Chapter II: Preface (2)

With all the comedy there is about it, however, this is the grand period of a boy’s life. You look at them, with their careless, easy, natural manners and movements in the streets and on the base ball ground, and their marvelous, systematic, indescribable, inimitable and complex awkwardness in your parlors, and do you never dream, looking at these young fellows, of the overshadowing destinies awaiting them, the mighty struggles mapped out in the earnest future of their lives, the thrilling conquests in the world of arms, the grander triumphs in the realm of philosophy, the fadeless laurels in the empire of letters, and the imperishable crowns that he who giveth them the victory binds about their brows, that wait for the courage and ambition of these boys? Why, the world is at a boy’s feet; and power and conquest and leadership slumber in his rugged arms and care-free heart. A boy sets his ambition at whatever mark he will--lofty or groveling, as he may elect--and the boy who resolutely sets his heart on fame, on wealth, on power, on what he will; who consecrates himself to a life of noble endeavor, and lofty effort; who concentrates every faculty of his mind and body on the attainment of his one darling point; who brings to support his ambition courage and industry and patience, can trample on genius; for these are better and grander than genius; and he will begin to rise above his fellows as steadily and as surely as the sun climbs above the mountains. Hannibal, standing before the Punic altar fires and in the lisping accents of childhood swearing eternal hatred to Rome, was the Hannibal at twenty-four years commanding the army that swept down upon Italy like a mountain torrent, and shook the power of the mistress of the world, bid her defiance at her own gates, while affrighted Rome huddled and cowered under the protecting shadows of her walls. Napoleon, building snow forts at school and planning mimic battles with his playfellows, was the lieutenant of artillery at sixteen years, general of artillery and the victor of Toulon at twenty-four, and at last Emperor--not by the paltry accident of birth which might happen to any man, however unworthy, but by the manhood and grace of his own right arm, and his own brain, and his own courage and dauntless ambition--Emperor, with his foot on the throat of prostrate Europe. Alexander, daring more in his boyhood than his warlike father could teach him, and entering upon his all conquering career at twenty-four, was the boy whose vaulting ambition only paused in its dazzling flight when the world lay at his feet. And the fair-faced soldiers of the Empire, they who rode down upon the bayonets of the English squares at Waterloo, when the earth rocked beneath their feet and the incense smoke from the altars of the battle god shut out the sun and sky above their heads, who, with their young lives streaming from their gaping wounds, opened their pallid lips to cry, “Vive L’Empereur,” as they died for honor and France, were boys--schoolboys--the boy conscripts of France, torn from their homes and their schools to stay the failing fortunes of the last grand army and the Empire that was tottering to its fall. You don’t know how soon these happy-go-lucky young fellows, making summer hideous with base ball slang, or gliding around a skating rink on their backs, may hold the state and its destinies in their grasp; you don’t know how soon these boys may make and write the history of the hour; how soon they alone may shape events and guide the current of public action; how soon one of them may run away with your daughter or borrow money of you.

Certain it is, there is one thing Tom will do, just about this period of his existence. He will fall in love with somebody before his mustache is long enough to wax.

Perhaps one of the earliest indications of this event, for it does not always break out in the same manner, is a sudden and alarming increase in the number and variety of Tom’s neckties. In his boxes and on his dressing case, his mother is constantly startled by the changing and increasing assortment of the display. Monday he encircles his tender throat with a lilac knot, fearfully and wonderfully tied. A lavender tie succeeds the following day. Wednesday is graced with a sweet little tangle of pale, pale blue, that fades at a breath; Thursday is ushered in with a scarf of delicate pea green, of wonderful convolutions and sufficiently expansive, by the aid of a clean collar, to conceal any little irregularity in Tom’s wash day; Friday smiles on a sailor’s knot of dark blue, with a tangle of dainty forget-me-nots embroidered over it: Saturday tones itself down to a quiet, unobtrusive, neutral tint or shade, scarlet or yellow, and Sunday is deeply, darkly, piously black. It is difficult to tell whether Tom is trying to express the state of his distracted feelings by his neckties, or trying to find a color that will harmonize with his mustache, or match Laura’s dress.

And during the variegated necktie period of man’s existence how tenderly that mustache is coaxed and petted and caressed. How it is brushed to make it lie down and waxed to make it stand out, and how he notes its slow growth, and weeps and mourns and prays and swears over it day after weary day. And now, if ever, and generally now, he buys things to make it take color. But he never repeats this offense against nature. He buys a wonderful dye, warranted to “produce a beautiful glossy black or brown at one application, without stain or injury to the skin.” Buys it at a little shabby, round the corner, obscure drug store, because he is not known there. And he tells the assassin who sells it him, that he is buying it for a sick sister. And the assassin knows that he lies. And in the guilty silence and solitude of his own room, with the curtains drawn and the door locked, Tom tries the virtues of that magic dye. It gets on his fingers and turns them black, to the elbow. It burns holes in his handkerchief when he tries to rub the malignant poison off his ebony fingers. He applies it to his silky mustache, real camel’s hair, very cautiously and very tenderly, and with some misgivings. It turns his lip so black it makes the room dark. And out of all the clouds and the darkness and the sable splotches that pall every thing else in Plutonian gloom, that mustache smiles out, grinning like some ghastly hirsute specter, gleaming like the moon through a rifted storm cloud, unstained, untainted, unshaded; a natural, incorruptible blonde. That is the last time anybody fools Tom on hair dye.

