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Growing Up: A Story of the Girlhood of Judith Mackenzie

by Mrs. Nathaniel Conklin · English · Gutenberg #42408 · 456,650 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Growing Up: A Story of the Girlhood of Judith Mackenzie

Author: Mrs. Nathaniel Conklin


        
Release date: March 24, 2013 [eBook #42408]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GROWING UP: A STORY OF THE GIRLHOOD OF JUDITH MACKENZIE ***

                              GROWING UP

                      A Story of the Girlhood of

                           JUDITH MACKENZIE


                       By JENNIE M. DRINKWATER


                     “Each year grows more sacred
                     with wondering expectation.”

                                 —Phillips Brooks.


                         A. L. BURT COMPANY,
                        PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK.




                           Copyright, 1894,

                        By A. I. Bradley & Co.




CONTENTS.

    I. The Horn Book
    II. Square Root and Other Things
    III. Was this the End?
    IV. Bensalem
    V. Daily Bread and Daily Will
    VI. The Best Thing in the World
    VII. A Small Disciple
    VIII. This Way or That Way?
    IX. The Flowers That Came to the Well
    X. The Last Apple
    XI. How Jean Had an Outing
    XII. A Secret Errand
    XIII. The Two Blessed Things
    XIV. An Afternoon with an Adventure in It
    XV. “First at Antioch”
    XVI. Aunt Affy’s Experience
    XVII. The Story of a Key
    XVIII. Judith’s Turning Point
    XIX. A Morning with a Surprise in It
    XX. Judith’s Afternoon
    XXI. Marion’s Afternoon
    XXII. Aunt Affy’s Evening
    XXIII. Voices
    XXIV. “I Always Thought You Cared”
    XXV. Cousin Don
    XXVI. Aunt Affy’s Faith and Judith’s Foreign Letter
    XXVII. His Very Best
    XXVIII. A New Anxiety
    XXIX. Judith’s Future
    XXX. A Talk and What Came of It
    XXXI. About Women
    XXXII. Aunt Affy’s Picture
    XXXIII. Nettie’s Outing
    XXXIV. “Sensations”




                              GROWING UP




I. THE HORN BOOK.


    “I remember the lessons of childhood, you see,
    And the horn book I learned on my poor mother’s knee.
    In truth, I suspect little else do we learn
    From this great book of life, which so shrewdly we turn,
    Saving how to apply, with a good or bad grace,
    What we learned in the horn book of childhood.”

                                            —Owen Meredith.

Judith’s mother sat in her invalid chair before the grate; she looked
very pretty to Judith with her hair curling back from her face, and
the color of her eyes and cheeks brought out by the becoming wrapper;
the firelight shone upon the mother; the fading light in the west
shone upon the girl in the bay-window, the yellow head, the blue
shoulders bent over the letter she was writing.

“Judith, come and tell me pictures.”

About five o’clock in the afternoon, her mother’s weariest-time,
Judith often told her mother pictures.

The picture-telling began when Judith was a little girl; one afternoon
she said: “Mother, I’ll tell you a picture; shut your eyes.”

It was in this very room; her mother leaned back in her wheel-chair,
lifted her feet to the fender, shut her eyes, and a small
seven-year-old “told” her “picture.”

Telling pictures had been the amusement of the one, and the rest of
the other, many, many weary times since.

As the child grew, her pictures grew.

“Yes, mother,” said the girl in the bay window, “I’ve just finished my
letter; I’ve written Aunt Affy the longest letter and told her all you
said.”

“Read it to me, please?”

Standing near the window to catch the light, Judith read aloud the
letter.

At times it was quaint and unchildish; then, forgetting herself,
Judith had run on with her ready pen, and, with pretty phrases, told
Aunt Affy the exciting events in her own life, and the quiet story of
her mother’s days.

“We are coming as soon as spring comes,” she ended, “mother is coming
to get strong, and I am coming to help you and learn about your
village. Beautiful Bensalem. Mother says I am learning the lessons
taught out of school; but how I would like to go to school with Jean
Draper in your big, queer school-room.” As she turned towards her
mother, the firelight and the light in her face were all the lights in
the room.

The home of these two people was in two rooms; one was the kitchen,
the other was bed-room, school-room, parlor. It was a month since her
mother had walked through the two rooms; several times a day Judith
pushed the wheel-chair through the rooms. She called these times her
mother’s excursions. Last winter her mother wiped dishes, sewed a
little, and once she made cake; this winter she had done little
besides teach Judith. The child was such an apt scholar that her
mother said she needed no teacher—she always taught herself.

Judith loved housekeeping; she loved everything she had to do, she
loved everything she was growing up to do; her mother she loved best
of all.

She lived all day long in a very busy world; the pictures helped fill
it.

“Now, mother, shut your eyes,” she began, gleefully.

[Illustration: “Now, mother, shut your eyes,” said Judith gleefully.]

The eyes shut themselves, the restless hands held themselves still;
there would not be many more weary days, but Judith did not know that.

Judith waited a moment until she could think.

“Mother, how do pictures come?”

“Bring me that paper Don brought last night; I saw something to show
you, then forgot it.”

Her mother turned the leaves of the paper and indicated the paragraph
with her finger. Judith read it aloud:—

“Some years ago I chanced to meet Sir Noël Paton on the shores of a
beautiful Scottish loch, all alone, with an open Bible in his hand. He
put his finger between his pages, as he rose to greet me, and still
kept it there as we talked. Supposing he might be devoting a quiet
hour to devotional reading in the secluded spot, I made no remark on
the nature of his studies; but after a few minutes he observed, with a
glance downwards, ‘You see, I am getting a new picture.’ He then
proceeded to explain that it was his habit, before settling down to
his winter’s work, to walk about in the neighborhood of his summer
residence, wherever that might be, with his Bible in his hand, seeking
for an inspiration. Sometimes the inspiration came almost immediately;
at others, he was weeks before he could please himself. The following
spring appeared ‘The Good Shepherd,’ one of the finest of his works.”

Her mother made no remark; she often waited for Judith’s thought.

“I think Aunt Affy sees things through the Bible, mother,” said
Judith, speaking her first thought.

“I know she does.”

“I see a face,” began the picture-teller, dropping down on the rug,
and resting her head against the padded arm of the chair.

“You love faces,” was the quick response.

“And voices, and hands, and hair. This face I see is a _good_
face—but, then, I do not often see ugly faces—the eyes tell the truth,
the lips tell the truth; perhaps it isn’t a handsome face; the
forehead is low, rather square, the eye-brows dark and heavy; the eyes
underneath are a kind of grayish blue, not _blue_ blue, like
mine, and they are looking at me very seriously; the nose is quite a
large nose, and the mouth large, too, with such splendid teeth; the
upper lip is smooth, and the cheeks and chin all shaven; the hair is
blackest black; now the eyes smile, and it looks like another face; I
do not know which face I like better. What is the name of my picture?”

“Strong and true.”

“That is a good name,” said the picture-teller, satisfied, “and who is
it?”

“Our dear Cousin Don,” was the reply with loving intonation.

“You always guess.”

“Because your pictures are so true. I like to look at people and
places through your eyes.”

Judith smiled, and looking a moment into the fire, began again: “A
fence, an old fence, and a terrace, not green, but rather dried up,
then a lawn, with a horse-chestnut, a big, big horse-chestnut tree on
each side the brick path, and then up three steps to a long piazza:
the house is painted white, with white shutters instead of blinds, and
there are three dormer windows in the roof; these windows make the
third story. I wish I could see inside, but I never did. Perhaps I
shall some day. ‘Some day’ is my fairyland, and may you be there to
see. That day Cousin Don came to take me walking he took me past the
place; he said some day when you could spare me longer he would take
me in, he wanted me to see the brown girl who lives there; but there
she stood on the piazza, the door was open and she was going in; she
_was_ a brown girl, all in brown with a brown hat and brown
feather; a brown face too—I love browns; she happened to turn and she
tossed a laugh down to Cousin Don. It was a pretty laugh, with
something in it I didn’t understand; it was a
laugh—that—didn’t—tell—everything. I told Don so. He said: ‘Nonsense!’
I don’t know what he meant.”

“That was Marion Kenney, and the old house on Summer Avenue,” guessed
Judith’s mother, who knew the story of the brown girl from Don’s
enthusiastic recitals.

Her mother’s voice was more rested; Judith pondered again.

“That was a city picture; this is a country picture. It is the
beautiful, beautiful country, even if the grass is dead, and the trees
bare; it is the February country in New Jersey; there are clouds, and
clouds, and clouds overhead; and a brook with the sun shining on it,
and a bridge with a stone wall on each side, a little bit of a stone
wall, and stone arches where the water flows through; perhaps it
rushes because the snow is melting so fast; there’s a garden with no
flowers in it yet, but there are flower stalks, and bushes, and
bushes; and a path up to the kitchen door, for the garden is down in a
hollow; the kitchen shines, it is so clean, and _smells_, oh, how
it does smell of graham bread, and hot molasses cake, and cup
custards, and apple pie—but we can’t _smell_ in a picture,” she
laughed.

“I can—in your pictures,” said her mother, echoing the laugh very
softly.

“And the dearest old sitting-room—Aunt Rody will call it ‘the room’ as
if it were the only room in the house; there’s a rag carpet on the
floor—Aunt Rody _dotes_ on rag carpets; so would I if it were not
for the endless sewing of the rags—and there’s a chair with rockers,
and on the top of the back of it a gilded house and trees almost
rubbed off, and on the back a calico cushion tied on with red dress
braid, and a calico cushion in the bottom, and the dearest old lady
sits in it and sews, and talks, and reads the Bible and the magazines;
there’s a chair without rockers for the old lady who never rocks or
does easy pleasant things, and hates it when other people, especially
little girls, do any easy pleasant thing; and there’s another chair,
like an office chair, with a leather cushion for the dear old man with
a rosy face like a rosy apple, and a bald head on the top, and long
white whiskers that he keeps so nice they shine like silver, and make
you never mind when he wants to kiss you; and there’s a high mantel
with a whole world of curious things on it that came out of a hundred
years ago, and a lounge with a shaggy dog on a cushion on one end of
it—how Aunt Rody _lets_ him is a wonder to me—and a round table
with piles of the ‘New York Observer’ on it. And just now the sweetest
lady in the world in her wine-colored wrapper is lying on the lounge
and the little girl in blue is flying about helping Aunt Affy and Aunt
Rody get supper—O, mother,” with a break in her voice, “how I
_ache_ to get you there and take care of you there; Cousin Don
says it is the best place in the world for you and me,—we would grow
fresh and green and send out oxygen like all the green things in
Bensalem. I think I’d like to grow green and send out oxygen.”

“Judith, you and I are always in the best place—for us.”

“Then,” said Judith, laughing, “I’d like a place not quite so good for
us—only just as good as Bensalem.”

“When I was a little girl, thirty years ago, the room was just the
same, only Doodles was another Doodles, and Aunt Affy’s curls were not
gray, and Uncle Cephas was not bald or white—his whiskers were red
then, and he was there off and on—and the other aunties came and
went—and Aunt Becky died—the friskiest Aunt Becky that ever lived. I
want my little girl to grow up in the dear old house, with not a stain
of the world upon her; I want to think of my little girl there with
Uncle Cephas and Aunt Affy.”

Judith understood; her mother had told her she would be there without
her mother; but that was to be years hence—sorrow was a long, long way
off to-night to the girl who must hope or her heart would break; she
brought her mother’s fingers to her lips and kissed them; she did not
worry her mother now-a-days even by kissing her lips or hair.

Cousin Don said to her that afternoon he took her to walk that she
must not hang over her mother, or kiss the life out of her, and above
all, never cry or moan when she talked about leaving her “alone.”
“Nothing makes her so strong as to see you brave,” he said, watching
the effect of his caution upon her listening face.

She had tried to be brave ever since.

“You can make pictures and see me there, mother,” she said brightly,
with a catch in her breath.

“I do—when I lie awake in the night, and give thanks.”

“Tell me over again about when you were a little girl, there,” she
coaxed.

Over and over again she had listened to the ever-new story of her
mother’s childhood and youth in Bensalem; Aunt Rody was the dragon,
Aunt Affy the angel, Uncle Cephas a helper in every difficulty, and
all the village a world where something strange and fascinating was
always happening.

“It was a very happy home for me when my father died and my mother
took me there; she died before I was twelve; and then twelve years I
was Aunt Affy’s girl; then your father took me away,” her mother said
with the memory of the years in her voice and eyes.

“I wonder if somebody will come and take me away, or whether I shall
stay forever and ever like Aunt Affy and Aunt Rody,” Judith wondered
in her expectant voice.

“If somebody comes—if our Father in Heaven sends somebody as good and
gentle and wise as your own father, I shall be glad of it up in
Heaven, I think. You do not remember your father; in his picture he is
like Don—Don is your father’s brother’s son; your fathers were much
alike. Your father was only a clerk, his salary was never large; Don’s
father was a business man, he died rich and left his only son a
fortune; but your father and I never longed for money—Don has always
given me money as his father did; he said you and I had a right to it.
It has never been hard to take money from Don—he will be always kind
to you; he thinks he has a right to you; you are the only children of
the two brothers; they were only two—they never had a sister. Now you
know all about your ancestry on both sides, I think; your grandfather
and grandmother Mackenzie were born in Scotland; they died before you
were born. Aunt Affy will be always telling you about the ‘Sparrow
girls.’ My mother was a Sparrow girl. Just a year ago we were in that
dear old home.”

“I was twelve then—I had my birthday there; perhaps I shall have
another birthday there in April. Aunt Affy wants us to come so much. I
can take better care of you now because I am older and I must not have
lessons to make you tired; we will have a long vacation; I will only
write poems for you and you needn’t even take the trouble to make the
measure right. Aunt Rody said I was a silly baby to be always hanging
about you; but she will see how I have grown up. Don says I am a
little woman. Now I’ll tell you a picture. Shut your eyes, again.”

The tear-blinded eyes were shut again; Judith had been looking into
the fire as she talked; she was afraid to look up into her mother’s
eyes. It was being brave to look into the fire.

“I see a room up-stairs, a room with a slanting roof and only one
window; the window looks down into the garden; it has a green paper
shade tied up with a cord; there is a strip of rag-carpet before the
bed, that is all the carpet there is; and there’s a funny old
wash-stand with a blue bowl sunk down into a hole on the top, and a
towel on the rail of the wash-stand with a red border—in winter a pipe
comes up in the stove-pipe hole from the big stove in the
sitting-room, but there’s ice in the pitcher very often; there’s a
bureau with a cracked looking-glass on the top, an old bureau,
everything is old but the little girl kneeling on the rag-carpet rug
beside the bed, with her head on the red and white quilt, saying her
prayers. That little girl is _you_, mother, a sweet, obedient
little girl, that hasn’t a will of her own, and tempers, and tantrums
like me.”

“I like to think that sweet little girl is you.”

“Then it _is_ me; I’ve grown sweet in a hurry,” Judith laughed,
“and left all my tempers and tantrums far behind.”

“There’s another T to go with them—_temptations_—through which
you grow strong.”

Not seeming to heed, but in reality holding her mother’s thought in
her heart Judith ran merrily on: “And I see a church, with a little
green in front, and posts to hitch the horses, the two church doors
are wide open, for in the picture it is Sunday morning; Aunt Rody is
in the head of a pew in the body of the church, and Aunt Affy sits
next, and Uncle Cephas is next the door, and there’s a girl between
Aunt Affy and Uncle Cephas, a girl fifteen years old and her hair is
braided, not in long, babyish curls—”

“Oh, my little girl, wear your curls as long as you can, because
mother loves them,” her mother urged, bending forward to touch the
soft, bright hair.

“Then her hair _is_ curled, and she is trying to be good and
listen. Perhaps she likes sermons—she looks so; in the picture the
sermon is like the Bible stories you tell me when we read together—I
_wish_ ministers told Bible stories. And there’s the sweetest
singing; it is like Marion Kenney’s singing; she sings like a bird,
Don says; there are girls and boys all over the church, for the
minister in the picture knows how to tell Bible stories to boys and
girls and make them as real as the people and things in Summer Avenue
and Bensalem; just as naughty and just as good. Jean Draper is
there—in the pew behind me. Why, mother,” bringing herself back to the
present and turning to look into her mother’s face, “Jean Draper was
never in the steam cars, or on a ferry-boat in all her life—she has
never been in New York or any where, only to Dunellen, which they call
‘town,’ and she walks there, or rides with her father. She wants to go
somewhere as much as I want to go to boarding-school. It’s the dream
of her life, as boarding-school is my dream.”

“Aunt Affy and Cousin Don will decide about boarding-school. Cousin
Don and I have talked about it, and I will tell Aunt Affy what I think
about it,” her mother decided with an unusual touch of firmness.

“But I wouldn’t leave _you_, mother, for all the boarding-schools
in the world.”

“And I wouldn’t let you for all the schools in the world.”

“Well, it’s only a dream, like Jean Draper’s outing. You like pictures
better than dreams. I think Don’s friend, Roger Kenney, is the
minister in the pulpit; Don said he had preached there almost all
winter, coming home every Tuesday—Monday he visits the people. Don is
sure Bensalem will give him a call. Uncle Cephas likes him so much,
and Uncle Cephas is an elder. Now, here’s another picture: on the same
side of the street as the church, with only the church-yard and the
locust grove between, it is the dear, dainty Queen Anne parsonage—only
two years old, and so new and pretty; Jean Draper went with me through
it—there was nobody there then—and nobody has lived there all this
year; there’s a furnace in the cellar like a city house, and a
bay-window in the study, and a pretty hall with stained-glass windows,
and a cunning kitchen, a cunning sitting-room, and sliding doors into
the parlor, and a piazza in the front, and at the side—and out every
window is the beautiful country. I hope I may go again. Mother, you
like this picture?” she asked earnestly, “that house is another dream
of mine. O, mother,” with a comical little cry, “I’m so full of
dreams, I’m full to bursting.”

“I like that picture. I like to think of Don’s friend there living a
strong life; he has no worldly ambition. Don says it has been wholly
rooted out of him. He was very fine in college, working beyond his
strength—eaten up with ambition. Then he had an experience; Don said
the fountains of the great deep were broken up in him, and he came out
of it another man—as humble and teachable as any child. Don is afraid
he will go there and be satisfied to stay.”

“Now, here’s another face,” said Judith, with a new reverence for
Don’s friend: “brown eyes, and a brown curly beard, and a brown head,
with laughing eyes, unless he is talking about grave things—he doesn’t
make you afraid to be good, but to love to. Still, I am so afraid he
will _talk_ to me some day and ask me questions; I don’t know how
to answer questions. Now, you know, I mean Don’s friend, Mr. Kenney.”

“Your pictures are very cheery. I hope you may tell some to poor old
Aunt Rody.”

“I shall never dare. She snaps at me. She shuts me up and makes me
forget what I want to say. Her eyes go _through_ me. I don’t love
Aunt Rody; I don’t _want_ to love Aunt Rody. She doesn’t like
baby girls,” contended Judith, shaking her yellow head. “She doesn’t
like me and Doodles. We are shaggy and a nuisance.”

“You will not always stay a baby girl.”

“No; I want to grow up faster; I wish I might braid my hair. I want to
write books and paint real pictures on canvas to earn money to take
you to Switzerland. I’m sure you would get well in Switzerland. I see
the pictures I would paint, and I think the books; but I am so slow
about it. Sweeping, and washing dishes, and doing errands, do not help
at all,” she said with a laugh that had no discouragement in it.

“They all help. Every obedient thing helps. You must grow up to your
book and your picture; living a sweet, joyous, truthful, obedient life
is growing up to it. The best books and the best pictures are the
expression of the truest and sweetest life; the strongest and wisest
life; am I talking over your head, dear?”

“No,” laughed Judith, “down into my heart.”

“My little girl has been her mother’s companion all these years; I
fear I sometimes forget that you are only a little girl. But if you
have grown old, you will grow young. I wish I could find a girl friend
for you. But God knows all the girls in the world, and he will find
one for you. If my daughter remembers all her life but one truth her
mother ever said to her, I hope it may be this: The true life is the
life hid with Christ; no other life _is_ life, it is playing at
life; this life is safe, still, hidden away, growing stronger every
day; the expression of it, the making it speak he will take care of
every hour of the day. You cannot understand this now—my words tell
you so little, but they will come back to you.”

“I will write it down,” promised Judith, who loved to write things
down, “and date it February fifteenth. Told in the Firelight. I know
what it means better than I can say it. I often know what things mean,
but I cannot say it.”

“Any more pictures?” suggested her mother, in a voice as bright as
Judith’s own.

“An old face with pink cheeks and a long gray curl behind each ear,
the softest step and the kindest voice—but I always forget and put
sounds in my pictures. Those sounds are always in my picture of Aunt
Affy.”

“You have not made a picture of Aunt Rody.”

“I don’t like to tell a picture of Aunt Rody. She is so old, so
old—and she isn’t happy—and I don’t believe she’s good. If it were not
for Aunt Rody I should think all old people were good; that all you
had to do to be good was to grow up and grow old.”

“She is not happy. Once, years and years ago, so long ago that almost
everybody has forgotten, she had a bitter disappointment.”

“What was it about, mother?” asked the girl, who always wove a
love-story into the stories she planned as she stepped about the
kitchen, or darned and mended the household wear.

“She was ready to be married—she learned that the man she loved—and
Aunt Rody _could_ love in those days—was a very, very bad man; he
deceived her; it did not break her heart, or soften it; it made it
hard. Unless we forgive, our hearts grow hard; she could not forgive;
she has said that she does not know how to forgive. Only in forgiving
do our hearts grow like God’s heart. He is always forgiving.”

“I forgave somebody once,” remembered Judith; “mother,” with a start,
“I do not always forgive Aunt Rody when she is ugly to me; if I do not
will I have a hard heart?”

