August 18, 2025 • 36 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 five 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 Dana Kovar, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter five, Old New England. When I first
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opened my eyes upon my native town, it was already
nearly two hundred years old, counting from the time when
it was part of the original Salem settlement, old enough
to have gained a character and an individuality of its own,
as it certainly had. We children felt at once that
we belonged to the town as we did to our
father or our mother. The sea was its nearest neighbor,
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and penetrated to every fireside, claiming close intimacy with every
home and heart. The farmers up and down the shore
were as much fishermen as farmers. They were as familiar
with the grand banks of Newfoundland as they were with
their own potatos. Every third man you met in the
street you might safely hail as shipmate, or skipper or captain.
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My father's early seafaring experience gave him the latter title.
To the end of his life. It was hard to
keep the boys from going off to sea before they
were grown. No inland occupation attracted them. Land lubber was
one of the most contemptuous epithets heard from boyish lips.
The spirit of adventure developed in them, a rough, breezy
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type of manliness, now almost extinct. Men talked about a
voyage to Calcutta or Hong Kong, or up the Straits
meaning Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, as if it were not
much more than going to the next village. It seemed
as if our nearest neighbors lived over there. Across the water,
we breathed the air of foreign countries curiously interblended with
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our own. The women of well to do families had
canton crape shawls and smyrna silks and turk satins for
sabbath day wear, which somebody had brought home for them.
Mantelpieces were adorned with nautilus and conk shells, and with
branches and fans of coral, and children had foreign curiosities
and treasures of the sea for playthings. There was one
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imported shell that we did not value much. It was
so abundant. The freckled univalve they called a prop yet
it had a mysterious interest for us little ones. We
held it to our ears and listened for the sound
of the waves, which we were told that it still
kept and always would keep. I remember the time when
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I thought that the ocean was really imprisoned somewhere within
that narrow aperture. We were accustomed to seeing barrels full
of coconuts rolled about, and there were jars of preserved
tropical fruits, tamarinds, ginger root, and other spicy appetizers, almost
as common as barberries and cranberries in the cupboards of
most housekeepers. I wonder what has become of those many,
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many little red guinea peas we had to play with.
It never seemed as if they really belonged to the
vegetable world, notwithstanding their name. We had foreign coins mixed
in with our large copper scents, all kinds, from the
Russian kopek to the halfpenny token of Great Britain. Those
were the days when we had half cents in circulation
to make change with. For part of our currency was
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the old fashioned ninepence twelve and a half cents, and
the fourpence happening six cents in a quarter. There was
a good deal of old England about us still, and
we had also many living reminders of strange lands across
the sea. Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the
thimbleberry hedges that bordered the cornfields, as much at home
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out of doors as within. Java sparrows and canaries and
other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny windows
into the street, delighting the ears of passing school children,
long before the robins came. Now and then somebody's pet
monkey would escape along the stone walls and shed roofs,
and try to hide from his boy persecutors by dodging
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behind a chimney, or by slipping through an open scuttle,
to the terror and delight of juveniles whose premises he invaded.
And there were wanderers from foreign countries, domesticated in many families,
whose swarthy complexions and Uncaucasian features became familiar in our streets. Mongolians, Africans,
and waifs from the Pacific Islands, who always were known
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to us by distinguished names, Hector and Scipio, and Julius
Caesar and Christopher Columbus. Families of black people were scattered
about the place, relics of a time when even New
England had not freed her slaves. Some of them had
belonged in my great grandfather's family, and they hung about
the old homestead at the farms long after they were
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at liberty to go anywhere they pleased. There was a
rose and a phyllis among them who came off into
our house to bring luscious high blackberries from the farm's woods,
or to do the household washing. They seemed pathetically out
of place, although they lived among us on equal terms,
respectable and respected. The pathos of the sea haunted the town,
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made audible to every ear when a coming northeaster brought
the rot of the waves in from the islands across
the harbour bar, with a moaning like that we heard
when we listened for it in the shell. Almost every
house had its sea tragedy. Somebody belonging to it had
been shipwrecked, or had sailed away one day and never returned.
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Our own part of the bay was so sheltered by
its islands that there were seldom any disasters heard of
near home, although the names of the two nearest, Great
and Little Misery, are said to have originated with a
shipwreck so far back in the history of the region
that it was never recorded. But one such calamity happened
in my infancy, spoken of always by those who knew
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its victim in subdued tones, the wreck of the Persia.
The vessel was returning from the Mediterranean, and in a
blinding snowstorm on a wild March night, her captain probably
mistook one of the cape and lighthouses for that on
Baker's Island, and steered straight upon the rocks in a
lonely cove just outside the cape. In the morning, the
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bodies of her dead crew were found tossing about with
her cargo of paper manufacturers rags. Among the breakers, her
captain and mate were Beverly men, and their funeral from
the meetinghouse the next Sabbath was an event which long
left its solemnity hanging over the town. We were rather
a young nation at this time. The history of the
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United States could only tell the story of the American Revolution,
of the War of eighteen twelve, and of the administration
of about half a dozen presidents. Our republicanism was fresh
and wide awake. The edge of George Washington's little hatchet
had not yet been worn down to its latter day.
It flashed keenly on our young eyes and ears in
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the reading books and through Fourth of July speeches. The
father of his country had been dead only a little
more than a quarter of a century, and General Lafayette
was still alive. He had indeed passed through our town
but a few years before, and had been publicly welcomed
under our own elms and Linden's. Even babies echoed the
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names of our two heroes in their prattle. We had
great training days when Drum and Fife took our ears
by storm, when the militia and the light infantry mustered
and marched through the streets to the common with boys
and girls at their heels, such girls as could get
their mother's consent or the courage to run off without it.
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We never could, but we always managed to get a
good look at the show in one way or another.
Old election or election day, as we called it, a
lost holiday now was a general training day, and it
came at our most delightful season, the last of May.
Lilacs and tulips were in bloom then, and it was
a picturesque fashion of the time. For little girls whose
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parents had no flower gardens to go around begging a
bunch of lilacs or a tulip or two. My mother
always made Lection cake for us on that day. It
was nothing but a kind of sweetened bread with a
shine of egg and molasses on top, but we thought
it delicious. The fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day were
the only other holidays that we made much account of,
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and the former was a far more well behaved festival
than it is in modern times. The bells rang without stint,
and at morning and noon cannon were fired off, But
torpedoes and firecrackers did not make the highways dangerous. Perhaps
they were thought too expensive an amusement. Somebody delivered an oration.
There was a good deal said about this universal Yankee nation.
