August 18, 2025 • 30 mins
Step back into the 1800s and experience the life of a seaside country girl in New England. Discover her dreams, aspirations, and the realities of her education and opportunities as she navigates a world shaped by her familys needs. At just 11 years old, she begins working in the Lowell Textile Mills in Massachusetts to support her family—a journey that leads her to edit magazines, teach at Wheaton College, and pen enchanting books filled with her hopes, memories, poetry, and profound insights on life. As she beautifully reflects, “Every little thread must take its place as warp or woof, and keep in it steadily... that we are entirely separate, while yet we entirely belong to the Whole, is a truth that we learn to rejoice in.” The preface, positioned at the end, serves as a fascinating historical afterward that enhances Lucys vivid narratives from the very first page. (Summary by Michele Fry, Book Coordinator)
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter four of A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Read by CHRISTA V. E. A
(00:22):
New England Girlhood, Chapter four, Naughty Children and fairy Tales.
Although the children of an earlier time heard a great
deal of theological discussion, which meant little or nothing to them,
there was one thing that was made clear and emphatic
in all the Puritan training, that the heavens and Earth
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stood upon firm foundations, upon the moral law as taught
in the Old Testament and confirmed by the New. Whatever
else we did not understand, we believed that to disobey
our parents, to lie, or steal, had been been forbidden
by a voice which was not to be gainsayed. People
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who broke or evaded these commands did so wilfully and
without excusing themselves or being excused by others. I think
most of us expected the fate of Anonius and Sophira
if we told what we knew was a falsehood. There
were reckless exceptions, However, a playmate of whom I was
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quite fond. Was once asked in my presence whether she
had done something forbidden which I knew she had been
about only a little while before. She answered no, and
without any apparent hesitation, after the person who made the
inquiry had gone. I exclaimed, with horrified wonder, how could you?
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Her reply was, oh, I only kind of said no.
What a real lie was to her? If she understood
a distinct denial of the truth as only kind of lying.
It perplexed me to imagine. The years proved that this
lack of moral perception was characteristic and nearly spoiled a
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nature full of beautiful gifts. I could not deliberately lie,
but I had my own temptations, which I did not
always successfully resist. I remember the very spot, in a
footpath through a green field where I first met the
Eighth Commandment and felt it looking me full in the face.
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I suppose I was five or six years old. I
had begun to be trusted with errands. One of them
was to go to a farmhouse for a quart of
milk every morning to purchase which I went always to
the money drawer in the shop and took out four cents.
We were allowed to take a small brown biscuit, or
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a date, or a fig or a gibraltar sometimes, but
we well understood that we could not help ourselves to money. Now,
there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop
window down town, which I had seen and set my
heart upon. I had learned that its price was two cents,
and one morning, as I passed around the counter with
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my tin pail, I made up my mind to possess
myself of that amount. My father's back was turned. He
was busy at his desk with account books and ledgers.
I counted out four cents aloud, but took six and
started on my errand with a fascinating picture before me
of that pink and green horseback rider as my very own.
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I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him.
I knew that his paint was poisonous, and I could
not have intended to eat him. There were much better
candies in my father's window. He would not sell these
dangerous painted toys to children. But the little man was
pretty to look at, and I wanted him and meant
to have him. It was just a child's first temptation
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to get possession of what was not her own. The
same ugly temptation that produces the defaulter, the burglar, and
the highway robber, and that made it necessary to declare
to every human being the law thou shalt not covet.
As I left the shop, I was conscious of a
certain pleasure in the success of my attempt, as any
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thief might be, and I walked off very fast, clattering
the coppers in the tin pail. When I was fairly
through the bars that led into the farmer's field and
nobody was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies
and looked at them as they lay in my palm.
Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning,
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but it seemed to me as if the sky grew
suddenly dark, and those two pennies began to burn through
my hand, to scorch me, as if they were red
hot to my very soul. It was agony to hold them.
I laid them down under a tuft of grass in
the footpath, and ran, as if I had left a
demon behind me. I did my errand, and returning, I
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looked about in the grass for the two cents, wondering
whether they could make me feel so badly again. But
my good angel hid them from me. I never found them.
I was too much of a coward to confess my
fault to my father. I had already begun to think
of him as an austere man like him in the
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parable of the talents. I should have been a much
happier child if I had confessed, For I had to
carry about with me for weeks and months a heavy
burden of shame. I thought of myself as a thief,
and used to dream of being carried off to jail
and condemned to the gallows for my offense. One of
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my story books told about a boy who was hanged
at Tyburn for stealing, and how was I better than he?
Whatever naughtiness I was guilty of. Afterwards, I never again
wanted to take what belonged to another, whether in the
family or out of it. I hated the sight of
the little sugar horseback rider from that day, and was
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thankful enough when some other child had bought him and
left his place in the window vacant. About this time,
I used to lie awake nights a good deal wondering
what became of infants who were wicked. I had heard
it said that all who died in infancy went to heaven.
