Chapter IV: Part 4

The children could not forgive their great-grandfather for having had such a sinister-looking garment, or for leaving it behind him to hang in the grim old garret and frighten them. Solemn as the garret looked, no doubt this was one of its jokes: to dress itself up in shadows and pretend things to tease the children, as we have known some real persons to do. It certainly was not fair, when they were up there all alone.

The scuttle in the roof was shut, in winter, to keep out the snow. A long ladder led up to it from the middle garret, and close to this ladder stood another uncanny-looking object--the bath-closet.

The family had always been inveterate bathers, but surely this shower bath must have capped the climax of its cold-water experiments.

It was contrived so that a pail of water, carried up by the scuttle ladder and emptied into a tilting vessel on top of the closet, could be made to descend on a sudden in a deluge of large drops upon the head of the person inside. There was no escape for that person; the closet gave him but just room to stand up under the infliction, and once the pail was tilted, the water was bound to come.

The children thought of this machine with shivering and dread. They had heard it said--perhaps in the kitchen--that their little grandmother had “nearly killed herself” in that shower bath, till the doctor forbade her to use it any more.

Its walls were screens of white cotton cloth, showing a mysterious opaque glimmer against the light, also the shadowy outlines of some objects within which the children could not account for. The narrow screen door was always shut, and no child ever dreamed of opening it or of meddling with the secrets of that pale closet. It was enough to have to pass it on lonesome errands, looming like a “sheeted ghost” in the garret’s perpetual twilight.

The garret, like some of the great foreign churches, had a climate of its own; still and dry, but subject to extremes of heat and cold. In summer it was the tropics, in winter the frozen pole.

But it had its milder moods also,--when it was neither hot nor cold, nor light nor dark; when it beamed in mellow half-tones upon its youthful visitors, left off its ugly frightening tricks, told them “once upon a time” stories, and even showed them all its old family keepsakes.

These pleasant times occurred about twice every year, at the spring and fall house-cleaning, when the women with brooms and dust-pans invaded the garret and made a cheerful bustle in that deserted place.

The scuttle hole in the roof was then open, to give light to the cleaners, and a far, bright square of light shone down. It was as if the garret smiled.

All the queer old things, stowed away under the eaves, behind boxes and broken furniture and stoves and rolls of carpets, were dragged forth; and they were as good as new discoveries to the children who had not seen them nor heard their stories since last house-cleaning time.

There was the brass warming-pan, with its shining lid full of holes like a pepper-box. On this warming-pan, as a sort of sled, the children used to ride by turns--one child seated on, or in, the pan, two others dragging it over the floor by the long, dark wood handle.

And there were the pattens “which step-great-grandmother Sheppard brought over from England;” one pair with leather straps and one with straps of cotton velvet, edged with a tarnished gilt embroidery. The straps were meant to lace over a full-grown woman’s instep, but the children managed somehow to keep them on their feet, and they clattered about, on steel-shod soles, with a racket equal to the midnight clatter of Santa Claus’s team of reindeer.

There was a huge muff of dark fur, kept in a tall blue paper bandbox; the children could bury their arms in it up to the shoulder. It had been carried by some lady in the time of short waists and scant skirts and high coat collars; when girls covered their bare arms with long kid gloves and tucked their little slippered toes into fur-lined foot-muffs and went on moonlight sleighing parties, dressed as girls dress nowadays for a dance.

One of these very same foot-muffs (the moths had once got into it) led a sort of at-arm’s-length existence in the garret, neither quite condemned nor yet allowed to mingle with unimpeachable articles of clothing. And there was a “foot-stove” used in old times on long drives in winter or in the cold country meeting-houses. They were indefatigable visitors and meeting-goers,--those old-time Friends. Weather and distance were nothing thought of; and in the most troublous times they could go to and fro in their peaceful character, unmolested and unsuspected, though no doubt they had their sympathies as strong as other people’s.