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Some rockets went up from Salem in the evening. We
watched them from the hill, and then went to bed,
feeling that we had been good patriots. There was always
a fast day, which I'm afraid most of us younger
ones regarded merely as a day when we were to
eat unlimited quantities of molasses gingerbread instead of sitting down
to our regular meals. When I read about Christmas, and
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the English story books. I wished we could have that
beautiful holiday, but our Puritan fathers shook their heads at Christmas.
Our Sabbath school library books were nearly all English reprints,
and many of the story books were very interesting. I
think that most of my favorites were by Missus Sherwood.
Some of them were about life in India, Little Henry
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and His Bearer, and Ayah and the Lady. Then there
were The Hedge of Thorns, Theophilus and Sophia, Anna Ross,
and a whole series of little English books that I
took great delight in. I had begun to be rather
introspective and somewhat unhealthily self critical, contrasting myself meanwhile, with
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my sister Lida, just a little older, who was my
usual playmate, and whom I admired very much for what
I could not help seeing her unusual sweetness of disposition.
I read Missus Sherwood's Infants Progress, and I made a
personal application of it, picturing myself as the naughty, wilful
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playful and my sister Lida as the saintly little piece.
This book gave me a morbid, unhappy feeling, while yet
it had something of the Fascination of the Pilgrim's Progress,
of which it is an imitation. I fancied myself followed
about by a fiendlike boy who haunted its pages, called
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inbred Sin, and the story implied that there was no
such thing as getting rid of him. I began to
dislike all boys on his account. There was one who
tormented my sister and me. We only knew him by name,
by jumping out at us from behind doorways or fences
on our way to school, making horrid faces at us.
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Inbred Sin I was certain looked just like him, and
the two strangely blended in one hideous presence, were the
worst nightmare of my dreams. There was too much reality
about that inbred Sin. I felt that I was acquainted
with him. He was the hateful hero of the little allegory,
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as satan Is of Paradise lost. I liked lessons that
came to me through fables and fairy tales, although in
reading Esop I invariably skipped the moral pinned on at
the end and made one for myself or else did
without missus. Lydia Marie Child's story of the Immortal Fountain
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in the Girl's Own Book which it was the joy
of my heart to read. Although it preached a searching
sermon to me, I applied in the same way that
I did the Infant's Progress. I thought of Lyda as
the gentle, unselfish rose, and myself as the ugly marian.
She was patient and obliging, and I felt that I
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was the reverse. She was considered pretty, and I knew
that I was the reverse of that too. I wondered
if Lida really had bathed in the Immortal Fountain, and
oh how I wished I could find the way there,
But I feared that trying to do so would be
of no use. The fairies would cross their wands to
keep me back, and their wings would darken at my approach.
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The book that I loved first and best, and lived
upon in my childhood was Pilgrim's Progress. It was as
a story that I cared for it, although I knew
that it meant something more, something that was already going
on in my own heart and life. Oh how I
used to wish that I too could start off on
a pilgrimage. It would be so much easier than the
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continual discouraging struggle to be good. The lot I most
envied was that of the contented shepherd boy in the
Valley of Humiliation, singing his cheerful songs and wearing the
herb called Heart's ease in his bosom. But all the
glorious ups and downs of the progress I would gladly
have shared with Christian and her children, never desiring to
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turn aside into any bypath meadow, while mister Greatheart led
the way and the shining ones came down to meet
us along the road. It was one of the necessities
of my nature as a child to have some one
being real or ideal man or woman before whom I
inwardly bowed down and worshiped. Mister Greatheart was the perfect
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hero of my imagination. Nobody in books or out of
them compared with him. I wondered if there were really
any mister Greathearts to be met with among living men.
I remember reading this beloved book once in a snowstorm,
and looking up from it out among the white, wandering flakes,
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with a feeling that they had come down from heaven
as its interpreters. That they were trying to tell me
in the airy up and down flight the story of
Innumerable Souls. I tried to fix my eye on one
particular flake, and to follow its course until it touched
the earth. But I found that I could not a
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little breeze was stirring, and the flake seemed to go
and return, and to descend, and then ascend again, as
if hastening homeward to the sky, losing itself at last
in the airy, infinite throng, and leaving me filled with
thoughts of that great multitude which no man could number,
clothed with white robes, crowding so gloriously into the closing
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pages of the Bible. Oh, if I could only be
sure that I should sometime be one of that invisible company.
But the heavens were already beginning to look a great
way off. I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,
Who are these in bright ray? And that seemed to
bring them nearer again. The history of the early martyrs,
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the persecutions of the Waldenses and of the Scotch covenanters,
I read and re read with longing emulation. Why could
I not be a martyr too? It would be so
beautiful to die for the truth as they did, As
Jesus did. I did not understand then that he lived
and died to show us what life really means, and
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to give us true life like his, the life of
love to God with all our hearts, of love to
all his human children for his sake, and that to
live this life faithfully is greater even than to die
a martyr's death. It puzzled me to know what some
of the talk I heard about being a Christian could mean.
I saw that it was something which only men and
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women could comprehend. And yet they taught me to say,
those dear words of the Master, suffer the little children
to come unto me. Surely he meant what he said.
He did not tell the children that they must receive
the Kingdom of God like grown people. He said that
everybody must enter into it as a little child. But
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our fathers were stalwart men, with many foes to encounter.
If anybody ever needed a grown up religion, they surely did,
and it became them well. Most of our every day
reading also came to us from over the sea. Miss
Edgeworth's juvenile stories were in great circulation, and we knew
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Harry and Lucy and Rosamond almost as well as we
did our own playmates. But we did not think those
English children had so good a time as we did,
they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed
to us that the little folks across the water never
were allowed to romp and run wild. Some of us
may have held a vague idea that this freedom of
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ours was the natural inheritance of Republican children. Only primroses
and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant story books
of ours, and we went a maying there with our
transatlantic playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our
baskets expecting to find those English flowers in our fields.
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How should children be wiser than to look for every
beautiful thing they've heard of on home ground? And indeed
our commonest field flowers were, many of them importations from
the mother country, clover and dande lyons and ox eye daisies.
I was delighted when my mother told me one day
that a yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip,
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for I thought she meant that it was a genuine
English cowslip, which I had read about. I was disappointed
to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh marigold.