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But it was also said that those who sinned could
not possibly go to heaven. I understood from talks I
had listened to among older people that infancy lasted until
children were about twelve years of age. Yet here was I,
an infant of less than six years, who had committed
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a sin. I did not know what to do with
my own case. I doubted whether it would do any
good for me to pray to be forgiven, but I
did pray because I could not help it. Though not allowed,
I believe I preferred thinking my prayers to saying them.
Almost always. Inwardly, I objected to the idea of being
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an infant. It seemed to me like being nothing in particular,
neither a child nor a little girl, neither a baby
nor a woman. Having discovered that I was capable of
being wicked, I thought it would be better if I
could grow up at once and assume my own responsibilities.
It quite demoralized me when people talked in my presence
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about innocent little children. There was much questioning in those
days as to whether fictitious reading was good for children.
To tell a story was one equivalent expression for lying,
but those who came nearest to my child life recognized
the value of truth as impressed through the imagination, and
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left me in delightful freedom. Among my fairy tale books,
I think I saw a difference from the first between
the old poetic legends and a modern lie, especially if
this latter was the invention of a fancy as youthful
as my own. I supposed that the beings of those
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imaginative tales had lived sometimes somewhere. Perhaps they still existed
in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy
to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit
our matter of fact neighborhood. I had never heard that
any fairies or elves came over with the pilgrims in
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the Mayflower. But a little red haired playmate with whom
I became intimate, used to take me off with her
into the fields, where, sitting on the edge of a
disused cartway fringed with pussy clover, she poured into my
ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made
with people who lived under the ground close by us
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in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me.
I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the
last century did Defoe's account of the apparition of Missus Veale.
She said that these subterranean people kept house, and that
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they invited her down to play with their children on
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, also that they sometimes left a
plate of cakes and tarts for her at their door.
She offered to show me the very spot where it was,
under a great apple tree, which my brothers called the
luncheon tree, because we used to rest and refresh ourselves
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there when we helped my father weed his vegetable garden.
But she guarded herself by informing me that it would
be impossible for us to open the door ourselves, that
it could only be unfastened from the inside. She told
me these people's names, a mister Pelican and a mister
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AppleTree Manisse, who had a very large family of little manniss.
She said that there was a still larger family, some
of them probably living just under the spot where we sat,
whose surname was Hoax. If either of us had been
familiar with another word pronounced in the same way, though
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spelled differently, I should since have thought that she was
all the time laughing in her sleeve at my easy belief.
These hoaxes were not good natured people. She added, whispering
to me that we must not speak about them aloud,
as they had sharp ears and might overhear us and
do us mischief. I think she was hoaxing herself as
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well as me. It was her way of being a
heroine in her own eyes and mine, And she had
always the manner of being entirely in earnest. But she
became more and more romantic in her inventions. A distant,
aristocratic looking mansion which we could see, half hidden by
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trees across the river, she assured me was a haunted house,
and that she had passed many a night there, seeing
unaccountable sights and hearing mysterious sounds. She further announced that
she was to be married some time to a young
man who lived over there. I inferred that the marriage
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was to take place whenever the ghostly tenants of the
house would give their consent. She revealed to me, under
promise of strict secrecy, the young man's name. It was Alonso.
Not long after, I picked up a book which one
of my sisters had borrowed, called Alonzo and Melissa, and
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I discovered that she had been telling me page after
page of Melissa's adventures as if they were her own.
The fading memory I have of the book is that
it was a very silly one. And when I discovered
that the rest of the romantic occurrences she had related
not in that volume, were to be found in the
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Children of the Abbey, I left off listening to her.
I do not think I regarded her stories as lies.
I only lost my interest in them after I knew
that they were all of her own, clumsy, second hand
making up out of the most commonplace material. My two
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brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother
Ben pointed up to the gilded weathercock on the old
South steeple and said to me, with a very grave face,
did you know that when over the cock crows, every
rooster in town crows too. I listened out at the
window and asked, but when will he begin to crow? Oh,
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roosters crow in the night, sometimes when you are asleep.
Then my younger brother would break in with a shout
of delight at my stupidity. I'll tell you when goosey
the next day after never when the dead ducks fly
over the river. But this must have been when I
was very small, for I remember thinking that the next
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day after never would come, sometime in millions of years perhaps,
and how queer it would be to see dead ducks
flying through the air. Witches were seldom spoken of in
the presence of us children. We sometimes overheard a snatch
of a witch story told in whispers by the flickering firelight,
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just as we were being sent off to bed. But
to the older people these legends were too much like realities,
and they preferred not to repeat them. Indeed, it was
over our town that the last black shadow of the
dreadful witchcraft delusion had rested. Mistress Hale's house was just
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across the burying ground, and Gallows Hill was only two
miles away beyond the bridge. Yet I never really knew
what the Salem witchcraft was until Goodrich's History of the
United States was put into my hands as a school
book and I read about it. There, elves and gnomes
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and air sprites and Genie were no strangers to us.
For my sister Emily, she who heard me say my
hymns and taught me to write, was mistress of an
almost limitless fund of imaginative lore. She was a very
shahrazade of story tellers, so her younger sisters thought, who
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listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight evening after
evening with fascinated wakefulness. Besides the tales that the child
world of all ages is familiar with, Red Riding Hood,
the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the Sleeping Beauty, and the rest,
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she had picked up somewhere most of the folk stories
of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of Germany,
which latter were not then made into the compact volumes
known among juvenile readers of today as Grimm's Household Tales.
