out, and there was no stiff, shy waiting. They began,
right off, with the "Muffin Man." Hazel danced up to Desire:--

          "O, _do_ you know the Muffin Man,
            The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?
          O, _do_ you know the Muffin Man
            That lives in Drury Lane?"

          "O, yes, I know the Muffin Man,
            The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man,
          O, yes, I know the Muffin Man
            That lives in Drury Lane."

And so they danced off together:--

          "Two of us know the Muffin Man,
            The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man,
          Two of us know the Muffin Man
            That lives in Drury Lane."

And then they besieged Miss Craydocke; and then the three met Ada
Geoffrey, just as she had come in and spoken to Diana and Mrs.
Ripwinkley; and Ada had caught the refrain, and responded instantly;
and _four_ of them knew the Muffin Man.

"I know they'll think it's common and queer, and they'll laugh
to-morrow," whispered Helena to Diana, as Hazel drew the lengthening
string to Dorris Kincaid's corner and caught her up; but the next
minute they were around Helena in her turn, and they were laughing
already, with pure glee; and five faces bent toward her, and five
voices sang,--

          "O, _don't_ you know the Muffin Man?"

And Helena had to sing back that she did; and then the six made a
perfect snarl around Mrs. Ripwinkley herself, and drew her in; and
then they all swept off and came down across the room upon Mr.
Oldways, who muttered, under the singing, "seven women! Well, the
Bible says so, and I suppose it's come!" and then he held out both
hands, while his hard face unbent in every wrinkle, with a smile
that overflowed through all their furrowed channels, up to his very
eyes; like some sparkling water that must find its level; and there
were eight that knew the Muffin Man.

So nine, and ten, and up to fifteen; and then, as their line broke
away into fragments, still breathless with fun, Miss Craydocke
said,--her eyes brimming over with laughing tears, that always came
when she was gay,--

"There, now! we all know the 'Muffin Man;' therefore it follows,
mathematically, I believe, that we must all know each other. I think
we'll try a sitting-down game next. I'll give you all something.
Desire, you can tell them what to do with it, and Miss Ashburne
shall predict me consequences."

So they had the "Presentation Game;" and the gifts, and the
dispositions, and the consequences, when the whispers were over, and
they were all declared aloud, were such hits and jumbles of sense
and nonsense as were almost too queer to have been believed.

"Miss Craydocke gave me a butter firkin," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "I
was to put it in the parlor and plant vanilla beans in it; and the
consequence would be that Birnam Wood would come to Dunsinane."

"She gave me a wax doll," said Helena. "I was to buy it a pair of
high-heeled boots and a chignon; and the consequence would be that
she would have to stand on her head."

"She gave me," said Mr. Oldways, "an iron spoon. I was to deal out
sugar-plums with it; and the consequence would be that you would all
go home."

"She gave me," said Lois James, "Woman's Rights. I shouldn't know
what to do with them; and the consequence would be a terrible
mortification to all my friends."

"She gave me," said Hazel, "a real good time. I was to pass it
round; and the consequence would be an earthquake."

Then they had "Scandal;" a whisper, repeated rapidly from ear to
ear. It began with, "Luclarion is in the kitchen making
tea-biscuits;" and it ended with the horrible announcement that
there were "two hundred gallons of hot pitch ready, and that
everybody was to be tipped into it."

"Characters," and "Twenty Questions," and "How, When, and Where,"
followed; and then they were ready for a run again, and they played
"Boston," in which Mr. Oldways, being "Sceattle," was continually
being left out, whereupon he declared at last, that he didn't
believe there was any place for him, or even that he was down
anywhere on the map, and it wasn't fair, and he was going to secede;
and that broke up the play; for the groat fun of all the games had
come to be Miss Craydocke and Uncle Titus, as it always is the great
fun to the young ones when the elders join in,--the older and the
soberer, the better sport; there is always something in the "fathers
looking on;" that is the way I think it is among them who always do
behold the Face of the Father in heaven,--smiling upon their smiles,
glowing upon their gladness.