My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself
a great deal. Paul and Virginia, Elizabeth or The Exiles
of Siberia, Nina and Icelandic Tale with the Vicar of Wakefield,
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The Tour to the Hebrides, Gullifer's Travels, The Arabian Nights,
and some odd volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels. I
read This Goddish Chiefs my first novel, when I was
about five years old. So absorbed was I in the
Sorrows of Lady Helen mar and Sir William Wallace that
I crept into a corner where nobody would notice me,
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and I read on through sunset into moonlight, with eyes
blurred with tears. I did not feel I was doing
anything wrong, for I had heard my father say he
was willing his daughters should read that one novel. He
probably did not intend the remark for the ears of
his youngest. However, my appetite for reading was omnivorous, and
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I devoured a great many romances. My sisters took them
from a circulating library, many more, perhaps than came to
my parents knowledge. But it was not often that one
escaped me wherever it was hidden. I did not understand
what I was reading, to be sure, and that was
one of the best and worst things about it. The
sentimentalism of some of those romances was altogether unchildlike, but
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I did not take much of it in It was
the habit of running over pages and pages to get
to the end of a story, the habit of reading
without caring what I read that I know to have
been bad for my mind. To use a nautical expression,
my brain was in danger of getting water logged. There
are so many more books of fiction written nowadays. I
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do not see how the young people who try to
read one tenth of them have any brains left for
every day use. One result of my infantile novel reading
was that I did not like to look at my
own face in a mirror, because it was so unlike
that of heroines, always pictured with high white foreheads and
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cheeks of a perfect oval. Mine was round, ruddy and
laughing with health. And though I practiced at the glass
a good deal, I could not lengthen it by puckering
down my lips. I quite envied the little girls who
were pale and pensive looking, as that was the only
ladyfied standard in the romances. Of course, course, the chief
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pleasure of reading them was that of identifying myself with
every new heroine. They began to call me a bookworm
at home. I did not at all relish the title.
It was fortunate for me that I liked to be
out of doors a great deal, and that I had
a brother, John, who was willing to have me for
an occasional companion. Sometimes he would take me with him
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when he went huckleberrying up the rural Monsrot Road, through
Cat's Swamp to the edge of burnt Hills and Beaver Pond.
He had a boy's pride in explaining these localities to me,
making me understand that I had a guide who was
familiar with every inch of the way, then charging me
not to move until he came back. He would leave
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me sitting alone on a great craggy rock while he
went off and filled his basket, out of sight among
the bushes. Indeed, I did not want to move. It
was also new and fascinating, the tall pine trees whispering
to each other across the sky openings above me, the
graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy cups,
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as if the elves had just spread their table for tea.
The unspeakable charm of the spice breathing air all wove
a web of enchantment about me from which I had
no wish to disentangle myself. The silent spell of the
woods held me with a power stronger even than that
of the solemn, voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother would
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get permission to take me on a longer excursion to
visit the old homestead at the farms. Three or four
miles was not thought too long a walk for a
healthy child of five years. And that road in the
old time led through a rural paradise beautiful at every season,
whether it were the time of song, sparrows and violets,
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of wild roses and coral hung barberry bushes, or of
fallen leaves and snow drifts. The wildness of the road
now exchanged for elegant modern cultivation, was its great charm
to us. We stopped at the cove Brook to hear
the cat birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel
in the sudden surprise of the open sea, and to
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listen to the chant of the waves, always stronger and
grander there than anywhere along the shore, we passed under
dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of
which held, under its skirting pines the secret of the
prettiest wood path to us in all the world, the
path to the ancestral farmhouse. We found children enough to
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play with there, as numerous a family as our own.
We were Sometimes I fancy the added dropped too much
of already overflowing juvenility. Farther down the road, where the
cousins were all grown up men and women. Aunt Betsy's cordial,
old fashioned hopitality sometimes detained us a day or two.
We watched the milking, and fed the chickens, and fared gloriously.
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Aunt Betsy could not have done more to entertain us
had we been the President's children. I have always cherished
the memory of a certain pair of large bowed spectacles
that she wore, and of the green calash held by
a ribbon bridle that sheltered her head. When she walked
up from the shore to see us, as she often did,
they announced to us the approach of inexhaustible kindliness and
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good cheer. We took in a home feeling with the words.
Aunt Betsy, then and always she had just the husband
that belonged to her, and my Uncle David, an upright man,
frank faced, large hearted, and spiritually minded. He was my
father's favorite brother, and to our branch of the family,
the Farms meant Uncle David and Aunt Betsy. My brother
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John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize entirely
with my own ideas. He had an inventive mind and
wanted me to share his boyish sports. But I did
not like to ride in a wheelbarrow, nor to walk
on stilts, nor even to coast down the hill on
his sled, and I all got a tumble if I tried,
for I was a rather clumsy child. Besides, I much
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preferred girls quieter games. We were seldom permitted to play
with any boys except our brothers. I drew the inference
that our boys must be a great deal better than
the other boys. My brother John had some fine playfellows,
but he seemed to consider me in the way when
they were his guests. Occasionally we would forget that the
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neighbor boys were not girls, and would find ourselves all
playing together in delightful unconsciousness. Although possibly a thought like
that of the ettric shepherd may now and then have
flitted through the mind of some masculine juvenile. Why the
boys should drive away little sweet maidens from the play,
or love to banter and fight so well, that's the
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thing I could never tell. One day, I thoughtlessly accepted
an invitation to get through a gap in the garden
fence to where the doctor's two boys were preparing to
take an imaginary sae sleigh ride in the midsummer. The
sleigh was stranded among tall weeds and corn stalks, but
I was politely handed in by the elder boy, who
sat down by my side and tucked his little brother
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in front at our feet, informing me that we were
father and mother and little son going to take a
ride to newbury Port. He had found an old pair
of reins and tied them to a saw horse that
he switched and gee uped vigorously. The journey was as
brief as delightful. I ran home feeling like the heroine
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of an elopement, asking myself, meanwhile, what would my brother
John say if he knew I had been playing with boys?
He was very particular about his sister's behavior, But I
incautiously said to one sister, in whom I did not
usually confide, that I thought James was the nicest boy
in the lane, and that I liked his little brother
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Charles too. She laughed at me so unmercifully for making
the remark that I never dared look toward the gap
in the fence again, beyond which I could hear the
boy's voices around the old sleigh, where they were playing
entirely forgetful of their former traveling companion. Still I continued
to think that my courteous cavalier James was the nicest
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boy in the lane. My brother's vigilant care of his
two youngest sisters was once the occasion to them of
a serious fright. My grandfather, the sexton, sometimes trusted him
to toll the bell for a funeral. In those days,
the bell was told for everybody who died. John was
social and did not like to go up into the
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belfry and stay an hour or so alone, And as
my grandfather positively forbade him to take any other boy
up there, he one day got permission for us two
little girls to go with him for company. We had
to climb up a great many stairs, and the last
flight was enclosed by a rough door with a lock inside,
which he was charged to fasten so that no mischievous
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boys should follow. It was strange to be standing up
there in the air, gazing over the balcony railing down
into the street, where the men and women looked so small,
and across to the water, and the ships in the east,
and the clouds and the hills in the west. But
when he struck the tongue against the great bell close
to our ears, it was more than we were prepared for.