Her choice was usually judicious. She omitted the ghosts and
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goblins that would have haunted our dreams. Although I was
now and then visited by a nightmare consciousness of being
a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task, such
as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold one
by one, or else lose my head. But she blended
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the humorous with the romantic in herself, so that we
usually dropped to sleep in good spirits, if not with
a laugh. That old story of the fisherman who had
done the man of the sea a favor and was
to be rewarded by having his wish granted. She told,
in so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it
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might all have happened on one of the islands out
in Massachusetts Bay. The fisherman was foolish enough, it seemed,
to let his wife do all his wishing for him,
And she, unsatisfied still though she had been made first
an immensely rich woman and then a great queen, at
last sent her husband to ask that they too might
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be made rulers over the sun, moon and stars. As
my sister went on with the story, I could see
the waves grow black, and could hear the wind mutter
and growl, while the fisherman called for the first second,
and reluctantly for the third time, O Man of the Sea,
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come listen to me. For Alice, my wife, the plague
of my life has sent me to beg a boon
of thee. As his call died away on the sullen wind,
the mysterious man of the sea rose in his wrath
out of the billows and said, go back to your
old mud hut and stay there with your wife, Alice,
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and never come to trouble me again. I sympathized with
the man of the sea and his righteous indignation at
the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman, and the moral
of the story remained with me, as the story itself did.
I think I understood dimly even then, that mean avarice
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and self seeking ambition always find their true level in
muddy earth, never among the stars. So it proved that
my dear mother's sister was prepared caring me for life
when she did not know it, when she thought she
was only amusing me. This sister, though only just entering
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her teens, was toughening herself by all sorts of unnecessary
hardships for whatever might await her womanhood. She used frequently
to sleep in the garret on a hard wooden sea
chest instead of in a bed, and she would get
up before daylight and run over into the burying ground,
barefooted and white robed. We lived for two or three
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years in another house than our own, where the oldest
graveyard in town was only separated from us by our
garden fence. To see if there were any ghosts there,
she told us, returning noiselessly, herself a smiling phantom with
long golden brown hair rippling over her shoulders. She would
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drop a trophy upon her little sister's pillow, in the
shape of a big yellow apple that had dropped from
the colonel's pumpkin sweeting tree in the graveyard close to
our fence. She was fond of giving me surprises, of
watching my wonder at seeing anything beautiful or strange for
the first time. Once, when I was very little, she
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made me supremely happy by rousing me before four o'clock
in the morning, dressing me hurriedly, and taking me out
with her for a walk across the graveyard and through
the dewy fields. The birds were singing, and the sun
was just rising, and we were walking toward the east,
hand in hand, when suddenly there appeared before us what
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looked to me like an immense blue wall, stretching right
and left as far as I could see. Oh, what
is it the wall of I cried. It was a
revelation she had meant for me, so you did not
know it was the sea, little girl, she said, it
was a wonderful illusion to my unaccustomed eyes, and I
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took in at that moment, for the first time something
of the real grandeur of the ocean. Not a sail
was in sight, and the blue expanse was scarcely disturbed
by a ripple, For it was the high tide calm,
that morning's freshness, that vision of the sea I know
I can never lose from our garret window, and the
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garret was my usual retreat when I wanted to get
away by myself, with my books or my dreams. We
had the distant horizon line of the bay, across a
quarter of a mile of trees and mowing fields. We
could see the white breakers dashing against the long, narrow
island just outside of the harbor, which I, with my
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childish misconstruction of names, called Breaker's Island, supposing that the
grown people had made a mistake when they spoke of
it as Baker's. But that far off, shining band of
silver and blue seemed so different from the whole great sea,
stretching out as if into eternity from the feet of
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the baby on the shore. The marvel was not lessened
when I began to study geography and comprehended that the
world is round. Could it really be that we had
that endless Atlantic Ocean to look at from our window,
to dance along the edge of, to wade into, or
bathe in, if we chose. The map of the world
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became more interesting to me than any of the story books.
In my fanciful explorations, I out traveled Captain Cook, the
only voyager around the world with whose name my childhood
was familiar. The field paths were safe, and I was
allowed to wander off alone through them. I greatly enjoyed
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the freedom of a solitary explorer. Among the seashells and
wild flowers, there were wonders everywhere. One day I picked
up a starfish on the beach. We called it a
five finger, and hung him on a tree to dry,
not thinking of him as a living creature. When I
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went some time after to take him down, he had
clasped with two or three of his fingers the bough
where I laid him, so that he could not be
removed without breaking his hardened shell. My conscience smote me
when I saw what an unhappy looking skeleton I had
made of him. I overtook the horseshoe crab on the sands,
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but I did not like to turn him over and
make him say his prayers as some of the children did.
