August 19, 2025 • 25 mins
In the late 19th century, being a Jew in Russia came with its own set of challenges and dangers. Facing persecution for their faith, many sought solace in their rich cultural traditions. When Mary Antins father decided to abandon these customs, he discovered that he no longer belonged in Russia. Thus, he emigrated to America with his family. While life presented its own struggles, Mary recalls her childhood in Boston with an almost idyllic sense of wonder. A bright and resilient young girl, she finds beauty in adversity and shares her inspiring journey through her captivating autobiography. Join Bridget as she brings Marys story to life, allowing you to experience her trials and triumphs firsthand. (Summary by Stav Nisser)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eighteen of The Promised Land. This LibriVox recording is
in the public domain. Recording by bridget Gage, The Promised
Land by Mary Anton, Chapter eighteen, The Burning Bush. Just
when Missus hutch was most worried about the error of
my ways, I entered on a new chapter of adventures,
even more remote from the cash girl's career than Latin
(00:22):
and geometry. But I ought not to name such harsh
things as landladies. At the opening of the fairy Story
of my girlhood, I have reached what was the second
transformation of my life, as truly as my coming to
America was the first great transformation. Robert Louis Stevenson, in
one of his Delightful Essays, credits the Lover with a
(00:42):
feeling of remorse and shame at the contemplation of that
part of his life which he lived without his beloved,
content with his barren existence. It is with just such
a feeling of remorse that I look back to my bookworm,
days before I began to study the natural history outdoors,
and with a feeling of shame, akin to the Lovers,
I confess how late in my life nature took the
(01:04):
first place in my affections The subject of nature study
is better developed in the public schools to day than
it was in my time. I remember my teacher in
the Chelsea Grammar School who encouraged us to look for
different kinds of grasses and the empty lots near home,
and to bring school samples of the serials we found
in our mother's pantries. I brought the grasses and cereals,
(01:26):
as I did everything else the teacher ordered. But I
was content. When nature's study was over and the arithmetic
lesson began, I was not interested, and the teacher did
not make it interesting. In the boy's books, I was
fond of reading. I came across all sorts of heroes,
and I sympathized with them. All the boy who ran
away to see, the boy who delighted in the society
(01:48):
of ranchmen and cowboys, the stage struck boy whose ambition
was to drive a pasteboard chariot in a circus, the
boy who gave up his holidays in order to earn
money for books. The bad boy who played tricks on people,
the clever boy who invented amusing toys for his blind
little sister. All these boys I admired. I could put
myself in the place of any one of these heroes
(02:10):
and delight in their delights. But there was one sort
of hero I never could understand, and that was the
boy whose favorite reading was natural history, who kept an aquarium,
collected beadles, and knew all about a man by the
name of Agazi. This style of boy always had a
seafaring uncle or a missionary aunt who sent him all
(02:31):
sorts of queer things from China and the South Sea Islands.
And the conversation between this boy and the seafaring uncle
home on a visit I was perfectly willing to skip.
The impossible hero usually kept snakes in a box in
the barn where his little sister was fond of playing
with her little friends. The snakes escaped at least once
before the end of the story, and the things the
(02:52):
boy said to the frightened little girls about the harmless
and fascinating qualities of snakes was something I had no
patience to read. No, I did not care for natural history.
I would read about travels, about deserts and nameless islands
and strange peoples. But snakes and birds and minerals and
butterflies did not interest me. In the least. I visited
(03:13):
the Natural History Museum once or twice, because it was
my way to enter every open door so as to
miss nothing that was free to the public. But the
curious monsters that filled the glass cases and adorned the
walls and ceilings failed to stir my imagination, and the
slimy things that floated in glass vessels were too horrid
for a second glance. Of all the horrid things that
(03:35):
ever passed under my eyes when I lifted my nose
from my book, spiders were the worst. Mice were bad enough,
and so were flies and worms and june bugs. But
spiders were absolutely the most loathsome creatures I knew. And
yet it was the spider that opened my eyes to
the wonders of nature and touched my girlish happiness with
the hues of the infinite. And it happened at Hell House.