In the tea-room, it was all even more delightful yet; it was further
out into the garden, shaded at the back by the deep leafiness of
grape-vines, and a trellis work with arches in it that ran up at the
side, and would be gay by and by with scarlet runners, and
morning-glories, and nasturtiums, that were shooting up strong and
swift already, from the neatly weeded beds.

Inside, was the tall old semicircular sideboard, with gingerbread
grooves carved all over it; and the real brass "dogs," with heads on
their fore-paws, were lying in the fire-place, under the lilac
boughs; and the square, plain table stood in the midst, with its
glossy white cloth that touched the floor at the corners, and on it
were the identical pink mugs, and a tall glass pitcher of milk, and
plates of the thinnest and sweetest bread and butter, and early
strawberries in a white basket lined with leaves, and the
traditional round frosted cakes upon a silver plate with a network
rim.

And Luclarion and Mrs. Ripwinkley waited upon them all, and it was
still no party, to be compared or thought of with any salad and
ice-pudding and Germania-band affair, such as they had had all
winter; but something utterly fresh and new and by itself,--place,
and entertainment, and people, and all.

After tea, they went out into the garden; and there, under the shady
horse-chestnuts, was a swing; and there were balls with which Hazel
showed them how to play "class;" tossing in turn against the high
brick wall, and taking their places up and down, according to the
number of their catches. It was only Miss Craydocke's "Thread the
Needle" that got them in again; and after that, she showed them
another simple old dancing game, the "Winding Circle," from which
they were all merrily and mysteriously untwisting themselves with
Miss Craydocke's bright little thin face and her fluttering cap
ribbons, and her spry little trot leading them successfully off,
when the door opened, and the grand Mr. Geoffrey walked in; the man
who could manage State Street, and who had stood at the right hand
of Governor and President, with his clear brain, and big purse, and
generous hand, through the years of the long, terrible war; the man
whom it was something for great people to get to their dinners, or
to have walk late into an evening drawing-room and dignify an
occasion for the last half hour.

Mrs. Ripwinkley was just simply glad to see him; so she was to see
Kenneth Kincaid, who came a few minutes after, just as Luclarion
brought the tray of sweetmeats in, which Mrs. Ripwinkley had so far
innovated upon the gracious-grandmother plan as to have after tea,
instead of before.

The beautiful cockles and their rhymes got their heads all together
around the large table, for the eating and the reading. Mr. Geoffrey
and Uncle Titus sat talking European politics together, a little
aside. The sugar-plums lasted a good while, with the chatter over
them; and then, before they quite knew what it was all for, they had
got slips of paper and lead pencils before them, and there was to be
a round of "Crambo" to wind up.

"O, I don't know how!" and "I never can!" were the first words, as
they always are, when it was explained to the uninitiated; but Miss
Craydocke assured them that "everybody could;" and Hazel said that
"nobody expected real poetry; it needn't be more than two lines, and
those might be blank verse, if they were _very_ hard, but jingles
were better;" and so the questions and the wards were written and
folded, and the papers were shuffled and opened amid outcries of,
"O, this is awful!" "_What_ a word to get in!" "Why, they haven't
the least thing to do with each other!"

"That's the beauty of it," said Miss Craydocke, unrelentingly; "to
_make_ them have; and it is funny how much things do have to do with
each other when they once happen to come across."

Then there were knit brows, and desperate scratchings, and such
silence that Mr. Geoffrey and Uncle Titus stopped short on the
Alabama question, and looked round to see what the matter was.

Kenneth Kincaid had been modestly listening to the older gentlemen,
and now and then venturing to inquire or remark something, with an
intelligence that attracted Mr. Geoffrey; and presently it came out
that he had been south with the army; and then Mr. Geoffrey asked
questions of him, and they got upon Reconstruction business, and
comparing facts and exchanging conclusions, quite as if one was not
a mere youth with only his eyes and his brains and his conscience to
help him in his first grapple with the world in the tangle and
crisis at which he found it, and the other a grave, practiced,
keen-judging man, the counsellor of national leaders.