I thought it must be wicked. And then he looked
so uncomfortable, imploringly wriggling his claws while he lay upon
his back. I believe. I did, however, make a small
collection of the shells of stranded horseshoe crabs deserted by
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their tents. There were also pretty canary colored cockle shells
and tiny purple mussels washed up by the tide. I
gathered them into my apron and carried them home, and
only learned that they too held living inhabitants by seeing
a dead snail protruding from every shell after they had
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been left to themselves for a day or two. This
made me careful to pick up only the empty ones,
and there were plenty of them. One we called a
butter boat. It had something shaped like a seat across
the end of it on the inside. And the curious
sea urchin that looked as if he was made only
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for ornament when he had once got rid of his spines,
and the transparent jellyfish that seemed to have no more
right to be alive than a ladle full of mucilage,
and the razor shells, and the barnacles, and the knotted kelp,
and the flabby green sea aprons. There was no end
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to the interesting things I found when I was trusted
to go down to the edge of the tide alone.
The tide itself was the greatest marvel, slipping away so noiselessly,
and creeping back so softly over the flats, whispering as
it reached the sands, and laughing aloud I am coming
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as dashing against the rocks. It drove me back to
where the sea lovage and purple beech peas had dared
to root themselves. I listened and felt through all my
little being that great surging word of power, but had
no guess of its meaning. I can think of it
now as the eternal voice of Law, ever returning to
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the green, blossoming, beautiful verge of gospel truth to confirm
its later revelation, and to say that Law and Gospel
belong together. The sea is his, and He made it,
and his hands formed the dry land, and the dry
land the very dust of the earth. Every day revealed
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to me some new miracle of a flower. Coming home
from school, one warm noon, I chanced to look down
and saw for the first time the dry roadside, all
starred with lavender tinted flowers, scarcely larger than a pin head,
fairy flowers, indeed prettier than anything that grew in gardens.
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It was the red sand wort. But why a purple
flower should be called red, I do not know. I
remember holding these little amethystine blossoms like jewels, in the
palm of my hand, and wondering whether people who walked
along the road knew what beautiful things they were treading upon.
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I never found the flower open except at noonday when
the sun was hottest. The rest of the time it
was nothing but an insignificant, dusty leaved weed, a weed
that was transformed into a flower only for an hour
or two every day. It seemed like magic. The busy
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people at home could tell me very little about the
wild flowers, and when I found a new one, I
thought I was its discoverer. I can see myself now
leaning in ecstasy over a small, rough leaved purple aster
in a lonely spot on the hill, and thinking that
nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such
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a flower before, because I never had. I did not
know then that the flower generations are older than the
human race. The commonest blossoms were after all the dearest,
because they were so familiar. Very few of us lived
upon carpeted floors. But soft green grass stretched away from
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our doorsteps, all golden with dandelions. In the spring. Those
dandelion fields were like another heaven, dropped down upon the earth,
where our feet wandered at will among the stars. What
need had we of luxurious upholstery when we could step
out into such splendor from the humblest door. The dandelions
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could tell us secrets too. We blew the fuzz off
their gray heads and made them answer our question, does
my mother want me to come home? Or we sat
down together in the velvety grass and wove chains for
our necks and wrists of the dandelion stems, and made
believe we were brides, or queen's or empresses. Then there
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was the white rock saxafrage, that filled the crevices of
the ledges with soft, tufty blooms, like lingering snow drifts.
Our mayflower that brought us the first message of spring.
There was an elusive sweetness in its almost in per
receptible breath, which one could only get by smelling it
in close bunches. Its companion was the tiny, four cleft
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innocence flower that drifted pale sky tints across the chilly fields.
Both came to us in crowds and looked out with us,
as they do with the small girls and boys of
today from the windy crest of powder House Hill, the
one playground of my childhood, which is left to the
children and the cows. Just as it was then, we
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loved these little democratic blossoms that gathered around us in
mobs at our may day rejoicings. It is doubtful whether
we should have loved the trailing arbutus any better had
it strayed as it never did, into our woods. Violets
and aneemonies played at hide and seek with us in
shady places. The gay Columbine rooted herself among the bleak
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rocks and laughed and nodded in the face of the
east wind Coquettah, wasting the show of her finery on
the frowning air. Blue birds twittered over the dandelions in spring.
In midsummer, goldfinches warbled among the thistletops, and high above
the bird congregations, the song sparrow sent forth her clear, warm,
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penetrating trill sunshine translated into music. We were not surfeited in
those days with what is called pleasure, but we grew
up happy and healthy, learning unconsciously the useful lesson of
doing without the birds and blossoms. Hardly won a gladder
or more wholesome life from the air of our homely
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New England than we did. Out of the strong came
forth sweetness. The beatitudes are the natural flowering forth of
the Ten Commandments, and the happiness of our lives was
rooted in the stern, vigorous virtues of the people we
lived among, drawing thence its bloom and song and fragrance.
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There was granite in their character and beliefs, but it
was granite that could smile in the sunshine and clothe
itself with flowers. We little ones felt the firm rock
beneath us, and were lifted up on it to emulate
their goodness and to share their aspirations. End of Chapter four.
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Naughty Children and Fairy Tales
Chapter four of A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Read by CHRISTA V. E. A
(00:22):
New England Girlhood, Chapter four, Naughty Children and fairy Tales.