“Yes. That spot toward Aunt Rody will grow harder and harder. You
cannot love God with the part of your heart that does not forgive.”

“Oh, deary _me_,” groaned Judith, springing up. “Will you like
milk-toast to-night? And prunes? Don says I know how to cook prunes.”

“Perhaps he will come to supper.”

“Then he must have a chop. Mother, I like to keep house. It’s easy.
It’s easier than forgiving,” she said, with her merry little laugh,
and a deep-down heartache.




II. SQUARE ROOT AND OTHER THINGS.


    “Let never day or night unhallowed pass;
    But still remember what the Lord hath done.”

                                  —Shakespeare.

“Judith, would you like to go up to Lottie’s room for an hour?”

Judith’s mother was still sitting before the grate with her feet
lifted to the fender; the tall figure of Donald Mackenzie stood behind
the wheel chair, bending, with his folded arms upon the back of the
chair.

“Yes, mother,” replied the voice from the kitchen, a busy,
pre-occupied voice.

Don had wiped the dishes for her, brought up coal, taken down ashes,
and declared that his three chops were the finest he had ever eaten.

“Lottie and her books just went up,” said Judith standing in the
door-way, and untying her kitchen apron. “Don, will you call me when
you go?”

“Yes, Bluebird; I can stay but an hour; I have to call for Miss
Marion; she has gone to a King’s Daughters’ meeting, and I told her I
would stop on my way home; I have to pass the house,” he explained in
reply to an impatient movement in the wheel chair. Judith went out
softly and ran lightly up the stairway.

“Aunt Hilda,” began the penitent voice above Aunt Hilda’s head, “I
have come to confess.”

“Don, I wish I had warned you.”

“Why didn’t you?” he asked, miserably.

“Because I thought you had common sense.”

“It is a case of common sense.”

Judith’s fingers tapped lightly on the third story door.

“Come in,” called a girlish voice.

“Are you studying? May I stay and study too?”

“You are always ahead of me,” grumbled Lottie.

“Because I take longer lessons, and mother has no one else to teach.
But she was tired to-day, and I couldn’t ask her about that dreadful
thing in square root. Did you find out?”

“Yes, and it’s as easy as mud.”

Both girls laughed.

“Bensalem mud isn’t easy; you think you are going through to China
every spring when the roads are bad.”

Judith had brought her pencil and pad; for half an hour the girls put
their heads together over square root; then Lottie Kindare threw her
book across the small room to the bed.

“Judith, I know something new to tell you; Grace Marvin told me to-day
at recess, and once it came true. I’ll show you.”

On the lowest shelf of the little book-case Lottie found her Bible; it
was dusty, but she did not notice that.

With their chairs very near together, the Bible in Lottie’s lap, the
girls sat silent a moment; Judith’s luminous eyes were filled with
expectation.

“Now wish for what you want most,” commanded Lottie, impressively.

“I wish most of all for mother to be strong enough to go to Bensalem
with Aunt Affy when she comes next week.”

Lottie colored and looked uncomfortable; this evening before she came
up stairs, her mother had told her that the doctor had stopped down
stairs to say that Mrs. Mackenzie must be urged to make no effort to
go into the country; it was too late.

“Not that; something else,” said Lottie, impatiently, “not such a
serious thing.”

“But I want that _most_,” said Judith, piteously.

“Then choose what you want second.”

“Then I want second to go to boarding-school.”

“That’s good,” exclaimed Lottie relieved, “now, shut your eyes and
open the Bible and put your finger down, and if it touches: ‘_And it
came to pass_,’ it _will_ come to pass.”

“How queer,” said Judith delighted, “what an easy way to find out
things. I wish I had known it before.”

“So do I, for then I might have known that I _couldn’t_ have had
a navy blue silk for Christmas; and I hoped for it until the very
day.”

Without any misgiving, Judith closed her eyes and opened the Bible;
her heart beat fast, her fingers trembled; she dared not open her eyes
and see.

“No, you haven’t your wish,” said Lottie’s disappointed voice; “it
reads: ‘And a cubit on one side, and a cubit on the other side’—that’s
dreadful and horrid; I’m so sorry, Ju.”

So was Judith; sorry and frightened.

“Now, I’ll try. I wish for a gold chain like Grace Marvin’s,” she
said, bravely. Judith looked frightened; but what was there to be
afraid of? It was not like fortune-telling; it was the _Bible_.

Judith watched her nervously; she was disappointed if it said in the
Bible that she could never go to boarding-school; but, oh, how glad
she was that she had not asked the Bible if her mother would ever be
strong enough to go to Bensalem. She could not have borne nothing but
a cubit about that. She would hate a “cubit” after this.

“There!” cried Lottie jubilantly, “I have it. See.”

Over the fine print near Lottie’s finger, Judith bent and read:
“_And it came to pass_.”

“Isn’t that splendid?” said Lottie, “but I wish you had got it. Do you
want to try again?”

“No,” hesitated Judith, “it frightens me, and I’m afraid it’s wicked.”

“Wicked,” laughed Lottie, “how can it be wicked?”

“I cannot explain how—but I’m sure mother would not like it.”

“But your mother is so particular,” explained Lottie, “everybody
isn’t. She thinks there’s a right and wrong to everything.”

“But _isn’t_ there?” persisted Judith.

“No,” contended Lottie boldly, but with a fear at her heart; “there
isn’t about this. This is right.”

“I hope it is,” said Judith, brightening.

“We tried it at noon recess one day, and John Kenney came and looked
on. He didn’t say what he thought.”

“Who is John Kenney?”

“The brightest and handsomest boy in the High School. He’s up head in
Latin and everything. He was at my New Year’s Eve party. Don’t you
remember? He sang college songs.”

“He’s the big boy that found a chair for me, and gave me ice cream the
second time. I shall always remember _him_,” said Judith,
fervently. “I did not know his name; when I think about him, I call
him John. John is my favorite name for a man; it has a strong sound, a
generous sound, and I like the color of it.”

“The _color_,” repeated Lottie, amazed.

“Don’t names have color and sound to you?” asked Judith, surprised.
“John is the deepest crimson to me, a glowing crimson. John belongs to
self-sacrifice and generous deeds. John is a hero and a saint.”

Lottie laughed noisily. Judith was the queerest girl. Her
_things_ were always getting mixed up with _thoughts_.
Lottie did not care for thoughts. School, dress, parties,
Sunday-school, summer vacations, John Kenney, dusting and making cake,
jolly times with her father, and home times and making calls with her
mother, were only “things” to this girl of fifteen; if there were
“thoughts” in them, she missed the thoughts. She was daring and
handsome; Judith admired her because she was so different from
herself.

“I don’t believe my mother would care,” said Lottie, honestly, as she
laid her Bible in its place upon her book-shelf.

“But your mother is different,” pleaded Judith.

“Yes, my mother is well; I suppose that makes the difference.”

With a sigh over her disappointment, for, somehow, she thought the
Bible could not be wrong, Judith went back to pad and pencil and
another hard example in square root.

“Lady bug, lady bug, fly away home,” chanted Don’s voice in the hall
below.

“He has a different name for you every time,” said Lottie. “Don’t tell
your mother if it will worry her.”

“I never tell her things that worry her,” replied Judith; “I’ve been
waiting three months to tell her that I have burnt a hole in the front
of my red cashmere and do not know how to mend it. When I go to
Sunday-school she sees me with my coat on, and after Sunday-school I
hurry and put on a white apron.”

With her arithmetic and pad, and a very grave face, Judith hastened
down stairs.

“Your mother is full of hope about Bensalem,” comforted cousin Don; “I
have said good-bye, for I expect to sail for Genoa on Saturday. She
gave me your photograph to take with me. I will write to you at
Bensalem; and if anybody ever hurts you, write to me quick and I’ll
come home and slay them with my little hatchet.”

“Are you going—so soon?” she asked, in an unchildish way; “what will
mother do without you?”

“She will have you and Aunt Affy. I wasn’t going so soon, but I found
it is better. Kiss your cousin Don.”

“Shall you stay _long_?”

“Long enough to go to London to buy me a wife,” he laughed; “kiss your
cousin Don.”

She kissed her cousin Don with eyes so filled with tears that she did
not see the tears in his eyes. The street door fastened itself behind
him; in the quiet street she heard his quick step on the pavement.

Her mother was sitting in the firelight with her head resting upon her
hand.

“Mother, Don’s _gone_,” burst out Judith.

“Yes, for a while. He will never forget his little cousin.”

“Genoa is a long way off.”

“Only a few days’ travel. It is good for him to go. He is engaged to
do some work on a paper, and he has always desired to see the world
afoot. It is good for him,” Don’s Aunt Hilda repeated.

“But it isn’t good for us, mother.”

“I hope it is not bad for us.—But I would be glad for him not to
go—just yet,” she sighed.

“Will Miss Marion, his brown girl, like it?” inquired Judith,
unexpectedly.

“She is not—why do you say that?”

“I don’t know, I saw her; I shouldn’t _think_ he would like to go
and leave us all,” said Don’s little cousin, chokingly, keeping back
the tears.

“He has a heartache to-night, poor boy. Now, little nurse, mother’s
tired. We will have prayer and go early to bed.”




III. “WAS THIS THE END?”


        “The worst is not
    So long as we can sing: _This is the worst_.”

                                   —Shakespeare.

The two parlors were swept and dusted; Marion Kenney enjoyed the
Friday sweeping; she stood in the center of the back parlor,
cheese-cloth duster in hand, taking a satisfied survey of the two
comfortable, old-fashioned rooms.

“Well, you _are_ picturesque!” exclaimed a voice from the doorway of
the back parlor.

With all her twenty-one years, Marion Kenney was girlish enough to
give a swift, shy look the length of the rooms to the long mirror
between the windows in the front parlor. But picturesque was
only—picturesque.

“I don’t see what a girl has to dress herself in furbelows for,” he
went on, ardently, and with evident embarrassment, “when there’s
nothing more becoming than the housekeeping costume; you are as
bewitching in that red sweeping-cap as in your most fashionable
headgear.”

“I like my morning dresses, too,” she said, with a flutter of breath
and color, “perhaps because I’m nothing but a humdrum girl at home.”

“The humdrum girl is getting to be the girl of the age,” he ran on,
his words tumbling over each other in the desire to say, for once in
his life, the least harmful thing; “all her education tends to bring
her down, or up, to the humdrum, if you mean the hum of housekeeping
ways. With a sensible education, literary and musical tastes (not
talents), a sweet temper, a pretty manner, and the tact that brings
out the best in a man, if that is humdrum”—he broke off abruptly, for
he had kindled a light in her face that he had no right to see.

“Have I told you about my little cousin Judith? But I know I have.
She’s a womanly little thing—too womanly. She’s the sweetest prophecy
of a woman. Oh, I remember I promised to take you to see my Aunt
Hilda. But that’s another thing to be laid over. If I live to keep all
my promises I shall live forever.”

“Don’t say that,” she urged, “you are not just to yourself. That is
the only promise you have failed to keep to me, and there’s time
enough for that.”

“I fear not,” he answered, seriously, “she is going away, and so am
I.”

He came to her and laid the photograph in her hand.

“Oh, how sweet!” was Marion’s quick exclamation.

“It _is_ sweet; but she is better than sweet; she has courage.”

“The eyes are too sad for such a girl—how old is she?”

“Nearly thirteen. I took her to New York for a day’s outing, and we
had the picture taken. She was anxious about leaving her mother so
long; the people in the house were with Aunt Hilda, but Lottie, the
girl in the house, is a flighty thing, and Judith was not trusting
her. I saw the look, but I couldn’t hinder it. It will go about
through Europe with me. Did Roger tell you last night—I asked him
to—that I’m off for my long-talked-of tour around the world?”

“_No_,” replied Marion, startled out of her self-command.

“Perhaps he came home late. I wanted to prepare you. It is not so
sudden in my thoughts. But I always do things suddenly after years of
thinking about them. My father wanted me to do this. He said if I were
not careful, money and literary tastes would make me an idle dog. That
set of Ruskin in my room I have left for you. You have made my winter
here so home-like, so refreshingly ‘humdrum,’ that I don’t know how to
thank you. When Roger begged me to come Thanksgiving Day I feared that
I would be one too many, but you all took me in so naturally that I
feel as if I had grown up in your old house with you and Roger. It’s
awfully hard to go, now I’ve come to the point; somehow I hated my
ticket as soon as I took it into my hand. But I knew Aunt Hilda and
Judith were going to Bensalem, and I cannot be with them there.
But—you will write to me?” he asked, pausing in his rush of words.

He had vowed that he would not speak of letters, but the unconscious
appeal of her attitude, the look that he felt in the eyes that could
not lift themselves had given his heart an ache, that, the next
instant, he hated her for making him feel. What right had she to hold
him so? He was Roger’s friend. He had only been kind, and frank and
considerate toward her, and grateful, because she had touched his life
with a touch like healing—he was a better fellow than he was last
winter; he had told her one confidential Sunday twilight that he
almost wanted to be a Christian.

“When will you—come back?” she faltered, speaking her uppermost
thought.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, roughly. “They may keep me there
years, if I do well for the paper—or I may study there—Judith and her
mother may bring me home—I have promised Aunt Hilda to take Judith for
my sister; that is a rousing responsibility for a bachelor like me. I
have been near them this winter, which was one of my reasons for
coming here. Now I think of it, perhaps it would have been better if I
had never come.”

“_I think it would._”

The slow, impressive words uttered themselves. She heard them as if
another voice had spoken them. They told the whole truth, the whole,
terrible, sorrowful truth, and he knew it.

“Good-bye,” she said, with a flash of defiance.

“Good-bye,” he said, not seeing the hand held firmly toward him.

“I will not write to you—you have no right to ask it.”

“No, I have not,” he answered humbly, “I have no right to anything;
not even to ask you to become my wife.”

She lifted her proud eyes; her lips framed the words that her tongue
refused to speak.

“I beg your pardon. I hardly know what I said.”

“It is hardly necessary to tell me that.”

“And you will not write to me?”

“No.”

“I am unhappy enough,” he blundered, “I never thought our happy winter
would end like this. I did not mean it to end like this.”

It was ended then. She herself had ended it. He would never hear the
new music she was practicing for him; they would not read together the
“Essays of Elia” he had given her last week; she could never tell him—

“I must catch the next train; Roger and I have a farewell dinner in
New York to-day. Old fellow, I’m sorry to leave him. I suppose when I
return I shall find him rusting out in Bensalem; for he’s determined
to go there against all the arguments I can bring up. Good-bye,
Marion.”

“Good-bye,” she said, again, allowing her fingers to stay a moment in
his hand.

“God bless you, dear.”

She remembered the blessing afterward; afterward, she remembered, too:
“and forgive me.” Or did she imagine that? Why should he say that? How
had he hurt her? He had only been like Roger.

She had said—what did she say that he should ask her to become his
wife when he had not once thought of it all winter—when he was going
away for years without thinking of it.

In her bewilderment she could not recall the terrible and true words
she herself had spoken, she imagined them to be beyond everything more
dreadful than she would dare think; they burned her through and
through, these words that had said themselves. Were they hurting him
every hour as they were hurting her?

Impetuous she knew herself to be; frank to a fault Roger plainly told
her that she was; often and often her outbursts were to her own
heart-breaking; but nothing before had she ever done like this; there
was no excuse for this, no healing; he would despise her as long as he
lived, and she would have no power ever to forget.

Shame that he understood, that he had all the time understood, was
burning her up like a fever; that he was gone she was unfeignedly
glad, that she might see his dear face no more, she sometimes prayed.
Still, with it all, her life went on as usual; the errands down town,
the calls, her Sunday-school class, her King’s Daughters’ meetings,
her regular hours for practice, the cake-making, the sweeping, she
even began to read one of the volumes of Ruskin she found on the table
in his chamber, with her name and his initials written in each book;
her life went on, her life with the heart gone out of it; her life
went on, but herself seemed staying behind somewhere.

It was a relief that Roger was away a part of every week, Roger, whom
nothing escaped; the others saw nothing,—she believed there was
nothing for them to see.




IV. BENSALEM.


    All service ranks the same with God;
    If now, as formerly he trod
    Paradise, his presence fills
    Our earth, each only as God wills
    Can work.

                       —Robert Browning.

In large black letters the word Post Office stared down the Bensalem
street from the end door of a small white house. A plump lady in gray
pushed open the door; the bell over the door sharply announced her
entrance; she stepped into the tiny room; straight before her a door
was shut, at her right were rows of glass pigeonholes with numerals
pasted upon them; no head was visible at the window the pigeonholes
surrounded; while she stood ready to tap upon the closed door that led
into the sitting-room, the sound of a horn clear and loud gave her a
start and betrayed her into a quick exclamation: “Why, deary me. What
next?”

“Come in here, come in here,” called a shaky voice from the other side
of the closed door.

She pushed the door open, to be confronted by the figure of an old man
lying in bed with a tin horn in his hand.

“Come right in, Miss Affy,” the old man said cheerfully; “I’ve got one
of my dreadful rheumatic days and can’t twist myself out of bed; I’ve
had my bed down here for a week now. I’ve got all the mail in bed with
me. Sarah had to go out and milk and feed the chickens, so she brought
the few letters and papers that were left over in here for me to take
care of. Doctor says I’ll be about in a week or so, if he can keep the
fever down. I never had rheumatic _fever_ before. Nobody comes this
time of day for letters. Nothing happens about five o’clock excepting
feeding the chickens. Sarah milks earlier than most folks so as to
tend the mail, when the stage gets in. She went out earlier than usual
to-day because she forgot the little chickens at noon. She just put
her head in to say she had taken a new brood off. Do sit down a
minute. Didn’t Mr. Brush tell you I had rheumatic fever? Sarah must
have told him when he came for his paper, night before last. She tells
everybody. I blew the horn to call Sarah in, but I don’t believe
she’ll come until she gets ready. The mail doesn’t mean anything to
her excepting getting our pay regular. There’s all the letters on the
foot of the bed; you can pick yours out. Sarah said you had a letter,
and she guessed it was from your niece, Mrs. Mackenzie, or her little
girl. Yes, that’s it. Mr. Brush’s paper is there, too.”

The plump lady in gray, with a long gray curl behind each ear, picked
among the letters and papers at the foot of the untidy bed, and found
a letter in a pretty hand addressed to Miss Affy S. Sparrow, and a
newspaper bearing the printed label, Cephas Brush.

“That is all,” remarked the Bensalem postmaster; “never mind fixing
them straight; I get uneasy and tumble them around.”

“I will sit here and read the letter, if I may.”

“Oh, yes, do. I haven’t heard any news to-day.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t brought you any,” said Miss Affy, “and you will
not care for my letter.”

“Oh, yes, I shall,” he answered, eagerly. “I was wishing I could read
all the letters to amuse me. I did read Mr. Brush’s paper. I tucked it
all back smooth; I knew he wouldn’t care.”

“He will call and bring you papers,” promised Miss Affy, tearing open
the envelope with a hair-pin.

“I wish he _would_. And a book, too. I wanted Sarah to take my book
back to the library to-day, and get another to read to-night if I
can’t sleep, but she said she hadn’t time; and, she can’t now, because
there’s supper and the mail coming in,” he groaned. “I had an awful
night last night; and if it hadn’t been for ‘Tempest and Sunshine,’ I
don’t know how I should have got through it.”

“That was enough for one night,” laughed the lady at the window
reading the letter. “I will try to find you something better than that
for to-night.”

“Will you go to the library for me? That’s just like you, Miss Affy.”

“Yes, I will go. If I cannot find anything I like I will call
somewhere else. There should be books enough in Bensalem to help you
through the night.”

“Is your letter satisfactory?” he questioned, curiously, as she
slipped it back into the envelope.

“Mrs. Mackenzie is very feeble; she wishes to come to Bensalem for the
change, and asks me to go and bring her and Judith.”

“But you and Miss Rody will not want the trouble of sick folks.”

“We want _her_,” said Miss Affy, rising; “I will leave your book in
the post-office, Mr. Gunn, so you need not blow the horn when you hear
me open the door.”

“But it may not be _you_; how shall I know?”

“True enough. Blow your horn, then.”

“You can _look_ in if it’s you, and Sarah isn’t there.”

“Where is the book to take back?”

“‘Tempest and Sunshine.’ Oh, Sarah hasn’t finished it yet. I forgot
that,” he said disappointedly. “She read it yesterday and gave me
nothing but bread and milk for supper, and I wanted pork and eggs. She
was on it long enough to finish,” he grumbled.

“No matter, then. I’ll get one for myself. It will be the first book I
have taken from the library.”

“And you such a reader, too. How many magazines do you take? I’d like
some of your old magazines while I’m laid up.”

“Mr. Brush will bring you a big bundle. But I will go to the library
now, for he may not wish to bring them to-night.”

The school library was kept at the house of one of the school
trustees; the errand gave Miss Affy another quarter of a mile to walk,
and it also gave her the opportunity of a call upon Nettie Evans,
whose small home was next door to the school-library. Cephas Brush had
told her that she knew how to kill more birds with one stone than any
woman he knew.

She walked past the syringa bushes of the school trustee’s front yard,
and knocked on the front door with the big brass knocker; there was no
response excepting the sound of rubbing and splash of water that came
through the open kitchen window. Miss Affy knocked the second time
with more determined fingers. It was a pity to take Mrs. Finch from
her washing, but it would be more of a pity to let that old man toss
in pain and groan for a book to read. As she gave the second knock she
wondered if his lamp were safely arranged, and if the reading by
lamp-light did not injure his eyes; she would look for a book with
good type.

The kitchen door was quickly opened, a woman with rolled-up sleeves
and dripping, par-boiled fingers called out pleasantly: “Why don’t you
come to this door?”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Finch,” said Miss Affy, walking past another syringa
bush, “I came to the Circulating Library.”