After all, they had no business to bring the great, troublesome,
heavy-weighted world into a child's party. I wish man never would;
though it did not happen badly, as it all turned out, that they did
a little of it in this instance. If they had thought of it,
"Crambo" was good for them too, for a change; and presently they did
think of it; for Dorris called out in distress, real or pretended,
from the table,--

"Kentie, here's something you must really take off my hands! I
haven't the least idea what to do with it."

And then came a cry from Hazel,--

"No fair! We're all just as badly off, and there isn't one of us
that has got a brother to turn to. Here's another for Mr. Kincaid."

"There are plenty more. Come, Mr. Oldways, Mr. Geoffrey, won't you
try 'Crambo?' There's a good deal in it, as there is in most
nonsense."

"We'll come and see what it is," said Mr. Geoffrey; and so the
chairs were drawn up, and the gray, grave heads looked on over the
young ones.

"Why, Hazel's got through!" said Lois, scratching violently at her
paper, and obliterating three obstinate lines.

"O, I didn't bother, you see! I just stuck the word right in, like a
pin into a pincushion, and let it go. There wasn't anything else to
do with it."

"I've got to make my pincushion," said Dorris.

"I should think you had! Look at her! She's writing her paper all
over! O, my gracious, she must have done it before!"

"Mother and Mr. Geoffrey are doing heaps, too! We shall have to
publish a book," said Diana, biting the end of her pencil, and
taking it easy. Diana hardly ever got the rhymes made in time; but
then she always admired everybody's else, which was a good thing for
somebody to be at leisure to do.

"Uncle Oldways and Lilian are folding up," said Hazel.

"Five minutes more," said Miss Craydocke, keeping the time with her
watch before her. "Hush!"

When the five minutes were rapped out, there were seven papers to be
read. People who had not finished this time might go on when the
others took fresh questions.

Hazel began reading, because she had been ready first.

"'What is the difference between sponge-cake and doughnuts?'
'Hallelujah.'"

          "Airiness, lightness, and insipidity;
           Twistiness, spiciness, and solidity.
           Hallelujah! I've got through!
           That is the best that I can do!'"

There was a shout at Hazel's pinsticking.

"Now, Uncle Titus! You finished next."

"My question is a very comprehensive one," said Uncle Titus, "with a
very concise and suggestive word. 'How wags the world?' 'Slambang.'"

          "'The world wags on
            With lies and slang;
            With show and vanity,
            Pride and inanity,
            Greed and insanity,
            And a great slambang!'"

"That's only _one_ verse," said Miss Craydocke. "There's another;
but he didn't write it down."

Uncle Titus laughed, and tossed his Crambo on the table. "It's true,
so far, anyway," said he.

"_So far_ is hardly ever quite true," said Miss Craydocke

Lilian Ashburne had to answer the question whether she had ever read
"Young's Night Thoughts;" and her word was "Comet."

          "'Pray might I be allowed a pun,
            To help me through with just this one?
            I've tried to read Young's Thoughts of Night,
            But never yet could come it, quite.'"

"O, O, O! That's just like Lilian, with her soft little 'prays' and
'allow me's,' and her little pussy-cat ways of sliding through tight
places, just touching her whiskers!"

"It's quite fair," said Lilian, smiling, "to slide through if you
can."

"Now, Mr. Geoffrey."

And Mr. Geoffrey read,--

"'What is your favorite color?' 'One-hoss.'"

          "'Do you mean, my friend, for a one-hoss shay,
            Or the horse himself,--black, roan, or bay?
            In truth, I think I can hardly say;
            I believe, for a nag, "I bet on the gray."

          "'For a shay, I would rather not have yellow,
            Or any outright, staring color,
            That makes the crowd look after a fellow,
            And the little _gamins_ hoot and bellow.