Although the children of an earlier time heard a great
deal of theological discussion, which meant little or nothing to them,
there was one thing that was made clear and emphatic
in all the Puritan training, that the heavens and Earth
(00:43):
stood upon firm foundations, upon the moral law as taught
in the Old Testament and confirmed by the New. Whatever
else we did not understand, we believed that to disobey
our parents, to lie, or steal, had been been forbidden
by a voice which was not to be gainsayed. People
(01:04):
who broke or evaded these commands did so wilfully and
without excusing themselves or being excused by others. I think
most of us expected the fate of Anonius and Sophira
if we told what we knew was a falsehood. There
were reckless exceptions, However, a playmate of whom I was
(01:25):
quite fond. Was once asked in my presence whether she
had done something forbidden which I knew she had been
about only a little while before. She answered no, and
without any apparent hesitation, after the person who made the
inquiry had gone. I exclaimed, with horrified wonder, how could you?
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Her reply was, oh, I only kind of said no.
What a real lie was to her? If she understood
a distinct denial of the truth as only kind of lying.
It perplexed me to imagine. The years proved that this
lack of moral perception was characteristic and nearly spoiled a
(02:07):
nature full of beautiful gifts. I could not deliberately lie,
but I had my own temptations, which I did not
always successfully resist. I remember the very spot, in a
footpath through a green field where I first met the
Eighth Commandment and felt it looking me full in the face.
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I suppose I was five or six years old. I
had begun to be trusted with errands. One of them
was to go to a farmhouse for a quart of
milk every morning to purchase which I went always to
the money drawer in the shop and took out four cents.
We were allowed to take a small brown biscuit, or
(02:48):
a date, or a fig or a gibraltar sometimes, but
we well understood that we could not help ourselves to money. Now,
there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop
window down town, which I had seen and set my
heart upon. I had learned that its price was two cents,
and one morning, as I passed around the counter with
(03:11):
my tin pail, I made up my mind to possess
myself of that amount. My father's back was turned. He
was busy at his desk with account books and ledgers.
I counted out four cents aloud, but took six and
started on my errand with a fascinating picture before me
of that pink and green horseback rider as my very own.
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I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him.
I knew that his paint was poisonous, and I could
not have intended to eat him. There were much better
candies in my father's window. He would not sell these
dangerous painted toys to children. But the little man was
pretty to look at, and I wanted him and meant
to have him. It was just a child's first temptation
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to get possession of what was not her own. The
same ugly temptation that produces the defaulter, the burglar, and
the highway robber, and that made it necessary to declare
to every human being the law thou shalt not covet.
As I left the shop, I was conscious of a
certain pleasure in the success of my attempt, as any
(04:21):
thief might be, and I walked off very fast, clattering
the coppers in the tin pail. When I was fairly
through the bars that led into the farmer's field and
nobody was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies
and looked at them as they lay in my palm.
Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning,
(04:44):
but it seemed to me as if the sky grew
suddenly dark, and those two pennies began to burn through
my hand, to scorch me, as if they were red
hot to my very soul. It was agony to hold them.
I laid them down under a tuft of grass in
the footpath, and ran, as if I had left a
demon behind me. I did my errand, and returning, I
(05:07):
looked about in the grass for the two cents, wondering
whether they could make me feel so badly again. But
my good angel hid them from me. I never found them.
I was too much of a coward to confess my
fault to my father. I had already begun to think
of him as an austere man like him in the
(05:28):
parable of the talents. I should have been a much
happier child if I had confessed, For I had to
carry about with me for weeks and months a heavy
burden of shame. I thought of myself as a thief,
and used to dream of being carried off to jail
and condemned to the gallows for my offense. One of
(05:48):
my story books told about a boy who was hanged
at Tyburn for stealing, and how was I better than he?
Whatever naughtiness I was guilty of. Afterwards, I never again
wanted to take what belonged to another, whether in the
family or out of it. I hated the sight of
the little sugar horseback rider from that day, and was
(06:10):
thankful enough when some other child had bought him and
left his place in the window vacant. About this time,
I used to lie awake nights a good deal wondering
what became of infants who were wicked. I had heard
it said that all who died in infancy went to heaven.
(06:31):
But it was also said that those who sinned could
not possibly go to heaven. I understood from talks I
had listened to among older people that infancy lasted until
children were about twelve years of age. Yet here was I,
an infant of less than six years, who had committed
(06:52):
a sin. I did not know what to do with
my own case. I doubted whether it would do any
good for me to pray to be forgiven, but I
did pray because I could not help it. Though not allowed,
I believe I preferred thinking my prayers to saying them.
Almost always. Inwardly, I objected to the idea of being
(07:17):
an infant. It seemed to me like being nothing in particular,
neither a child nor a little girl, neither a baby
nor a woman. Having discovered that I was capable of
being wicked, I thought it would be better if I
could grow up at once and assume my own responsibilities.
It quite demoralized me when people talked in my presence
(07:40):
about innocent little children. There was much questioning in those
days as to whether fictitious reading was good for children.