“The Circulating Library is where I am. I keep it in the kitchen,
because I cannot circulate about my work to attend it,” replied Mrs.
Finch, extending a hospitable wet hand; “You see I’m late to-day;
usually my washing is all out at eleven o’clock. But his folks came to
dinner, three of them, unexpectedly—Monday, too, and I had to spring
around and cook a dinner; the Sunday left-overs wouldn’t do. They
didn’t leave the house until half-past two, so I had to leave the
dinner dishes, piled them up in the shed, under a pan, and put on my
boiler again. It don’t often happen, and I put a good face on it.”

“You turn a very cheery face toward life, Mrs. Finch.”

“Well, I try to. It’s all I’ve got to give anyway;” Mrs. Finch
replied, removing the cover from the boiler and poking at the clothes
with a long clothes-stick; the steam rolled out the door and windows;
as the room was cleared, Miss Affy discovered a high mahogany bureau
with brass rings, the top of which was covered with books in neat
piles.

“You are welcome to look at the books and take one. I wish you
_would_ sit down, Miss Affy, I can talk while I work. I wish I might
stay and wash the dishes for you.”

Miss Affy prayed every day, “Use me, Lord, any way, any where.”

“With that dress on?” said Mrs. Finch, regarding the new spring suit
with favor. “I couldn’t help looking at you in church, if it _was_
Sunday, and thinking that you looked sweet enough to be a bride.”

“Thank you. I am fond of this dress,” replied Miss Affy in her simple,
sweet way.

“When you are married, you must be married in gray. I was married in
white. Thirty years ago.”

“I remember it,” said Miss Affy, “Cephas and I were there.”

“Don’t think about the dishes. It’s just like you.”

“I would more than think about them, but I must call on Nettie, and
then I promised to read awhile to Mrs. Trembly; she is more blind than
she was, and Agnes breaks her heart because she cannot find more time
to read to her and amuse her.”

“They should come before dishes. People first, I say. That’s why I’m
behind with my washing. People first, I say to Jonas, and he looks
scornful. But it will pay some day.”

“You have not a catalogue?”

“A seed catalogue? We’ve never had a call for that. I thought
everybody had one.”

“So we have, dozens. I meant a catalogue of the books. I would like to
know what our boys and girls are reading.”

“Grown people, too. Everybody reads the books. Every time Mr. Gunn is
laid up he is crazy for books. Look them over; lots of them are out.
No matter how you put them back, if you only pile them up.”

“But you have a book in which to put down my name and the number of
the book I take.”

“Oh, no; take any you like. I couldn’t be bothered that way. We expect
new books. The last entertainment the school children had was to raise
money for books. We don’t get anything for keeping the books, but
Jonas is the greatest reader that ever was; he has read them all. But
I never have time. I don’t know what is in any of them.”

“Your husband knows. I am glad he reads them. Our young people must be
taken care of. Books have been everything to me. These books are an
influence in Bensalem.”

“I hope so,” replied the keeper of the books, not thinking for an
instant that they could be otherwise than a good influence.

“Excuse me if I go on with my work; that is the last boiler-full.”

“I would not stay if I interrupted you,” said Miss Affy. “I may take
considerable time, for I want to know what our boys and girls are
reading. I know every book in the Sunday-school library, but I had
forgotten that Bensalem boasted a public school library.”

After a half-hour’s search, Miss Affy’s choice was made; the type of
the book was not large enough for the old man’s reading at night, but
the story was excellent: “Samuel Budget, the Successful Merchant.”

“I’m sorry about the type,” she said, “but it is better than the
newspapers.”

“The type? Is that the name of the story?” questioned the woman at the
wash-tub.

“The print I should say. Thank you for letting me come. But I am sorry
to leave those dishes.”

“Don’t be sorry. My kitchen will be very sweet when the syringas are
out. And don’t think I’m always so late with my washing. It was all
his folks.”

“How is Nettie these days?”

“Miserable enough. She doesn’t know how to get outside of her poor
little self. But then, who of us does, until we are _pulled_ out?” she
asked, with cheerful philosophy, as Miss Affy went away past the
syringa bushes.

Miss Affy spent an hour in Nettie Evans’s chamber, telling the little
girl stories about her great-niece, Judith Mackenzie, who lived in the
city with her dear, sick mother, and they both were soon coming to
Bensalem, and Judith would love to visit her often, and Judith told
stories, that were worth telling; last summer in the evenings, in
Summer Avenue, she had a dozen boys and girls on the steps, listening
to her stories continued from one evening to another. Nettie’s white
face grew glad, and in the night she was comforted by the thought of
the coming of the story-teller. Then Miss Affy crossed the street to
the one-story yellow house and read from a Sunday-school library-book
to blind Mrs. Trembly, whose only daughter had little time to spare
her mother from her housekeeping and dressmaking, and on her way home,
stopped at the Post-office with “Samuel Budget.”

At the supper table, she remarked to Cephas and her sister Rody: “I do
hope our new minister will have a good wife. Bensalem needs the
ministry of a woman—a real deaconess.”

“As if you weren’t one,” said Cephas, with admiration in his eyes.

“But I’m not the minister’s wife.”

“Nor anybody else’s,” retorted Aunt Rody, sharply, with a look at the
bald-headed, white-whiskered man opposite her at the foot of the
table. The look passed over him instead of going through him, as he
gave a laugh, a contented laugh that hurt Aunt Rody, even more than
she had intended her look to hurt him.

Those two would circumvent her some day; the longer she lived the more
sure she was of it, and the more would it cut her to the quick. Every
year she fought against it (if one can fight with no antagonist), the
more rebelliously she was set against it. There was but one hope for
her: that she would outlive one of them; she hoped to outlive both of
them.




V. DAILY BREAD AND DAILY WILL.


    “We walk by faith and not by sight.”

    “Creatures of reason do not necessarily become
    unreasonable when they consent to walk by faith; nor
    do creatures of trust necessarily become faithless
    when they are gladdened in a walk by sight.”

Judith sat in the bay-window with a book in her lap; a box of books
had come by express to Miss Judith G. Mackenzie the very day her
Cousin Don sailed for Genoa; they were books written for children;
they were all Judith’s own.

With the light of the sunset in her face, Judith sat reading Jean
Ingelow’s “Stories Told to a Child.”

“O mother, it is too splendid for anything,” she exclaimed; “when you
are rested I will read it to you.”

“Is your ironing all done?”

“Yes, mother.”

“And Aunt Affy’s bed made?”

“All made. Mrs. Kindare put up the cot herself and lent me two
blankets. It is a cunning room; Aunt Affy will like it; Mrs. Kindare
said she could spare the room better than not, and Aunt Affy may stay
a month, waiting until we can go home with her.”

“Put away your book, dear; and come and sit on the rug close to me. I
want to be all alone with my little girl once more before Aunt Affy
comes.”

Reluctantly Judith closed the book; she remembered afterward that she
thought she would rather finish the story than go and sit on the rug
and talk to her mother.

“Mother,” she began, as brightly as though a minute ago she had not
wished to finish the story first, “Don might have stayed with us all
winter and had that room to sleep in.”

“Yes, I thought of that. It would have made a difference in somebody’s
life.”

“Whose life?” Judith questioned.

“In his own,” replied her mother, “and other people’s. I did not
intend to speak my thought aloud.”

The sunset was in the room: it was over Judith, and over her mother.

“Was he sorry he did not come here?” Judith persisted.

“I think he was. He said we would have made him so comfortable. He
would have taken his meals with Mrs. Kindare.”

“Are you sorry, too?”

“No—not exactly. If it were a mistake, it will be taken care of—it is
very queer to trust God with our sins and not with our mistakes.”

“I made a ‘mistake’ that night he was here, mother; I did not mean to
make a sin.”

“Tell me, dear.”

“I thought I would never tell. I was afraid it would worry you. But I
cried after I went to bed. You will think me naughty and silly.”

“Do I ever?”

“Yes, oh, yes,” smiled Judith, “you always do every time I am.”

“I could not lie down in peaceful sleep to-night if I believed that my
little daughter kept a thought in her heart she would rather not tell
her mother.”

“But I shouldn’t keep silly thoughts in my heart.”

“That is what mothers are for—to hear all the silly things.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” decided Judith, bringing herself from a lounging
posture, upright, and yet not touching her mother’s knees; “that night
Lottie said there was a good way to find out what would happen to you
next—to wish for a thing and shut your eyes and open the Bible and put
your hand on a verse, and if it said _And it came to pass_ you would
certainly have it. We both did it, and she got her wish and I didn’t
get mine. My heart was heavy, for I was afraid you wouldn’t like it as
soon as I did it.”

“I do not like it. But I am glad you did it.”

“Why, _mother_!”

“Because I can talk to you about something I might never have thought
about.”

“I like _that_,” said Judith, comforted; “I hope Cousin Don’s mistake
will be good for him.”

“It is already. What do you want to know about yourself?”

“Things that will happen, grown-up things. I make castles about
grown-up things. When I make an air-castle I am never a little girl,
but a big girl, fifteen or eighteen, and that kind of things happen;
the kind of things that happen to girls in books. Is that silly?”

“No; it is only not wise. It spoils to-day, and to-day is too good to
be spoiled. God has made to-day for us, and we slight his gift by
passing it by and trying to find out the things that will happen to us
to-morrow. Suppose you would not read the children’s books Cousin Don
sent you, but coax him to give you grown-up books.”

“I couldn’t be so mean,” said Judith warmly.

“But questions do come to us, wonders about our grown-up time. Is it
not trusting God more to wait for His answers?”

“Oh, yes, I _am_ waiting—unless I can find a way—like that way—to find
out.”

“That is not God’s way; he never told us to find out his will that
way. When he said, ‘And it came to pass,’ it was about something that
had happened, not about something that will happen; and about someone
else, and not about you. The Bible was not written to tell us such
things.”

“But I didn’t know that really,” said Judith, miserable, and ready to
cry.

“That was a mistake, not a sin. We all make mistakes before we know
better. If you should do so again, it would be a sin, because now you
know better.”

“But people did cast lots in Bible times. Don’t you know about finding
out about another disciple to make up the twelve after Judas killed
himself? I read that to you this morning.”

“Yes, I remember that. Casting lots was one of God’s ways in old times
to discover his will. The lot was cast into the lap, and the disposal
thereof was of the Lord. They knew God was willing for them to
cast lots.”

“Yes,” said Judith, in her intelligent voice.

“And this, I just thought of it. That time about choosing another
disciple was the last time. After the Holy Spirit was given there was
no need; the Holy Spirit always reveals the will of God.”

Judith’s eyes grew dull; she could not understand; she felt dimly that
she had done wrong in not trusting God to tell her about her “wish” in
his own way.

“Whenever, in all your life to come, a question about your future
comes to you, a longing to know about something that may happen to
you, or may not happen—but I should not say that; I should say about
something God may will to give you, or may will to keep from you, say
this to yourself: I need not think about it; God knows all about it,
for he _makes_ it; he will tell me as soon as he wants me to know.”

“Yes,” said Judith, with a child’s confidence.

“After that, it would be not only ‘silly,’ but faithless to think
about it. Every day brings its own answer; your daily bread and God’s
daily will come together; his bread gives us strength to do his will.
Will mother’s little girl remember?”

“Yes,” said Judith gravely; “and when you see me forgetting you must
remind me. Will it be wrong if I say ‘daily will’ when I say ‘daily
bread’?”

“Not wrong,” answered her mother, smiling, “only that it comes in the
prayer before daily bread.”

“Does it?”

“Repeat it and see.”

Judith repeated: “Our Father, who art in heaven; Hallowed be thy name;
Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven; give
us this day our daily bread—Why, so it does. But I didn’t put them
together before.”

“The _will_ comes first. If we do his will, he will not forget the
things we long for every day. Love his will better than your own will
and wishes.”

“That’s hard,” said Judith, “I don’t know how.”

“That is what you are in the world for, _to learn how_.”

Judith arose and stood before the grate with sweet, grave, troubled
eyes.

The yellow hair, the innocent face, the blue dress, the loving touch
of lips and fingers, the growing into girlhood; how could she give
them up and go?

“O, mother, mother!” cried Judith, turning at the sound of a stifled
cry, “Are you worse? What shall I do?” then in a tone of quick,
astonished joy, “Oh, here’s Aunt Affy at the door!”




VI. THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD.


    “What’s the best thing in the world?
    Something out of it, I think.”

            —Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

From Genoa there came a note to Marion:—

    “Dear friend Marion:

    To-day’s mail brings me saddest and most unexpected news. I
    believed my Aunt Hilda would live years; I would not have left
    her had I thought she would be taken so soon. She died in
    Summer Avenue before she could be taken to Bensalem. Judith
    has written herself, the bravest child’s letter. She is in
    Bensalem with two old aunts of her mother.

    Roger hopes to have you for his housekeeper; you will be near
    Judith; will you take her under your wing? Her mother
    especially wished her not to go to boarding-school. She has
    always been a child of promise; she may fizzle out as
    promising children do and become only an ordinary girl; but
    she will always be sweet and brave, which is better than being
    brilliant. One sweet woman is worth a thousand brilliant ones;
    that is the reason there are so many more sweet ones. I would
    change my plans and return for her sake, but what can a
    bachelor cousin do for her? She will be sheltered from harmful
    influences in Bensalem. She will write me regularly. I have
    written to Roger about her money affairs.

                                                Your friend,
                                                           Don.”

In reply Marion wrote the briefest note:—

    “Dear friend Don:

    I will do my best for Judith.

                                                Yours truly,
                                                        Marion.”

“It will be the best thing in the world for Marion,” replied the voice
of Marion’s mother.

“There is no best thing in the world for Marion,” Marion told herself
wearily, rising from the back parlor sofa, where she had thrown
herself to be alone, and stepping softly across the room to the door.

To be alone in the dark was the best thing in the world for her; to be
alone in the dark forever. For something had happened to her that had
never happened to any girl before. With a light tread she went up
stairs: she would not have her mother know that she had overheard the
remark made to her father—her mother could not know all, only herself
and Don Mackenzie knew her cruel secret; he would never tell, not even
Roger, and she could sooner die than let the words pass her lips to
any human creature. Girls had gone through terrible things before; but
no girl ever had gone through this; no girl could, unless she were
like herself, and no girl was like herself, so impetuous, so headlong,
so frank that frankness became a sin.

In her own chamber she found the darkness and solitude she craved; the
darkness and solitude she thought she would crave forever. The voices
in the front parlor went on low and steadily, planning a best thing
for Marion for whom no best was possible.

“Yes, it will certainly be a good thing,” her father answered in a
relieved tone; “she hasn’t been herself since Donald Mackenzie went
away.”

“I was afraid when he came,” was the low uttered response.

“Mothers are always afraid,” returned the father, who had urged his
coming.

“But I was specially afraid; Don is so attractive, so unconscious of
himself, and I know Marion well enough to know that she would make an
ideal of him—”

“Nonsense,” was the sharp interruption.

“It may be nonsense, but it is true; it has proved true. Marion is
imaginative, as I was at her age: I know how I idealized _you_—”

“And the reality of me broke your heart,” he said, with a light, fond
laugh.

“Yes. Sometimes it did. But I lived through it and learned that you
were human, and deliciously human, and, if you will allow me to say
so, a great improvement on my girlish ideal.”

“At any rate, I was not afraid to let you try,” he answered; “but Don
has gone without giving her the trial. I suspect he saw it and went.”

“I know he did,” said Marion’s mother.

“Does Roger know it?” asked Marion’s father.

“Roger always knows everything and looks as if he knew nothing,”
replied the motherly voice; “I think he was relieved when Don went
away.”

“You think she will soon get over it?” her father asked. It would have
broken Marion’s heart to hear the solicitude in her father’s voice.

“I’m afraid there’s no ‘over it’ for a girl like her; but she is
plucky enough to get through it; the worst of it is, Don is such a
fine fellow.”

“He had no right to care for her—” her father began angrily.

“He couldn’t help that,” argued her mother.

“Then he should care more, and be a man, and speak his mind—”

“I think he _must_ care for some one else; if he hadn’t he couldn’t
resist Marion.”

“Marion is like other girls,” said Marion’s father impatiently; “not a
whit prettier—”

“No, not prettier,” she assented, with protest in her tone.

“Or more accomplished,” he insisted.

“She hasn’t accomplishments, beside her fine education, and music—”

“All girls play, I suppose he sees other girls—”

“And she saw but one man. That was the trouble. I wonder how fathers
and mothers can help that. Roger wanted him to come to board through
the winter, said a boarding-house was dismal, and his mother had just
died—well, we can’t help it now. Don has cared for all the children—he
was great friends with Maurice and John. If she will go to Bensalem
and keep house for Roger, it will be just the thing.”

“I think so myself,” he answered, reasonably.

“Roger will be only too happy; his sister Marion has always been his
sweetheart.”

“Bensalem will do,” replied her father, hopefully, shifting all his
responsibility; “when we visit them next summer she will be as rosy as
ever and singing about the house like a bird.”

“Then Roger must accept that call,” decided Roger’s mother positively.
“A year in the country will brush off his student ways—it will be the
best thing in the world for both of them.”

“And poor Bensalem?”

“It isn’t poor Bensalem,” she retorted, indignantly. “They knew what
they wanted when they called Roger.”

“Roger is a good boy, but he isn’t the least bit brilliant,” said
Roger’s father, cheerfully.

“He is something better,” said Roger’s mother.

“But how can you get along without her?”

“Better than Roger can. Besides, Martha and Lou will soon be through
school; Roger and Marion are not our only children.”

“You talk as though they were, sometimes,” he retorted. “Anyhow, let
the sky fall, but do something for Marion.”




VII. A SMALL DISCIPLE.


    “Who comes to God an inch through doubtings dim,
    In blazing light God will advance a mile to him.”

                                  —From the Persian.

Aunt Rody gave Judith a nudge. The nudge startled the absorbed reader
into dropping, with a thud, the book she held in her hand upon the
carpeted floor of the pew; with a crimsoned face Judith stooped and
picked up the book; after a moment of deliberation and a defiant flash
toward Aunt Rody, stiff and straight in the end of the pew, she
re-opened her book and was again lost in the fascinating story. Aunt
Rody glared at her, but she turned a page, only half conscious of the
wrath that was being heaped up against her; this time it was not a
nudge, but a large hand that startled her; the large hand, brown,
strong, was laid across the page.

Judith gave a glance, not defiant, into the kindly, grave eyes, then
shut the book, straightened herself and tried hard to listen to the
minister.

The figure at the other end of the pew, the man’s figure, settled back
comfortably to listen, and listened without trying hard.

The kindly, grave eyes under the shaggy black brows never stirred from
the minister’s face; once in a while the brown, strong hand stroked
the long white beard; Judith watched him as he listened, and then she
watched Aunt Rody, unbending, alert, with her deep-set black eyes, her
hard-working hands very still in her new, black kid gloves.

When the sermon was ended Judith gave a sigh of relief; she could sit
still, she had sat still; but her mind had not followed the minister.

She wished she could like sermons. She liked the Bible. This sermon
was not like the Bible.

As she stood in the church doorway, waiting for Aunt Rody, who always
had something to tell, or something to ask in the crowd in the aisle,
she overheard a loud whisper behind her: “Oh, that’s Judith Mackenzie.
She has come to stay with the Sparrow girls. Her mother was their
niece. Father died long ago; mother last winter.” To escape further
details, the listener stepped forward and down one step; there was a
stir and some one stood beside her, a tall young man, not like any one
else in Bensalem: she knew without raising her eyes that he was the
new minister. She flushed, thinking that he had noticed that she was
reading her Sunday School book in church.

“Would you like to be a Christian?” he asked, with something in his
tone that made it hard for her to keep the tears back.

This was worse than a rebuke for reading; she might have excused
herself for that; for this she had no words. The voice was very low;
perhaps no one heard beside herself.

Too startled to speak at first, she kept silent; then, too truthful to
speak one word that she was not sure was true, and thinking that she
hardly knew what it was to _be_ a Christian, she could not say “Yes”;
not daring to say “No,” she stood silent.

“Pray for the Holy Spirit,” he said, moving away.

She knew how to pray; she had prayed all her life; but she had never
once prayed for the Holy Spirit. She was afraid to do that.

What would happen to her if she did, she wondered, as she walked down
the paved path to the gate; would a tongue of flame come down from
heaven and settle on her head? Would she speak with tongues, right
there, before them all, in the crowd? Would she heal the sick by
prayer and anointing with oil? Would she pray in prayer-meeting, and
go about from house to house talking about the Lord Jesus, whose dear,
sacred name she seldom took upon her lips?

What a strange thing to say to a girl of thirteen!

There were no young disciples in the Bible; they were all grown up and
old.

Just now all she wanted to do was to tell Jesus and his Father
everything that troubled her, and everything she was glad of, and read
the Bible, and,—“Come Judith,” interrupted Aunt Rody’s shrill voice.
She sat on the back seat of the carriage with Aunt Rody; Mr. Brush sat
alone on the front seat; Aunt Affy had not come to church to-day; it
was her turn to stay at home.

Aunt Rody insisted that some one should always stay at home; there was
the silver, and her will, and a great many other things to be guarded
from Sunday marauders.

“Judith Grey Mackenzie,” began Aunt Rody, in her most revengeful
voice, “you must behave in church or stay at home.”

“I was behaving—I read to help behave; when I cannot understand I
think everyday thoughts; isn’t that worse than reading?”

“Nothing is so bad behaved as reading. And all the folks seeing you.
What do you suppose the new minister thinks of you?”

“He thinks I am not—”

Her shy lips could not frame the words “a Christian.”

“Not very well brought up,” tartly finished Aunt Rody.

“I brought myself up, that’s the reason then,” replied Judith, her
eyes filling with resentful tears. “Mother was always too sick. Cousin
Don said my mother was the sweetest mother in the world.”

“You act like a sick mother; but you’ve got an aunt that isn’t sick;
and if I ever see you read again in church you shall not go to church
for six months. Tell your Cousin Don that.”

“I wouldn’t mind church,” replied Judith.

“To Sunday School then, if that hurts more.”