The eye he has for immaculate linen and faultless collars. How it amazes his mother and sisters to learn that there isn’t a shirt in the house fit for a pig to wear, and that he wouldn’t wear the best collar in his room to be hanged in.

And the boots he crowds his feet into! A Sunday-school room, the Sunday before the picnic or the Christmas tree, with its sudden influx of new scholars, with irreproachable morals and ambitious appetites, doesn’t compare with the overcrowded condition of those boots. Too tight in the instep; too narrow at the toes; too short at both ends; the only things about those boots that don’t hurt him, that don’t fill his very soul with agony, are the straps. When Tom is pulling them on, he feels that if somebody would kindly run over him three or four times, with a freight train, the sensation would be pleasant and reassuring and tranquilizing. The air turns black before his starting eyes, there is a roaring like the rush of many waters in his ears, he tugs at the straps that are cutting his fingers in two and pulling his arms out by the roots, and just before his blood-shot eyes shoot clear out of his head, the boot comes on--or the straps pull off. Then when he stands up, the earth rocks beneath his feet, and he thinks he can faintly hear the angels calling him home. And when he walks across the floor the first time his standing in the church and the Christian community is ruined forever. Or would be if any one could hear what he says. He never, never, never gets to be so old that he can not remember those boots, and if it is seventy years afterward his feet curl up in agony at the recollection. The first time he wears them, he is vaguely aware, as he leaves his room that there is a kind of “fixy” look about him, and his sisters’ tittering is not needed to confirm this impression. He has a certain, half-defined impression that every thing he has on is a size too small for any other man of his size. That his boots are a trifle snug, like a house with four rooms for a family of thirty-seven. That the hat which sits so lightly on the crown of his head is jaunty but limited, like a junior clerk’s salary; that his gloves are a neat fit, and can’t be buttoned with a stump machine. Tom doesn’t know all this: he has only a general, vague impression that it may be so. And he doesn’t know that his sisters know every line of it. For he has lived many years longer, and got in ever so much more trouble, before he learns that one bright, good, sensible girl--and I believe they are all that--will see and notice more in a glance, remember it more accurately, and talk more about it, than twenty men can see in a week. Tom does not know, for his crying feet will not let him, how he gets from his room to the earthly paradise where Laura lives. Nor does he know, after he gets there, that Laura sees him trying to rest one foot by setting it up on the heel. And she sees him sneak it back under his chair and tilt it up on the toe for a change. She sees him ease the other foot a little by tugging the heel of the boot at the leg of the chair. A hazardous, reckless, presumptuous experiment. Tom tries it so far one night, and slides his heel so far up the leg of his boot, that his foot actually feels comfortable, and he thinks the angels must be rubbing it. He walks out of the parlor sideways that night, trying to hide the cause of the sudden elongation of one leg, and he hobbles all the way home in the same disjointed condition. But Laura sees that too. She sees all the little knobs and lumps on his foot, and sees him fidget and fuss, she sees the look of anguish flitting across his face under the heartless, deceitful, veneering of smiles, and she makes the mental remark that master Tom would feel much happier, and much more comfortable, and more like staying longer, if he had worn his father’s boots.

But on his way to the house, despite the distraction of his crying feet, how many pleasant, really beautiful, romantic things Tom thinks up and recollects and compiles and composes to say to Laura, to impress her with his originality, and wisdom, and genius, and bright exuberant fancy and general superiority over all the rest of Tom kind. Real earnest things, you know; no hollow, conventional compliments, or nonsense, but such things, Tom flatters himself, as none of the other fellows can or will say. And he has them all in beautiful order when he gets at the foot of the hill. The remark about the weather, to begin with; not the stereotyped old phrase, but a quaint, droll, humorous conceit that no one in the world but Tom could think of. Then, after the opening overture about the weather, something about music and Beethoven’s sonata in B flat, and Haydn’s symphonies, and of course something about Beethoven’s grand old Fifth symphony, somebody’s else mass, in heaven knows how many flats; and then something about art, and a profound thought or two on science and philosophy, and so on to poetry and from poetry to “business.”