To tell a story was one equivalent expression for lying,
but those who came nearest to my child life recognized
the value of truth as impressed through the imagination, and
(08:03):
left me in delightful freedom. Among my fairy tale books,
I think I saw a difference from the first between
the old poetic legends and a modern lie, especially if
this latter was the invention of a fancy as youthful
as my own. I supposed that the beings of those
(08:25):
imaginative tales had lived sometimes somewhere. Perhaps they still existed
in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy
to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit
our matter of fact neighborhood. I had never heard that
any fairies or elves came over with the pilgrims in
(08:46):
the Mayflower. But a little red haired playmate with whom
I became intimate, used to take me off with her
into the fields, where, sitting on the edge of a
disused cartway fringed with pussy clover, she poured into my
ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made
with people who lived under the ground close by us
(09:09):
in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me.
I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the
last century did Defoe's account of the apparition of Missus Veale.
She said that these subterranean people kept house, and that
(09:30):
they invited her down to play with their children on
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, also that they sometimes left a
plate of cakes and tarts for her at their door.
She offered to show me the very spot where it was,
under a great apple tree, which my brothers called the
luncheon tree, because we used to rest and refresh ourselves
(09:53):
there when we helped my father weed his vegetable garden.
But she guarded herself by informing me that it would
be impossible for us to open the door ourselves, that
it could only be unfastened from the inside. She told
me these people's names, a mister Pelican and a mister
(10:13):
AppleTree Manisse, who had a very large family of little manniss.
She said that there was a still larger family, some
of them probably living just under the spot where we sat,
whose surname was Hoax. If either of us had been
familiar with another word pronounced in the same way, though
(10:35):
spelled differently, I should since have thought that she was
all the time laughing in her sleeve at my easy belief.
These hoaxes were not good natured people. She added, whispering
to me that we must not speak about them aloud,
as they had sharp ears and might overhear us and
do us mischief. I think she was hoaxing herself as
(10:59):
well as me. It was her way of being a
heroine in her own eyes and mine, And she had
always the manner of being entirely in earnest. But she
became more and more romantic in her inventions. A distant,
aristocratic looking mansion which we could see, half hidden by
(11:20):
trees across the river, she assured me was a haunted house,
and that she had passed many a night there, seeing
unaccountable sights and hearing mysterious sounds. She further announced that
she was to be married some time to a young
man who lived over there. I inferred that the marriage
(11:42):
was to take place whenever the ghostly tenants of the
house would give their consent. She revealed to me, under
promise of strict secrecy, the young man's name. It was Alonso.
Not long after, I picked up a book which one
of my sisters had borrowed, called Alonzo and Melissa, and
(12:03):
I discovered that she had been telling me page after
page of Melissa's adventures as if they were her own.
The fading memory I have of the book is that
it was a very silly one. And when I discovered
that the rest of the romantic occurrences she had related
not in that volume, were to be found in the
(12:25):
Children of the Abbey, I left off listening to her.
I do not think I regarded her stories as lies.
I only lost my interest in them after I knew
that they were all of her own, clumsy, second hand
making up out of the most commonplace material. My two
(12:47):
brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother
Ben pointed up to the gilded weathercock on the old
South steeple and said to me, with a very grave face,
did you know that when over the cock crows, every
rooster in town crows too. I listened out at the
window and asked, but when will he begin to crow? Oh,
(13:10):
roosters crow in the night, sometimes when you are asleep.
Then my younger brother would break in with a shout
of delight at my stupidity. I'll tell you when goosey
the next day after never when the dead ducks fly
over the river. But this must have been when I
was very small, for I remember thinking that the next
(13:30):
day after never would come, sometime in millions of years perhaps,
and how queer it would be to see dead ducks
flying through the air. Witches were seldom spoken of in
the presence of us children. We sometimes overheard a snatch
of a witch story told in whispers by the flickering firelight,
(13:52):
just as we were being sent off to bed. But
to the older people these legends were too much like realities,
and they preferred not to repeat them. Indeed, it was
over our town that the last black shadow of the
dreadful witchcraft delusion had rested. Mistress Hale's house was just
(14:13):
across the burying ground, and Gallows Hill was only two
miles away beyond the bridge. Yet I never really knew
what the Salem witchcraft was until Goodrich's History of the
United States was put into my hands as a school
book and I read about it. There, elves and gnomes
(14:34):
and air sprites and Genie were no strangers to us.
For my sister Emily, she who heard me say my
hymns and taught me to write, was mistress of an
almost limitless fund of imaginative lore. She was a very
shahrazade of story tellers, so her younger sisters thought, who
(14:55):
listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight evening after
evening with fascinated wakefulness. Besides the tales that the child
world of all ages is familiar with, Red Riding Hood,
the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the Sleeping Beauty, and the rest,
(15:16):
she had picked up somewhere most of the folk stories
of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of Germany,
which latter were not then made into the compact volumes
known among juvenile readers of today as Grimm's Household Tales.