“Oh, tut, tut,” came good humoredly from the front seat. “Don’t forget
your own young days, Rody.”

“I never had any. Just as I shall never have any old age. I’ve never
had time to be young or old.”

Judith laughed. Aunt Rody was eighty-four years old.

“Don’t you deceive me about the book, Judith, for I don’t always go to
church.”

“Aunt Rody,” with girlish dignity, “I never deceived any one in my
life.”

“That’s a good deal to say.”

“I haven’t lived to be eighty-four, but I think I never _shall_
deceive. I would rather _die_ than not be true,” she burst out.

“H’m, you haven’t been tried.”

Judith thought she had; did not this grim, hard old woman try her
every day of her life?

The long village street was lined with maples and locusts; inside the
yards were horse-chestnut trees, lilacs, and syringas.

All over the beautiful country the fruit trees were in blossom; Judith
revelled in the fragrance and delicate tints of the apple-blossom; she
called it her apple-blossom spring.

The story and a half red farmhouse, with its slanting roof and long
piazza, marked the “Sparrow place”; it had been the Sparrow place one
hundred and fifty years. The red farmhouse was built one hundred years
ago; the Sparrow girls, the eight sisters, were all born there long
before many of the village people could remember.

As Judith stepped up on the piazza the bowed gray head at the window
was lifted; the girl went to the open window and stood; Aunt Affy took
off her spectacles and laid them in the book she was reading.

Judith thought Aunt Affy read but one book. How could anyone be wise
and read only one book?

“Well, dear,” said Aunt Affy in her welcoming tones. To Aunt Affy
Judith Grey Mackenzie was the sweetest picture of girlhood in all the
world; she was as fresh as the dew, tinted like an apple-blossom, as
natural as a wild rose. To everyone else she was a girl of thirteen,
with the faults, the forgetfulness, the impetuosity, the
thoughtlessness, and above all, the selfishness of girlhood. Her
yellow hair fell in long curls to her waist, because her mother had
loved it so; her eyes of deepest blue were frank and truth-telling; in
her lips, flexible, yet strong, was revealed a world of loving; a
world that she had not yet learned herself.

She was impatient, passionate, rebellious; but never was it in face,
voice, or attitude when under the witchery of Aunt Affy’s
appreciation.

“Aunt Affy, I’ve been wicked,” she confessed in a humiliated voice.

“So have I. I’ve been sitting here grumbling, when I should be the
happiest old sinner in the world.”

“I’ve been wickeder than that.”

“How much wickeder?”

“I borrowed a Sunday-school book to take to church because I do not
understand Mr. Kenney.”

“Did that help you understand him?”

“I did try at first,” Judith explained, laughing at Aunt Affy’s
serious question, “but it was about the things in Revelation, the hard
things—”

“Did he not say anything you _could_ understand?”

“No—” said Judith, thinking that his message to her, her own private
message, was the hardest of all to understand.

“You were very rude.”

“How was it rude?” Judith questioned, surprised.

“He was speaking to you, and you refused to listen.”

“I was listening to someone else,” said Judith, troubled.

“That was more rude still. That was premeditated rudeness.”

“I hope he did not notice it.”

“You may trust him for that.”

“But I cannot tell him I am sorry; it would choke me to death.”

“And another thing—if he is Christ’s ambassador, and you refused to
listen—”

The girl’s eyes filled, and her lips trembled; was it _that_ she had
done?

“It’s time to set the table,” were Aunt Affy’s next words, in an
unconcerned tone, polishing her glasses with a corner of her white
apron. That small, clean old kitchen; how Judith loved it. She loved
every kind of work that was done in it, even the wash-tubs, the smell
of the suds was exhilarating, and baking and ironing days were her
delight. Every nerve and muscle responded to the call to labor.

The south door opened on a flagged walk that led to Aunt Affy’s flower
garden, the north door led you out into a deep, square, grassy yard,
where the clothes were hung and bleached; a tall, shaggy pine stood
sentinel at one side of the door, on the other side ran the bench upon
which the milk-pans shone in a row; beyond the grass rose a stone
wall, and then there were fields and woods; woods in which the thrush
hid, and the whip-poor-will; a brook started from a spring in the
woods and tumbled over the pebbles down into the meadows, then out,
below the flower garden and across the road, where it was bridged with
a stone arch.

In the kitchen was a brick oven, its iron door stood out black among
the white-washed bricks; the uneven boards of the kitchen were always
scrubbed clean, the stove was brushed into a shining blackness every
day, the two tables were as spotless as sand, the scrubbing-brush and
Aunt Affy’s strong hands could make them.

Out of the three windows were pictures of which the city-bred girl
never wearied. Her apple-blossom spring was the spring of her new
birth.

“Aunt Rody, please excuse me,” Judith said, rising from the dinner
table.

“You haven’t eaten your custard, and you like it with crab-apple
jelly.”

The yellow custard in the big coffee-cup with a broken handle, and the
generous spoonful of jelly quivering on top was a temptation; she
looked at it, then pushed it away. Nobody would ever know that she was
punishing herself for being “rude” in church; it was easier to punish
herself than to apologize to Mr. Kenney; and something had to be done.

“I want to study my Sunday-school lesson,” she evaded, and then her
heart sank at her deception; she had not told Aunt Rody all the truth.

She fled into the parlor with a question from Aunt Rody pursuing her;
her cheeks were burning, and she was trembling with shame and anger.

Why couldn’t Aunt Rody leave her alone? Sometimes she almost hated
Aunt Rody. A corner of the stiff, long, horse-hair sofa was her
retreat; it was often her retreat; she called it her valley of
humiliation.

In her lesson to-day she found the loveliest thing. Aunt Affy was
teaching her that the Bible was a treasure-house.

“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love
one to another.”

All men know—just by loving—not by doing any great hard thing—by
loving—but that was hard, if it meant bearing with Aunt Rody’s
misunderstanding and sharpness and fault-finding, and being always on
the watch to find evil in you.

But “all men know” was the comfort of it; she need not pray in prayer
meeting as Miss Kenney did, nor do the wonderful things the disciples
did; all men would know that she wanted to be a Christian, if she
tried to be loving.

She repeated the words of Christ in a soft monotone, her small Bible
in her hand, and her head pillowed on her hair on the hard sofa-arm.

Aunt Affy pushed the door wider and entered, bringing a glass half
filled with crab-apple jelly.

“I saved your custard—it’s on the hanging shelf in the cellar,” she
said, opening the door of the chimney cupboard to set the glass in its
own space in the row of jelly glasses.

“Aunt Affy,” lifting her tumbled head, and with grave eyes asking her
question: “what is—who is a disciple?”

“A disciple is one who learns. You are my disciple when you learn of
me. The disciple of Christ is the man, or woman, or child who learns
of him. When you are about the farm with Cephas, you are his disciple,
in sewing and mending you are Aunt Rody’s, in housekeeping generally
you are my disciple.”

Aunt Affy went out, and the tumbled head dropped back to the hard
sofa-arm again. Would Christ let her be a “disciple” a little while,
and then be a Christian when she grew up, she pondered.

She wanted to learn of him; she would read the Gospels through and
through and through. She would learn them by heart. For her lesson
to-day she would learn these seven verses he had spoken to his own,
real, grown-up disciples.

That afternoon in Sunday-school, after the lesson was ended, the new
minister left his class of boys and came to the pulpit stairs and
stood and talked to the children; his opening sentence thrilled one
small listener:—

“_The disciples were called Christians_ first at Antioch.”

If you were a disciple, only a disciple, learning and loving, you were
called a Christian. Then he spoke of the Holy Spirit; he was the very
heart and will of Christ; he spoke in a low, sweet voice to children,
a constraining voice, making known the things Christ the Lord would
have them do; he showed them the things of Christ.

Had she dared she would have stepped out of her pew and gone up the
aisle to the new minister and told him that she _did_ want to be a
Christian, and she would not be afraid to ask the Holy Spirit to tell
her all the things Christ wanted her to do. Miss Kenney, her teacher
and the minister’s sister, noticed the start and flush, the hesitancy,
the eager look, as the minister came down the aisle and paused to
speak to her girls; she saw Judith’s eyes drop as he took her hand,
and then her shy withdrawal of herself.

Suddenly the girl turned, and with the flash of decision in her voice,
said bravely, detaining the minister with her trembling little hand:—

“I am sorry I read in church this morning; I will never do it again,
even if I don’t understand. Please excuse me.”

“I saw you,” he said, smiling, and taking the brave little hand into
both his own; “I will try to talk to _you_ next Sunday. Thank you for
the lesson.”

Then shy Judith slipped away, and never told even Aunt Affy that she
had apologized to the new minister.

That evening in the twilight, sitting on the piazza alone, she wrote
on the fly-leaf of her small Bible, in pencil:—

                Judith Grey Mackenzie; A Disciple.

And the date, May 15, 18—.

She thought she would like to tell somebody that she was a disciple.
But if they should ask how it happened, she could not tell. It had
happened as still as a leaf fluttering in the wind, as softly as the
apple-blossoms came; nobody could tell about that. She thought the
Holy Spirit must know how it happened.




VIII. THIS WAY, OR THAT WAY?


    “My times are in Thy hand, and Thou
    Wilt guide my footsteps at Thy will.”

It was six o’clock that May evening, and Joe was running away. He did
not know he was running away. He had never been taught to read, and no
one had ever told him a story, and his own experience of life was so
limited, that he did not know that he was starting out in the world to
find adventures, to find good or evil, to find a new life, and that
new life, shaped more by what was inside of himself, than what was
outside of himself. If the man who just passed him had asked him what
he was doing, he would have said, had he not been overcome by one of
his fits of shyness, that he was “gittin’ out.”

The air was damp, and sweet with the scent of blossoms. At his right
ran a range of low hills, abrupt and green; at his left, as far as he
could see, stretched the swamp, miles of meadow, over-flooded in the
spring, waving with grass in the summer, and homely with unpainted
one-story houses, and out-buildings in various stages of decay; it was
a pasture land for the cattle of the farmers in the upland district,
and Joe’s bare feet had trodden its miles morning and night ever since
he had been old enough to drive the cows.

He went on slowly, with his hands in his pockets, too heavy-hearted to
whistle, not thinking about anything, only feeling, with something in
his throat that would not be swallowed down, miserable and defiant;
remembering nothing in his past to regret not having learned that
there was anything in his future to hope for, he was conscious only of
something stirring within, stirring to action, to wideness, to
freedom, and therefore he must “git out” to find it; therefore he was
getting out.

His plan, if he had a plan, was to find a woman in the village who had
once spoken kindly to him, and given him a huge slice of warm bread
and butter; in the swamp he knew he might find work among the Germans,
but the swamp was so lonely at night, and he did not like the ways of
the Germans; in all the world he had but one friend, this woman who
had spoken kindly to him.

She might not give him work, or a bed, but she would _look_ at him, as
no one else ever looked, and she would speak kindly. The road over the
hill drew his lagging feet, then he stood, hesitating, at the turn of
the hill road and swamp road; the hill road led to people, and a
church, a store, where boys and men gathered at night to read the
newspaper, and smoke, and have fun; to the blacksmith’s shop, and,
most of all, to the little house next door, where the woman lived who
had cut that large slice across her big, hot loaf.

A German, in the swamp, had told him to come to him for a home and
work, if he ever wanted to leave his place; work he must, and a
home—the woman’s face came between him and the German, his heart began
to beat very fast, he wondered why his heart beat so fast sometimes,
and he took his life in his hands, and started on a run for the road
over the hill, where was the only thing in the world that seemed like
love, although of love he had never had one thought. Then he began to
walk slowly again; he had decided there was no need of hurrying, there
was no need of doing anything—he had never been given a reason for
doing anything excepting that one or the other of the old men with
whom he had lived all his remembered life bade him do it. He had done
things because he was told; he did not know why, excepting that
because he was told.

If he were being told now to run away, he did not know; he had never
thought that he might tell himself to do things. Not for a moment did
he believe that the two old men would take the trouble to look for
him, or to wish him back; every day, one, or both, said to each other
or to him that he was not worth his salt, and would never amount to
anything; they must be glad he was gone. But the cows. They would be
sorry, especially Beauty; one of the old men would milk her to-night,
but they would not pat her and talk to her, and ask her if she were
glad she was a cow and not a boy, and was worth her salt, and all her
feed beside; she had no friend but him, and she would look around for
him with her big eyes; again he stood hesitating—Beauty wanted him—his
tears fell fast; but he must go on, he wanted something better than
Beauty.

So he went on down the hill, past the pretty parsonage and the
church—wondering, if he had no place to sleep, if he might sleep in
the church; then past the school-house, with its large play-ground,
and turned by the liberty-pole, and walked very slowly along the
street until he reached the blacksmith’s shop, and there, in the
doorway of the small house, stood the woman looking for him.

“Why, Joe, what are you doing here at milking time?” she asked in a
brisk tone, as the boy stopped before the gate.

“I’m done milking for them two old men,” he said, in a voice he tried
hard to make brave. “Chris and Sam don’t want me any longer; I’m
gittin’ out.” And then, big boy as he was, feeling lost in a strange
world, he began to cry.

“There! there! Sonny,” soothed the voice, changing from its briskness
into sympathy, as the woman stepped down the three steps; “Come and
eat supper with me; I know what I’ll do with you. I’m glad you
happened to come along this way.”

Pushing open the gate, she laid her hand on his arm and drew him into
the house by his soiled and ragged sleeve.

“We don’t want a boy, haven’t work enough; but I know somebody who
does, late in the season as it is. Mr. Brush, Mr. Cephas Brush, he
farms the Sparrow place, you know; while he was waiting at the shop
this very morning, he came to the well for a drink, and I went out to
give him a glass so he needn’t drink out of that rusty tin cup, and he
asked me if I knew where he could find a boy. His boy went off in
March. _He’s_ a good master, and that’s a good home; Miss Affy is like
a mother to every stray thing and you won’t mind if Miss Rody does
scold, she never means any harm. I’ll take you down there right after
supper. Mr. Evans had his early because he wanted to go to town, and I
was feeding my chickens, two hundred and five now,—Nettie puts down
every new brood in a book—and couldn’t stop to eat. I didn’t think I
was going to have company for supper. Nettie had hers earlier than
usual because she was tired, and wanted to go to bed.” She pulled him
through the narrow hall as she talked, Joe, once in a while, giving a
quick, hard sob, and opened the door into the tiny kitchen.

The tea-kettle on the stove was singing a cheery welcome, the white
cloth and pink dishes on the round table in the centre of the room
gave him another welcome, and the touch and tone of the woman who had
been kind to him brought him the cheeriest welcome of all, as she
pushed him down into the chair opposite her own at the table, saying:
“I know what men’s cooking _is_, and I know you are half-starved. Who
made the bread?”

“I got that at the store.”

“You had potatoes, of course.”

“Oh, yes, and fried pork, lots of it, and pan-cakes. My! can’t Chris
make good pan-cakes!”

“Can he?” inquired Mrs. Evans, doubtfully, taking the tea-pot off the
stove and setting it on the table.

“Now, here’s hot fried potatoes for you, and good bread and butter,
and a big saucer of rice pudding—Mr. Evans is _never_ tired of rice
pudding,—and sponge cake that little Judith brought to Nettie to-day
because it is her own baking. Nettie took a bite and said I must put
the rest on the supper-table. And you can have tea or milk, or both.”

After bustling about in the shed, Mrs. Evans seated herself at the
table opposite her guest.

“Who would have thought I was going to eat supper with you, Joe? The
world does turn on its axis once every twenty-four hours, and
unexpected things do happen. I’ll tell Nettie all about it tomorrow;
it will make a happening in her poor little life.”

Joe gave her a shy, quick glance, then bowed his head; some time,
somewhere, not with the old men, certainly, he had bowed his head and
said something at the table; he did not remember where it was, or what
words he said, or why he said anything at all, but the pretty
tea-table, or the savory food reminded him of a life he had once
lived; he listened for a chorus of voices:—

“For what we are about to receive—receive—truly thankful.”

It was like music in the boy’s heart; he lifted his head with a light
shining in his tear-blurred eyes.

“Well, I never,” ejaculated Mrs. Evans.

The boy held his knife and fork with a grace her husband had not
acquired, taking his food as slowly and daintily as a girl.

“Those Tucker men, that old Chris and Sam have no claim on you, and
they haven’t done as well by you as they promised they would when they
took you, a little fellow, out of the Christie Home. I’ve often spoken
to Mr. Evans about it, but he’s so easy going I might as well have
talked to the wind. I told our new minister that he must ‘high-way and
hedge’ you; he has noticed you; but he is feeling his way among the
people, and couldn’t make a stir as soon as he came.”

“Is _that_ where I was?” asked astonished Joe. “I thought I used to be
somewhere. _They_ never told me. I seem to remember things that
happened before I can remember. They told me that I hadn’t any father
or mother, and wouldn’t have any home if they had not taken me in.”

“People thought you ought to be sent to school and Sunday-school, but
what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. I’m glad enough you
have left them, but you should have told them you wanted to leave.”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” he muttered “they wouldn’t have said
anything.”

“Now, I’ll put out the cat, and leave the table standing, and bolt the
shed door, and lock the front door, and put on my things, and we’ll be
off. Nettie is fast asleep and will never miss me.”

“I will wash the dishes for you; we put them under the pump, then wipe
them on anything.”

“That wouldn’t suit me, thank you,” laughed Mrs. Evans; “you can hoe
corn better than wipe dishes, and Mr. Brush has acres and acres of
corn to hoe, and potatoes too: he’s making that old Sparrow farm pay.”

Joe did not know that he had been lost, but he began to feel very much
found.

“I’m glad you went out to the well with that glass,” he said, as his
hostess wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and tied the blue ribbons
of a blue wool hood under her chin.

“I’m usually glad of kind things I do; I suppose that’s one reason I
do them.”

Joe unlatched the gate, holding it open for her to pass through, then
pushed it shut; Beauty and this woman seemed to belong to the same
order of creaturehood; the woman’s eyes were like Beauty’s, soft, and
big and brown, and _they answered you_. She took his hand and drew it
under her arm in a sort of comradeship, and then they went on, the
woman and the boy, to find the gate that would swing open into a world
of which it had never entered the boy’s heart to dream.

The gate was shut and a man in shirt-sleeves with a pipe in his mouth
was standing on the mysterious and happy side of it resting his elbows
on the pickets, and, attracted by voices, looking up the road in the
starlight towards the two figures.

“You stay here, Joe—that’s Mr. Brush. I’ll tell him all your story.”

“My story?” repeated Joe, in amazement.

“You didn’t know you had any,” she laughed. “Well, folks don’t usually
until it is all lived through. I didn’t know I had any girlhood until
I married and lost it.”

“I haven’t lost anything,” said Joe, bewildered.

“No; and I think you have got something—stand back, till I call you.”

She went on, and Joe heard the two voices exchange a friendly “Good
evening,” and then to escape his “story” climbed up the steep, green
bank, and waited under a cherry tree. Cherry blossoms were not as
pretty as apple blossoms, he meditated; it was queer how the blossoms
would fall off, and the hard, green fruit come—but it always did,
somehow.

He wished Mrs. Evans would come back and take his hand again, making
him feel ashamed and glad, and say, “Joe, you are going home with me.
That man doesn’t want you, and I do.”

And there he stood, not still, but first on one bare foot, and then on
the other, and then he whistled; the stars shining down through the
cherry blossoms were almost as kind as Beauty’s eyes, but they were so
far off.

The low voices talked on and on; at last, to the great relief of the
boy who was waiting to know if anybody in the world wanted to own him,
the man’s voice was raised in a cheerful: “Well, I’ll see Mr. Chris
Tucker to-morrow, and make it right.”

And, then, in her brisk way, Mrs. Evans called, “Come, Joe; it is all
right.”

The barefoot, ragged boy emerged out of the shade of the cherry limbs
and went, faint-heartedly to answer the call.

“Well, Joe,” welcomed the old man, unlatching the gate and throwing it
wide open, “come in and stay with me awhile. I guess I want you and
you want me.”

But Joe begun to cry, and rub his eyes with the back of his dirty
brown hand: “I am sixteen years old, and I am a stump of a thing, and
will eat you out of house and home, and shan’t never amount to much.”

“Tut, nonsense!” exclaimed the old man; “don’t you like to work?”

“I never did nothing else; I don’t like nothing else,” replied Joe,
dropping his hand, somewhat reassured.

“Who said you are sixteen? Come in and let me have a look at you.”

Joe stepped inside the gate; kind, strong hands drew him within the
light that streamed from the kitchen windows and open door.

“Good night, Joe,” said Mrs. Evans.

“Good night,” said Joe.

He had not learned how to say “thank you.”

“They said so,” he replied to the latest question.

“Those men. The Tucker twins. They are seventy, and hale old fellows.
I’ll warrant you know how to work. You are not fourteen. You shall do
a boy’s work and _be_ a boy. You _may_ grow to be as tall as old
Christopher himself. There’s plenty of man-timber in you. Now come and
see what the women-folks will say to you.”

Joe shrank back.

“I thought I was going to live with you.”

“And you thought I lived alone like the other old men? I’m a miserable
old bachelor, but I’ve got plenty of women-folks, thank the Lord.”

A little girl rushed to the door, and a barking Scotch terrier made a
spring at the new-comer.

“Oh, what a dog,” Joe exclaimed, stooping to catch frisking, curly
Doodles into his arms. Homesick for Mrs. Evans, frightened and glad,
he followed the old man into the kitchen with the curly dog in his
arms.

“Affy, here’s the boy I’ve been looking for, and you’ve been praying
for, I’ve no doubt.”

Aunt Affy turned and looked at the boy: short, stout, dirty, ragged,
with a shock of uncombed black hair, a lock falling over his forehead,
long black eyelashes concealed the eyes he kept shyly fixed upon the
curly bundle in his arms.

“What is your name, dear?” she inquired.