But alas, when Tom reaches the gate, all these well ordered ideas display evident symptoms of breaking up; as he crosses the yard, he is dismayed to know that they are in the convulsions of a panic, and when he touches the bell knob, every, each, all and several of the ideas, original and compiled, that he has had on any subject during the past ten years, forsake him and return no more that evening. When Laura opened the door he had intended to say something real splendid about the imprisoned sunlight of something, beaming out a welcome upon the what you may call it of the night or something. Instead of which he says, or rather gasps: “Oh, yes, to be sure; to be sure; ho.” And then, conscious that he has not said anything particularly brilliant or original, or that most any of the other fellows could not say with a little practice, he makes one more effort to redeem himself before he steps into the hall, and adds, “Oh, good morning; good morning.” Feeling that even this is only a partial success, he collects his scattered faculties for one united effort and inquires: “How is your mother?” And then it strikes him that he has about exhausted the subject, and he goes into the parlor, and sits down, and just as soon as he has placed his reproachful feet in the least agonizing position, he proceeds to wholly, completely and successfully forget everything he ever knew in his life. He returns to consciousness to find himself, to his own amazement and equally to Laura’s bewilderment, conducting a conversation about the crops, and a new method of funding the national debt, subjects upon which he is about as well informed as the town clock. He rallies, and makes a successful effort to turn the conversation into literary channels by asking her if she has read “Daniel Deronda,” and wasn’t it odd that George Washington Eliot should name her heroine “Grenadine,” after a dress pattern? And in a burst of confidence he assures her that he would not be amazed if it should rain before morning, (and he hopes it will, and that it may be a flood, and that he may get caught in it, without an ark nearer than Cape Horn.) And so, at last, the first evening passes away, and after mature deliberation and many unsuccessful efforts he rises to go. But he does not go. He wants to; but he doesn’t know how. He says good evening. Then he repeats it in a marginal reference. Then he puts it in a foot note. Then he adds the remark in an appendix, and shakes hands. By this time he gets as far as the parlor door, and catches hold of the knob and holds on to it as tightly as though some one on the other side were trying to pull it through the door and run away with it. And he stands there a fidgetty statue of the door holder. He mentions, for not more than the twentieth time that evening that he is passionately fond of music but he can’t sing. Which is a lie; he can. Did she go to the Centennial? “No.” “Such a pity”--he begins, but stops in terror, lest she may consider his condolence a reflection upon her financial standing. Did he go? Oh, yes; yes; he says, absently, he went. Or, that is to say, no, not exactly. He did not exactly go to the Centennial; he staid at home. In fact, he had not been out of town this Summer. Then he looks at the tender little face; he looks at the brown eyes, sparkling with suppressed merriment; he looks at the white hands, dimpled and soft, twin daughters of the snow; and the fairy picture grows more lovely as he looks at it, until his heart outruns his fears; he must speak, he must say something impressive and ripe with meaning, for how can he go away with this suspense in his breast? His heart trembles as does his hand; his quivering lips part, and--Laura deftly hides a vagrom yawn behind her fan. Good night, and Tom is gone.

There is a dejected droop to the mustache that night, when in the solitude of his own room Tom releases his hands from the despotic gloves, and tenderly soothes two of the reddest, puffiest feet that ever crept out of boots not half their own size, and swore in mute, but eloquent anatomical profanity at the whole race of bootmakers. And his heart is nearly as full of sorrow and bitterness as his boots. It appears to him that he showed off to the worst possible advantage; he is dimly conscious that he acted very like a donkey, and he has the not entirely unnatural impression that she will never want to see him again. And so he philosophically and manfully makes up his mind never, never, never, to think of her again. And then he immediately proceeds, in the manliest and most natural way in the world, to think of nothing and nobody else under the sun for the next ten hours. How the tender little face does haunt him. He pitches himself into bed with an aimless recklessness that tumbles pillows, bolster, and sheets into one shapeless, wild, chaotic mass, and he goes through the motions of going to sleep, like a man who would go to sleep by steam. He stands his pillow up on end, and pounds it into a wad, and he props his head upon it as though it were the guillotine block. He lays it down and smooths it out level, and pats all the wrinkles out of it, and there is more sleeplessness in it to the square inch than there is in the hungriest mosquito that ever sampled a martyr’s blood. He gets up and smokes like a patent stove, although not three hours ago he told Laura that he de-tes-ted tobacco.