(03:59):
It was not darc Hale, though it might have been,
who showed me the way to the settlement house on
Garland Street which bears his name. Hale House is situated
in the midst of a labyrinth of narrow streets and
alleys that constitutes the slum of which Harrison Avenue is
the backbone, and of which Dover Street is a member.
Bearing in mind the fact that there are almost no
(04:19):
playgrounds in all this congested district, you will understand that
Hale House has plenty of work on its hands to
carry a little sunshine into the grimy tenement homes. The
beautiful story of how that is done cannot be told here.
But what Hale House did for me I may not
omit to mention. It was my brother Joseph who discovered
Hale House. He started a debating club and invited his
(04:42):
chums to help him settle the problems of the republic.
On Sunday afternoon, the club held its first session in
our empty parlor on Dover Street, and the United States
Government was in a fair way to be put on
a sound basis at last, when the numerous babies belonging
to our establishment broke up the meeting, leave the administration
in suspense as to its future course. The next meeting
(05:05):
was held in Isaac Malnsky's parlor, and the orators were
beginning to jump to their feet and shake their fists
at each other in excellent parliamentary form, when Missus Milnsky
sallied in to smile at the boy's excitement. But at
the sight of seven pairs of boy's boots scuffling on
her cherished parlor carpet, the fringed cover of the center
table hanging by one corner, and the plush photograph album
(05:27):
unceremoniously laid aside, indignation took the place of good humor
in missus Malinsky's ample bosom, and she ordered the boys
to clear out, threatening Ike with dire vengeance if ever
again he ventured to enter the parlor with ungentle purpose.
On the following Sunday, Harry Rubinstein offered the club the
hospitality of his parlor, and the meeting began satisfactorily. The
(05:50):
subject on the table was the tariff, and the pros
and aunties were about evenly divided. Congress might safely have
taken a nap with the hub Debating Club to handle
its affairs if Harry Rubinstein's big brother, Jake had not interfered.
He came out of the kitchen where he had been
stuffing the baby with peanuts, and stood in the doorway
of the parlor and winked at the dignified chairman. The
(06:12):
chairman turned his back on him, whereupon Jake pelted him
with peanut shells. He mocked the speakers and called them kids,
and wanted to know how they could tell the tariff
from a sunstroke. Anyhow, We've got to have free trade,
he mocked. PA listened to the kids in the interests
of the American laborer. Hooray, listen to the kids. Pa.
Flesh and blood could not bear this. The political reformers
(06:35):
adjourned indefinitely, and the club was in danger of extinction
for want of a sheltering roof, when one of the
members discovered that Hale House on Garland Street was waiting
to welcome the club. How the debating club prospered in
the genial atmosphere of the settlement house. How from a
little club it grew to be a big club as
the little boys became young men. How Joseph and Isaac
(06:57):
and Harry and the rest won prizes in public deay debates.
How they came to be a part of the multiple
influence for good that issues from Garland Street. All this
is a piece of the history of Hale House, whose
business in the slums is to mold the restless children
on the street corners into noble men and women. I
brought the debating Club into my story just to show
how naturally the children of the slums strift toward their
(07:19):
salvation if only some island of safety lies in the
course of their innocent activities. Not a child in the
slum is born to be lost. They are all born
to be saved. And the raft that carries them unharmed
through the perilous torrent of tenement life is the child's
unconscious aspiration for the best. But there must be lighthouses
(07:39):
to guide him midstream. Dora followed Joseph to Hale House,
joining a club for little girls which has since become
famous in the Hale House district. The leader of this club,
under pretense of teaching the little girls the proper way
to sweep and make beds artfully teaches them how to
beautify a tenement home by means of noble living. Joseph
(08:01):
and Dora were so enthusiastic about Hell House that I
had to go over and see what it was all about,
and I found the Natural History Club. I do not
know how Miss Black, who was then the resident, persuaded
me to try the Natural History Club in spite of
my aversion for bugs. I suppose she tried me in
various girls clubs and found that I did not fit
(08:22):
any more than I fitted in the dancing club that
I attempted years before, I dare say. She decided that
I was an old maid and urged me to come
to the meetings of the Natural History Club, which was
composed of adults. The members of this club were not
people from the neighborhood, I understood, but workers at Hell
House and their friends, and they often had eminent naturalists, travelers,
(08:43):
and other notables lecture before them. My curiosity to see
a real, live naturalist probably induced me to accept Missus
Black's invitation in the end, for up to that time
I had never met any one who enjoyed the creepy
society of snakes and worms, except in books. The Natural
History Club sat in a ring around the reception room,
(09:03):
facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Missus Black
introduced me, and I said glad to meet you all
around the circle and sat down in a kindergarten chair
beside the piano. It was Friday evening, and I had
the sense of leisure which pervades this school girl's consciousness
when there is to be no school on the morrow.