A china bowl is still shown, in one branch of grandfather’s family, which one of the great-aunts, then a young woman, carried on her saddle-bow through both the British and Continental lines, from her old home on Long Island to her husband’s house on the west bank of the Hudson above West Point.

No traveling member of the society ever thought of “putting-up” for the night anywhere but at a Friend’s house. Journeys were planned in stages from such a Friend’s house to such another one’s, or from meeting to meeting. In days when letter postage was dear and newspapers were almost unknown, such visits were keenly welcome, and were a chief means by which isolated country families kept up their communication with the world.

There were many old-fashioned household utensils in the garret, the use of which had to be explained to the children; and all this was as good as history, and more easily remembered than much that is written in books.

There was the old “Dutch oven” that had stood in front of roaring hearth-fires in days when Christmas dinners were cooked without the aid of stoves or ranges. And there were the iron firedogs, the pot-hooks and the crane which were part of the fireplace furniture. And the big wool-wheel for the spinning of yarn, the smaller and lady-like flax-wheel, and the tin candle moulds for the making of tallow candles; and a pleasure it must have been to see the candles “drawn,” when the pure white tallow had set in the slender tubes and taken the shape of them perfectly,--each candle, when drawn out by the wick, as cold and hard and smooth as alabaster. And there was the “baby-jumper” and the wicker “runaround,” to show that babies had always been babies--just the same restless little pets then as now--and that mother’s and nurse’s arms were as apt to get tired.

The garret had kept a faithful family record, and hence it told of sickness and suffering as well as of pleasure and business and life and feasting.

A little old crutch, padded by some woman’s hand with an attempt to make it handsome as well as comfortable, stood against the chimney on the dark side next the eaves. It was short enough for a child of twelve to lean upon. It had seen considerable use, for the brown velvet pad was worn quite thin and gray. Had the little cripple ever walked again? With what feelings did the mother put that crutch away up-garret when it was needed no more? The garret did not say how that story of pain had ended; or whether it was long or short. The children never sought to know. It was one of the questions which they did not ask: they knew very little about pain themselves, and perhaps they did not fully enter into the meaning of that sad little relic.

Still less did they understand the reverence with which the house-cleaning women handled a certain bare wooden frame, neither handsome nor comfortable looking. It had been made to support an invalid in a sitting posture in bed; and the invalid for whom it was provided, in her last days, had suffered much from difficulty of breathing, and had passed many weary hours, sometimes whole nights, supported by this frame. It had for those who knew its use the sacredness of association with that long ordeal of pain, endured with perfect patience and watched over with constant love.

But these were memories which the little children could not share. When their prattling questions touched upon the sore places, the wounds in the family past, they were not answered, or were put aside till some more fitting occasion, or until they were old enough to listen with their hearts.

Under the eaves there was an old green chest whose contents, year after year, the children searched through in the never-failing hope that they should find something which had not been there the year before. There were old account-books with their stories of loss and gain which the children could not read. There were bundles of old letters which they were not allowed to examine. There were “ink-portraits,” family profiles in silhouette, which they thought very funny, especially in the matter of coat collars and “back hair.” There were schoolgirl prizes of fifty years ago; the schoolgirls had grown into grandmammas, and some were dead. There was old-fashioned art-work, paintings on velvet or satin; boxes covered with shells; needlebooks and samplers showing the most exemplary stitches in colors faded by time. There were handsomely bound volumes of “Extracts,” containing poems and long passages of elegant prose copied in pale-brown ink, in the proper penmanship of the time. And there was a roll of steel-plate engravings which had missed the honor of frames; and of these the children’s favorite picture was one called The Wife.

It is some time since I have seen that picture; I may be wrong about some of the details. But as I remember her, the wife was a long-necked lady with very large eyes, dressed in white, with large full sleeves and curls falling against her cheek. She held a feather hand-screen, and she was doing nothing but look beautiful and sweetly attentive to her husband, who was seated on the other side of the table and was reading aloud to her by the light of an old-fashioned astral lamp.