This is the only time Tom will ever go through this, in exactly this way. It is the one rare golden experience, the one bright, rosy dream of his life. He may live to be as old as an army overcoat, and he may marry as many wives as Brigham Young, singly, or in a cluster, but this will come to him but once. Let him enjoy all the delightful misery, all the ecstatic wretchedness, all the heavenly forlornness of it as best he can. And he does take good, solid, edifying misery out of it. How he does torture himself and hate Smith, the empty headed donkey, who can talk faster than poor Tom can think, and whose mustache is black as Tom’s boots, and so long that he can pull one end of it with both hands. And how he does detest that idiot Brown, who plays and sings, and goes up there every time Tom does, and claws over a few old forgotten five-finger exercises and calls it music; who comes up there, some night when Tom thinks he has the evening and Laura all to himself, and brings up an old, tuneless, voiceless, cracked guitar, and goes crawling around in the wet grass under the windows and makes night perfectly hideous with what he calls a serenade. And he speaks French, too, the beast. Poor Tom; when Brown’s lingual accomplishments in the language of Charlemagne are confined to--“aw--aw--er ah--vooly voo?” and on state occasions to the additional grandeur of “avy voo mong shapo?” But poor Tom who once covered himself with confusion by telling Laura that his favorite in “Robert le Diable” was the beautiful aria, “Robert toy que jam,” considers Brown a very prodigal in linguistic attainments; another Cardinal Mezzofanti; and hates him for it accordingly. And he hates Daubs, the artist, too, who was up there one evening and made an off hand crayon sketch of her in an album. The picture looked much more like Daubs’ mother, and Tom knew it, but Laura said it was oh just delightfully, perfectly splendid, and Tom has hated Daubs most cordially ever since. In fact, Tom hates every man who has the temerity to speak to her, or whom she may treat with lady-like courtesy. Until there comes one night when the boots of the inquisition pattern sit more lightly on their suffering victims. When Providence has been on Tom’s side and has kept Smith and Daubs and Brown away, and has frightened Tom nearly to death by showing him no one in the little parlor with its old-fashioned furniture but himself and Laura and the furniture. When, almost without knowing how or why, they talk about life and its realities instead of the last concert or the next lecture; when they talk of their plans, and their day dreams and aspirations, and their ideals of real men and women; when they talk about the heroes and heroines of days long gone by, grey and dim in the ages that are ever made young and new by the lives of noble men and noble women who lived, and did, and never died in those grand old days, but lived and live on, as imperishable and fadeless in their glory as the glittering stars that sang at creation’s dawn. When the room seems strangely silent when their voices hush; when the flush of earnestness upon her face gives it a tinge of sadness that makes it more beautiful than ever; when the dream and picture of a home Eden, and home life, and home love, grows every moment more lovely, more entrancing to him until at last poor blundering, stupid Tom, speaks without knowing what he is going to say, speaks without preparation or rehearsal, speaks, and his honest, natural, manly heart touches his faltering lips with eloquence and tenderness and earnestness that all the rhetoric in the world never did and never will inspire, and----. That is all we know about it. Nobody knows what is said or how it is done. Nobody. Only the silent stars or the whispering leaves, or the cat, or maybe Laura’s younger brother, or the hired girl, who generally bulges in just as Tom reaches the climax. All the rest of us know about it is, that Tom doesn’t come away so early that night, and that when he reaches the door he holds a pair of dimpled hands instead of the insensate door knob. He never clings to that door knob again; never. Unless ma, dear ma, has been so kind as to bring in her sewing and spend the evening with them. And Tom doesn’t hate anybody, nor want to kill anybody in the wide, wide world, and he feels just as good as though he had just come out of a six months’ revival; and is happy enough to borrow money of his worst enemy.

But, there is no rose without a thorn. Although, I suppose, on an inside computation, there is, in this weary old world as much as, say a peck, or a peck and a half possibly, of thorns without their attendant roses. Just the raw, bare thorns. In the highest heaven of his newly found bliss, Tom is suddenly recalled to earth and its miseries by a question from Laura which falls like a plummet into the unrippled sea of the young man’s happiness, and fathoms its depths in the shallowest place. “Has her own Tom”--as distinguished from countless other Toms, nobody’s Toms, unclaimed Toms, to all intents and purposes swamp lands on the public matrimonial domain--“Has her own Tom said anything to pa?” “Oh, yes! pa;” Tom says, “To be sure; yes.” Grim, heavy browed, austere pa. The living embodiment of business. Wiry, shrewd, the life and mainspring of the house of Tare and Tret. “’M. Well. N’ no,” Tom had not exactly, as you might say, poured out his heart to pa. Somehow or other he had a rose-colored idea that the thing was going to go right along in this way forever. Tom had an idea that the programme was all arranged, printed and distributed, rose-colored, gilt-edged, and perfumed. He was going to sit and hold Laura’s hands, pa was to stay down at the office, and ma was to make her visits to the parlor as much like angels’, for their rarity and brevity, as possible. But he sees, now that the matter has been referred to, that it is a grim necessity. And Laura doesn’t like to see such a spasm of terror pass over Tom’s face; and her coral lips quiver a little as she hides her flushed face out of sight on Tom’s shoulder, and tells him how kind and tender pa has always been with her, until Tom feels positively jealous of pa. And she tells him that he must not dread going to see him, for pa will be oh so glad to know how happy, happy, happy he can make his little girl. And as she talks of him, the hard working, old-fashioned, tender-hearted old man, who loves his girls as though he were yet only a big boy, her heart grows tenderer, and she speaks so earnestly and eloquently that Tom, at first savagely jealous of him, is persuaded to fall in love with the old gentleman--he calls him “Pa,” too, now,--himself.

But by the following afternoon this feeling is very faint. And when he enters the counting room of Tare & Tret, and stands before pa--Oh, land of love, how could Laura ever talk so about such a man. Stubbly little pa; with a fringe of the most obstinate and wiry gray hair standing all around his bald, bald head; the wiriest, grizzliest mustache bristling under his nose; a tuft of tangled beard under the sharp chin, and a raspy undergrowth of a week’s run on the thin jaws; business, business, business, in every line of the hard, seamed face, and profit and loss, barter and trade, dicker and bargain, in every movement of the nervous hands. Pa; old business! He puts down the newspaper a little way, and looks over the top of it as Tom announces himself, glancing at the young man with a pair of blue eyes that peer through old-fashioned iron-bowed spectacles, that look as though they had known these eyes and done business with them ever since they wept over their A B C’s or peeped into the tall stone jar Sunday afternoon to look for the doughnuts.