I liked the pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home.
(09:25):
I liked the faces of the company I was in.
I was prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if
I was a little boared. The tall, lean gentleman with
the frank blue eyes got up to read the minutes
of the last meeting. I did not understand what he read,
but I noticed that it gave him great satisfaction. This
man had greeted me as if he had been waiting
(09:46):
for my coming all his life. What did missus Black
call him? He looked and spoke as if he was
happy to be alive. I liked him. Oh, yes, this
was mister Winthrop. I let my thoughts wander with my
eyes all around the circle, trying to read the characters
of my new friends in their faces. But suddenly my
attention was arrested by a word. Mister Winthrop had finished
(10:07):
reading the minutes and was introducing the speaker of the evening.
We are fortunate in having with us mister Emerson, whom
we all know as an authority on spider's Spiders? What
hard luck? Mister Winthrop pronounced the words Spider's with unmistakable relish,
as if he doated on the horrid creatures, but I
(10:27):
my nerves contracted into a tight knot. I gripped the
arms of my little chair, determined not to run. With
all those strangers looking on, I watched mister Emerson to
see when he would open a box of spiders. I
recalled a hideous experience of long ago when putting on
a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks.
I felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down
(10:48):
my bare arm and shook a spider out of my sleeve.
I watched the lecturer, but I was not going to run.
It was too bad that missus Black had not warned me.
After a while, I realized that the lecturer had no
menagerie in his pockets. He talked in a familiar way
about different kinds of spiders and their ways, And as
(11:09):
he talked, he wove across the doorway, where he stood
a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in
his hand and looping various lengths on invisible tax he
had ready in the door frame. I was fascinated by
the progress of the web. I forgot my terrors. I
began to follow mister Emerson's discourse. I was surprised to
hear how much there was to know about a dusty
(11:31):
little spider. Besides that he could spin his webs as
fast as my brum could sweep them away. The drama
of the spider's daily life became very real to me
as the lecturer went on his struggle for existence, his
wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors,
the intricate safeguards of his simple existence, the fitness of
(11:52):
his body for his surroundings, of his instincts, for his
vital needs. The whole picture of the spider's pursuit of
life under the direction of dafa At Laws filled me
with a great wonder and left no room in my
mind for repugnance or fear. It was the first time
the natural history of a living creature had been presented
to me under such circumstances that I could not avoid
hearing and seeing, And I was surprised at my dullness
(12:15):
in the past, when I had rejected books on natural history.
I did not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once.
I did not at once begin to collect worms and bugs,
but on the next sweeping day, I stood on a chair,
craning my neck to study the spider webs I discovered
in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two
webs of more than ordinary perfection. I suffered to remain
(12:38):
undisturbed for weeks. Although it was my duty as a
house cleaner to sweep the ceiling clean. I began to
watch for the mice that were wont to scurry across
the floor when the house slept and I alone waked.
I even placed a crust for them on the threshold
of my room, and cultivated a breathless intimacy with them.