This, of course, was the ideal wife, so thought the little girls. Every other form of wifehood known to them was more or less made up of sewing and housework and everyday clothes. Even in the family past, it had the taint of the Dutch oven and the spinning-wheel and the candle moulds upon it. They looked at their finger-tips; no, it was not likely theirs would ever grow to be long and pointed like hers. _The_ wife no one of them should ever be--only _a_ wife perhaps, with the usual sewing-work, and not enough white dresses to afford to wear one every evening.

It took one day to clean the garret and another to put things away. Winter clothing had to be brushed and packed in the chests where it was kept; the clothes closet had to be cleaned; then its door was closed and locked. The last of the brooms and dust-pans beat a retreat, the stair door was shut, and the dust and the mystery began to gather as before.

But summer, though no foe to dust, was a great scatterer of the garret mysteries. Gay, lightsome summer peeped in at the half-moon window and smiled down from the scuttle in the roof. Warm weather had come, the sash that fitted the gable window was taken out permanently. Outdoor sounds and perfumes floated up. Athwart the sleeping sunbeams golden dust motes quivered, and bees from the garden sailed in and out on murmuring wing.

If a thunderstorm came up suddenly, then there was a fine race up two flights of stairs!--and whoever reached the scuttle ladder first had the first right to climb it, and to pull in the shutter that covered the scuttle hole. There was time, perhaps, for one breathless look down the long slope of bleached shingles,--at the tossing treetops, the meadow grass whipped white, the fountain’s jet of water bending like a flame and falling silent on the grass, the neighbor’s team hurrying homeward, and the dust rising along the steep upward grade of the village road.

Then fell the first great drop--another, and another; the shutter hid the storm-bright square of sky, and down came the rain--trampling on the shingles, drumming in the gutters, drowning the laughing voices below; and suddenly the garret grew cool, and its mellow glow darkened to brown twilight.

Under the gable window there stood for many years a white pine box, with a front that let down on leather hinges. It was very clean inside and faintly odorous. The children called it the bee-box, and they had a story of their own to account for the tradition that this box had once held rich store of honey in the comb.

A queen bee, they said, soaring above the tops of the cherry-trees in swarming-time, had drifted in at the garret window with all the swarm in tow; and where her royal caprice had led them, the faithful workers remained and formed a colony in the bee-box, and, like honest tenants, left a quantity of their sweet wares behind to pay for their winter’s lodging.

There may have been some truth in this story, but the honey was long since gone, and so were the bees. The bee-box, in the children’s time, held only files of old magazines packed away for binding. Of course they never were bound; and the children who used to look at the pictures in them, grew into absent-minded girls with half-lengths of hair falling into their eyes when they stooped too low over their books,--as they always would, to read. The bee-box was crammed till the lid would no longer shut. And now the dusty pages began to gleam and glow, and voices that all the world listened to spoke to those young hearts for the first time in the garret’s stillness.

The rapt young reader, seated on the garret floor, never thought of looking for a date, nor asked, “Who tells this story?” Those voices were as impersonal as the winds and the stars of the summer night.

It might have been twenty years, it might have been but a year before, that Lieutenant Strain led his brave little band into the deadly tropic wilderness of Darien. It is doubtful if those child-readers knew why he was sent, by whom, or what to do. The beginning of the narrative was in a “missing number” of the magazine. It mattered not; they read from the heart, not from the head. It was the toils, the resolves, the sufferings of the men that they cared about,--their characters and conduct under trial. They agonized with “Truxton” over his divided duty, and they wept at his all but dying words:--

“Did I do right, Strain?”