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The little sister, scarcely three years old, screamed and shrieked,
I shall be stunded, I shall be stunded. I do
not know where she picked up that final syllable, but
it made her terror much more emphatic. Still, the great
waves of solemn sound went eddying on over the hills
and over the sea, and we had to hear it
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all though we stopped our ears with our fingers. It
was an immense relief to us. When the last stroke
of the passing bell was struck and John said we
could go down. He took the key from his pocket
and was fitting it into the lock when it slipped,
dropping down through a wide crack in the floor beyond
our reach. Now the little sister cried again and would
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not be pacified. And when I looked up and caught
John's blank, dismayed look, I began to feel like crying too.
The question went swiftly through my mind, how many days
can we stay up here without starving to death? For
I really thought we should never get down out of
our prison in the air, never see our mother's face again.
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But my brother's wits returned to him. He led us
back to the balcony and shouted over the railing to
a boy in the street, making him understand that he
must go and inform my father that we were locked
into the belfry. It was not long before we saw
both him and my grandfather on their way to the church.
They came up to the little door and told us
to push with our united strength against it. The rusty
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lock soon yielded, And how good it was to look
into those two beloved human faces once more. But we
little girls were not invited to join my brother again
when he told the bell. If we had been, I
think we should have promptly declined the invitation. Many of
my childish misadventures came to me in connection with my
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little sister, who, having been much indulged, took it for
granted that she could always have what she wanted. One day,
we two were allowed to take a walk together, I
as the older, being supposed to take care of her.
Although we were only going towards the cove over a
secluded road, she insisted upon wearing a brand new pair
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of red Morocco boots. All went well until we came
to a bog by the road side where sweet flag
and cat tails grew out. In the middle of the bog,
where no ventured someome boy had ever attempted their seizure.
There were many tall, fine looking brown cat tails growing.
She caught sight of them, and before I saw what
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she was doing, she had shot from my side like
an arrow from the bow, and was far out on
the black, quaking surface that at first upheld her light weight.
I stood petrified with horror. I knew all about that
dangerous place. I had been told that nobody had ever
found out how deep that mud was. I had uttered
just one imploring come back when she turned to me
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with a shriek, throwing up her arms towards me. She
was sinking. There was nobody in sight, and there was
no time to think. I ran, or rather flew across
the bog with just one thought in mind. I have
got to get her out. Some angel must have prevented
me from making a misstep and sinking with her. I
felt the power of a giant suddenly taking possession of
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my small frame. Quicker than I could tell of it.
I had given one tremendous pull. She had already sunk
above her boot tops, and had dragged her back to
the road. It is a marvel to me now how I,
a child of scarcely six years, succeeded in rescuing her.
It did not seem to me as if I were
doing it myself, but as if some unseen power had
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taken possession of me for a moment and made me
do it. And I suppose that when we act from
a sudden impulse to help another out of trouble, it
never is ourself that does the good deed. The highest
strength just takes us and uses us. I certainly felt
equal to going straight through the earth to China after
my little sister. If she had sunk out of sight.
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We were two miserable looking children when we reached home.
The sticky ooze, having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps
of mud, with which my own clothes also were soiled.
I had to drag or carry her all the way,
for she could not or would not walk a step,
and alas for the Morocco boots, they were never again read.
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I also received a scolding for not taking better care
of my little sister, and I was not very soon
allowed again to have her company in my rambles. We
usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out
of door amusement near home, and our sports, as well
as our books, had a spice of merry Old England.
They were full of kings and queens and made sharp contrasts,
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as well as odd mixtures with the homeliness of our
everyday life. One of them, a sort of rhymed dialogue,
began with the couplet Queen Anne. Queen Anne, she sits
in the sun, as fair as a lady, as white
as a nun. If Queen Anne did not give a
right guess as to which hand of the messenger held
the King's letter to her, she was contemptuously informed that
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she was as brown as a bun. In another game,
four little girls joined hands across in couples, chanting, I
wish my father were a king, I wish my mother
were a queen, and I a little companion, concluding with
a close embrace, in a dizzying whirl, breathlessly shouting all
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together a bundle of faggots, A bundle of faggots. In
a third which may have begun with a juvenile reacting
of the colonial struggle for liberty, we ranged ourselves under
two leaders, who made an archway over our heads of
their lifted hands and arms, saying, as we passed beneath,
lift up the gates as high as the sky, and
let King George and his army pass by. We were
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told to whisper oranges or lemons for a password, and
oranges always won the larger enlistment, whether British or American.
And then there was Grandmother Gray, and the old woman
from Newfoundland with all her children in her hand, and
the Night from Spain inquiring for your daughter Jane, and
numberless others, nearly all of them bearing a distinct Old
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world flavor. One of our play places was an unoccupied
end of the burying ground, overhung by the colonel's apple
trees and close under his wall, so that we should
not be too near the gravestones. I do not think
that death was at all a real thing to me
or my brothers and sisters. At this time we lived
so near the graveyard that it seemed merely the extension
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of our garden. We wandered there at will, trying to
decipher the moss grown inscription, and wondering at the homely
carvings of crossbones and cherubs and willow trees on the
gray slate stones. I did not associate those long green
mounds with people who had once lived. Though we were careful,
having been so instructed not to step on the graves,
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to ramble about there and puzzle ourselves with the names
and dates was like turning over the pages of a
curious old book. We had not the least feeling of
irreverence in taking the edge of the graveyard for our playground.
It was known as the old burying ground, and we
children regarded it with a sort of affectionate freedom, as
we would a grandmother. Because it was old. That indeed
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was one peculiar attraction of the town itself. It was old,
and it seemed old, much older than it does now.
There was only one main street said to have been
the first settler's cow path to Wenthem, which might account
for its zigzag picturesqueness. All the rest were courts or lanes.
The town used to to wear a delightful air of drowsiness,
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as if she had stretched herself out for an afternoon nap,
with her head towards her old mother Salem, and her
whole length reclining towards the sea, till she felt at
her feet through her green robes the dip of the
deep water at the farms. All her elder children recognized
in her quiet, steady going ways of maternal unity and
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strength of character, as of a town that understood her
own plans and had settled down to peaceful, permanent habits.
Her spirit was that of most of our Massachusetts coast towns.
They were transplanted shoots of Old England, and it was
the voice of a mother country more ancient than their
own that little children heard crooning across the sea in
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their cradle hymns and nursery songs. End of Chapter five,
Old New England, read by Dana Kovar, Tampa, Florida, April seventeen,
two thousand, twenty three.