          "'Do you mean for ribbons? or gowns? or eyes?
            Or flowers? or gems? or in sunset skies?
            For many questions, as many replies,
            Drops of a rainbow take rainbow dyes.

          "'The world is full, and the world is bright;
            Each thing to its nature parts the light;
            And each for its own to the Perfect sight
            Wears that which is comely, and sweet, and right.'"

"O, Mr. Geoffrey! That's lovely!" cried the girl voices, all around
him. And Ada made a pair of great eyes at her father, and said,--

"What an awful humbug you have been, papa! To have kept the other
side up with care all your life! Who ever suspected _that_ of you?"

Diana and Hazel were not taken so much by surprise, their mother
had improvised little nursery jingles for them all their baby days,
and had played Crambo with them since; so they were very confident
with their "Now, mother:" and looked calmly for something
creditable.

"'What is your favorite name?'" read Mrs. Ripwinkley. "And the word
is 'Stuff.'"

          "'When I was a little child,
            Looking very meek and mild,
            I liked grand, heroic names,--
            Of warriors, or stately dames:
            Zenobia, and Cleopatra;
            (No rhyme for that this side Sumatra;)
            Wallace, and Helen Mar,--Clotilda,
            Berengaria, and Brunhilda;
            Maximilian; Alexandra;
            Hector, Juno, and Cassandra;
            Charlemagne and Britomarte,
            Washington and Bonaparte;
            Victoria and Guinevere,
            And Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
            --Shall I go on with all this stuff,
            Or do you think it is enough?
            I cannot tell you what dear name
            I love the best; I play a game;
            And tender earnest doth belong
            To quiet speech, not silly song.'"

"That's just like mother; I should have stopped as soon as I'd got
the 'stuff' in; but she always shapes off with a little morriowl,"
said Hazel. "Now, Desire!"

Desire frantically scribbled a long line at the end of what she had
written; below, that is, a great black morass of scratches that
represented significantly the "Slough of Despond" she had got into
over the winding up, and then gave,--

"'Which way would you rather travel,--north or south?'
'Goosey-gander.'"

          "'O, goosey-gander!
                If I might wander,
            It should be toward the sun;
                The blessed South
                Should fill my mouth
            With ripeness just begun.
                For bleak hills, bare,
                With stunted, spare,
            And scrubby, piney trees,
                Her gardens rare,
                And vineyards fair,
            And her rose-scented breeze.
                For fearful blast,
                Skies overcast,
            And sudden blare and scare
                Long, stormless moons,
                And placid noons,
            And--all sorts of comfortablenesses,--there!'"

"That makes me think of father's horse running away with him once,"
said Helena, "when he had to head him right up against a brick wall,
and knock everything all to smash before he could stop!"

"Anybody else?"

"Miss Kincaid, I think," said Mr. Geoffrey. He had been watching
Dorris's face through the play, flashing and smiling with the
excitement of her rhyming, and the slender, nervous fingers twisting
tremulously the penciled slip while she had listened to the others.

"If it isn't all rubbed out," said Dorris, coloring and laughing to
find how badly she had been treating her own effusion.

"You see it _was_ rather an awful question,--'What do you want
most?' And the word is, 'Thirteen.'"

She caught her breath a little quickly as she began:--

          "'Between yourself, dear, myself, and the post,
            There are the thirteen things that I want the most.
            I want to be, sometimes, a little stronger;
            I want the days to be a little longer;
            I'd like to have a few less things to do;
            I'd better like to better do the few:
            I want--and this might almost lead my wishes,--
            A bigger place to keep my mops and dishes.
            I want a horse; I want a little buggy,
            To ride in when the days grow hot and muggy;
            I want a garden; and,--perhaps it's funny,--
            But now and then I want a little money.
            I want an easy way to do my hair;
            I want an extra dress or two to wear;
            I want more patience; and when all is given,
            I think I want to die and go to heaven!'"