They worshiped, with unquestioning faith, at the shrine of that factitious god of battles, Abbot’s “Napoleon.” With beating hearts and burning cheeks they lived in the tragic realism of “Witching Times.” “Maya, the Princess,” and “The Amber Gods,” “In a Cellar,” “The South Breaker,” stormed their fresh imaginations, and left them feverishly dreaming; and there in the garret’s tropic warmth and stillness they first heard the voice of the great master who gave us Colonel Newcome, and who wrought us to such passionate sympathy with the fortunes of Clive and Ethel. And here, too, the last number was missing, and for a long time the young readers went sorrowing for Clive, and thinking that he and Ethel had been parted all their lives.

These garret readings were frequently a stolen joy, but perhaps “mother” was in the secret of the bee-box, and did not search very closely or call very loud when a girl was missing, about the middle of the warm, midsummer afternoons.

About midsummer the sage was picked and spread upon newspapers upon the garret floor to dry. That was a pleasant task. Children are sensitive to the touch of beauty connected with their labors. Their eyes lingered with delight upon the color, the crêpe-like texture of the fragrant sage, bestrewing the brown garret floor with its delicate life already wilting in the dry, warm air.

“September winds should never blow upon hops,” the saying is; therefore the hops for a whole year’s yeast-making were gathered in the wane of summer; and here, too, was a task that brought its own reward. The hops made a carpet for the garret floor, more beautiful even than the blue-green sage; and as the harvest was much larger, so the fair living carpet spread much wider. It was a sight to see, in the low light of the half-moon window, all the fragile pale green balls, powdered to the heart’s core with gold-colored pollen--a field of beauty spread there for no eye to see. Yet it was not wasted. The children did not speak of what they felt, but nothing that was beautiful, or mysterious, or stimulating to the fancy in those garret days, was ever lost. It is often the slight impressions that, like the “scent of the roses,” wear best and most keenly express the past.

No child ever forgot the physiognomy of those rooms at grandfather’s: the mid-afternoon stillness when the sun shone on the lemon-tree, and its flowers shed their perfume on the warm air of the sitting-room; the peculiar odor of the withering garden when October days were growing chill; the soft rustle of the wind searching among the dead leaves of the arbor; the cider-mill’s drone in the hazy distance; the creaking of the loaded wagons; the bang of the great barn doors when the wind swung them to.

No child of all those who have played in grandfather’s garret ever forgot its stories, its solemn, silent make-believes, the dreams they dreamed there when they were girls, or the books they read.

THE SPARE BEDROOM AT GRANDFATHER’S

It was the hour for fireside talks in the cañon: too early, as dusk falls on a short December day, for lamps to be lighted; too late to snatch a page or two more of the last magazine, by the low gleam that peered in the western windows.

Jack had done his part in the evening’s wood-carrying, and now was enjoying the fruits of honest toil, watching the gay red flames that becked and bowed up the lava-rock chimney. The low-ceiled room, with its rows of books, its guns and pipes and idols in Zuñi pottery, darkled in corners and glowed in spots, and the faces round the hearth were lighted as by footlights, in their various attitudes of thoughtfulness.

“Now, what is _that_?” cried Jack’s mamma, putting down the fan screen she held, and turning her head to listen.

It was only the wind booming over the housetop, but it had found a new plaything; it was strumming with a free hand and mighty on the long, taut wires that guyed the wash-shed stovepipe. The wash-shed was a post-script in boards and shingles hastily added to the main dwelling after the latter’s completion. It had no chimney, only four feet of pipe projecting from the roof, an item which would have added to the insurance had there been any insurance. The risk of fire was taken along with the other risks, but the family was vigilant.

Mrs. Gilmour listened till she sighed again. The wind, she said, reminded her of a sound she had not thought of for years,--the whirring of swallows’ wings in the spare bedroom chimney at home.

“Swallows in the chimney?” cried Jack, suddenly attentive. “How could they build fires then, without roasting the birds?”