When the little gray beast acknowledged my hospitality by nibbling
(12:59):
my c in full sight and so by degrees, I
came to a better understanding of my animal neighbors on
all sides, and I began to look forward to the
meetings of the Natural History Club. The club had frequent
field excursions in addition to the regular meetings at the seashore,
in the woods. In the fields at high tide and
low tide in summer and winter, by sunlight and by moonlight,
(13:22):
the marvelous story of orderly nature was revealed to me
in fragments that allured the imagination and made me beg
for more. Some of the members of the club were
school teachers, accustomed to answering questions. All of them were patient,
some of them took special pains with me, but nobody
took me seriously as a member of the club. They
(13:42):
called me the club mascot, and appointed me curator of
the club museum, which was not in existence, at a
salary of ten cents a year, which was never paid.
And I was well pleased with my unique position in
the club, delighted with my new friends, and raptured with
my new study. More and more as the seasons rolled by,
(14:03):
and page after page of the Book of Nature was
turned before my eager eyes, did I feel the wonder
and thrill of the revelations of science, till all my
thoughts became colored with the tints of infinite truths. My
days arranged themselves around the meetings of the club as
a center. The whole structure of my life was transfigured
by my novel experiences outdoors. I realized, with a shock
(14:25):
at first, but afterwards with complacency, that books were taking
a secondary place in my life. My irregular studies in
natural history holding the first place I began to enjoy
the natural history rooms, and I was obliged to admit
to myself that my heart hung with a more thrilling
suspense over the fate of some beans I had planted
in a window box than over the fortunes of the
(14:48):
classic hero about whom we were reading at school. But
for all my enthusiasm about animals, plants and rocks, for
all my devotion to the Natural History Club, I did
not become a thorough nextists. My scientific friends were right
not to take me seriously. Mister Winthrop, in his delightfully
frank way, called me a fraud, and I did not
(15:09):
resent it. I dipped into zoology, botany, geology, ornithology, and
an infinite number of other ologies, as the activities of
the club or of particular members of it gave me opportunity.
But I made no systematic study of any branch of science,
at least not until I went to college. For what
enthralled my imagination in the whole subject of natural history
(15:32):
was not the orderly array of facts, but the glimpse
I caught through this or that fragment of science of
the grand principles underlying the facts. By asking questions by listening,
when my wise friends talked, by reading, by pondering and dreaming,
I slowly gathered toward the kaleidoscopic bits of the stupendous
panorama which is painted in the literature of Darwinism. Everything
(15:55):
I had ever learned at school was illumined by this
new knowledge. The worlds lay new, made under my eyes,
vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea
of a great country when I exchanged Polotzk for America.
It was no such enlargement as I now experienced, when
in place of the measurable Earth, with its paltry tail
of historic sentries, I was given the illimitable universe to
(16:18):
contemplate with the numberless ands of infinite time. As the
meaning of nature was deepened for me, so was its
aspect beautified. Hitherto I had loved in nature the spectacular,
the blazing sunset, the whirling tempest, the flush of summer,
the snow wonder of winter. Now, for the first time
(16:38):
my heart was satisfied with the microscopic perfection of a
solitary blossom. The harmonious murmur of autumn woods broke up
into a hundred separate melodies, as the pelting acorn, the
scurrying squirrel, the infrequent chirp of the lingering cricket, and
the soft speed of ripe pine cones through dense grown branches.
Each struck its discriminate core word. In the scented air.
(17:02):
The outdoor world was magnified in every dimension. Inanimate things
were vivified, living things were dignified. No two persons at
the same value on any given thing. And so it
may very well be that I am boasting of the
enrichment of my life through the study of natural history.
To ears that hear not, I need only recall my
own obtuseness to the subject before the story of the
(17:24):
spider sharpened my senses to realize that these confessions of
a nature lover may bore every other person who reads them.