Chapter five 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 Dana Kovar, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter five, Old New England. When I first
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opened my eyes upon my native town, it was already
nearly two hundred years old, counting from the time when
it was part of the original Salem settlement, old enough
to have gained a character and an individuality of its own,
as it certainly had. We children felt at once that
we belonged to the town as we did to our
father or our mother. The sea was its nearest neighbor,
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and penetrated to every fireside, claiming close intimacy with every
home and heart. The farmers up and down the shore
were as much fishermen as farmers. They were as familiar
with the grand banks of Newfoundland as they were with
their own potatos. Every third man you met in the
street you might safely hail as shipmate, or skipper or captain.
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My father's early seafaring experience gave him the latter title.
To the end of his life. It was hard to
keep the boys from going off to sea before they
were grown. No inland occupation attracted them. Land lubber was
one of the most contemptuous epithets heard from boyish lips.
The spirit of adventure developed in them, a rough, breezy
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type of manliness, now almost extinct. Men talked about a
voyage to Calcutta or Hong Kong, or up the Straits
meaning Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, as if it were not
much more than going to the next village. It seemed
as if our nearest neighbors lived over there. Across the water,
we breathed the air of foreign countries curiously interblended with
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our own. The women of well to do families had
canton crape shawls and smyrna silks and turk satins for
sabbath day wear, which somebody had brought home for them.
Mantelpieces were adorned with nautilus and conk shells, and with
branches and fans of coral, and children had foreign curiosities
and treasures of the sea for playthings. There was one
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imported shell that we did not value much. It was
so abundant. The freckled univalve they called a prop yet
it had a mysterious interest for us little ones. We
held it to our ears and listened for the sound
of the waves, which we were told that it still
kept and always would keep. I remember the time when
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I thought that the ocean was really imprisoned somewhere within
that narrow aperture. We were accustomed to seeing barrels full
of coconuts rolled about, and there were jars of preserved
tropical fruits, tamarinds, ginger root, and other spicy appetizers, almost
as common as barberries and cranberries in the cupboards of
most housekeepers. I wonder what has become of those many,
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many little red guinea peas we had to play with.
It never seemed as if they really belonged to the
vegetable world, notwithstanding their name. We had foreign coins mixed
in with our large copper scents, all kinds, from the
Russian kopek to the halfpenny token of Great Britain. Those
were the days when we had half cents in circulation
to make change with. For part of our currency was
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the old fashioned ninepence twelve and a half cents, and
the fourpence happening six cents in a quarter. There was
a good deal of old England about us still, and
we had also many living reminders of strange lands across
the sea. Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the
thimbleberry hedges that bordered the cornfields, as much at home
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out of doors as within. Java sparrows and canaries and
other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny windows
into the street, delighting the ears of passing school children,
long before the robins came. Now and then somebody's pet
monkey would escape along the stone walls and shed roofs,
and try to hide from his boy persecutors by dodging
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behind a chimney, or by slipping through an open scuttle,
to the terror and delight of juveniles whose premises he invaded.
And there were wanderers from foreign countries, domesticated in many families,
whose swarthy complexions and Uncaucasian features became familiar in our streets. Mongolians, Africans,
and waifs from the Pacific Islands, who always were known
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to us by distinguished names, Hector and Scipio, and Julius
Caesar and Christopher Columbus. Families of black people were scattered
about the place, relics of a time when even New
England had not freed her slaves. Some of them had
belonged in my great grandfather's family, and they hung about
the old homestead at the farms long after they were
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at liberty to go anywhere they pleased. There was a
rose and a phyllis among them who came off into
our house to bring luscious high blackberries from the farm's woods,
or to do the household washing. They seemed pathetically out
of place, although they lived among us on equal terms,
respectable and respected. The pathos of the sea haunted the town,
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made audible to every ear when a coming northeaster brought
the rot of the waves in from the islands across
the harbour bar, with a moaning like that we heard
when we listened for it in the shell. Almost every
house had its sea tragedy. Somebody belonging to it had
been shipwrecked, or had sailed away one day and never returned.
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Our own part of the bay was so sheltered by
its islands that there were seldom any disasters heard of
near home, although the names of the two nearest, Great
and Little Misery, are said to have originated with a
shipwreck so far back in the history of the region
that it was never recorded. But one such calamity happened
in my infancy, spoken of always by those who knew
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its victim in subdued tones, the wreck of the Persia.
The vessel was returning from the Mediterranean, and in a
blinding snowstorm on a wild March night, her captain probably
mistook one of the cape and lighthouses for that on
Baker's Island, and steered straight upon the rocks in a
lonely cove just outside the cape. In the morning, the
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bodies of her dead crew were found tossing about with
her cargo of paper manufacturers rags. Among the breakers, her
captain and mate were Beverly men, and their funeral from
the meetinghouse the next Sabbath was an event which long
left its solemnity hanging over the town. We were rather
a young nation at this time. The history of the
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United States could only tell the story of the American Revolution,
of the War of eighteen twelve, and of the administration
of about half a dozen presidents. Our republicanism was fresh
and wide awake. The edge of George Washington's little hatchet
had not yet been worn down to its latter day.
It flashed keenly on our young eyes and ears in
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the reading books and through Fourth of July speeches. The
father of his country had been dead only a little
more than a quarter of a century, and General Lafayette
was still alive. He had indeed passed through our town
but a few years before, and had been publicly welcomed
under our own elms and Linden's. Even babies echoed the
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names of our two heroes in their prattle. We had
great training days when Drum and Fife took our ears
by storm, when the militia and the light infantry mustered
and marched through the streets to the common with boys
and girls at their heels, such girls as could get
their mother's consent or the courage to run off without it.
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We never could, but we always managed to get a
good look at the show in one way or another.
Old election or election day, as we called it, a
lost holiday now was a general training day, and it
came at our most delightful season, the last of May.
Lilacs and tulips were in bloom then, and it was
a picturesque fashion of the time. For little girls whose
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parents had no flower gardens to go around begging a
bunch of lilacs or a tulip or two. My mother
always made Lection cake for us on that day. It
was nothing but a kind of sweetened bread with a
shine of egg and molasses on top, but we thought
it delicious. The fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day were
the only other holidays that we made much account of,
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and the former was a far more well behaved festival
than it is in modern times. The bells rang without stint,
and at morning and noon cannon were fired off, But
torpedoes and firecrackers did not make the highways dangerous. Perhaps
they were thought too expensive an amusement. Somebody delivered an oration.
There was a good deal said about this universal Yankee nation.
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Some rockets went up from Salem in the evening. We
watched them from the hill, and then went to bed,
feeling that we had been good patriots. There was always
a fast day, which I'm afraid most of us younger
ones regarded merely as a day when we were to
eat unlimited quantities of molasses gingerbread instead of sitting down
to our regular meals. When I read about Christmas, and
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the English story books. I wished we could have that
beautiful holiday, but our Puritan fathers shook their heads at Christmas.