Her choice was usually judicious. She omitted the ghosts and
(15:37):
goblins that would have haunted our dreams. Although I was
now and then visited by a nightmare consciousness of being
a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task, such
as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold one
by one, or else lose my head. But she blended
(15:58):
the humorous with the romantic in herself, so that we
usually dropped to sleep in good spirits, if not with
a laugh. That old story of the fisherman who had
done the man of the sea a favor and was
to be rewarded by having his wish granted. She told,
in so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it
(16:20):
might all have happened on one of the islands out
in Massachusetts Bay. The fisherman was foolish enough, it seemed,
to let his wife do all his wishing for him,
And she, unsatisfied still though she had been made first
an immensely rich woman and then a great queen, at
last sent her husband to ask that they too might
(16:42):
be made rulers over the sun, moon and stars. As
my sister went on with the story, I could see
the waves grow black, and could hear the wind mutter
and growl, while the fisherman called for the first second,
and reluctantly for the third time, O Man of the Sea,
(17:04):
come listen to me. For Alice, my wife, the plague
of my life has sent me to beg a boon
of thee. As his call died away on the sullen wind,
the mysterious man of the sea rose in his wrath
out of the billows and said, go back to your
old mud hut and stay there with your wife, Alice,
(17:25):
and never come to trouble me again. I sympathized with
the man of the sea and his righteous indignation at
the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman, and the moral
of the story remained with me, as the story itself did.
I think I understood dimly even then, that mean avarice
(17:48):
and self seeking ambition always find their true level in
muddy earth, never among the stars. So it proved that
my dear mother's sister was prepared caring me for life
when she did not know it, when she thought she
was only amusing me. This sister, though only just entering
(18:09):
her teens, was toughening herself by all sorts of unnecessary
hardships for whatever might await her womanhood. She used frequently
to sleep in the garret on a hard wooden sea
chest instead of in a bed, and she would get
up before daylight and run over into the burying ground,
barefooted and white robed. We lived for two or three
(18:33):
years in another house than our own, where the oldest
graveyard in town was only separated from us by our
garden fence. To see if there were any ghosts there,
she told us, returning noiselessly, herself a smiling phantom with
long golden brown hair rippling over her shoulders. She would
(18:54):
drop a trophy upon her little sister's pillow, in the
shape of a big yellow apple that had dropped from
the colonel's pumpkin sweeting tree in the graveyard close to
our fence. She was fond of giving me surprises, of
watching my wonder at seeing anything beautiful or strange for
the first time. Once, when I was very little, she
(19:17):
made me supremely happy by rousing me before four o'clock
in the morning, dressing me hurriedly, and taking me out
with her for a walk across the graveyard and through
the dewy fields. The birds were singing, and the sun
was just rising, and we were walking toward the east,
hand in hand, when suddenly there appeared before us what
(19:39):
looked to me like an immense blue wall, stretching right
and left as far as I could see. Oh, what
is it the wall of I cried. It was a
revelation she had meant for me, so you did not
know it was the sea, little girl, she said, it
was a wonderful illusion to my unaccustomed eyes, and I
(20:03):
took in at that moment, for the first time something
of the real grandeur of the ocean. Not a sail
was in sight, and the blue expanse was scarcely disturbed
by a ripple, For it was the high tide calm,
that morning's freshness, that vision of the sea I know
I can never lose from our garret window, and the
(20:27):
garret was my usual retreat when I wanted to get
away by myself, with my books or my dreams. We
had the distant horizon line of the bay, across a
quarter of a mile of trees and mowing fields. We
could see the white breakers dashing against the long, narrow
island just outside of the harbor, which I, with my
(20:48):
childish misconstruction of names, called Breaker's Island, supposing that the
grown people had made a mistake when they spoke of
it as Baker's. But that far off, shining band of
silver and blue seemed so different from the whole great sea,
stretching out as if into eternity from the feet of
(21:09):
the baby on the shore. The marvel was not lessened
when I began to study geography and comprehended that the
world is round. Could it really be that we had
that endless Atlantic Ocean to look at from our window,
to dance along the edge of, to wade into, or
bathe in, if we chose. The map of the world
(21:32):
became more interesting to me than any of the story books.
In my fanciful explorations, I out traveled Captain Cook, the
only voyager around the world with whose name my childhood
was familiar. The field paths were safe, and I was
allowed to wander off alone through them. I greatly enjoyed
(21:53):
the freedom of a solitary explorer. Among the seashells and
wild flowers, there were wonders everywhere. One day I picked
up a starfish on the beach. We called it a
five finger, and hung him on a tree to dry,
not thinking of him as a living creature. When I
(22:15):
went some time after to take him down, he had
clasped with two or three of his fingers the bough
where I laid him, so that he could not be
removed without breaking his hardened shell. My conscience smote me
when I saw what an unhappy looking skeleton I had
made of him. I overtook the horseshoe crab on the sands,
(22:37):
but I did not like to turn him over and
make him say his prayers as some of the children did.