“The chimneys were three stories high, and the swallows built near the top, I suppose. They had the sky and the stars for a ceiling to their dark little bedrooms. In spring there was never more than a blaze of sticks on the hearth--not that, unless we had visitors to stay. Sometimes a young swallow trying to fly fell out of the nest and fluttered across the hearth into the room. That was very exciting to us children. But at house-cleaning time a great bag of straw was stuffed up the chimney’s throat to save the hearth from falling soot and dried mud and the litter from the nests. It was a brick hearth painted red, and washed always with milk to make it shine. The andirons were such as you will see in the garret of any good old house in the East,--fluted brass columns with brass cones on top.

“It was in summer, when the bird colony was liveliest, that we used to hear the beating of wings in the chimney,--a smothered sound like the throbbing of a steamer’s wheels far off in a fog, or behind a neck of land.”

Jack asked more questions; the men seemed not inclined to talk, and the mother fell to remembering aloud, speaking sometimes to Jack, but often to the others. All the simple features of her old Eastern home had gained a priceless value, as things of a past gone out of her life which she had scarcely prized at the time. She was half jealous of her children’s attachment to the West, and longed to make them know the place of the family’s nativity, through such pictures of it as her memory could supply.

But her words meant more to herself than to any that listened.

“Did we ever sleep in that bedroom with the chimney-swallows?” asked Jack. He was thinking, What a mistake to stop up the chimney and cut off communication with such jolly neighbors as the swallows!

Yes, his mother said; he had slept there, but before he could remember. It was the winter he was three years old, when his father was in Deadwood.

There used to be such beautiful frost-pictures on the eastern window panes; and when the sun rose and the fire was lighted and the pictures faded, a group of little bronze-black cedars appeared, half a mile away, topping the ridge by the river, and beyond them were the solemn blue hills. Those hills and the cedars were as much a part of a winter’s sunrise on the Hudson as the sun himself.

Jack used to lie in bed and listen for the train, a signal his mother did not care to hear, for it meant she must get up and set a match to the fire, laid overnight in the big-bellied, air-tight stove that panted and roared on its four short legs, shuddering in a transport of sudden heat.

When the air of the room grew milder, Jack would hop out in his wrapper and slippers, and run to the north window to see what new shapes the fountain had taken in the night.

The jet of water in winter was turned low, and the spray of it froze and piled above the urn, changing as the wind veered and as the sun wasted it. On some mornings it looked like a weeping white lady in a crystal veil; sometimes a Niobe group, children clinging to a white, sad mother, who clasped them and bowed her head. When the sun peeped through the fir-trees, it touched the fountain statuary with sea tints of emerald and pearl.

Had Jack been old enough to know the story of Undine, he might have fancied that he saw her, on those winter mornings, and I am sure he would have wanted to fetch her in and warm her and dry her icy tears.

The spare-room mantelpiece was high. Jack could see only the tops of things upon it, even by walking far back into the room; but of a morning, mounted on the pillows of the great four-poster, he could explore the mantel’s treasures, which never varied nor changed places. There was the whole length and pattern of the tall silver-plated candlesticks and the snuffers in their tray; the Indian box of birch-bark overlaid with porcupine quills, which held concealed riches of shells and coral and dark sea beans; there was the centre vase of Derbyshire spar, two dolphins wreathing their tails to support a bacchante’s bowl crowned with grape leaves. In winter this vase held an arrangement of dried immortelles, yellow and pink and crimson, and some that verged upon magenta and should have been cast out as an offense to the whole; but grandmother had for flowers a charity that embraced every sin of color they were capable of. When her daughters grew up and put on airs of superior taste, they protested against these stiff mementos; but she was mildly inflexible; she continued to gather and to dry her “everlastings,” with faithful recognition of their prickly virtues. She was not one to slight old friends for a trifling mistake in color, though Art should put forth her edict and call them naught.

In the northeast corner of the room stood a great invalid chair, dressed, like a woman, in white dimity that came down to the floor all round. The plump feather cushion had an apron, as little Jack called it, which fell in neat gathers in front. The high stuffed sides projected, forming comfortable corners where a languid head might rest.