Our Sabbath school library books were nearly all English reprints,
and many of the story books were very interesting. I
think that most of my favorites were by Missus Sherwood.
Some of them were about life in India, Little Henry
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and His Bearer, and Ayah and the Lady. Then there
were The Hedge of Thorns, Theophilus and Sophia, Anna Ross,
and a whole series of little English books that I
took great delight in. I had begun to be rather
introspective and somewhat unhealthily self critical, contrasting myself meanwhile, with
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my sister Lida, just a little older, who was my
usual playmate, and whom I admired very much for what
I could not help seeing her unusual sweetness of disposition.
I read Missus Sherwood's Infants Progress, and I made a
personal application of it, picturing myself as the naughty, wilful
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playful and my sister Lida as the saintly little piece.
This book gave me a morbid, unhappy feeling, while yet
it had something of the Fascination of the Pilgrim's Progress,
of which it is an imitation. I fancied myself followed
about by a fiendlike boy who haunted its pages, called
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inbred Sin, and the story implied that there was no
such thing as getting rid of him. I began to
dislike all boys on his account. There was one who
tormented my sister and me. We only knew him by name,
by jumping out at us from behind doorways or fences
on our way to school, making horrid faces at us.
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Inbred Sin I was certain looked just like him, and
the two strangely blended in one hideous presence, were the
worst nightmare of my dreams. There was too much reality
about that inbred Sin. I felt that I was acquainted
with him. He was the hateful hero of the little allegory,
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as satan Is of Paradise lost. I liked lessons that
came to me through fables and fairy tales, although in
reading Esop I invariably skipped the moral pinned on at
the end and made one for myself or else did
without missus. Lydia Marie Child's story of the Immortal Fountain
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in the Girl's Own Book which it was the joy
of my heart to read. Although it preached a searching
sermon to me, I applied in the same way that
I did the Infant's Progress. I thought of Lyda as
the gentle, unselfish rose, and myself as the ugly marian.
She was patient and obliging, and I felt that I
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was the reverse. She was considered pretty, and I knew
that I was the reverse of that too. I wondered
if Lida really had bathed in the Immortal Fountain, and
oh how I wished I could find the way there,
But I feared that trying to do so would be
of no use. The fairies would cross their wands to
keep me back, and their wings would darken at my approach.
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The book that I loved first and best, and lived
upon in my childhood was Pilgrim's Progress. It was as
a story that I cared for it, although I knew
that it meant something more, something that was already going
on in my own heart and life. Oh how I
used to wish that I too could start off on
a pilgrimage. It would be so much easier than the
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continual discouraging struggle to be good. The lot I most
envied was that of the contented shepherd boy in the
Valley of Humiliation, singing his cheerful songs and wearing the
herb called Heart's ease in his bosom. But all the
glorious ups and downs of the progress I would gladly
have shared with Christian and her children, never desiring to
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turn aside into any bypath meadow, while mister Greatheart led
the way and the shining ones came down to meet
us along the road. It was one of the necessities
of my nature as a child to have some one
being real or ideal man or woman before whom I
inwardly bowed down and worshiped. Mister Greatheart was the perfect
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hero of my imagination. Nobody in books or out of
them compared with him. I wondered if there were really
any mister Greathearts to be met with among living men.
I remember reading this beloved book once in a snowstorm,
and looking up from it out among the white, wandering flakes,
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with a feeling that they had come down from heaven
as its interpreters. That they were trying to tell me
in the airy up and down flight the story of
Innumerable Souls. I tried to fix my eye on one
particular flake, and to follow its course until it touched
the earth. But I found that I could not a
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little breeze was stirring, and the flake seemed to go
and return, and to descend, and then ascend again, as
if hastening homeward to the sky, losing itself at last
in the airy, infinite throng, and leaving me filled with
thoughts of that great multitude which no man could number,
clothed with white robes, crowding so gloriously into the closing
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pages of the Bible. Oh, if I could only be
sure that I should sometime be one of that invisible company.
But the heavens were already beginning to look a great
way off. I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,
Who are these in bright ray? And that seemed to
bring them nearer again. The history of the early martyrs,
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the persecutions of the Waldenses and of the Scotch covenanters,
I read and re read with longing emulation. Why could
I not be a martyr too? It would be so
beautiful to die for the truth as they did, As
Jesus did. I did not understand then that he lived
and died to show us what life really means, and
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to give us true life like his, the life of
love to God with all our hearts, of love to
all his human children for his sake, and that to
live this life faithfully is greater even than to die
a martyr's death. It puzzled me to know what some
of the talk I heard about being a Christian could mean.
I saw that it was something which only men and
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women could comprehend. And yet they taught me to say,
those dear words of the Master, suffer the little children
to come unto me. Surely he meant what he said.
He did not tell the children that they must receive
the Kingdom of God like grown people. He said that
everybody must enter into it as a little child. But
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our fathers were stalwart men, with many foes to encounter.
If anybody ever needed a grown up religion, they surely did,
and it became them well. Most of our every day
reading also came to us from over the sea. Miss
Edgeworth's juvenile stories were in great circulation, and we knew
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Harry and Lucy and Rosamond almost as well as we
did our own playmates. But we did not think those
English children had so good a time as we did,
they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed
to us that the little folks across the water never
were allowed to romp and run wild. Some of us
may have held a vague idea that this freedom of
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ours was the natural inheritance of Republican children. Only primroses
and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant story books
of ours, and we went a maying there with our
transatlantic playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our
baskets expecting to find those English flowers in our fields.
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How should children be wiser than to look for every
beautiful thing they've heard of on home ground? And indeed
our commonest field flowers were, many of them importations from
the mother country, clover and dande lyons and ox eye daisies.
I was delighted when my mother told me one day
that a yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip,
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for I thought she meant that it was a genuine
English cowslip, which I had read about. I was disappointed
to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh marigold.