Tom, who had felt all along there could be no inspiration on his part in this scene, has come prepared. At least he had his last true statement at his tongue’s end when he entered the counting room. But now, it seems to him that if he had been brought up in a circus, and cradled inside of a sawdust ring, and all his life trained to twirl his hat, he couldn’t do it better, nor faster, nor be more utterly incapable of doing anything else. At last he swallows a lump in his throat as big as a ballot box, and faintly gasps, “Good morning.” Mr. Tret hastens to recognize him. “Eh? oh; yes; yes; yes; I see; young Bostwick, from Dope & Middlerib’s. Oh yes. Well--?” “I have come, sir,” gasps Tom, thinking all around the world from Cook’s explorations to “Captain Riley’s Narrative,” for the first line of that speech that Tare & Tret have just scared out of him so completely that he doesn’t believe he ever knew a word of it. “I have come--” and he thinks if his lips didn’t get so dry and hot they make his teeth ache, that he could get along with it; “I have, sir,--come, Mr. Tret; Mr. Tret, sir--I have come--I am come--” “Yes, ye-es,” says Mr. Tret, in the wildest bewilderment, but in no very encouraging tones, thinking the young man probably wants to borrow money; “Ye-es; I see you’ve come. Well; that’s all right; glad to see you. Yes, you’ve come?” Tom’s hat is now making about nine hundred and eighty revolutions per minute, and apparently not running up to half its full capacity. “Sir; Mr. Tret,” he resumes, “I have come, sir; Mr. Tret--I am here to--to sue--to sue, Mr. Tret--I am here to sue--” “Sue, eh?” the old man echoes sharply, with a belligerent rustle of the newspaper; “sue Tare & Tret, eh? Well, that’s right, young man; that’s right. Sue, and get damages. We’ll give you all the law you want.” Tom’s head is so hot, and his heart is so cold, that he thinks they must be about a thousand miles apart. “Sir,” he explains, “that isn’t it. It isn’t that. I only want to ask--I have long known--Sir,” he adds, as the opening lines of his speech come to him like a message from heaven, “Sir, you have a flower, a tender lovely blossom; chaste as the snow that crowns the mountain’s brow; fresh as the breath of morn; lovelier than the rosy-fingered hours that fly before Aurora’s car; pure as the lily kissed by dew. This precious blossom, watched by your paternal eyes, the object of your tender care and solicitude, I ask of you. I would wear it in my heart, and guard and cherish it--and in the--” “Oh-h, ye-es, yes, yes,” the old man says soothingly, beginning to see that Tom is only drunk, “Oh yes, yes, I don’t know much about them myself; my wife and the girls generally keep half the windows in the house littered up with them, Winter and Summer, every window so full of house plants the sun can’t shine in. Come up to the house, they’ll give you all you can carry away, give you a hat full of ’em.” “No, no, no; you don’t understand,” says poor Tom, and old Mr. Tret now observes that Tom is very drunk indeed. “It isn’t that, sir. Sir, that isn’t it. I--I--I want to marry your daughter!” And there it is at last, as bluntly as though Tom had wadded it into a gun and shot it at the old man. Mr. Tret does not say any thing for twenty seconds. Tom tells Laura that evening that it was two hours and a half before her father opened his head. Then he says, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes; to be sure; to--be--sure.” And then the long pause is dreadful. “Yes, yes. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know about that, young man. Said any thing to Jennie about it?” “It isn’t Jennie,” Tom gasps, seeing a new Rubicon to cross; “its----” “Oh, Julie, eh? well, I don’t----” “No, sir,” interjects the despairing Tom, “it isn’t Julie, it’s----” “Sophie, eh? Oh, well, Sophie----” “Sir,” says Tom, “If you please, sir, it isn’t Sophie, its----” “Not Minnie, surely? Why, Minnie is hardly--well, I don’t know. Young folks get along faster than----” “Dear Mr. Tret,” breaks in the distracted lover, “it’s Laura.”

As they sit and stand there, looking at each other, the dingy old counting room, with the heavy shadows lurking in every corner, with its time-worn, heavy brown furnishings, with the scanty dash of sunlight breaking in through the dusty window, looks like an old Rubens painting; the beginning and the finishing of a race: the old man, nearly ready to lay his armor off, glad to be so nearly and so safely through with the race and the fight that Tom, in all his inexperience and with all the rash enthusiasm and conceit of a young man, is just getting ready to run and fight, or fight and run, you never can tell which until he is through with it. And the old man, looking at Tom, and through him, and past him, feels his old heart throb almost as quickly as does that of the young man before him. For looking down a long vista of happy, eventful years, bordered with roseate hopes and bright dreams and anticipations, he sees a tender face, radiant with smiles and kindled with blushes; he feels a soft hand drop into his own with its timid pressure; he sees the vision open, under the glittering summer stars, down mossy hillsides, where the restless breezes, sighing through the rustling leaves, whispered their tender secret to the noisy katydids; strolling along the winding paths, deep in the bending wild grass, down in the star-lit aisles of the dim old woods; loitering where the meadow brook sparkles over the white pebbles or murmurs around the great flat stepping-stones; lingering on the rustic foot-bridge, while he gazes into eyes eloquent and tender in their silent love-light; up through the long pathway of years, flecked and checkered with sunshine and cloud, with storm and calm, through years of struggle, trial, sorrow, disappointment, out at last into the grand, glorious, crowning beauty and benison of hard-won and well-deserved success, until he sees now this second Laura, re-imaging her mother as she was in the dear old days. And he rouses from his dream with a start, and he tells Tom he’ll “Talk it over with Mrs. Tret, and see him again in the morning.”