Joe had never heard “dear” before, but supposed she must be speaking
to him; he raised his eyes and smiled; they were shy, honest eyes;
Aunt Affy smiled too.

“I am Joe,” he said, pulling Doodles’ ears.

“Do you remember your father and mother?”

“No; I don’t remember nobody but Chris and Sam.”

“Is your name Joseph?”

“I don’t know; I never thought. I guess it’s Joseph—or Jo—no, now I
remember another name: _Josiah_. Is that a boy’s name?”

“A boy’s name, and a king’s name. I am glad your name is Josiah. I
will tell you about him some time.”

The little girl stood near the lady, but she did not stare at him, and
Joe gave her glances now and then from under his long lashes; he would
like to know her name, and what she was here for. A man’s fur cap
covered the black head; when he left the house, angry and discouraged,
he had put upon his head the first thing he seized.

“Doodles hasn’t given you time to take your hat off, Joe, or did you
forget?” suggested Aunt Affy’s unreproachful voice.

“Didn’t forget it,” said Joe, pulling it off and dropping it on the
floor. “They used to eat with their hats on, but I always took mine
off.”

“I should think you would,” exclaimed indignant Judith.

Joe put his cheek down upon Doodles’ head, smoothing the sleeping head
with his brown cheek.

“What is the dog’s name?” he inquired.

“Doodles,” answered Judith, hastening to speak to the rude, strange
boy who had traveled from an unknown country.

“O, Doodles, Doodles, Doodles,” whispered Joe, in a fond voice,
rubbing his cheek on the soft head.

“Well, Joe, do you love cows as well as dogs?” inquired Mr. Brush.

“Yes,” said Joe, thinking of the cow that was missing him to-night. He
hoped she was asleep now. “But I’m glad I found Doodles.”

“Now, Joe, drop Doodles,” said Aunt Affy, “and follow me up these
kitchen stairs. I have a room ready for an obedient, truthful,
industrious boy.”

[Illustration: “Now, Joe, drop Doodles,” said Aunt Affy, “and follow
me up these kitchen stairs.”]

“Where is _he_?” asked Joe, lifting his shaggy head.

They all laughed, and laughing, also, Joe followed the plump,
sweet-faced lady up the kitchen stairs.




IX. THE FLOWERS THAT CAME TO THE WELL.


    “He might have made the earth bring forth
    Enough for great and small,
    The oak tree and the cedar tree,
    And not a flower at all.”

                                —Mary Howitt.

Nettie Evans sat in her invalid chair leaning forward with her chin
on the window-sill looking down into her father’s untidy back yard.

The only pleasant thing in it was a lilac bush that was a marvel of
beauty when it was in bloom, but that had faded many weary days ago,
leaving ugly brown bunches where the lilacs had been; there were two
well-worn paths, one leading to the kitchen door, and the other to
the well, and nothing besides, excepting weeds with a background of
apple orchard. If Nettie had raised her eyes she would have seen
woods, and hills and fields of grain, a bit of road, a wooden bridge,
and a deep blue sky full of puffy, white clouds, but she would not
raise her eyes; when her back ached as it did to-day she never saw
anything but the weeds in the yard, especially those tall rag-weeds
growing close around the well. Her father had promised to “clear up”
the yard after planting, but planting had come and gone, and he was
still too busy.

“Oh, if I were only able to pull weeds,” she sighed.

It was a very gentle sigh, she was not strong enough to sigh heavily.
Three years ago she could shout and run, to-day she could not move
her feet, and there were many days during the year when she must lie
still in bed.

In winter, she had a south room, at the front of house, where she saw
the rising and the setting sun, and had a good view of all the people
who passed back and forth from the village; in summer, she had this
cool north room that looked out on the back yard.

The back yard was full of interest to her—when she could forget the
weeds. Twenty times a day her mother came to the kitchen door to look
up at her, and tell her how the work was going on; she knew what was
cooking by the odors that came up to her and what all the noises
meant, from the click of the egg-beater to the thud of the
churn-dasher, and she saw old Mrs. Finch when she came to borrow
baking powder, and the pedlars, and book-agents, and apple-tree men;
but best of all she liked to watch for her father to come in to
dinner and supper.

In blue flannel shirt and big straw hat, tired and dusty and warm, he
never failed to look up and call: “Why, hello, you there, daughter?”
just as if she were well, and had only run up stairs for a moment.
And her weak, “I’m here, father,” made the sadness and the happiness
of his life.

Nettie moved her head slightly, and gained a view of the pasture
where three cows were feeding; she could not see the brook, but she
knew that it ran through the pasture, and she knew there were blue
lilies all along the brook, some of them growing in the water.

How she longed to see those lilies growing in the water!

She was only ten years old the last time she saw those lilies: she
was driving home the cows at night, in her pink calico dress and
stout leather shoes, with her father’s old straw hat on the back of
her head, “a picture of a happy, healthy, country lassie,” her father
thought as he watched her standing by the clump of lilies while she
waited for the cows to drink. She was thinking she would gather a big
bunch of the lilies as soon as they were opened the next morning—but
the pet calf came behind her and butted her down, and her father
carried home in his arms a helpless little daughter. And there were
tiger lilies in bloom; she could not see the place where they were
growing, but it was only a quarter of a mile away in a fence corner,
such a patch of them! Oh, how she longed to see those tiger lilies
growing! The last time she saw the tiger lilies was the Sunday before
she said good-bye to the blue lilies—she was walking home alone from
Sunday-school in white dress and blue ribbons, and brown kid shoes,
and when she came to the fence corner with the great clump of tiger
lilies, she thought of picking a large bunch of them, but just then
she heard a noise behind her, and turning, saw a neighbor’s three
little black and white pigs; they had followed her all the way from
the corner, and it was so funny to think how she had walked along
unconsciously, with those pigs in single file behind her, that she
just stood and laughed, and then she clapped her hands at them and
chased them back, and forgot all about the tiger lilies.

“Oh, blue lilies, oh, tiger lilies, I’ll _never_ see you growing any
more,” she sighed.

“Why, hello, daughter, you up there?” called the voice below her.

Nettie did not answer; she felt too discouraged to speak, but she
looked down and tried to smile at her father.

Her father looked just as usual, only he had a scythe over his
shoulder.

“I came in a little earlier to cut down your weeds,” he called
cheerily.

Nettie watched him as he swung the scythe, and listened to the swish,
swish, as the tall weeds fell; when the weeds around the well grew
less she caught a glimpse of something blue, and then of something
red; she pulled herself up to the window, and leaned out, and then
she shrieked:—

“Father, don’t cut down the _lilies_!”

There they were, blue lilies and tiger lilies, growing together,
close by the well!

“How did they _get_ there, father?” she called.

“They must have been in the sod that I put around the well last
fall,” he replied; “I remember now that I got it from two different
places. If I had cut down the weeds before the lilies bloomed, I
shouldn’t have known they were there, and should have cut them all
down together.”

Nettie fell back in her chair with a sigh of delight, watching her
father while with his hands he pulled all the weeds away from the
lilies.

“Mother,” she called, lifting herself forward, and resting her chin
again on the window-sill.

“Well, Deary,” came in a quick voice from the shed, and her mother
appeared in the shed doorway with the dish of boiled potatoes she
held in her hand when Nettie’s voice reached her.

“Mother, will you ask Judith to stop and see my lilies the next time
she goes past?”

“Your lilies, child?”

“Yes, my own lilies, there by the well. They came and grew just for
me.”

Mrs. Evans gave a glance toward the well, then hastened to set the
potato dish on the dinner table.

“Of all things! And how she has wanted to see lilies grow! The
blessed child is watched over and done for as her father and I can’t
do. I declare,” in a shame-faced way, all to herself, “when such
things happen I wish I was a Christian.”

“Mother, mother,” called the happy voice again; “I want Joe to see my
lilies too.”

“Yes, Deary,” promised her mother from within the shed.




X. THE LAST APPLE.


    “God loves not only a cheerful giver, but a cheerful
    worker as well.”

                                       —Fletcher Reade.

That afternoon as Nettie was slowly rousing herself from her
afternoon nap in her chair, she heard a low, joyful exclamation under
her windows.

“Oh, lovely. Mrs. Evans, it’s like—a poem.”

Then a light flashed over the pale face, and Nettie lifted herself
forward to look, and to speak.

“O, Judith, I wanted you to see them. You do love pretty things so.”

Judith came through the shed, and up the narrow rag-carpeted stairs
to the open door of Nettie’s chamber.

“I wish you would write a poem for me.”

Nettie Evans was Judith’s “public,” and a most enthusiastic one; the
young author looked very grave one day when Nettie told her that she
liked her poems better than the ones she read to her from the
Longfellow book.

“I have brought a poem for you; no one has seen it yet; I’ve copied
it to send to my Cousin Don; you know he’s in Switzerland, climbing
mountains, and having splendid times. It happened one Thanksgiving—I
was here in the country, you remember, with my mother. I saw one rosy
apple left on the top of a tree, and I felt so sorry for it. One day
I thought of it again, and I wrote this.”

Judith drew her chair close to Nettie’s and took the folded sheet of
note paper from her pocket.

“Oh, I wish I could make poems and sew carpet rags,” moaned Nettie.

Judith dared not say she wished she might, she dared not pity her, or
look at her; she unfolded her poem and began to read:—

                   THE LAST APPLE.

    I am a rosy-cheeked apple,
        Left all alone on the tree,
    And in the cold wind I am sighing,
        ‘Oh, what will become of me.’

Nettie nodded approval, and the poet read modestly on:—

    They’ve picked my sisters and cousins,
        But I was too little to see;
    Now, they will be eaten at Christmas,
        But nothing will happen to me.

    The beets are pulled, and the parsnips
        Are cosily left in the ground—
    When the farmer counts up his produce,
        No record of me will be found.

    I was as pretty a blossom
        As ever gave sweets to a bee;
    But ’mong the good things for winter,
        No one will be thankful for me.

    There’s place for radish and carrot,
        Though common as common can be,
    And I wonder, wonder, wonder,
        Why _I_ was left on the tree.

    Oh, here comes poor little Sadie,
        With her face all wet with tears;
    A face so pale and hardened,
        But not with the lapse of years.

    Now, fly to my aid, dear cold wind,
        And receive my last command,—
    With a twist, and turn and flutter,
        _Just drop me into her hand_.

In Nettie’s radiant face and tear-filled eyes Judith found the
appreciation for which her soul thirsted.

“That’s _lovely_,” exclaimed Nettie, “may I keep it and learn it?”

“Of course you may. I’ll copy it for you.”

“And I’ll say it in the night if I cannot go to sleep. How much I’ve
had in one day. The lilies and the red apple. Don’t you believe that
if you can’t go out and get things _they always come_?”

“But part of the fun is going out to get them,” said Judith, and
then, in quick penitence, “but it must be so lovely to have them come
to you.”

“Agnes Trembly came yesterday to make me a new blue wrapper; I like
to have her sew here with me. Her mother is blind and that is harder
than my lot. Agnes said she wished she was a queen. But I never
thought of that.”

“Now I’ll tell you a story. There is a little girl somewhere who _is_
a queen, and sometimes she has to sit in state and receive people,
and do other queenly things. One day when she was playing with her
dolls, what do you think she said?”

“What?” asked Nettie, her face beaming.

“_If you are naughty again, I will make you a queen._”

Nettie laughed to the story-teller’s content.

“Now, I’ll tell you a chicken story. This happened to me. Aunt Rody
often lets me help her feed the chickens. We had a brood of little
chickens, and all died but two of them; I don’t know why, I took good
care of them. One morning I found the mother dead. And what do you
think?—those two poor motherless little sisters cuddled under their
dead mother’s wing. I would like to write a poem about that, only it
breaks my heart, and I like to write about happy things. The next day
one of them died, and the left one hadn’t any chicken companion. And
then, what do you think? A hen mother who had only one chicken,
deserted that and went to roost; and this one little black chicken
tried to make friends with the sisterless little white chicken. It
was too pretty to watch them. The one whose mother deserted went into
her little coop and called and called to the other one; but the white
chicken didn’t understand at first; when she _did_ understand, the
black chicken made it so plain, and she ran to the coop, and the
little black chicken and the little white chicken cuddled together as
loving and happy as could be.”

“You can put that into a poem,” suggested Nettie, her eyes alight
with Judith’s presence and stories.

“Nettie,” said Judith, impulsively, “I love to have you to tell
things to.”




XI. HOW JEAN HAD AN OUTING.


    “Is it warm in that green valley,
    Vale of Childhood, where you dwell?
    Is it calm in that green valley,
    Round whose bourns such great hills swell?
    Are there giants in the valley,
    Giants leaving foot-prints yet?
    Are there angels in the valley?
    Tell me—I forget.”

                                —Jean Ingelow.

Jean had been crying; in fact, she was crying now, but the tears were
stopped on their way down her cheeks by the rush of her new thought.
She was always having new thoughts; but this was the most splendid
new thought she had ever had in her fourteen years of life.

“I’ll do it!” she exclaimed aloud, springing to her feet. “I’ll just
do it, and nobody will know but myself. I’ll go away to a new place
and stay two weeks.”

In her delight she clapped her hands and whirled about the room. It
was such a small room to clap your hands and whirl about in. That was
the cause of her tears—that small room; that and the house, the farm,
and everything she had to do—and doing the same disagreeable things
every day, and never going anywhere.

School closed yesterday; and this morning Sophie Elting, her best
friend, had gone away, for an _outing_ she called it, with a little
city air she had caught from her cousins. She was going to the
sea-shore to be gone two weeks.

“I’ll play go,” cried Jean, “and I’ll stay at home and do all the
things here that people do when they go on an outing.”

The first thing was to pack up. Sophie had a new trunk, and had shown
her all her pretty things packed snugly in it: cologne, a box of
paper, new handkerchiefs, and ever so many things to go on an outing
with. How could Jean play she had things which she hadn’t? And she
had no trunk. She would “pack” in a shawl-strap.

She put in her Sunday dress, her morning gingham, two white aprons,
her Bible and tooth-brush. She had ever so many things to take on an
outing. In half an hour her shawl-strap was packed. She looked down
at it with a sigh of relief and pleasure. Now she had started.

“Jean,” came up the stairway, “do you want to go to town?”

Of course she did! The coming back would be “getting there.” She was
going into the country for two weeks to board. The boarding was a
part of it. She had never boarded in her life; she would be a summer
boarder at Daisy Farm.

“There’s the butter to take,” the voice at the foot of the stairs
went on, “and you may as well get your shoes, and I’ll give you
twenty-five cents to spend as you like.”

“Oh, thank you!” cried Jean, delightedly. That would buy a box of
paper and envelopes, and she had twenty cents for stamps. She could
not think of another thing she wanted.

At six o’clock that afternoon, when Jean drove back into the yard
with her father, she had two packages, her shoes and the box of
paper. She had not been her usual talkative self on the way home.
This gentleman sitting beside her was the farmer to whose house she
was going. He had met her at the train. She was looking about the
country and admiring things; she found seven things to admire which
she had never noticed before. At the tea-table she intended to talk
about them—“rave,” as the summer boarders did.

She went up to her little room and gravely unpacked her shawl-strap,
putting the things into the drawers and the closet.

Her sister Lottie was setting the tea-table,—not in her play, but in
sober reality,—and it was Minnie’s turn to milk to-night. The four
sisters shared the housework with their mother; Jean was number
three. Pet, eleven years old, was the youngest.

“I must take a great interest in everybody,” Jean said to herself.
“Boarders always do. I must try to do good to somebody, as Mrs. Lane
helped me last summer.”

At the supper-table she began to talk about the beautiful five-mile
drive from town, and the sunset from the top of the hill.

“It _is_ pretty,” said Minnie.

“And the bridge with the willows. It is pretty enough for a picture;
and the ducks sailing down the stream.”

“I always said we had pretty things near home,” remarked her father.

Then Lottie found a nook in the woods to talk about, and Pet told of
a place like a cave, and the view on the top after you climbed the
big rock. The tired mother brightened. After supper Jean followed her
father out the back door and stood beside him.

“How is the watermelon patch doing?” she asked, in a voice of great
interest, after thinking a minute.

“Finely! Never so well before. Come and look at it.”

It was a pleasant walk. Jean imagined that she had a white shawl
thrown about her, and once in a while gave it a twitch as she
listened while the farmer talked about his melons. She asked
questions she had never thought of asking before, and learned several
new things about the farm.

“It’s a good thing to be a good farmer,” she said. “I never thought
before how much farmers had to know.” Her father looked pleased.

It was Jean’s work to wash the milk-pails and milk-pans. She did it
that night with a sense of enjoyment which she had never had before,
for she was simply “helping” of her own accord. She would be very
helpful; she would try to make these strangers care very much for
her. She would watch every day to see what she could do for them.
Mrs. Lane last summer had taught the class in the Sunday-school to
which Jean belonged, and had said that “all must try to be a blessing
to every one whom their life touched.” It appeared to Jean that her
life touched everybody’s in this house.

Sunday was a wonderful day. She listened to the new preacher, and the
new Sunday-school was certainly very pleasant. She spoke to a little
girl she had never noticed before, and gave a rose to Julia Weed,
whom she had always disliked. She was trying to be like Mrs. Lane.

In the evening she stayed at home from church with her mother,
because her mother’s head ached; and when, for the first time in her
life, she proposed reading her Sunday-school book to her mother, she
was both pleased and rebuked to hear her reply, “Oh yes, I should
like it! I can’t read evenings, and I often think how interesting
your books look.”

“And if I can’t finish it to-night, may I read tomorrow night?” Jean
asked eagerly.

“If I am not too tired.”

“But it will rest you.”

“Perhaps so. It will be something new.”

Something new for her to be thoughtful about her own hard-working
mother! And she had to imagine herself in somebody else’s home to
think of it.

What a day Monday was! She was busy all the morning, “helping,” and
she found it good fun. In the afternoon she wrote a long letter to
Sophie, and she had so much to tell that she filled three sheets. In
the evening she read aloud to her mother, and her father listened,
after he read his paper, and said it was a “jolly good book.”

When she left the room to go to bed, she said, “Good night!” Usually
she forgot it. She was careful to remember “thank you,” and “please.”

It was not her turn to iron. To-morrow would be a long, hot ironing
day, and there were so many starched things this week. Lottie was in
a hurry to finish the pink muslin she was making for herself. If she
should offer to iron two hours, and let Lottie sew—but how she hated
to iron!

Still, she could only stay with these people two weeks—and there was
nothing else Lottie would like so much; she and Lottie had not been
very good friends lately, and this would “make up.” She was the one
to make up, for she had been cross and had refused to do her work in
order to let Lottie go to the picnic. Minnie did it, and let Lottie
go, and Jean had felt mean ever since.

But she was only fourteen, and it was vacation. But Mrs. Lane
said—and now she wished she hadn’t!—that nobody ever had a vacation
from doing kind things.

She could help iron next week. This was her week.

“I guess it’s God’s week!” This was one of Jean’s new thoughts. Going
into your own home like a new somebody was very hard work; she almost
wished she were not a summer boarder, that she had stayed at home!
And this last thought was so funny that the people down-stairs heard
her laughing.

“Jean is a happy child,” said her mother.

“Yes, she seems to have a new kink,” replied her father. “She is
taking a sudden interest in everything. I used to think she hated the
farm and everything about it. The farm is all I’ve got to give my
girls, and it hurts me to have them care nothing about it.”

“It’s vacation, and she’s more rested,” said Minnie. “She loves books
better than any of us, and studies harder.”

“I don’t know what the secret is, but I’m glad of it,” her father
replied.

With a brave heart the next morning Jean asked Lottie if she might
iron two hours and let her sew on her pink muslin.

“You blessed child!” cried Lottie. “I had thought I must sit up all
night to get it done for tomorrow. Two hours will be a great lift.”

Ironing was hot and hard work, beside being extremely unpleasant work
to Jean; but she pushed the two hours into three, and never was so
happy in her life as when her oldest sister gave her an unaccustomed
kiss, which was even better than her words: “I won’t forget this,
Jeanie.”

Wednesday morning Jean remembered that, as a stranger, she must learn
something about the village and the village people. Bensalem was a
pretty village with one long street, two churches, one store, a
post-office, and an old school-house. She had another thought to-day;
this, too, grew out of something Mrs. Lane said at Sunday-school.
“Bind something, if you can; make some good thing fast, like forming
a little society.”

How she would like to do that! She counted over the girls she liked
best. There were nine, and ten would form a society, bound fast
together. This she regarded as a very promising new thought. But what
should it be for? Jean pondered a great deal, but she could think of
nothing but her “outing.”

Her outing! Why shouldn’t it be an Outing Society—not to get up real
vacations for people, but to get them out of themselves, and into the
way of helping things along, and beginning right at home. For that
was the curious part of it—that you didn’t have to go away anywhere.
It seemed to come to you.

Jean resolved to call on the girls and tell them about it, and ask
them to come to her house and talk it over. She knew now what she
would call it: The Outing Ten.

First she would call at the Parsonage and tell Miss Marion about it,
and ask her what to do first and next.

But she could not tell Miss Marion about it all herself; perhaps
Judith Mackenzie would go; Judith knew Miss Marion better than any of
the girls. She was always staying at the Parsonage “for company” for
Miss Marion.




XII. A SECRET ERRAND.


    “Say not ‘small event’! Why ‘small’?
    Costs it more pain than this, ye call
    A ‘great event,’ should come to pass,
    Than that? Untwine me from the mass
    Of deeds which make up life, one deed
    Power shall fall short in or exceed!”

                       —Robert Browning.

On the lounge in the sitting-room, Judith lay cuddled up with a rare
ailment for her, a throbbing headache; Aunt Affy had brought a pillow
from her own entry bedroom, and bathed her forehead with Florida
water; then brushed her hair for a long time and told her a story
about her far-away girlhood, “when Becky and Cephas and I had our
good times. Not that we don’t have good times now; Becky has hers up
yonder, and poor Cephas and I do the best we can for each other down
here.”