My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself
a great deal. Paul and Virginia, Elizabeth or The Exiles
of Siberia, Nina and Icelandic Tale with the Vicar of Wakefield,
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The Tour to the Hebrides, Gullifer's Travels, The Arabian Nights,
and some odd volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels. I
read This Goddish Chiefs my first novel, when I was
about five years old. So absorbed was I in the
Sorrows of Lady Helen mar and Sir William Wallace that
I crept into a corner where nobody would notice me,
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and I read on through sunset into moonlight, with eyes
blurred with tears. I did not feel I was doing
anything wrong, for I had heard my father say he
was willing his daughters should read that one novel. He
probably did not intend the remark for the ears of
his youngest. However, my appetite for reading was omnivorous, and
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I devoured a great many romances. My sisters took them
from a circulating library, many more, perhaps than came to
my parents knowledge. But it was not often that one
escaped me wherever it was hidden. I did not understand
what I was reading, to be sure, and that was
one of the best and worst things about it. The
sentimentalism of some of those romances was altogether unchildlike, but
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I did not take much of it in It was
the habit of running over pages and pages to get
to the end of a story, the habit of reading
without caring what I read that I know to have
been bad for my mind. To use a nautical expression,
my brain was in danger of getting water logged. There
are so many more books of fiction written nowadays. I
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do not see how the young people who try to
read one tenth of them have any brains left for
every day use. One result of my infantile novel reading
was that I did not like to look at my
own face in a mirror, because it was so unlike
that of heroines, always pictured with high white foreheads and
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cheeks of a perfect oval. Mine was round, ruddy and
laughing with health. And though I practiced at the glass
a good deal, I could not lengthen it by puckering
down my lips. I quite envied the little girls who
were pale and pensive looking, as that was the only
ladyfied standard in the romances. Of course, course, the chief
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pleasure of reading them was that of identifying myself with
every new heroine. They began to call me a bookworm
at home. I did not at all relish the title.
It was fortunate for me that I liked to be
out of doors a great deal, and that I had
a brother, John, who was willing to have me for
an occasional companion. Sometimes he would take me with him
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when he went huckleberrying up the rural Monsrot Road, through
Cat's Swamp to the edge of burnt Hills and Beaver Pond.
He had a boy's pride in explaining these localities to me,
making me understand that I had a guide who was
familiar with every inch of the way, then charging me
not to move until he came back. He would leave
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me sitting alone on a great craggy rock while he
went off and filled his basket, out of sight among
the bushes. Indeed, I did not want to move. It
was also new and fascinating, the tall pine trees whispering
to each other across the sky openings above me, the
graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy cups,
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as if the elves had just spread their table for tea.
The unspeakable charm of the spice breathing air all wove
a web of enchantment about me from which I had
no wish to disentangle myself. The silent spell of the
woods held me with a power stronger even than that
of the solemn, voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother would
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get permission to take me on a longer excursion to
visit the old homestead at the farms. Three or four
miles was not thought too long a walk for a
healthy child of five years. And that road in the
old time led through a rural paradise beautiful at every season,
whether it were the time of song, sparrows and violets,
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of wild roses and coral hung barberry bushes, or of
fallen leaves and snow drifts. The wildness of the road
now exchanged for elegant modern cultivation, was its great charm
to us. We stopped at the cove Brook to hear
the cat birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel
in the sudden surprise of the open sea, and to
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listen to the chant of the waves, always stronger and
grander there than anywhere along the shore, we passed under
dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of
which held, under its skirting pines the secret of the
prettiest wood path to us in all the world, the
path to the ancestral farmhouse. We found children enough to
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play with there, as numerous a family as our own.
We were Sometimes I fancy the added dropped too much
of already overflowing juvenility. Farther down the road, where the
cousins were all grown up men and women. Aunt Betsy's cordial,
old fashioned hopitality sometimes detained us a day or two.
We watched the milking, and fed the chickens, and fared gloriously.
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Aunt Betsy could not have done more to entertain us
had we been the President's children. I have always cherished
the memory of a certain pair of large bowed spectacles
that she wore, and of the green calash held by
a ribbon bridle that sheltered her head. When she walked
up from the shore to see us, as she often did,
they announced to us the approach of inexhaustible kindliness and
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good cheer. We took in a home feeling with the words.
Aunt Betsy, then and always she had just the husband
that belonged to her, and my Uncle David, an upright man,
frank faced, large hearted, and spiritually minded. He was my
father's favorite brother, and to our branch of the family,
the Farms meant Uncle David and Aunt Betsy. My brother
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John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize entirely
with my own ideas. He had an inventive mind and
wanted me to share his boyish sports. But I did
not like to ride in a wheelbarrow, nor to walk
on stilts, nor even to coast down the hill on
his sled, and I all got a tumble if I tried,
for I was a rather clumsy child. Besides, I much
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preferred girls quieter games. We were seldom permitted to play
with any boys except our brothers. I drew the inference
that our boys must be a great deal better than
the other boys. My brother John had some fine playfellows,
but he seemed to consider me in the way when
they were his guests. Occasionally we would forget that the
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neighbor boys were not girls, and would find ourselves all
playing together in delightful unconsciousness. Although possibly a thought like
that of the ettric shepherd may now and then have
flitted through the mind of some masculine juvenile. Why the
boys should drive away little sweet maidens from the play,
or love to banter and fight so well, that's the
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thing I could never tell. One day, I thoughtlessly accepted
an invitation to get through a gap in the garden
fence to where the doctor's two boys were preparing to
take an imaginary sae sleigh ride in the midsummer. The
sleigh was stranded among tall weeds and corn stalks, but
I was politely handed in by the elder boy, who
sat down by my side and tucked his little brother
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in front at our feet, informing me that we were
father and mother and little son going to take a
ride to newbury Port. He had found an old pair
of reins and tied them to a saw horse that
he switched and gee uped vigorously. The journey was as
brief as delightful. I ran home feeling like the heroine
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of an elopement, asking myself, meanwhile, what would my brother
John say if he knew I had been playing with boys?
He was very particular about his sister's behavior, But I
incautiously said to one sister, in whom I did not
usually confide, that I thought James was the nicest boy
in the lane, and that I liked his little brother
(25:52):
Charles too. She laughed at me so unmercifully for making
the remark that I never dared look toward the gap
in the fence again, beyond which I could hear the
boy's voices around the old sleigh, where they were playing
entirely forgetful of their former traveling companion. Still I continued
to think that my courteous cavalier James was the nicest
(26:15):
boy in the lane. My brother's vigilant care of his
two youngest sisters was once the occasion to them of
a serious fright. My grandfather, the sexton, sometimes trusted him
to toll the bell for a funeral. In those days,
the bell was told for everybody who died. John was
social and did not like to go up into the
(26:36):
belfry and stay an hour or so alone, And as
my grandfather positively forbade him to take any other boy
up there, he one day got permission for us two
little girls to go with him for company. We had
to climb up a great many stairs, and the last
flight was enclosed by a rough door with a lock inside,
which he was charged to fasten so that no mischievous
(26:57):
boys should follow. It was strange to be standing up
there in the air, gazing over the balcony railing down
into the street, where the men and women looked so small,
and across to the water, and the ships in the east,
and the clouds and the hills in the west. But
when he struck the tongue against the great bell close
to our ears, it was more than we were prepared for.