And so they are duly and formally engaged; and the very first thing they do, they make the very sensible, though very uncommon, resolution to so conduct themselves that no one will ever suspect it. And they succeed admirably. No one ever does suspect it. They come into church in time to hear the benediction--every time they come together. They shun all other people when church is dismissed, and are seen to go home alone the longest way. At picnics they are missed not more than fifty times a day, and are discovered sitting under a tree, holding each other’s hands, gazing into each other’s eyes and saying--nothing. When he throws her shawl over her shoulders, he never looks at what he is doing, but looks straight into her starry eyes, throws the shawl right over her natural curls, and drags them out by the hairpins. If, at sociable or festival, they are left alone in a dressing-room a second and a half, Laura emerges with her ruffle standing around like a railroad accident; and Tom has enough complexion on his shoulder to go around a young ladies’ seminary. When they drive out, they sit in a buggy with a seat eighteen inches wide, and there is two feet of unoccupied room at either end of it. Long years afterward, when they drive, a street car isn’t too wide for them; and when they walk, you could drive four loads of hay between them.

And yet, as carefully as they guard their precious little secret, and as cautious and circumspect as they are in their walk and behavior, it gets talked around that they are engaged. People are so prying and suspicious.

And so the months of their engagement run on; never before, or since, time flies so swiftly--unless, it may be, some time when Tom has an acceptance in bank to meet in two days, that he can’t lift one end of--and the wedding day dawns, fades, and the wedding is over. Over, with its little circle of delighted friends, with its ripples of pleasure and excitement, with its touches of home love and home life, that leave their lasting impress upon Laura’s heart, although Tom, with man-like blindness, never sees one of them. Over, with ma, with the thousand and one anxieties attendant on the grand event in her daughter’s life hidden away under her dear old smiling face, down, away down under the tender, glistening eyes, deep in the loving heart; ma, hurrying here and fluttering there, in the intense excitement of something strangely made up of happiness and grief, of apprehension and hope; ma, with her sudden disappearances and flushed reappearances, indicating struggles and triumphs in the turbulent world down stairs; ma, with the new-fangled belt, with the dinner-plate buckles, fastened on wrong side foremost, and the flowers dangling down the wrong side of her head, to Sophie’s intense horror and pantomimic telegraphy; ma, flying here and there, seeing that every thing is going right, from kitchen to dressing-rooms; looking after everything and everybody, with her hands and heart just as full as they will hold, and more voices calling “ma,” from every room in the house, than you would think one hundred mas could answer. But she answers them all, and she sees after everything, and just in the nick of time prevents Mr. Tret from going down stairs and attending the ceremony in a loud-figured dressing-gown and green slippers; ma, who, with the quivering lip and glistening eyes, has to be cheerful, and lively, and smiling; because, if, as she thinks of the dearest and best of her flock going away from her fold, to put her life and her happiness into another’s keeping, she gives way for one moment, a dozen reproachful voices cry out, “Oh-h ma!” How it all comes back to Laura, like the tender shadows of a dream, long years after the dear, dear face, furrowed with marks of patient suffering and loving care, rests under the snow and the daisies; when the mother-love that glistened in the tender eyes has closed in darkness on the dear old home; and the nerveless hands, crossed in dreamless sleep upon the pulseless breast, can never again touch the children’s heads with caressing gesture; how the sweet vision comes to Laura, as it shone on her wedding morn, rising in tenderer beauty through the blinding tears her own excess of happiness calls up, as the rainbow spans the cloud only through the mingling of the golden sunshine and the falling rain.

And pa, dear old shabby pa, whose clothes will not fit him as they fit other men; who always dresses just a year and a half behind the style; pa, wandering up and down through the house, as though he were lost in his own home, pacing through the hall like a sentinel, blundering aimlessly and listlessly into rooms where he has no business, and being repelled therefrom by a chorus of piercing shrieks and hysterical giggling; pa, getting off his well worn jokes with an assumption of merriment that seems positively real; pa, who creeps away by himself once in a while, and leans his face against the window, and sighs, in direct violation of all strict household regulations, right against the glass, as he thinks of his little girl going away to-day from the home whose love and tenderness and patience she has known so well. Only yesterday, it seems, to him, the little baby girl, bringing the first music of baby prattle into his home; then a little girl in short dresses, with school-girl troubles and school-girl pleasures; then an older little girl, out of school and into society, but a little girl to pa still. And then----. But, somehow, this is as far as pa can get; for he sees, in the flight of this, the first, the following flight of the other fledglings; and he thinks how silent and desolate the old nest will be when they have all mated and flown away. He thinks, when their flight shall have made other homes bright and cheery and sparkling, with music and prattle and laughter, how it will leave the old home hushed and quiet and still. How, in the long, lonesome afternoons, mother will sit by the empty cradle that rocked them all, murmuring the sweet old cradle songs that brooded over all their sleep, until the rising tears check the swaying cradle and choke the song--and back, over river and prairie and mountain, that roll and stretch and rise between the old home and the new ones, comes back the prattle of her little ones, the rippling music of their laughter, the tender cadences of their songs, until the hushed old home is haunted by memories of its children--gray and old they may be, with other children clustering about their knees; but to the dear old home they are “the children” still. And dreaming thus, when pa for a moment finds his little girl alone--his little girl who is going away out of the home whose love she knows, into a home whose tenderness and patience are all untried--he holds her in his arms and whispers the most fervent blessing that ever throbbed from a father’s heart; and Laura’s wedding day would be incomplete and unfeeling without her tears. So is the pattern of our life made up of smiles and tears, shadow and sunshine. Tom sees none of these background pictures of the wedding day. He sees none of its real, heartfelt earnestness. He sees only the bright, sunny tints and happy figures that the tearful, shaded background throws out in golden relief; but never stops to think that, without the shadows, the clouds, and the somber tints of the background, the picture would be flat, pale, and lusterless.