Here the pale young mothers of the family “sat up” for the first time to have their hair braided, or to receive the visits of friends; here, in last illnesses, a wan face sinking back showed the truth of the doctor’s verdict.

White dimity, alternating with a dark-red reps in winter, covered the seats of the fiddle-backed mahogany chairs. White marseilles or dimity covers were on the washstand, and the tall bureau had a swinging glass that rocked back against the wall and showed little Jack a picture of himself walking into a steep background of the room--a small chap in kilts, with a face somewhat out of drawing and of a bluish color; the floor, too, had a queer slant like the deck of a rolling vessel. But with all its faults, this presentation of himself in the glass was an appearance much sought after by Jack, even to the climbing on chairs to attain it.

When grandmother came to her home as a bride, the four-poster was in full panoply of high puffed feather-bed, valance and canopy and curtains of white dimity, “English” blankets, quilted silk comforter, and counterpane of heavy marseilles, in a bygone pattern. No pillow shams were seen in the house; its fashions never changed. The best pillow-cases were plain linen, hemstitched,--smooth as satin with much use, as Jack’s mother remembered them,--and the slender initials, in an old-fashioned hand, above the hem, had faded sympathetically to a pale yellow-brown.

Some of the house linen had come down from great-grandmother’s trousseau. It bore her maiden initials, E. B., in letters that were like the marking on old silver of that time; the gracious old Quaker names, sacred to the memory of gentle women and good housewives whose virtues would read like the last chapter of Proverbs, the words of King Lemuel, the prophecy which his mother taught him.

It was only after the daughters of the house grew up and were married and came home on visits with their children, that the spare bedroom fell into common use, and new fashions intruded as the old things wore out.

When Jack’s mother was a child, it still kept its solemn and festal character of birth and marriage and death chamber; and in times less vital it was set apart for such guests as the family delighted to honor. Little girls were not allowed to stray in there by themselves; even when sent to the room on errands, they went and came with a certain awe of the empty room’s cold dignity.

But at the semi-annual house-cleaning, when every closet and bureau drawer resigned itself to the season’s intrusive spirit of research, the spare room’s kindly mysteries were given to the light. The children could look on and touch and handle and ask questions; and thus began their acquaintance with such relics as had not been consigned to the darker oblivion of the garret, or suffered change through the family passion for “making over.”

In the bottom drawer of the bureau was the “body” of grandmother’s wedding gown. The narrow skirt had served for something useful,--a cradle quilt, perhaps, for one of the babies. Jack could have put the tiny dress waist into one of his trousers’ pockets with less than their customary distention. It was a mere scrap of dove-colored silk, low necked, and laced in the back. Grandmother must have worn over her shoulders one of the embroidered India muslin capes that were turning yellow in that same drawer.

The dress sleeves were “leg o’ mutton,” but these, too, had been sacrificed in some impulse of mistaken economy.

There was the high shell comb, not carved, but a solid piece of shell which the children used to hold up to the light to see the colors glow like a church window. There were the little square-toed satin slippers, heelless, with flat laces that crossed over the instep; and there were the flesh-colored silk stockings and white embroidered wedding shawl.

Little grandmother must have been rather a gay Friend; she never wore the dress, as did her mother, who put on the “plain distinguishing cap” before she was forty. She dressed as one of the “world’s people,” but always plainly, with a little distance between herself and the latest fashion. She had a conscientious scorn of poor materials. Ordinary self-respect would have prevented her wearing an edge of lace that was not “real,” or a stuff that was not all wool, if wool it professed to be, or a print that would not “wash;” and her contempt for linen that was part cotton, for silk that was part linen, or velvet with a “cotton back,” was of a piece with her truthfulness and horror of pretense.