(27:18):
The little sister, scarcely three years old, screamed and shrieked,
I shall be stunded, I shall be stunded. I do
not know where she picked up that final syllable, but
it made her terror much more emphatic. Still, the great
waves of solemn sound went eddying on over the hills
and over the sea, and we had to hear it
(27:40):
all though we stopped our ears with our fingers. It
was an immense relief to us. When the last stroke
of the passing bell was struck and John said we
could go down. He took the key from his pocket
and was fitting it into the lock when it slipped,
dropping down through a wide crack in the floor beyond
our reach. Now the little sister cried again and would
(28:01):
not be pacified. And when I looked up and caught
John's blank, dismayed look, I began to feel like crying too.
The question went swiftly through my mind, how many days
can we stay up here without starving to death? For
I really thought we should never get down out of
our prison in the air, never see our mother's face again.
(28:22):
But my brother's wits returned to him. He led us
back to the balcony and shouted over the railing to
a boy in the street, making him understand that he
must go and inform my father that we were locked
into the belfry. It was not long before we saw
both him and my grandfather on their way to the church.
They came up to the little door and told us
to push with our united strength against it. The rusty
(28:45):
lock soon yielded, And how good it was to look
into those two beloved human faces once more. But we
little girls were not invited to join my brother again
when he told the bell. If we had been, I
think we should have promptly declined the invitation. Many of
my childish misadventures came to me in connection with my
(29:06):
little sister, who, having been much indulged, took it for
granted that she could always have what she wanted. One day,
we two were allowed to take a walk together, I
as the older, being supposed to take care of her.
Although we were only going towards the cove over a
secluded road, she insisted upon wearing a brand new pair
(29:28):
of red Morocco boots. All went well until we came
to a bog by the road side where sweet flag
and cat tails grew out. In the middle of the bog,
where no ventured someome boy had ever attempted their seizure.
There were many tall, fine looking brown cat tails growing.
She caught sight of them, and before I saw what
(29:50):
she was doing, she had shot from my side like
an arrow from the bow, and was far out on
the black, quaking surface that at first upheld her light weight.
I stood petrified with horror. I knew all about that
dangerous place. I had been told that nobody had ever
found out how deep that mud was. I had uttered
just one imploring come back when she turned to me
(30:13):
with a shriek, throwing up her arms towards me. She
was sinking. There was nobody in sight, and there was
no time to think. I ran, or rather flew across
the bog with just one thought in mind. I have
got to get her out. Some angel must have prevented
me from making a misstep and sinking with her. I
felt the power of a giant suddenly taking possession of
(30:34):
my small frame. Quicker than I could tell of it.
I had given one tremendous pull. She had already sunk
above her boot tops, and had dragged her back to
the road. It is a marvel to me now how I,
a child of scarcely six years, succeeded in rescuing her.
It did not seem to me as if I were
doing it myself, but as if some unseen power had
(30:57):
taken possession of me for a moment and made me
do it. And I suppose that when we act from
a sudden impulse to help another out of trouble, it
never is ourself that does the good deed. The highest
strength just takes us and uses us. I certainly felt
equal to going straight through the earth to China after
my little sister. If she had sunk out of sight.
(31:18):
We were two miserable looking children when we reached home.
The sticky ooze, having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps
of mud, with which my own clothes also were soiled.
I had to drag or carry her all the way,
for she could not or would not walk a step,
and alas for the Morocco boots, they were never again read.
(31:39):
I also received a scolding for not taking better care
of my little sister, and I was not very soon
allowed again to have her company in my rambles. We
usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out
of door amusement near home, and our sports, as well
as our books, had a spice of merry Old England.
They were full of kings and queens and made sharp contrasts,
(32:02):
as well as odd mixtures with the homeliness of our
everyday life. One of them, a sort of rhymed dialogue,
began with the couplet Queen Anne. Queen Anne, she sits
in the sun, as fair as a lady, as white
as a nun. If Queen Anne did not give a
right guess as to which hand of the messenger held
the King's letter to her, she was contemptuously informed that
(32:26):
she was as brown as a bun. In another game,
four little girls joined hands across in couples, chanting, I
wish my father were a king, I wish my mother
were a queen, and I a little companion, concluding with
a close embrace, in a dizzying whirl, breathlessly shouting all
(32:46):
together a bundle of faggots, A bundle of faggots. In
a third which may have begun with a juvenile reacting
of the colonial struggle for liberty, we ranged ourselves under
two leaders, who made an archway over our heads of
their lifted hands and arms, saying, as we passed beneath,
lift up the gates as high as the sky, and
let King George and his army pass by. We were
(33:10):
told to whisper oranges or lemons for a password, and
oranges always won the larger enlistment, whether British or American.
And then there was Grandmother Gray, and the old woman
from Newfoundland with all her children in her hand, and
the Night from Spain inquiring for your daughter Jane, and
numberless others, nearly all of them bearing a distinct Old
(33:32):
world flavor. One of our play places was an unoccupied
end of the burying ground, overhung by the colonel's apple
trees and close under his wall, so that we should
not be too near the gravestones. I do not think
that death was at all a real thing to me
or my brothers and sisters. At this time we lived
so near the graveyard that it seemed merely the extension
(33:54):
of our garden. We wandered there at will, trying to
decipher the moss grown inscription, and wondering at the homely
carvings of crossbones and cherubs and willow trees on the
gray slate stones. I did not associate those long green
mounds with people who had once lived. Though we were careful,
having been so instructed not to step on the graves,
(34:16):
to ramble about there and puzzle ourselves with the names
and dates was like turning over the pages of a
curious old book. We had not the least feeling of
irreverence in taking the edge of the graveyard for our playground.
It was known as the old burying ground, and we
children regarded it with a sort of affectionate freedom, as
we would a grandmother. Because it was old. That indeed
(34:41):
was one peculiar attraction of the town itself. It was old,
and it seemed old, much older than it does now.
There was only one main street said to have been
the first settler's cow path to Wenthem, which might account
for its zigzag picturesqueness. All the rest were courts or lanes.
The town used to to wear a delightful air of drowsiness,
(35:03):
as if she had stretched herself out for an afternoon nap,
with her head towards her old mother Salem, and her
whole length reclining towards the sea, till she felt at
her feet through her green robes the dip of the
deep water at the farms. All her elder children recognized
in her quiet, steady going ways of maternal unity and
(35:24):
strength of character, as of a town that understood her
own plans and had settled down to peaceful, permanent habits.
Her spirit was that of most of our Massachusetts coast towns.
They were transplanted shoots of Old England, and it was
the voice of a mother country more ancient than their
own that little children heard crooning across the sea in
(35:48):
their cradle hymns and nursery songs. End of Chapter five,
Old New England, read by Dana Kovar, Tampa, Florida, April seventeen,
two thousand, twenty three.
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