"I never saw such bright people in all my life!" said Ada Geoffrey,
when the outcry of applause for Dorris had subsided, and they began
to rise to go. "But the _worst_ of all is papa! I'll never get over
it of you, see if I do! Such a cheat! Why, it's like playing dumb
all your life, and then just speaking up suddenly in a quiet way,
some day, as if it was nothing particular, and nobody cared!"

With Hazel's little divining-rod, Mrs. Ripwinkley had reached out,
testing the world for her, to see what some of it might be really
made of. Mrs. Geoffrey, from her side, had reached out in turn,
also, into this fresh and simple opportunity, to see what might be
there worth while.

"How was it, Aleck?" she asked of her husband, as they sat together
in her dressing-room, while she brushed out her beautiful hair.

"Brightest people I have been among for a long time--and nicest,"
said the banker, concisely. "A real, fresh little home, with a
mother in it. Good place for Ada to go, and good girls for her to
know; like the ones I fell in love with a hundred years ago."

"That rhymed oracle,--to say nothing of the _fraction_ of a
compliment,--ought to settle it," said Mrs. Geoffrey, laughing.

"Rhymes have been the order of the evening. I expect to talk in
verse for a week at least."

And then he told her about the "Crambo."

A week after, Mrs. Ledwith was astonished to find, lying on the
mantel in her sister's room, a card that had been sent up the day
before,--

          "MRS. ALEXANDER H. GEOFFREY."




XI.

MORE WITCH-WORK.


Hazel was asked to the Geoffreys' to dinner.

Before this, she and Diana had both been asked to take tea, and
spend an evening, but this was Hazel's little especial "invite," as
she called it, because she and Ada were writing a dialogue together
for a composition at school.

The Geoffreys dined at the good old-fashioned hour of half past two,
except when they had formal dinner company; and Hazel was to come
right home from school with Ada, and stay and spend the afternoon.

"What intimacy!" Florence Ledwith had exclaimed, when she heard of
it.

"But it isn't at all on the grand style side; people like the
Geoffreys do such things quite apart from their regular connection;
it is a sort of 'behind the scenes;'" said Glossy Megilp, who was
standing at Florence's dressing-glass, touching up the little heap
of "friz" across her forehead.

"Where's my poker?" she asked, suddenly, breaking off from the
Geoffrey subject, and rummaging in a dressing box, intent upon
tutoring some little obstinate loop of hair that would be _too_
frizzy.

"I should think a 'blower' might be a good thing to add to your
tools, Glossy," said Desire. "You have brush, poker, and tongs, now,
to say nothing of coal-hod," she added, glancing at the little open
japanned box that held some kind of black powder which had to do
with the shadow of Glossy's eyelashes upon occasion, and the
emphasis upon the delicate line of her brows.

"No secret," said Glossy, magnanimously. "There it is! It is no
greater sin than violet powder, or false tails, for that matter; and
the little gap in my left eyebrow was never deliberately designed.
It was a 'lapsus naturæ;' I only follow out the hint, and complete
the intention. Something _is_ left to ourselves; as the child said
about the Lord curling her hair for her when she was a baby and
letting her do it herself after she grew big enough. What are our
artistic perceptions given to us for, unless we're to make the best
of ourselves in the first place?"

"But it isn't all eyebrows," said Desire, half aloud.

"Of course not," said Glossy Megilp. "Twice a day I have to do
myself up somehow, and why shouldn't it be as well as I can? Other
things come in their turn, and I do them."

"But, you see, the friz and the fix has to be, anyhow, whether or
no. Everything isn't done, whether or no. I guess it's the 'first
place,' that's the matter."

"I think you have a very theoretical mind, Des, and a slightly
obscure style. You can't be satisfied till everything is all mapped
out, and organized, and justified, and you get into horrible snarls
trying to do it. If I were you, I would take things a little more as
they come."

"I can't," said Desire. "They come hind side before and upside
down."