Among the frivolities in the lower drawer was a very dainty little nightcap, embroidered mull or some such frailness; the children used to tie it on over their short hair, framing the round cheeks of ten and twelve years old. It was the envelope for sundry odd pieces of lace, “old English thread,” and yellow Valenciennes, ripped from the necks and sleeves of little frocks long outgrown.

The children learned these patterns by heart; also the scrolls and garlands on certain broad collars and cuffs of needlework which always looked as if something might be made of them; but nothing was, although Jack’s mamma was conscious of a long felt want in doll’s petticoats, which those collars would have filled to ecstasy.

In that lower drawer were a few things belonging to grandmother’s mother, E. B. of gracious memory. There were her gauze neck-handkerchiefs, and her long-armed silk mitts which reported her a “finer woman” than any of her descendants of the third generation, since not a girl of them all could show an arm that would fill out these cast coverings handsomely from wrist to biceps.

And there was a bundle of her silk house shawls, done up in one of the E. B. towels, lovely in color and texture as the fair, full grandmotherly throat they once encircled. They were plain, self-fringed, of every shade of white that was not white.

There they lay and no one used them; and after a while it began to seem a waste to the little girls who had grown to be big girls. The lightest minded of them began to covet those sober vanities for their own adornment. Mother’s scruples were easily smiled away; so the old Quaker shawls came forth and took their part in the young life of the house--a gayer part, it would be safe to say, than was ever theirs upon the blessed shoulders of E. B. One or two of them were made into plaited waists to be worn with skirts and belts of the world’s fashion. And one soft cream-white shawl wrapped little Jack on his first journey in this world; and afterward on many journeys, much longer than that first one “from the blue room to the brown.”

No advertised perfumes were used in grandmother’s house, yet the things in the drawers had a faint sweet breath of their own. Especially it lingered about those belongings of her mother’s time--the odor of seclusion, of bygone cleanliness and household purity.

The spare bedroom was at its gayest in summer-time, when, after the daughters of the house grew up, young company was expected. Swept and dusted and soberly expectant, it waited, like a wise but prudent virgin, with candles unlighted and shutters darkened. Its very colors were cool and decorous, white and green and dark mahogany polish, door knobs and candlesticks gleaming, andirons reflected in the dull-red shine of the hearth.

After sundown, if friends were expected by the evening boat, the shutters were fastened back, and the green Venetian blinds raised, to admit the breeze and a view of the garden and the grass and the plashing fountain. Each girl hostess visited the room in turn on a last, characteristic errand,--one with her hands full of roses, new blown that morning; another to remove the sacrificed leaves and broken stems which the rose-gatherer had forgotten; and the mother last of all to look about her with modest pride, peopling the room with the friends of her own girlhood, to be welcomed there no more.

Then, when the wagon drove up, what a joyous racket in the hall; and what content for the future in the sound of heavy trunks carried upstairs!

If only one girl guest had come, she must have her particular friend of the house for a bedfellow; and what in all the world did they not talk of, lying awake half the summer night in pure extravagance of joy--while the fountain plashed and paused, and the soft wind stirred in the cherry-trees, and in the moonlit garden overblown roses dropped their petals on the wet box-borders.

Visitors from the city brought with them--besides new books, new songs, sumptuous confectionery and the latest ideas in dress--an odor of the world; something complex rich and strange as the life of the city itself. It spread its spell upon the cool, pure atmosphere of the Quaker home, and set the light hearts beating and the young heads dreaming.

In after years came the Far West, with its masculine incense of camps and tobacco and Indian leather and soft-coal smoke. It arrived in company with several pieces of singularly dusty male baggage; but it had not come to stay.

For a few days of confusion and bustle it pervaded the house, and then departed, on the “Long Trail,” taking little Jack and his mother away. And in the chances and changes of the years that followed, they were never again to sleep in the spare bedroom at grandfather’s.

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

Transcriber’s Notes

Page 9: “a snow flaw came” changed to “a snow fall came”

Page 66: “those were bad places, for” changed to “those were bad places for”