And then, the presents. The assortment of brackets, serviceable, ornamental and--cheap. The French clock, that never went, that does not go, that never will go. And the nine potato mashers. The eight mustard spoons. The three cigar stands. Eleven match safes; assorted patterns. A dozen tidies, charity fair styles, blue dog on a yellow background, barking at a green boy climbing over a red fence, after seal brown apples. The two churns, old pattern, straight handle and dasher, and they have as much thought of keeping a cow as they have of keeping a section of artillery. Five things they didn’t know the names of, and never could find any body who could tell what they were for. And a nickel plated pocket corkscrew, that Tom, in a fine burst of indignation, throws out of the window, which Laura says is just like her own impulsive Tom. And not long after her own impulsive Tom catches his death of cold and ruins the knees of his best trowsers crawling around in the wet grass hunting for that same corkscrew. Which is also just like her own impulsive Tom.

And then, the young people go to work and buy e-v-e-r-y thing they need, the day they go to housekeeping. Every thing. Just as well, Tom says, to get every thing at once and have it delivered right up at the house, as to spend five or six or ten or twenty years in stocking up a house, as his father did. And Laura thinks so too, and she wonders that Tom should know so much more than his father. This worries Tom himself, when he thinks of it, and he never rightly understands how it is, until he is forty-five or fifty years old and has a Tom of his own to direct and advise him. So they make out a list, and revise it, and rewrite it, until they have every thing down, complete, and it isn’t until supper is ready the first day, that they discover there isn’t a knife, a fork, or a plate or a spoon in the new house. And the first day the washerwoman comes, and the water is hot, and the clothes are all ready, it is discovered that there isn’t a wash-tub nearer than the grocery. And further along in the day the discovery is made that while Tom has bought a clothes-line that will reach to the north pole and back, and then has to be coiled up a mile or two in the back yard, there isn’t a clothes-pin in the settlement. And in the course of a week or two, Tom slowly awakens to the realization of the fact that he has only begun to get. And if he should live two thousand years, which he rarely does, and possibly may not, he would think, just before he died, of something they had wanted the worst way for five centuries, and had either been too poor to get, or Tom had always forgotten to bring up. So long as he lives, Tom goes on bringing home things that they need--absolute, simple necessities, that were never so much as hinted at in that exhaustive list. And old Time comes along, and knowing that the man in that new house will never get through bringing things up to it, helps him out and comes around and brings things, too. Brings a gray hair now and then, to stick in Tom’s mustache, which has grown too big to be ornamental, and too wayward and unmanageable to be comfortable. He brings little cares and little troubles, and little trials and little butcher bills, and little grocer’s bills, and little tailor bills, and nice large millinery bills, that pluck at Tom’s mustache and stroke it the wrong way and make it look more and more as pa’s did the first time Tom saw it. He brings, by and by, the prints of baby fingers and pats them around on the dainty wall paper. Brings, some times, a voiceless messenger that lays its icy fingers on the baby lips, and hushes their dainty prattle, and in the baptism of its first sorrow, the darkened little home has its dearest and tenderest tie to the upper fold. Brings, by and by, the tracks of a boy’s muddy boots, and scatters them all up and down the clean porch. Brings a messenger, one day, to take the younger Tom away to college. And the quiet the boy leaves behind him is so much harder to endure than his racket, that old Tom is tempted to keep a brass band in the house until the boy comes back. But old Time brings him home at last, and it does make life seem terribly real and earnest to Tom, and how the old laugh rings out and ripples all over Laura’s face, when they see old Tom’s first mustache budding and struggling into second life on young Tom’s face.

And still old Time comes round, bringing each year whiter frosts to scatter on the whitening mustache, and brighter gleams of silver to glint the brown of Laura’s hair. Bringing the blessings of peaceful old age and a lovelocked home to crown these noble, earnest, real human lives, bristling with human faults, marred with human mistakes, scarred and seamed and rifted with human troubles, and crowned with the compassion that only perfection can send upon imperfection. Comes, with happy memories of the past, and quiet confidence for the future. Comes, with the changing scenes of day and night; with winter’s storm and summer’s calm; comes, with the sunny peace and the backward dreams of age; comes, until one day, the eye of the relentless old reaper rests upon old Tom, standing right in the swarth, amid the golden corn. The sweep of the noiseless scythe that never turns its edge, Time passes on, old Tom steps out of young Tom’s way, and the cycle of a life is complete.