Judith wondered why she should say “poor Cephas”; he had laughing
eyes, and a merry laugh, and everything that happened to him seemed
just the very best thing that could happen.

Aunt Rody had brewed a bowl of bitter stuff and stood threateningly
near while Judith lifted her dizzy head and forced herself to taste
it.

“More,” urged Aunt Rody.

She tasted again.

“More,” insisted Aunt Rody.

She tasted several times with a look of pitiful appeal that Aunt Rody
resisted.

“More,” commanded Aunt Rody.

“I can’t,” sobbed Judith, but she obeyed, and Aunt Rody set the
yellow bowl on a chair by the sofa, that she might taste it whenever
she felt like it.

Homesick Judith hid her face in the small pillow as soon as she was
left alone, and cried; she cried for her mother not a year dead, for
her father whom she scarcely remembered, for the pretty room she had
with her mother in her own city home, for her picture of the Madonna
with the child, that Aunt Rody declared popish and would not suffer,
even in Judith’s own room; then she cried because Miss Kenney had not
come yesterday, as she half promised, and then because Aunt Rody had
made Cephas say that she should not run about in the fields with him,
but stay in the house these wonderful days and sew carpet rags; and
then, if she cried about anything she cried in her sleep; a soft step
was in the room, the lightest touch covered her with Aunt Affy’s
fleecy white shawl.

“Sit down,” whispered Aunt Affy’s voice, “she is fast asleep; she is
a good sleeper, we shall not disturb her; I shouldn’t wonder if she
had fits of home-sickness; she never tells; we are all old folks;
Rody thinks she doesn’t need any more schooling because she can do
sums and writes such a handsome hand, so she doesn’t go to school—and
doesn’t know many young folks. Rody never _did_ understand young
folks, you know that.”

“I should think _you_ knew that,” replied the other whispering,
indignant voice. “So Cephas is back again; he was gone five years,
wasn’t he?”

“Five this last time, three the other time.”

Judith stirred, pushed the white wool away from her face, and
listened.

“He was good to go,” replied the still indignant voice.

Judith made a soft rustle; Aunt Affy did not heed it.

“Yes, he _was_ good,” assented Aunt Affy’s sweet, old voice, “he is
always ready to do the thing that’s happiest for me. He was so
homesick and wrote such heart-rending letters that I couldn’t stand
it. Rody sniffed, as she has always sniffed at us, but she said he
might come back if we were both so set on it, so shamelessly set on
it.”

Judith’s little protesting groan was not noticed; then she shut her
eyes and listened, because she could not help it.

“It’s a burning shame, and the sister you have been to her, too. You
took your money and bought your sisters out that you might keep the
old place for Rody.”

“I wanted it for myself, too,” was Aunt Affy’s honest reply.

“But you could have taken your money and married Cephas—”

“But, you see, she never could bear the thought of my marrying at
all; she doesn’t dislike Cephas so much, but she wants me all to
herself. She doesn’t like men, I’ll allow that; she never had any
kind of happy experience herself, unless it happened before I was
born, and she doesn’t _know_. After Becky died, Cephas and I had to
comfort each other; Rody never was a great hand at comforting, and
the other girls were all dead or married. She had been a mother to me
all my life; I was a two week’s old baby left in her care; and Becky
was only two years old; we were her two babies.”

“You had whippings and scoldings enough thrown in, I’ll be bound,”
was the visitor’s tart rejoinder.

“The scoldings are thrown in now,” said Aunt Affy, with the glimmer
of a smile; “I am only a girl to her; I shall never grow up to her;
not old enough to be married, sixty years old as I am. Cephas told
her yesterday that he would fix up the old house with his own money,
he has considerable laid by, and she dared him to pull off a shingle
or drive a nail. He said she should always be the head of the house,
and she said there was no need for him to tell her _that_. You see
that we could not be happy in making her old age unhappy. She is so
old that defiance might kill her; she is eighty-four.”

“I’d _let_ it kill her then,” said Miss Affy’s life-long friend.

“No, you wouldn’t. Your sister is your sister, and she is all the
mother I ever knew. Cephas and I jog on together like two old married
folks. She says we will be glad when she is under the sod and we can
have our own way.”

“She might let you have it now, and then you wouldn’t be glad,” urged
Jean Draper’s mother.

“She cannot let us have it; her own will is too strong for her; when
she gives up to us she will die.”

“Then I’d do it anyway,” counselled the other voice.

“We did talk of that, but we are afraid to—she is so old,” whispered
Aunt Affy, feeling faint with the very thought of it.

“Well, it’s an old folks’ romance, and I didn’t know old folks had
any,” said the woman who was married at sixteen.

But the girl on the lounge with her face in the pillow had listened;
she had listened and learned something Aunt Affy would not have told
her for the world.

How could she ever look into Aunt Affy’s face again? And, oh, how
could she ever love Aunt Rody?

She groaned, and Aunt Affy came to her and asked if she felt worse.
The neighbor went out on tiptoe; Aunt Rody came from the kitchen to
stand threateningly near while Aunt Affy coaxed mouthful by mouthful
the draining of the bitter bowl.

While Aunt Rody was taking her nap that afternoon Jean Draper knocked
on the open kitchen door. Judith and Aunt Affy were washing dishes
together at the kitchen sink; Judith gave a cry of pleased surprise
at the sound of the knock and the vision of the girl in the doorway.

“O, Jean, I _wished_ for you,” she said, with the longing for young
companionship in her heart.

“And I wanted you. I am going to see Miss Marion on a secret errand,
and I can’t do it without you. Can you spare her, Miss Affy?”

“If her head will let her go,” began Miss Affy, doubtfully.

“Oh, that’s well,” cried Judith, joyfully, “but what will Aunt Rody
say?” she questioned in dismay.

“I will take care of that,” promised Aunt Affy, anticipating with
dread the half hour’s scolding the permission would bring upon
herself.

“You are making her a gad-about just like yourself,” the monologue
would begin.

“Are you _sure_, Aunt Affy, dear?” asked Judith, anxiously.

“Yes, sure. Run away and put on your new gingham.”




XIII. THE TWO BLESSED THINGS.


        “In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and
        He shall direct thy paths.”

                             —_Prov._ iii. 6.

        “How excellent a thought to me
        Thy loving-kindness then shall be!
        Thus in the shadow of Thy wings
        I’ll hide me from all troublous things.”

“My life is like Africa; there are no paths anywhere,” said Marion.
She was not petulant; the tone was not petulant; Marion knew she
thought she was bearing her life bravely. The study was cool and
darkened that August afternoon; she lay idly upon the lounge, a fresh
magazine in her lap, and a pile of books on the carpet within reach
of her idle hands.

A year ago she thought she loved books—and music, and life.

Roger liked to have her near him while he wrote and studied, but he
did not like her idle moods. This latest one had lasted two days.

He pushed his large volume away, and taking up an ivory paper cutter
began to run its sharp edges across his fingers. Marion was easily
hurt; he could not advise work as he did yesterday.

“If your life were like Africa,” he began in an unsuggestive tone,
“you would have a beaten track wherever you turned; no unmapped
country in the world is better supplied with paths than this same
Africa that your hedged-in life is like. Every village is connected
with some other village by a path; you can follow ziz-zag paths from
Zanzibar to the Atlantic; they are beaten as hard as adamant; they
are made by centuries of native traffic.”

“I have learned something about Africa,” she answered, demurely, “if
not about my life.”

“Which are you the more interested in?”

“Oh, Africa, just now. I am not interested in my life at all.”

“Marion, dear, is Bensalem a failure?”

“Yes, as far as I am concerned. Not for you, dear old boy; it is
splendid for you, and for Bensalem. Even Judith listens in church.”

“I know she does. I write my sermons for her.”

“For a girl? How do you expect to reach other people, then?” she
inquired, surprised.

“The inspiration came to me, that Sunday she told me she was sorry
for not listening, to begin all over again—to look at life from a
fresh standpoint, from the standpoint of youth, ardent, hungry,
sensation-loving youth—”

“Sensation—”

“Not in its usual acceptation; truth cannot but give you a sensation;
I knew it would not hurt the old people and the middle-aged to begin
again; to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child, and I have
attempted to teach the children in the Kingdom of Heaven; to talk
simply about the grand old truths; to keep that girl before me as I
thought out my sermons—a thoughtful girl who has had some experience
in life, and when a thought or the expression of it was over her
head, I struck it out.”

“Now I know your secret. ‘Simplicity and strength’ are your
characteristics, David Prince, our literary blacksmith, who wrote
Bensalem up for the Dunellen _News_, was pleased to say. Shall you
keep this up?”

“Until I find a better way,” he said, contentedly.

“Everybody listens.”

“Even Miss Rody,” he said, smiling at the memory of Miss Rody’s face.

“And all the other old folks. Old folks and children. What about the
young men and maidens?”

“Aren’t ‘simplicity and strength’ good enough for them?” he inquired,
seriously.

“It’s good enough for me.”

“Not quite,” he answered.

“Why?”

“You listen, of course.”

“But I do not grow fast enough? Roger, I’ve stopped growing. I knew
something was the matter with me, and that’s it.”

“A pretty serious _it_.”

“I know that better than you can tell me. I wish Judith Grey
Mackenzie—how Aunt Rody brings that out—would give _me_ an
inspiration.”

“Bring her here for a week and I’ll promise that she will.”

“Aunt Affy could not spare her. Her yellow head is the sunshine of
that old house. But I’ll have her some day. I wish I _owned_ her.”

“I wish you did. I would buy her myself if I had money enough.”

“I wonder who _does_ own her,” said Marion; “I forgot that she does
not belong to anybody.”

“She does belong to somebody. Her mother gave her to Aunt Affy.”

Perhaps she belonged somewhat to her “Cousin Don.”

Roger never talked about Don. He never read aloud to her the foreign
letters she saw so often on the study table.

A sigh came of itself before she could stifle it; the idle fingers
opened the magazine; Roger’s pen began to race across the paper.
Voices on the piazza brought Marion to her feet; Judith’s voice was
in the hall.

“O, Miss Marion, we came to tell you—” began Judith.

“And to ask you how—” continued Jean.

“To make an Outing Ten,” finished Judith.

At the tea-table Marion told Roger the story of how Jean had an
outing.

“I wish you might have heard the unconscious way she told it. My life
_is_ like Africa: all beaten tracks. I am to be the President of the
Outing Ten. All Bensalem is to be my own special private outing, but
nobody is to know it.”

“Then, Marion dear, you will have the two most blessed things on the
earth.”

“What are they?”

“Don’t you know?”

“You think work is one,” she said doubtfully.

“So you think. And companionship is the other.”

“Roger, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t given you companionship; I’ve been
stupid, self-absorbed, idle—”

“Anything else?”

“But you have been desolate, sometimes.”

“My work has been my companionship.”

“Then there is only one blessed thing to you,” she said, merrily.
“May you get it.”

“I am getting it every day.”

“Then you do not inwardly fret against the limitations of this bit of
a village—” she began, frightened at herself for the suggestion: “I
thought, perhaps, you were _bearing_ Bensalem.”

“So I am, I hope,” he answered, gravely, “in my heart, and in my
prayers.”

“I beg your pardon,” she returned, flushing under the “splendid
purpose in his eyes.” “I might have known you were too broad to feel
narrowed, as I do.”

“You remember what Lowell says: ‘There are few brains that would not
be better for living for a while on their own fat.’”

“And that is better than the fat of the land—which you will never get
in Bensalem.”

“I think I started from my new standpoint without worldly ambition.
Think of Paul writing the Epistle to the Romans from a literary point
of view.”

“Well, then,” with a laugh that was half a grumble, “I despair of
you, if you ‘take pleasure’ as he did in all sorts of infirmities and
limitations—I was beginning to be ambitious for you. You spent all
the afternoon last week with Agnes Trembly’s mother, reading to her,
and telling her stories—you do not take time to _study_ as you used
to study. You were such a student. Now all you care for is people—and
the Bible,” she ran on, discontentedly; “What does Don think of you?”
she asked, with a sudden flush.

“He is in despair,” he replied, thinking of Don’s latest letter of
angry expostulation.

“He is ambitious,” said Marion, reproachfully.

“So am I,” he answered, smiling at the reproach.

“But in such a way. I like ambition. I would like to do something in
the world myself.”

“The man, or woman, or child, who does the will of God is every day
doing something in the world,” he said, seriously.

For a moment she was silenced, then urged by her own discontent she
burst out:—

“But five hundred or a thousand people might as well listen to you,
and be influenced by your ‘strength and simplicity,’ as this handful
of Bensalem.”

“The perfect Teacher was more than once content with but one
listener.”

“Yes; but his sermon was written and handed down to all the ages,”
she answered, in a flash.

“If one life here in Bensalem is moved, and another life moved by
that, who can tell how far down the ages the influence may go?
Beside, that is not my care,” he said, in his rested voice.

“But _wouldn’t_ you, now, candidly, rather influence ten hundred
lives than one hundred?”

“Candidly, I would.”

“And, yet, you have refused a call to Maverick, and stay stupidly
here.”

“Stupidly is your own interpretation. I will be content to move one
man if I might choose the man. I am determined to learn what can be
done in a village by one man who stays for the ‘fat of the land,’ the
youth. From Drummond’s standpoint, only the boy himself and the young
man understand the boy. My outlook just now is from the standpoint of
that big-eyed, sensitive-lipped Joe, and your Judith. Men and women
are but boys and girls grown tall. I find out the boy; you are
helping me to the girl.”

“I am glad I can help,” said Marion, satisfied.




XIV. AN AFTERNOON WITH AN ADVENTURE IN IT.


    “Lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”

                                             —_Luke_ xi. 4.

    “Lord, Thou knowest all things: Thou knowest that I love Thee.”

                                             —_John_ xxi. 17.

It was rag-carpet afternoon; it was also another kind of an
afternoon, an afternoon with an adventure in it, and Judith longed
for adventures; but, of course, all she knew, at first, was the
rag-carpet; the adventure was to happen in the kitchen, and the
rag-carpet ball was happening in Aunt Affy’s room.

Judith was a working member of the Outing Ten, but if her outing
meant this rag-carpet ball it was very discouraging, and if it were
not for the pleasure of telling the President about the rag-carpet,
she thought she would resign and become member of a ten that had more
fun in it.

But then, Miss Marion was doing this kind of thing herself, things
she did not like to do about the house, for she had sent away her
servant and was doing all the work excepting washing and ironing,
and, perhaps, in the village, too, she was doing uncongenial errands;
but, of course, she would never tell the Outing Ten about that; she
was going out to tea and making calls, as she had said she never
_would_ do when she came to Bensalem, and she was taking her music
back and practicing hours every day, and reading solid books, instead
of novels; she had let books and music go for a while, Judith had
heard her say to Aunt Affy, and that Jean Draper’s outing had been
the blessing of her life. It was Nettie’s blessing, too; she told
Marion she had an “outing” every day; she was patching a quilt and
studying history.

The history study was a part of Marion’s outing, but the Ten did not
know that.

Aunt Affy, wearing a calico loose gown of lilac and white, was seated
in a rocker at the window combing her long gray hair: her hair was
soft and thick, she twisted it into a coil, and behind her each ear
she brushed a long curl.

Judith liked to twist these curls around her fingers when she talked
to Aunt Affy.

“Only a little more to do,” encouraged Aunt Affy, giving her coil a
firm twist.

Sitting on the matting at Aunt Affy’s feet the little girl began her
weary work again.

“Aunt Affy! How did you get your name?” she inquired with the
eagerness of something new to talk about.

“How did you get yours?” asked Aunt Affy, seriously.

“But mine is a real name.”

“Isn’t mine?”

“I never heard it before.”

“Some people have never heard of Judith.”

“That is true. Nettie never had.”

“Mine is in the Bible. So is Rody’s.”

“_Is_ it? Well, I’ve never read the Bible through.”

“I will show it to you.”

“Aunt Affy, you and Aunt Rody never look in the glass when you comb
your hair. You sit anywhere. It’s very funny.”

“When you have combed your hair sixty and eighty years you will not
need to look in the glass,” was the serious reply.

“It isn’t sixty,” said literal Judith. “You did not do it when you
were a baby.”

Taking her New Testament in large type from the small table near her,
Aunt Affy found the place and laid it on the arm of her chair; Judith
lifted herself and read where Aunt Affy’s finger pointed: “And to our
beloved Apphia—but that isn’t Affy,” said astonished Judith.

“It grew down to it when I was a girl, and has never grown up. Shall
I find Rody?”

Again Aunt Affy found the place, and Judith read. “‘And as Peter
knocked at the door of the gate, a damsel came to hearken named
Rhoda.’ That’s very funny,” she said, settling down among her rags.

“There were eight of us girls, and we all had Bible names: Rody,
Dark, that was Dorcas, Mary, Marthy, Deborah, that’s your mother’s
mother, Hanner, it is really Hannah, Becky, and Affy the youngest, is
eight. Rody and I only are left. They were all married but Rody and
Becky and me. Cephas was engaged to poor Becky, and she died; he went
away after that, went South, went West, and at last came here; I
wrote to him to come and finish his days with me. Rody wasn’t exactly
pleased.”

“Why?” asked Judith, excited over the old folks’ romance.

“She doesn’t like new happenings, and she never _had_ liked Cephas.”

“She scolds him,” said Judith, with a feeling of sympathy.

“She scolds me. She scolds the minister. It is only her way of
talking.”

At that moment Aunt Rody’s blue gingham sunbonnet appeared at the
window; Judith’s nervous fingers worked hurriedly.

“Not done yet. Jean Draper is worth two of you. The graham bread is
out of the oven, a perfect bake, and I am going to call on Mrs.
Evans, and take Nettie a custard.”

“Well,” said Aunt Affy.

Aunt Rody’s hair was white, but if it were soft to the touch,
Judith’s fingers would never know; her black eyes were deep set, she
had not one tooth, and her wrinkled lips had a way of keeping
themselves sternly shut, unless they were sternly opened.

“Joe is hunting eggs; I hope he won’t get into mischief while I’m
gone.”

“He hasn’t yet,” said Judith, Joe’s champion.

Joe, with his closely cut black hair, his grateful eyes, new gray
suit with navy blue flannel shirt, rough shoes, willing and efficient
ways, and his great love for Doodles, was some one not at all out of
place on the “Sparrow farm;” even dainty Judith did not altogether
disapprove his presence at the table.

The small disciple’s forehead was all in a pucker, and the blue eyes
were so filled with tears that there was not room enough in her eyes
for them; one tear kept pushing another down over her cheeks; they
even rolled over her lips and tasted salt.

“Have you noticed the name on my new darning yarn?” inquired Aunt
Affy, replacing the New Testament on the table.

“Superior quality,” read Judith, taking the card from the basket Aunt
Affy brought to her lap from the table.

“No; on the top.”

“Dorcas,” read Judith.

“Dorcas. Who is that for?”

“The name of the man who made it,” replied Judith, stopping her
dawdling and threading her needle.

“I think not.”

“His little girl’s name, perhaps,” ventured Judith.

“It may be, for aught I know; but I do not _think_ that is the name
of the wool.”

“Then I don’t know,” said Judith, interestedly.

“I know something and I will tell you. A long, long, _long_ time ago,
there was a little girl; I think she learned to sew when she was a
little girl, for she knew how to sew beautifully, and her work was
strong and did not rip easily. Perhaps she began by doing
disagreeable things and then went on to other things until she
learned how to make coats and garments for children and grown-up
people. Her name was Dorcas.”

“Did the man who made the wool into yarn know about her?” asked
Judith.

“I think so. Almost everybody does.”

“I never heard of her before. Is that all?”

“No; that is only the beginning. She was a disciple. And disciples
always love each other and work for each other.”

“Do they?” asked Judith, her face glowing. Why, that was splendid and
easy.

“And she worked for widows and perhaps for their little children, and
they loved her dearly. But she died, and oh, how they grieved! They
sent for another disciple, Peter; they thought he could help them.
His faith was so great that he kneeled down and prayed; then he spoke
to her, and she opened her eyes, and looked at him, and then she sat
up. And then he called the people she had made coats and garments
for, and in great joy they had her back alive again. God was willing
for her to come back to earth and go on with her beautiful work. He
cares for the work of his disciples, even when it is only using
thread and needle.”

Judith’s curly head drooped over her hated work; she was so ashamed
of behaving “ugly”; she hoped she had not behaved quite as ugly as
she felt.

The ball was the required size at last, and she joyfully took it up
in the garret to the barrel that was only half filled.

Then, aimlessly, she wandered into the kitchen, and there, odorously,
temptingly, under a clean, coarse towel, were the two loaves of warm
graham bread; she thought she cared for nothing in the way of bread,
cake, or pudding as much as she cared for fresh graham bread and
butter.

And Aunt Rody never _would_ put it on the table fresh. For a slice of
this she must wait until tomorrow night.

Lifting the coarse towel she peeped, then she touched; another touch
brought a crumb, such a delicious crumb; another, and another, and
another delicious crumb, and the crust of one end of a loaf was all
picked off.

“Oh, deary _me_!” cried Judith, in dismay.

Then she covered it carefully, standing spellbound.

What would Aunt Rody say to her?

What would Aunt Rody _do_ to her?

Afraid to go away and leave the bread that would tell its own story,
afraid to stay with it, for Aunt Rody’s sunbonnet and heavy step
might appear at any moment, she went to the sink to pump water over
her hands and to decide what to do next.

Joe was on his way to the barn and stables to gather eggs; Aunt Rody
had made a law that she should not go into any of the outbuildings
without permission,—without _her_ permission; in summer time there
were “so many machines and things around, and children had a way of
stepping into the jaws of death.” She missed hunting the eggs.

The gate swung to, there was a step on the flagged path; with her
hands dripping, she flew up the kitchen stairs; on the landing she
waited, breathless, to hear what Aunt Rody would say.