I thought it must be wicked. And then he looked
so uncomfortable, imploringly wriggling his claws while he lay upon
his back. I believe. I did, however, make a small
collection of the shells of stranded horseshoe crabs deserted by
(22:59):
their tents. There were also pretty canary colored cockle shells
and tiny purple mussels washed up by the tide. I
gathered them into my apron and carried them home, and
only learned that they too held living inhabitants by seeing
a dead snail protruding from every shell after they had
(23:20):
been left to themselves for a day or two. This
made me careful to pick up only the empty ones,
and there were plenty of them. One we called a
butter boat. It had something shaped like a seat across
the end of it on the inside. And the curious
sea urchin that looked as if he was made only
(23:43):
for ornament when he had once got rid of his spines,
and the transparent jellyfish that seemed to have no more
right to be alive than a ladle full of mucilage,
and the razor shells, and the barnacles, and the knotted kelp,
and the flabby green sea aprons. There was no end
(24:03):
to the interesting things I found when I was trusted
to go down to the edge of the tide alone.
The tide itself was the greatest marvel, slipping away so noiselessly,
and creeping back so softly over the flats, whispering as
it reached the sands, and laughing aloud I am coming
(24:23):
as dashing against the rocks. It drove me back to
where the sea lovage and purple beech peas had dared
to root themselves. I listened and felt through all my
little being that great surging word of power, but had
no guess of its meaning. I can think of it
now as the eternal voice of Law, ever returning to
(24:46):
the green, blossoming, beautiful verge of gospel truth to confirm
its later revelation, and to say that Law and Gospel
belong together. The sea is his, and He made it,
and his hands formed the dry land, and the dry
land the very dust of the earth. Every day revealed
(25:10):
to me some new miracle of a flower. Coming home
from school, one warm noon, I chanced to look down
and saw for the first time the dry roadside, all
starred with lavender tinted flowers, scarcely larger than a pin head,
fairy flowers, indeed prettier than anything that grew in gardens.
(25:33):
It was the red sand wort. But why a purple
flower should be called red, I do not know. I
remember holding these little amethystine blossoms like jewels, in the
palm of my hand, and wondering whether people who walked
along the road knew what beautiful things they were treading upon.
(25:53):
I never found the flower open except at noonday when
the sun was hottest. The rest of the time it
was nothing but an insignificant, dusty leaved weed, a weed
that was transformed into a flower only for an hour
or two every day. It seemed like magic. The busy
(26:14):
people at home could tell me very little about the
wild flowers, and when I found a new one, I
thought I was its discoverer. I can see myself now
leaning in ecstasy over a small, rough leaved purple aster
in a lonely spot on the hill, and thinking that
nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such
(26:34):
a flower before, because I never had. I did not
know then that the flower generations are older than the
human race. The commonest blossoms were after all the dearest,
because they were so familiar. Very few of us lived
upon carpeted floors. But soft green grass stretched away from
(26:56):
our doorsteps, all golden with dandelions. In the spring. Those
dandelion fields were like another heaven, dropped down upon the earth,
where our feet wandered at will among the stars. What
need had we of luxurious upholstery when we could step
out into such splendor from the humblest door. The dandelions
(27:20):
could tell us secrets too. We blew the fuzz off
their gray heads and made them answer our question, does
my mother want me to come home? Or we sat
down together in the velvety grass and wove chains for
our necks and wrists of the dandelion stems, and made
believe we were brides, or queen's or empresses. Then there
(27:44):
was the white rock saxafrage, that filled the crevices of
the ledges with soft, tufty blooms, like lingering snow drifts.
Our mayflower that brought us the first message of spring.
There was an elusive sweetness in its almost in per
receptible breath, which one could only get by smelling it
in close bunches. Its companion was the tiny, four cleft
(28:08):
innocence flower that drifted pale sky tints across the chilly fields.
Both came to us in crowds and looked out with us,
as they do with the small girls and boys of
today from the windy crest of powder House Hill, the
one playground of my childhood, which is left to the
children and the cows. Just as it was then, we
(28:30):
loved these little democratic blossoms that gathered around us in
mobs at our may day rejoicings. It is doubtful whether
we should have loved the trailing arbutus any better had
it strayed as it never did, into our woods. Violets
and aneemonies played at hide and seek with us in
shady places. The gay Columbine rooted herself among the bleak
(28:55):
rocks and laughed and nodded in the face of the
east wind Coquettah, wasting the show of her finery on
the frowning air. Blue birds twittered over the dandelions in spring.
In midsummer, goldfinches warbled among the thistletops, and high above
the bird congregations, the song sparrow sent forth her clear, warm,
(29:19):
penetrating trill sunshine translated into music. We were not surfeited in
those days with what is called pleasure, but we grew
up happy and healthy, learning unconsciously the useful lesson of
doing without the birds and blossoms. Hardly won a gladder
or more wholesome life from the air of our homely
(29:41):
New England than we did. Out of the strong came
forth sweetness. The beatitudes are the natural flowering forth of
the Ten Commandments, and the happiness of our lives was
rooted in the stern, vigorous virtues of the people we
lived among, drawing thence its bloom and song and fragrance.
(30:05):
There was granite in their character and beliefs, but it
was granite that could smile in the sunshine and clothe
itself with flowers. We little ones felt the firm rock
beneath us, and were lifted up on it to emulate
their goodness and to share their aspirations. End of Chapter four.
(30:27):
Naughty Children and Fairy Tales
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