GETTING READY FOR THE TRAIN.

When they reached the depot, Mr. Man and his wife gazed in unspeakable disappointment at the receding train, which was just pulling away from the bridge switch at the rate of a thousand miles a minute. Their first impulse was to run after it; but as the train was out of sight, and whistling for Sagetown before they could act upon the impulse, they remained in the carriage and disconsolately turned the horses’ heads homeward.

“It all comes of having to wait for a woman to get ready,” Mr. Man broke the silence with, very grimly.

“I was ready before you were,” replied his wife.

“Great heavens!” cried Mr. Man, in irrepressible impatience, jerking the horses’ jaws out of place, “just listen to that! And I sat out in the buggy ten minutes, yelling at you to come along, until the whole neighborhood heard me!”

“Yes,” acquiesced Mrs. Man, with the provoking placidity which no one can assume but a woman, “and every time I started down stairs you sent me back for something you had forgotten.”

Mr. Man groaned. “This is too much to bear,” he said, “when everybody knows that if I was going to Europe, I would just rush into the house, put on a clean shirt, grab up my gripsack, and fly; while you would want at least six months for preliminary preparations, and then dawdle around the whole day of starting until every train had left town.”

Well, the upshot of the matter was, that the Mans put off their visit to Peoria until the next week, and it was agreed that each one should get ready and go down to the train and go, and the one who failed to get ready should be left. The day of the match came around in due time. The train was to go at 10:30, and Mr. Man, after attending to his business, went home at 9:45.

“Now then,” he shouted, “only three-quarters of an hour to train time. Fly around; a fair field and no favors, you know.”

And away they flew. Mr. Man bulged into this room and rushed through that one, and dived into one closet after another with inconceivable rapidity, chuckling under his breath all the time, to think how cheap Mrs. Man would feel when he started off alone. He stopped on his way up stairs to pull off his heavy boots, to save time. For the same reason he pulled off his coat as he ran through the dining-room, and hung it on the corner of the silver closet. Then he jerked off his vest as he rushed through the hall, and tossed it on a hook in the hat-rack, and by the time he reached his own room he was ready to plunge into his clean clothes. He pulled out a bureau drawer and began to paw at the things, like a Scotch terrier after a rat.

“Eleanor!” he shrieked, “where are my shirts?”

“In your bureau drawer,” quietly replied Mrs. Man, who was standing placidly before a glass, calmly and deliberately coaxing a refractory crimp into place.

“Well, by thunder, they ain’t!” shouted Mr. Man, a little annoyed. “I’ve emptied every last thing out of the drawer, and there isn’t a thing in it that I ever saw before.”

Mrs. Man stepped back a few paces, held her head on one side, and after satisfying herself that the crimp would do, and would stay where she had put it, replied:

“These things scattered around on the floor are all mine. Probably you haven’t been looking in your own drawer.”

“I don’t see,” testily observed Mr. Man, “why you couldn’t have put my things out for me, when you had nothing else to do all morning.”

“Because,” said Mrs. Man, settling herself into an additional article of raiment with awful deliberation, “nobody put mine out for me. ‘A fair field and no favors,’ my dear.”

Mr. Man plunged into his shirt like a bull at a red flag.

“Foul!” he shouted, in malicious triumph. “No button on the neck!”

“Because,” said Mrs. Man, sweetly, after a deliberate stare at the fidgeting, impatient man, during which she buttoned her dress and put eleven pins where they would do the most good, “because you have got the shirt on wrong side out.”

When Mr. Man slid out of that shirt, he began to sweat. He dropped the shirt three times before he got it on, and while it was over his head he heard the clock strike ten. When his head came through he saw Mrs. Man coaxing the ends and bows of her necktie.

“Where’s my shirt studs?” he cried.

Mrs. Man went out into another room and presently came back with gloves and hat, and saw Mr. Man emptying all the boxes he could find in and about the bureau. Then she said:

“In the shirt you just took off.”

Mrs. Man put on her gloves while Mr. Man hunted up and down the room for his cuff buttons.

“Eleanor,” he snarled, at last, “I believe you must know where those buttons are.”

“I haven’t seen them,” said the lady, settling her hat, “didn’t you lay them down on the window sill in the sitting-room last night?”

Mr. Man remembered, and he went down stairs on the run. He stepped on one of his boots, and was immediately landed in the hall at the foot of the stairs with neatness and dispatch, attended in the transmission with more bumps than he could count with a Webb’s adder, and landing with a bang like the Hellgate explosion.

“Are you nearly ready, Algernon?” asked the wife of his family, sweetly, leaning over the balusters.

The unhappy man groaned. “Can’t you throw me down that other boot?” he asked.

Mrs. Man pityingly kicked it down to him.

“My valise?” he inquired, as he tugged away at the boot.

“Up in your dressing-room,” she answered.

“Packed?”

“I do not know; unless you packed it yourself, probably not,” she replied, with her hand on the door knob; “I had barely time to pack my own.”

She was passing out of the gate, when the door opened, and he shouted:

“Where in the name of goodness did you put my vest? It has all my money in it!”

“You threw it on the hat-rack,” she called back, “good-bye, dear.”