The step was in the kitchen, there was a pause,—Aunt Rody must be
uncovering the bread; a smothered exclamation, then a quick, angry
voice: “_That_ Joe! He’s always doing something underhanded. He’s too
fond of eating; I will not say one word, but he shall not have any of
_this_ graham bread, or the next, if I can help it. When he asks for
it I’ll tell him before all the table-full that he _knows why_.”

The awful sentence was delivered in an awful voice; tearful and
trembling, the culprit up the stairway heard every word; it was her
dreadful secret, her guilty secret; she no more dared to rush down
the stairs and confess the theft than she dared—she could not think
of any comparison.

She fled through the large, unfurnished chamber, known as the
store-room, to her own room, and there, bolting the door, threw
herself upon the bed and wept as she had never wept before; because
she had never been so wicked and frightened before. Joe would be
punished for her sin; she would not dare confess if Aunt Rody starved
him to death.

“Judith, Judith, come out on the piazza,” called Aunt Affy.

She peeped in the glass: her eyes were red, and her hair was tumbled;
the latter was nothing new, she could sit in the hammock with her
eyes away from Aunt Affy.

As she stepped from the sitting-room door to the piazza, Joe rushed
around the corner of the house, an egg in each hand, frightened and
out of breath.

“There’s an earthquake—in the southern part of Africa—and I’ve been
in it; and I’m afraid the house will go in; oh, what shall we do? Mr.
Brush is up in the field—”

“Stand still, Joe, and get some breath to talk with, and then tell us
what has happened to you,” said Aunt Affy, quietly. Joe dropped on
the piazza floor, still carefully holding the eggs.

“Will the house rock and come down, do you think, Aunt Affy, as the
houses did in the book Judith read?”

“How did you get all that earth on your clothes and tear your
shirt-sleeve?” Judith inquired, forgetting her red eyes in the latest
adventure.

“In the earthquake; I went in almost up to my neck, but I held on
with one hand and didn’t break the eggs.”

“Where _was_ the earthquake?” she asked.

“In the sheep pen. I was looking for eggs, and the first I knew I
felt the ground sliding, and I was going down—there was water, for I
heard it splash. I thought you said _fire_ was inside the earth; I
went down into water. And I caught hold of something with one hand
because I had two eggs in the other, and I pulled, and pulled, and
pulled myself up and out.”

“Why, Joe, you poor boy,” exclaimed Aunt Affy, in alarm, “that old
cistern has caved in at last, and you’ve been in it; you might have
been drowned. What a mercy that you are safe. Don’t you go near that
sheep pen again until Mr. Brush says you may.”

“I’ll _never_ go near it again—I’ve had enough of it. I _couldn’t_
scream—I tried to, but nobody heard. Are you sure it won’t cave in
again, and get here, and swallow up the house?”

“_That_ will not,” laughed Judith, “Oh, you queer boy.”

“Then may I have some bread and butter?” he asked, rising. “I think
it will turn me crazy if it caves in again.”

“Aunt Rody is in the kitchen; tell her your story and ask her for the
bread,” replied Aunt Affy.

Judith trembled so that she could scarcely stand; she dared not
follow Joe; she dared not stay where she was: Aunt Rody herself made
a way of escape for her by coming to the kitchen door with a slice of
graham bread in her hand.

“Here, Joe: I heard your story. Here’s the bread. I hope you’ll
behave yourself after this. Now, Judith, you see the reason I keep
you from hunting eggs. You might be dead in that cistern this moment.”

“You couldn’t pull yourself up as I did,” remarked Joe, giving Aunt
Rody the two eggs as she handed him the graham bread.

Judith drew a long breath of relief. Now she need never tell; Joe
would not be punished.

That evening at family prayer Cephas read about the institution of
the Lord’s Supper and the betrayal of Christ: Joe shuffled his feet
until a look from Aunt Rody quieted him; Judith looked as if she were
listening, but she did not catch the meaning of a single sentence
until something arrested her rapid, remorseful thinking: “And when
they had kindled a fire in the midst of the hall, and were set down
together, Peter sat down among them. But a certain maid beheld him as
he sat by the fire, and earnestly looking upon him, and said, This
man was also with him. And he denied him, saying: Woman I know him
not.”

Peter was afraid. He was afraid to tell that woman. The small
disciple looked at the old lady sitting in her high straight-backed
chair, with her long hands so still in her lap, her lips tight shut,
her eyes roving from Joe to Judith, and then to Joe, then the
dreadful round again, and she thought the woman that frightened Peter
must have been like Aunt Rody.

She knew how afraid Peter was.

She did not hear one word of the long prayer; she knelt near Aunt
Rody; she tried not to sob, or to be afraid, but she _was_ afraid;
not now of being found out, but afraid that she was wicked. As long
as she lived she would never dare to tell.

And she never did tell, not as long as Aunt Rody lived.

For many a day her heart was heavy with the sin of allowing the
innocent to be suspected; but she was not a very brave small disciple.

One night at prayers she surprised them all by saying suddenly and
vehemently: “I don’t care if Peter _was_ so wicked; I like him better
than anybody in the whole Bible.”




XV. “FIRST AT ANTIOCH.”


    “How beautiful it is to be alive!
    To wake each morn as if the Maker’s grace
    Did us afresh from nothingness derive,
    That we might sing: How happy is our case,
    How beautiful it is to be alive.”

                               —H. S. Sutton.

It was Saturday afternoon; Judith had been busy in the kitchen all
the morning with Aunt Rody, and she (not Aunt Rody) had kept her
temper; that was one happening that made the day memorable and
delightful, and then there were three others: one was her miracle,
another the maidens that were going out to draw water, and the
disciple from Antioch, and, most memorable of all, the plan for
boarding-school.

The miracle happened in this way: Aunt Rody sent her to take a basket
of things to Nettie Evans, a “Sunday surprise,” Judith called it;
tiny biscuits, jelly cake, and a little round box of figs.

Nettie had had a wearisome day (very much more dreadful than a
Saturday morning in the kitchen with Aunt Rody, Judith told herself),
and Mrs. Evans thought it better for her not to go up to Nettie’s
room, for the pain in her back was better, she had fallen asleep and
she was afraid to have her disturbed.

“May I get a drink of water?” Judith asked. She always felt thirsty
when she came near the plank that formed the ascent from the ground
where the kitchen had been to the bit of floor that was left for the
sink to stand on. The old kitchen had been torn down this summer, and
nothing remained of it excepting the sink which contained the pump
(the water came from the well where Nettie’s lilies grew), the window
over the sink, the roof overhead, and the walls on each side of the
sink. She liked the fun of running up and down this plank, and she
liked to stand and look out of this window toward the east. It was a
window toward the east. Sometimes she thought about the Jews praying
toward the east. She wished once that something would happen to this
window because it _was_ a window toward the east. A window facing the
east in a house was not at all remarkable; but a window that was not
in a house brought itself into very interesting prominence.

And this afternoon her something happened. There was a wonder in the
heavens.

It was afternoon; she knew it was, she was sure of it; dinner was
over hours ago; Aunt Rody had helped her wipe the dinner dishes, and
Aunt Affy had gone to town with Uncle Cephas to take the week’s
butter to her customers; and she was on her way to the parsonage to
sing hymns with Miss Marion, the hymns for church to-morrow, and she
_never_ went till afternoon. But there it was. The sun was in the
east in the afternoon; round, peering through mist with a pale,
yellow splendor; she saw something that no one in the world had ever
seen. It was the sun rising in the afternoon.

It must be a miracle; a miracle in the window towards Jerusalem.

But the sun surely had not stood still ever since morning; it was
high up when she stood in the back yard and rang the dinner bell for
Uncle Cephas and Joe.

Was it a miracle just for her?

That _was_ the east; it had been the east ever since she was born; it
had been the east ever since the the world was made; and it was the
_sun_.

It was nothing to see the full moon in the east; the last time she
went driving with Miss Marion and Mr. Roger they saw the full moon in
the east and he talked about it. This was not the full moon.

“Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Evans, quick, quick,” she called, excitedly,
fearing that her miracle would vanish.

Hurried steps crossed the new kitchen and Mrs. Evans appeared.

“What _is_ it, child? Don’t wake Nettie.”

“Look,” said Judith, with the dignity of a youthful prophetess,
pointing to the apparition; “see the sun in the east in the
afternoon.”

Mrs. Evans stepped up the plank, and looked. It _was_ the sun in the
east in the afternoon.

“Well, I declare!” ejaculated Mrs. Evans, “that does beat all I ever
saw. Where did it come from? How could it get there?” Startled, she
turned, and toward the west, there was the big, round sun shining in
all his glory.

“Oh, I see,” with a breath of relief; “I thought the world must be
coming to an end. It is the reflection. Look, don’t you see? the sun
is opposite the window. But it _is_ a wonderful sight. I wish it
would stay until I could call the neighbors in.”

Judith looked at the west and reasoned about it; she turned toward
the east, then to the west, then to the window again.

“So it is,” with an inflection of disappointment.

Mrs. Evans laughed softly and hurried back to the new kitchen.

Judith pumped her glass of water with the radiance of two suns in her
face.

“Little girl, little girl,” called a voice from a buggy in the road,
“will you direct me to the parsonage?”

“Go on straight up the hill, turn to the right and see the church;
the next house is the parsonage,” she replied with ready exactness.

“Thank you,” said a second voice, with a foreign accent; the face
bent forward was very dark, with dark eyes, and dark beard.

Half an hour afterward she found Miss Marion in her own room, and
before they went down to the parlor to the piano, she and Miss Marion
read together in First Samuel.

They were reading the Bible through together; Marion told her brother
that it was a revelation to her to read the Bible with a girl, and an
old woman; it was looking forward and looking backward.

Judith read her three verses and then gave a joyful exclamation:—

“‘And as they went up the hill to the city, they found young maidens
going out to draw water, and said unto them: Is the seer here?

“‘And they answered them and said, He is, behold he is before you;
make haste, now, for he came to-day to the city, for there is a
sacrifice of the people to-day in the high place; as soon as ye be
come into the city, ye shall straightway find him, before he go up to
the high place to eat, for the people will not eat until he come,
because he doth bless the sacrifice; and afterwards they eat that be
bidden. Now, therefore, get you up; for about this time ye shall find
him.’ Oh, Miss Marion, that is like me. I was getting a drink of
water and I sent two men to find the Bensalem seer.”

“Even Saul couldn’t find the way without the maidens,” reflected
Marion.

“And they were put in the story for all the world to read about; I
wish people wouldn’t forget about girls now-a-days.”

“Who does?” asked Marion; “this is the girls’ century.”

[Illustration: “I wish people wouldn’t forget about girls
now-a-days.” “Who does?” asked Marion; “this is the girls’ century.”]

“Nobody ever thinks about me. I am never _in_ things like the other
girls. Aunt Rody will never let me go anywhere; Aunt Affy coaxed her
one day, and cried and said she was spoiling my girlhood, but Aunt
Rody was worse than ever after that. I cry night after night because
she will not let me go to boarding-school. Boarding-school has been
the dream of my life; I make pictures about it to myself. Did _you_
go to boarding-school?”

“Yes, for one year, and was glad enough to go home again. I wish you
would come to school to _me_; do you suppose you could?” asked Marion
with a sudden and joyous inspiration.

“O, Miss Marion,” was all the girl could reply for very gladness.

“We will plan about it, Roger and I. If you can come and stay all day
and study, and take music lessons, three or four days a week, it will
be better than boarding-school for you, and more than you can think
for me. You have been on my mind, but I didn’t dare propose anything;
I knew Aunt Affy would not be allowed to have her way.”

Both Judith’s arms were about Marion’s neck, with her face hidden on
Marion’s shoulder.

“I’ve wanted a sister all my life,” she said laughing and crying
together.

Sunday morning on entering church her attention was arrested by a
large map stretched across the platform, or half-way across it; the
pulpit had been removed and in its stead were flowers, a row of pink
bloom and shades of green.

A tall gentleman, with the very blackest hair and beard she had ever
seen, arose and stood near the map.

How her heart gave a throb when he said, touching a spot on the map:
“That is Antioch, the place where the disciples were first called
Christians. I was born in Antioch, where Paul and Barnabas preached
Christ. I was born in Antioch, and I was re-born in Antioch.”

Judith held her breath. He was a disciple, a Christian come from
Antioch. She drew back, almost afraid; she felt as if Christ must be
there standing very near this disciple.

He talked about the beautiful city and made it as near and real as
this little village in which there was a church of disciples. It was
like seeing one of the twelve disciples, Peter, or James, or John; or
perhaps Paul, because he had been in Antioch.

But he said he had been “reborn” there; what could he mean? Re—again;
born again. Was he born twice in Antioch? She had been born only
once. Must every disciple be born over like this disciple who was
born both times in Antioch?

For a long time she puzzled herself over this new, strange thing;
then, when she could not bear it any longer, she asked Aunt Affy.

“When he was born, and for years as he grew up, he did not love and
obey Christ, and then the Holy Spirit gave him a loving and obedient
heart, and that loving and obedient heart is so new that it is like
being born over again,” was Aunt Affy’s simple, and sure unraveling
of her perplexity.




XVI. ONE OF AUNT AFFY’S EXPERIENCES.


    “O, Master, let me walk with Thee
    In lowly paths of service free;
    Tell me Thy secret; help me bear
    The strain of toil; the fret of care.”

                     —Washington Gladden.

The dream of Judith’s girlhood was coming true in a most unexpected
way; she did not go to boarding-school, but boarding-school came to
her in Bensalem; four days every week she studied at the parsonage
with Miss Marion, her cousin Don’s “brown girl”; the dinner was the
boarding-school part; often she was persuaded to stay to supper, and
sometimes there would be an excuse for her to remain over night.

Aunt Rody thought the excuses were much oftener than need be; she
said “it seemed” that something was always going on at the parsonage;
the parsonage was a worldly place with games, and company and music.

Cephas replied that the parsonage folks were not going out into the
world, but bringing the world in and consecrating it; she must not
forget that “God so loved the world.”

Aunt Rody retorted that He commanded his people not to love it,
anyway. In his slow way Cephas replied: “He never told His people not
to love it _His_ way.”

The worldliness was not hurting Judith; nothing was hurting the
little girl her mother left, when she shut her eyes upon all that
would ever happen to her.

How it happened that she went to boarding-school she never knew; she
knew Aunt Affy cried and could not sleep all one night, that for once
in his sweet-tempered life Uncle Cephas was angry, and as he told the
minister, “talked like a Dutch uncle to Rody”; she knew a letter came
from cousin Don to Aunt Rody herself, and that Aunt Rody did not
speak to anybody in the house, excepting innocent Joe, for three
whole weeks.

In spite of Aunt Rody, Agnes Trembly made new dresses from the
materials Miss Marion took Judith to New York to select, and a box of
school books was sent by express, and another box with every latest
thing in the way of school-room furnishing. A bureau in Miss Marion’s
room was placed at the disposal of her goods, and one corner of a
wardrobe was made ready for her dresses.

Still, with all her happy privileges, there was no place she called
home; she said: “Aunt Affy’s” and “the parsonage.”

Once, speaking of Summer Avenue, she said “home” unconsciously. She
rarely spoke of her mother. All her loneliness and desolation and
heartaches she poured out in her letters to cousin Don. He
understood. She never thought that she must be “brave” for him.

Nothing since her mother went away comforted her like her
boarding-school.

During one heart-opening twilight she confided to Marion about
casting lots in the Bible to find out if she would ever go to
boarding-school.

“What _did_ you find?” asked Marion.

If she were shocked she kept the shock out of her voice. She told
Roger afterward she was almost too shocked to speak.

“The queerest thing that meant nothing: ‘And a cubit on the one side
and a cubit on the other side.’”

“I am glad you found that,” said Marion, “I think God wanted to help
you by giving you that.”

“But it _didn’t_ help; how could it?”

“It helps me.”

“It doesn’t sound like a Bible verse; it is just nothing,” persisted
Judith.

“God’s words can never be ‘just nothing.’ Those words were something
to somebody, and they are a great deal to me. Do you remember
something Christ says about a cubit?”

“No; did he ever say anything?”

“He said this: _Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to
his stature?_ You were taking thought to add something to your life.
Your thought-taking has not done it,” said Marion, thinking that her
own thought-taking had added no cubit to her own life.

“No, indeed; I never should have thought of the parsonage
boarding-school. Who did think of it besides you, Miss Marion?”

“Several people who love you. If you had never thought of it, it
would have been thought of for you. In that same talk Christ told the
people: Your heavenly father knoweth that ye have need of all these
things: _for_ your heavenly Father knoweth; that’s why we do not have
to think about the cubits. I think I’ll give Roger ‘_For_ your
heavenly Father’ for a text.”

“I am so glad,” said Judith, with radiant eyes, “I love that ‘cubit’
now.”

“So do I. I will certainly ask Roger to preach about our cubit.”

“But don’t let him put me in,” protested Judith. “I should look
conscious so everybody would know I was the girl. Jean Draper will be
sure to know.”

“He will not let it be a girl. He will make it somebody who was
superstitious, and anxious, and did not trust God, nor know how to
learn his will. Trust Roger for that. I always know when he puts
people in, for we talk it over together; he puts me in so often that
I am accustomed to being made a text of; and his own mistakes and
failures are in all the time.”

“I thought mine were,” acknowledged Roger’s attentive and
appreciative listener.

“And Uncle Cephas is sure his are in,” laughed Marion. “I think it is
only the outside of us that isn’t alike.”

Very often Judith was allowed to sit in the study with her books and
writing.

Mr. Kenney told her that she never disturbed him, that he would be
disturbed if she were not there with her books and table in the
bay-window.

“Ask me a question whenever you like,” he said one day.

But her questions were kept for Miss Marion. The year went on to
Judith in household work, in study, in church work and “growing up”
with the village girls; Nettie Evans and Jean Draper were her chief
friends. The year went on to Marion. June came; the new minister and
his sister had been a year in Bensalem.

Marion told him that his sermons were growing up, because his boys
and girls were growing up.

In this year Marion Kenney had discovered Aunt Affy.

She said to her one afternoon in the entry bedroom: “I was hungry to
find you; I knew I wanted somebody. I knew you were in the world,
because if you were not in the world, I should not be hungry for you.”

“‘If it were not so, I would have told you,’” said Aunt Affy, in the
confident tone in which she always repeated the Lord’s own words.

Judith heard the words: the wonderful words, and in her fashion, made
a commentary upon them: when things were not so, and couldn’t be so,
God told you, so that you needn’t be too disappointed; he wouldn’t
let you hope too long for things _and build on them_—that is, if you
were not wilful about them. You might think just a little while about
a thing, and not be silly about it, and if it were not so you would
soon find out. She had found out about boarding-school—only she had
been pretty bad about that all by herself, and did not deserve to
have Miss Marion for a teacher.

_Was Miss Marion paid?_ She had never thought of it until this moment.

It was “rag carpet afternoon.” Judith coaxed Aunt Rody to allow her
to take her half-finished ball and pile of rags up garret again,
after Miss Marion came, but Aunt Rody sternly refused: “When I was a
little girl I did my stent, company or no company. You can see Miss
Kenney after you are through.”

“But I am so slow,” sighed the rag-carpet sewer.

“Be fast, then,” was the grim advice.

Judith and her carpet rags were on the floor of the entry between the
two bed-rooms; Aunt Rody was sitting in her bed-room in a rocker
combing her long gray hair; the door of Aunt Affy’s room opposite was
open; Aunt Affy was seated in her rocker mending the sleeve of a coat
for Cephas; Marion Kenney in her privileged fashion had come into the
back yard and knocked at the open entry door.

Lifting her head, Judith saw her in the rush-bottomed chair; she had
thrown her hat aside, her face was toward Aunt Affy.

Marion Kenney was Judith’s ideal; she was such a dainty maiden, with
brown hair and brown eyes, the most bewitching ways, and so true.

It was happiness enough for Judith to sit or stand near her to watch
and to listen; and, this afternoon, she had to sit in the entry far
away from her and sew carpet rags.

“Aunt Rody,” called Marion across the hall, in an audacious voice,
“may Judith bring her ball and rags in here?”

“Affy doesn’t want that room cluttered up,” was the slow, ungracious
response.

“Oh, yes, I do,” said Aunt Affy, eagerly. “I like it cluttered up.”

“Go then, Judith,” was the severe permission; “you are all children
together, I verily believe.”

With a merry “Thank you” Marion sprang to help gather the rags, and
deposited them and Judith on the rag carpet between herself and Aunt
Affy.

If it had not been for the rags and the ball that grew so tediously,
there would have been nothing in the world for Judith to wish for.

“Aunt Affy, I brought a question to-day, as I always do,” began
Marion, and Judith’s fingers stayed that she might hear the question
and the answer.

She did not know how to ask Marion’s questions, but she did know how
to understand something of Aunt Affy’s answers. In her spiritual and
intellectual appreciation she was far ahead of anyone’s knowledge of
her. She had a talent for receptivity and, girl as she was, for
discipline.

“If you had read the Bible through forty times, as Aunt Affy has, you
would know all the answers,” said Judith.

“Forty times,” repeated Marion, in amazement.

“I did not tell her; she found it out,” replied Aunt Affy, with
humility; “I read my mother’s Bible, and Judith found dates and
numbers in the back of it, so I had to tell her it was the number of
times I had read it through.”

“You were as young as I when you began,” said Marion.

“I was twenty; I felt so alone somehow, that year, I yearned for it.
I read it through in less than a year, then I began again, and next
year again, now it is second nature; I should be lost without it.”

“What _is_ second nature?” asked the girl on the floor, among the
carpet rags.

“It is something that is so much a part of yourself,—that comes after
you have your first nature—that it is as much your nature as if you
were born first so,” answered Aunt Affy with pauses for clearness.
“You feel as if you were born the second time, and it would be as
hard to get rid of as though you were born the first time with it.”