"Well, if everybody is upside down, there's a view of it that makes
it all right side up, isn't there? It seems to be an established
fact that we must dress and undress, and that the first duty of the
day is to get up and put on our clothes. We aren't ready for much
until we do. And one person's dressing may require one thing, and
another's another. Some people have a cork leg to put on, and some
people have false teeth; and they wouldn't any of them come hobbling
or mumbling out without them, unless there was a fire or an
earthquake, I suppose."

Glossy Megilp's arguments and analogies perplexed Desire, always.
They sometimes silenced her; but they did not always answer her. She
went back to what they had been discussing before.

"To 'lay down the shubbel and the hoe,'--here's your poker, under
the table-flounce, Glossy,--and to 'take up the fiddle and the bow,'
again,--I think it's real nice and beautiful for Hazel--"

"To 'go where the good darkies go'?"

"Yes. It's the _good_ of her that's got her in. And I believe you
and Florence both would give your best boots to be there too, if it
_is_ behind. Behind the fixings and the fashions is where people
_live_; 'dere's vat I za-ay!'" she ended, quoting herself and Rip
Van Winkle.

"Maybe," said Florence, carelessly; "but I'd as lief be _in_ the
fashion, after all. And that's where Hazel Ripwinkley never will
get, with all her taking little novelties."

Meanwhile, Hazel Ripwinkley was deep in the delights of a great
portfolio of rare engravings; prints of glorious frescoes in old
churches, and designs of splendid architecture; and Mrs. Geoffrey,
seeing her real pleasure, was sitting beside her, turning over the
large sheets, and explaining them; telling her, as she gazed into
the wonderful faces of the Saints and the Evangelists in Correggio's
frescoes of the church of San Giovanni at Parma, how the whole dome
was one radiant vision of heavenly glory, with clouds and angel
faces, and adoring apostles, and Christ the Lord high over all; and
that these were but the filling in between the springing curves of
the magnificent arches; describing to her the Abbess's room in San
Paolo, with its strange, beautiful heathen picture over the mantel,
of Diana mounting her stag-drawn car, and its circular walls painted
with trellis-work and medallioned with windows, where the heads of
little laughing children, and graceful, gentle animals peeped in
from among vines and flowers.

Mrs. Geoffrey did not wonder that Hazel lingered with delight over
these or over the groups by Raphael in the Sistine Chapel,--the
quiet pendentives, where the waiting of the world for its salvation
was typified in the dream-like, reclining forms upon the still,
desert sand; or the wonderful scenes from the "Creation,"--the
majestic "Let there be Light!" and the Breathing of the breath of
life into Man. She watched the surprise and awe with which the child
beheld for the first time the daring of inspiration in the
tremendous embodiment of the Almighty, and waited while she could
hardly take her eyes away. But when, afterward, they turned to a
portfolio of Architecture, and she found her eager to examine spires
and arches and capitals, rich reliefs and stately facades and
sculptured gates, and exclaiming with pleasure at the colored
drawings of Florentine ornamentation, she wondered, and questioned
her,--

"Have you ever seen such things before? Do you draw? I should hardly
think you would care so much, at your age."

"I like the prettiness," said Hazel, simply, "and the grandness; but
I don't suppose I should care so much if it wasn't for Dorris and
Mr. Kincaid. Mr. Kincaid draws buildings; he's an architect; only he
hasn't architected much yet, because the people that build things
don't know him. Dorris was so glad to give him a Christmas present
of 'Daguerreotypes de Paris,' with the churches and arches and
bridges and things; she got it at a sale; I wonder what they would
say to all these beauties!"

Then Mrs. Geoffrey found what still more greatly enchanted her, a
volume of engravings, of English Home Architecture; interiors of old
Halls, magnificent staircases, lofty libraries and galleries dim
with space; exteriors, gabled, turreted and towered; long, rambling
piles of manor houses, with mixed styles of many centuries.

"They loo

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