“Carpet rags will never be my second nature,” sighed Judith, picking
up a long, red strip. “I wish reading the Bible would.”

“Aunt Affy, it is only this,” began Marion, again, flushing a little
with the effort of bringing her secret into spoken words. “I want
somebody to do good to; I have my class in Sunday school, and that is
a great deal, but it doesn’t satisfy—and there must be somebody; if
it were not so, I wouldn’t be so hungry to do it. I say it with all
humility; I know there is something in me to give, and it is growing.
But I don’t know how to find somebody.”

Judith’s fingers dropped the long, red strip; it would be a story to
hear Aunt Affy tell Miss Marion how to find somebody.

“Then, you are just ready to hear my story.”

“I knew you had it; I saw it in your face.”

“It is one of the true stories, the stories as true as Bible stories,
that you and I are living every day.”

How Judith’s face glowed. Was _she_ living a true story? As real as
the Bible stories?

“God helps and hears now, as quickly, as willingly, as sufficiently,
as he did in the old Bible times; we live in the new Bible times. I
heard a woman once wishing for a _new_ Bible, the old Bible seemed
written so long ago, and about people who lived so long ago. We are
making a new Bible; our life is a new Acts of the Disciples.”

And she was in it? How could Judith think of carpet rags? Unless
carpet rags were in it, too.

“I like that,” said Marion, “for Acts has been called the Gospel of
the Risen Lord, and we know He _is_ risen, and with us in the Holy
Spirit.”

Aunt Affy was silent a moment; like Judith her fingers stayed and
would not work.

“Yes,” she said, too satisfied to say another word.

“Aunt Affy’s Bible is full of marks and dates,” said Judith, “as if
she were writing her new Bible in her old one.”

“Now I’ll tell you how I found somebody. I wanted somebody to give
to, as you do. I felt full of good things to give. The village was
more full of young people then; now the boys go to the city, or away
off somewhere, then they stayed and married village girls. There were
people enough, but I did not know how to find the one willing to take
something from me. So I prayed about it: my giving, and the somebody.
The first thing I learned when I began to live in the Bible was to
pray about everything as Bible folks did—I wanted to do all the right
things they did, and shape my life as near to God as some of them
did.”

Aunt Affy never talked as naturally as when talking to girls; she
felt that step by step she had been over their ground. As Rody said,
Affy had never grown up. A woman apart from the world, she lived a
wide life; every day her clear vision swept from childhood to old
womanhood.

“Before the answer came I read in the Old Testament (for all these
things happened for our sakes, the New Testament tells us, throwing
light on the old stories), three verses in the first chapter of
Judges. How I studied it. And how much for myself I found in it—and
for you. Joshua was dead; the children of Israel had no human
counsellor, so ‘they asked the Lord.’ They knew he would speak to
them as plainly as Joshua had. They had work to do, as you and I
have; God’s own planned work. They asked who should go up first to
the work; the Lord said: Judah. That was plain enough. As plain as he
says to you: ‘Marion, do this.’”

“_How_ does he say it to me?”

“In two ways. First by giving you something to give. Then giving you
the longing to find somebody, to give to.”

“Yes,” said Marion, in a full tone.

“With the permission he gave a promise.”

“I _like_ a promise to work on; I feel so sure,” said Marion,
brightly.

“This promise was: Behold I have delivered the land into his hand. It
is given to him, still he must go and get it; he must work and get
it. God does not often put ready-made things into our hands; if he
did we would not be co-workers.”

Judith understood. Aunt Affy would not have thought of telling these
things to Judith.

“That is his way of working for us, working _in_ us. His work does
not interfere with our work, only makes our work sure and strong. We
speak the words; he keeps them from falling to the ground. Judah was
the strongest tribe; he had been made ready for pioneer work; the
first thing he did was to speak to Simeon, his brother, and say: Come
with me. He found somebody to work with him. But he had to go first.
He chose Simeon. We may choose somebody to work with us.”

“But, Aunt Affy, I meant somebody to work _for_,” replied Marion, who
had a mission to somebody.

“There is nobody in the world to work _for_; it is always somebody to
work with. We are all co-workers with God. The somebody you wish to
find is a co-worker, too. Why not? Has God chosen only _you_ for His
work?”

Marion looked ashamed; frightened at herself, and ashamed.

“How could I be so proud?”

“Oh, we all can,” said Aunt Affy, smiling. “And this brings me to my
own story.”

“The new Bible,” said Judith, eagerly.

“One day I asked our Father to bring some one to me; my life has
never been a going out, for Rody could never spare me, it has been a
bringing in, instead; then I came in here and read about Judah and
Simeon, and waited. The waiting is always a part of it.”

“Why?” asked Judith impatiently.

“Because God says so; that is the best reason I know. And my somebody
came. Somebody to help in the work planned for both of us. And the
happy thing about it (one of the happy things) was that the somebody
started to come to me before I began to ask. Sometimes, people say
things will happen if we don’t pray; perhaps they will, it is not for
me to say they will not, but the happening will not be in _answer to
prayer_, and that has a joyfulness of its own, that nobody knows
except the One who answers and the one who prays. That is a joy too
great to be told. Sometimes, I know that I have been as happy over an
answered prayer as I _can_ be. And I can be very happy,” Aunt Affy
said, with happy tears shining in her eyes.

“This somebody was not anybody new, or strange, or very far off; when
I thought about it there was no surprise in it; it was somebody who
had been coming to meet me a long while—in preparation. Then, we were
ready to be co-workers in a very simple way, making no stir, but I
trust our work together will not prove hay or stubble in the last
day. It was somebody I chose myself; we do a great deal of our own
choosing. But it was God’s work and God’s workers, like Judah and
Simeon. There was prayer first, and Judah using his knowledge and
judgment. No wonder God could keep his promise; they helped him keep
his promise, as you and I do. Do you remember what Andrew did after
Jesus called him and asked him to spend that day with him? ‘_He first
findeth his own brother._’”

“My only brother _is_ found,” said Marion. “Now some one else may be
‘first.’”

“And I haven’t any,” said listening Judith. “But I have my cousin
Don; I wonder about him.”

“We each have our own; whoever we find is our own. This is our own
world,” Aunt Affy replied in her happy voice.

Marion’s question was answered. Aunt Affy always understood what was
surging underneath her restless, foamy current of talk.

Since she had known Aunt Affy she had grown quieter; she had come to
Bensalem “in a fume,” she told Aunt Affy, and the air, or
“something,” was making things look different.

Aunt Affy smiled her wise, sweet smile; she knew the time came to
girls when things had to “look different.”




XVII. THE STORY OF A KEY.


    “What time I am afraid, I will
    Trust in Thee.”

Aunt Rody had a way of bringing her work and sitting somewhere near
when Marion came; the girl’s vivacity, and gossip of village folks,
gossip in its heavenliest sense, attracted the hard-visaged,
hard-handed, sharp-tongued old woman.

An afternoon with Marion Kenney was to the old woman, who never read
stories, what a volume of short stories is to other people; stories,
humorous, pathetic, and always with a touch of the best in life. And,
somehow, the best found an answering chord in something in Aunt Rody.

But for that something nobody could have lived in the house with Aunt
Rody.

The door across the hall was open; all was quiet within the small
bedroom.

For the world Aunt Rody would not acknowledge any weakness by
bringing her chair into Affy’s room, or even into the entry. She was
not fond of company; and all Bensalem knew it. Cephas asked her years
ago if she wanted to be buried in a corner of the graveyard all by
herself and the brambles.

“Heaven is a sociable place, Rody, and you might as well get used to
it.”

Aunt Affy’s story was done, there was no sound in the other bedroom;
Judith picked among her colored strips.

“I had a letter from my cousin Don last night, Miss Marion,” said
Judith, “and he said he was glad I loved the parsonage.”

“Did he?” asked Marion, twisting one of Judith’s curls about her
finger.

“O, Judith, I know you want me to tell you a story,” she said
hastily, as Aunt Affy slipped on her glasses again and took the coat
sleeve into her hand. To Marion that coat sleeve was a part of Aunt
Affy’s “new Bible.”

“Oh, yes,” replied Judith, with pure delight.

“Judith would have enjoyed the age of tradition,” said Aunt Affy;
“just think,” in her voice of young enthusiasm, “instead of reading
it, what it would be to hear from Andrew’s own lips the story of that
day.”

“We are living there now,” said Marion; “I am. The title of my life
just now is ‘The Parsonage story of Village Life.’ But the story I
want to tell Judith to-day is an episode in my own life. Seven years
ago. I haven’t even told Roger yet, and I tell him everything. I
think I never told any one before. I used to be at the head of things
in those days; father was often away, and the children were all
younger, except Roger, and mother wasn’t strong. We lived in an old
house in a broad city street, away back, with a box-bordered yard in
front, and lilacs, and old-fashioned things behind; we were all born
there, even Roger, the eldest, and our only moving times was in the
spring and fall cleaning. Once a friend of mine moved, and I was
enough in the moving times to be there at an impromptu dinner; we
stood around a pine table in the kitchen, or sat on anything we could
find, a firkin, or peach basket turned upside down, and they let me
eat a piece of pie in my fingers. All I wanted was to do something
just like it myself. And when mother said I might stay all my
birthday week and help Aunt Bessie move, I thought my ship had come
in, laden with moving times.

“Aunt Bessie lived in the city in a beautiful home, but something had
happened that summer; Uncle Frank was in Europe and could not come
home, and Aunt Bessie and the children had to go into the country for
a year.

“The ‘country’ was only seven miles away; first the train, then the
horse cars, and, then, a two-mile drive.

“The wagons from the country came for the things Monday morning;
there were two big loads (everything else had been sold), and in the
country home we expected to find new and plain furniture that had
already been sent from the stores.

“Monday the children and I had a hilarious time at dinner; moving
times had begun, and I _did_ eat a piece of pie in my fingers. I was
too full of the fun of things to notice that Aunt Bessie ate no
dinner, and Elsie and I were teasing Rob in noisy play after dinner,
and did not see that she was very white and scarcely spoke at all.

“‘Marion,’ she said at last, ‘I cannot conquer it; I’ve tried for
half the day and all night; I cannot hold up my head another minute;
one of my terrible headaches has come upon me. Jane will have to stay
here with me and baby and Rob—do you think _you_ could—but no, you
couldn’t—it’s too lonely for you—and I may not get there to-night.’

“‘Go to Sunny Plains alone—and have an adventure! Oh, Aunt Bessie!
It’s too good to be true.’

“Unmindful of her headache I clapped my hands, and danced Rob up and
down. It was all my own moving time.

“‘But, Marion, what would your mother think?’ she protested, weakly;
‘of course there are near neighbors—and you might take something to
eat—and, if I do not get there, you must go across the way and stay
all night. The old man who had the two white horses—you remember him,
said he was our nearest neighbor, and he hoped we would be
neighborly. He said he had a daughter about your age—you might ask
her—if I _do_ let you go—to stay with you all night.’

“‘But, after all,’ looking at our trim, colored maid of all work,
‘perhaps Jane may better go and you stay with me. And—’

“‘Oh, no, ma’am, oh, no, indeed, ma’am,’ tremulously interrupted Jane
(she was only two years older than I). ‘I couldn’t think of it; I
should die of fright. I never lived in a wilderness, and I expect to
give warning the first week, for I never can bear the country.’

“‘Now, Aunt Bessie, you see I have to go,’ I persuaded. ‘Jane can’t
help being afraid—and I didn’t know how to be afraid—really, I don’t
know what to be afraid of. Let Elsie go with me, and we’ll do
everything ourselves—have the house all in order for you to-morrow
morning, and have the most glorious time we ever had in our lives. My
Cousin Jennie isn’t fifteen, and she stayed a week over alone in the
country while Uncle and Auntie were away. Oh, _do_ let us go, Aunt
Bessie.’

“‘Somebody must, I suppose,’ half consented Aunt Bessie, who was
growing whiter every moment; ‘Elsie, are you brave enough to go with
Marion?’

“‘Yes, mamma,’ said nine-year-old Elsie, in her grave little way,
‘_but I don’t know what the brave is for_.’

“‘I’m glad you don’t,’ smiled her mother. ‘Well, Jane—I hope I am not
doing wrong—fix two boxes of lunch—and, you know you take the train
to Paterson and then the horse-cars to Hanover—I will give you five
dollars, Marion, you will have to take a carriage at Hanover—but you
know all about it—you went with me to look at the house—and you know
where to have the furniture put as I told you that day—and you can
get things at the store—half a mile off—Jane, you will have to keep
Rob and baby—Marion, I don’t know _what_ your mother will say—it’s
well there was a load of things left so that I may have a bed
to-night—’

“During this prologue my feet were dancing, and my fingers rubbing
each other impatiently, I was so afraid she would end with a
sufficient reason for not allowing us to go. I could not believe that
we were really off until we sat in the train, each with a huge,
stuffed lunch-box, and I with five dollars in my pocketbook and my
head confused with ten thousand parting directions, among which was,
many times repeated: ‘Be sure to _ask_ that girl to stay all night
with you.’

“At the terminus at Hanover we got out and stood and looked around.
Elsie was a little thing, but she was wise, and I liked to ask her
advice.

“‘Aunt Bessie found a horse and a carriage at the blacksmith’s shop
that day, didn’t she?’

“This was hardly asking advice, but Elsie brightened, and answered
deliberately: ‘We walked on a canal-boat, then, to the other side,
for the bridge was being built.’

“‘Then we are in the right place, for there’s the new bridge,’ I
exclaimed, relieved, for I missed the canal boat we had that day made
a bridge of.

“‘And we went down that way to the blacksmith’s shop,’ she said
pointing in a familiar direction. Yes, I remembered that. The
immensity of my undertaking was beginning to press upon me; I was
glad I had brought Elsie.

“With a business-like air we crossed the bridge, and walked along a
grass-bordered path to the blacksmith’s shop; there seemed to be two
shops in the long building; before one open door a horse was being
shod, before the other a group of men stood with hands in their
pockets watching a fire that had died down into a red-hot circle—the
circle looked like red-hot iron. As we waited for the horse to be
harnessed and brought, Elsie and I stood across the street watching
the red-hot iron ring—as large as a wagon wheel.

“Elsie looked as though she were forgetting everything in that red
wonder, and I began to feel a trifle strange and lonely, for my
little cousin was so self-absorbed that she was not much company.

“‘Hallo, there!’ called the blacksmith as a boy drove a two-seated
wagon out from behind somewhere.

“With my best business air I asked the price before we stepped up
into the wagon and replied, ‘Very well,’ to his modest one dollar.

“The drive was beautiful; Elsie looked and looked but scarcely spoke.
But she did exclaim when we crossed the railroad, at the tiniest
railroad station, we, or anybody else, ever saw.

“It was a brown shed, without a window even—the door stood wide open,
there was no one within, no stove, no seats, no ticket office.

“‘Well, we are in the wilderness,’ I said aloud.

“And then, the ‘store.’ I wish I could tell you about that store. It
was about as large as—a hen-coop, everything, everything in it. I got
out and went in, for Aunt Bessie had asked me to inquire for letters
which she had directed to be sent to Sunny Plains. The post-office
was a rude desk and a few cubby-holes up on the wall above it; I saw
a letter laid on a meal sack—this place behind the store seemed to be
both post-office and granary.

“‘I’ll be down by and by—you are the new people, I suppose; I saw
your things go by,’ remarked a pleasant young man behind the counter;
‘I’ll come for orders. I hope you will trade with us.’

“‘Thank you, I suppose so. And I wish you would bring some kerosene,’
I said, remembering that I must burn a lamp all night.

“Along the half mile on the way to the new house were scattered
several farmhouses, then came the church, and churchyard, and, on a
rise beyond the churchyard, a pretty house.

“‘_That’s_ it,’ Elsie said, ‘I know the house.’

“The key was in the possession of the white-haired old man with the
two horses, and his house was opposite the church.

“Elsie was too shy to go to the door and knock and ask for Mrs.
Pettingill’s key, but I was very glad to go; I began to feel that I
would like to see the girl who would stay all night with us. She
answered my knock, a tall girl, with an encouraging face. She brought
the key, saying the wagons were all unloaded; two had come Saturday
with things; her father had said my mother and all the family were
coming before night.

“‘Aunt Bessie was too ill,’ I replied, glad to have the neighborly
subject opened so easily, ‘and she said I might ask you to come over
and stay all night with Elsie and me.’

“‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ she answered, hastily; ‘I’m going away—I’m all
dressed now. I’m sorry, too,’ she added, sympathetically, at
something in my face, ‘but I can’t disappoint my grandmother; she
sent for me because she is sick.’

‘Then, of course, you will have to go. (Then I began to know what
‘brave’ meant.) Thank you for the key.’

“Up the steep, weed-tangled drive we went to the side door; the
boy-driver unlocked the door for us, giving a view of the moving
times within. I paid him his dollar, and he drove away, leaving us in
the wilderness.

“Elsie stood and looked around as usual.

“It _was_ a wilderness, a wilderness everywhere; the two-story house,
painted brown, with red trimmings, was set in the middle of a large
field; it had been untenanted for two years; the hedgerows had grown
luxuriant, the grass was knee-deep; the house faced the west (the
driver told me that), and the west this August afternoon was an
immense field of cabbages bordered by tall trees; above it was the
sky, beyond that might be anything, or everything; at the east
stretched a mown field, dotted with trees, an apple-tree that looked
a hundred years old near the fence, then a thick woods, over the top
of which ran a line of green, low hills; among the greenness a red
slanting roof was visible; at the south stretched other fields, among
the trees a white house, with outhouses, a well-sweep; at the north,
beyond two fields, in which cows were pasturing, in a grove, a thick,
green grove, was the churchyard, with rows and rows of white stones,
now and then a white or a granite monument; the brown church-tower
arose above the tree-tops. And this was my wilderness for a night,
with the sky, the protecting, loving sky over all, and bending down
to enfold us all into its sunshine.

“‘It’s pretty,’ said Elsie.

“‘Yes, it is pretty. Now we must go in and go to work.’

“The opened door led into the small dining-room; small and so
crowded; as my big brother said, there was a place for everything,
and everything was in it.

“The front parlor, back parlor, hall, all crowded; up stairs there
was nothing but emptiness and roominess.

“The kitchen, such a pretty kitchen, was crowded with everything,
too—and a pine table, a firkin, and an up-turned, or down-turned
peach basket.

“I was in a whirl, an ecstasy, an enthusiasm; but as somebody
remarks, nothing is done without enthusiasm; now what should I do
with mine, that, and nothing else?

“Suddenly, to Elsie’s great perplexity, I gave a shout and rushed out
the dining-room door, and down through the tangles into the road.

“I had espied two men, working men, in shirt sleeves, with coats
thrown over their arms. Farmers, or farmer’s sons, probably, great,
true-hearted sons of the soil, knightly fellows who were ready to—

“‘Are you—do you know anybody—’ I began, breathless, and with flying
hair.

“They stopped and gazed at me.

“‘We have just moved in. I would like things moved, and bedsteads put
up, and boxes opened.’

“‘We can do it,’ said one promptly.

“He had lost one eye; the other eye looked honest.

“‘Yes, we’re out of the work,’ said his companion.

“He had a stiff neck; he did not look quite so honest.

“‘Can you come now?’ I faltered.

“‘Yes, right off. Come, Jim,’ was the cheerful response. ‘All we want
is to be told what to do.’ I could always tell people what to do; at
home I was called the ‘manager.’

“For two hours I kept those men busy; Elsie, with grave eyes and
sealed lips, followed us about. I tried to forget the stiff neck, and
the eye that did not look honest, and had forgotten both, when there
was a heavy rap on the open dining-room door.

“There stood the young man from the store.

“I had forgotten that I did not like those two busy men, who never
spoke unless spoken to, still I was glad enough to cry when I saw
this familiar and friendly face.

“I had known him so long ago I could tell him anything.

“‘H’m. Somebody to help you,’ he said, stepping in, pad and pencil in
hand, for an order.

“The men were in the back parlor; one was unpacking a box of books,
the other was sweeping.

“Yes,” I replied confidently, “I needed help and I called them in. I
don’t believe—” my voice sinking to a whisper, “that they are tramps,
do you?”

“Oh, no. They are hatters. They have been about here two or three
years; the factory is closed. The worst thing about them is drink.
They will drink up all you give them. Still, it was hardly a right
thing for you to do.”

“Elsie’s arm was linked in mine, her big eyes fixed on the young
man’s face.

“‘A thing is always right—after it is done,’ I said desperately.

“‘Whew! you are a wise one,’ he said quizzically. ‘I’ve brought
kerosene—have you lamps for to-night? Oh, yes, I see you have. Sugar,
bread coffee, tea, what will you have?’

“I gave the order; he wrote it, then lingered.

“‘They are about done for to-night, I suppose.’

“‘Yes, I shall send them away.’

“He drove away, and I was left with my hatters.

“‘You have worked two hours,’ I said; ‘what do I owe you?’

“The man with one eye looked at the man with a stiff neck.

“‘Fifty cents, eh, Jim?’

“‘That’s about it,’ said Jim.

“I did not bring my pocket-book down stairs, there were two bills in
it; I handed each a twenty-five-cent piece with the most reassuring
and disarming air (one air was for myself, the other for them), and
thanked them, hoping they would soon have work at their trade.

“They said ‘thank you’ and ‘good-night,’ and Elsie and I were left
alone.

“‘Aren’t you hungry?’ asked Elsie, ‘It is late and dark.’

“‘So it is: we will have supper in the kitchen—and I will fill a lamp
to burn all night.’

“That supper was not quite as much fun as I thought it would be;
Elsie munched a sandwich and wished she were home; out the window the
fire-flies were glistening in the tall grass; the gravestones loomed
up very white and tall and stiff.

“‘We’ll go to bed early,’ I said cheerily, ‘and be up early in the
morning to put everything in order. Aunt Bessie will be sure to be
here early.’

“Elsie followed me up stairs still munching a sandwich. She, too,

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