But I do not pretend to be concerned about the
reader at this point. I never hope to explain to
my neighbor the exact value of a winter sunrise in
my spiritual economy. But I know that my life has
grown better since I learned to distinguish between a butterfly
(17:46):
and a moth. That my faith in Man is the
greater because I have watched for the coming of the
song sparrow in the spring, and my thoughts of immortality
are the less wavering, because I have cherished the winter
duckweed on my lawn. Those who find their greatest intellectual
and emotional satisfaction in the study of nature are apt
to refer their spiritual problems also to science. That is
(18:09):
how it went with me. Long before my introduction to
natural history, I had realized, with an uneasy sense of
the breaking of peace, that the questions which I thought
to have been settled years before, were beginning to tease
me anew. In Russia, I had practiced a prescribed religion,
with little faith in what I professed, and a restless
questioning of the universe. When I came to America, I
(18:33):
lightly dropped the religious forms that I had half mocked before,
and contented myself with a few novel phrases employed by
my father in his attempt to explain the riddle of existence.
The busy years flew by when from morning till night
I was preoccupied with the process of becoming an American,
and no question arose in my mind that my books
(18:53):
or my teachers could not fully answer. Then came a
time when the ordinary business of my girl's life discharged
itself automatically, and I had leisure once more to look
over and around things. This period, coinciding with my moody adolescence,
I rapidly entangled myself in a net of doubts and
questions after the well known manner of a growing girl.
(19:15):
I asked once more how did I come to be?
And I found that I was no whit wiser than
poor reb Leba, whom I had despised for his ignorance
for all my years of America and schooling, I could
give no better answer to my clamoring questions than the
teacher of my childhood. Whence came the fair world. Was
there a God after all? And if so, what did
(19:37):
he intend when he made me? It was always my
way if I wanted anything, to turn my daily life
into a pursuit of that thing. Have you seen the
treasure I seek? I asked of every man I met,
And if it was God that I desired, I made
all my friends search their hearts for evidence of his being.
I asked all the wise people I knew what they
(19:58):
were going to do with themselves after death? And if
the wise failed to satisfy me. I questioned the simple
and listened to the babies talking in their sleep. Still
the imperative clamor of my mind remained unallayed. Was all
my life to be a hunger and a questioning I
complained of my teachers, who stuffed my heads with facts
(20:19):
and gave my soul no crumbed feet on. I blamed
the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding
over the emptiness of knowledge and praying for revelations. Sometimes
I lived for days in a chimuera of doubts, feeling
that it was hardly worth while living at all if
I was never to know why I was born and
why I could not live forever. It was in one
(20:39):
of these prolonged moods that I heard that a friend
of mine, a distinguished man of letters whom I greatly admired,
was coming to Boston for a short visit. A terrific
New England blizzard arrived some hours in advance of my
friend's train, But so intent was I on questioning him
that I disregarded the weather and struggled through towering snowdrifts
in the teeth of the wild wind to the railroad station.
(21:03):
There I nearly perished of weariness while waiting for the train,
which was delayed by the storm. But when my friend
emerged from one of the snow crusted cars, I was rewarded.
For the blizzard had kept the reporters away, and the
great Man could give me his undivided attention. No doubt
he understood the pressing importance of the matter to me
(21:23):
from the trouble I had taken to secure an early
interview with him. He heard me out very soberly and
answered my questions as honestly as a thinking man could. Not.
A word of what he said remains in my mind,
but I remembered going away with the impression that it
was possible to live without knowing everything after all, and
that I might even try to be happy in a
(21:43):
world full of riddles. In such ways as this, I
sought peace of mind, but I never achieved more than
a brief truce. I was coming to believe that only
the stupid could be happy, and that life was pretty
hard on the philosophical when the great new interest of
science came into my life and scattered my blue devils
as the sun scatters the night damps. Some of my
(22:06):
friends in the Natural History Club were deeply versed in
the principles of evolutionary science and were able to guide
me in my impetuous rush to learn everything in a day.
I was in a hurry to deduce from the conglomeration
of isolated facts that I picked up in the lectures
the final solution of all my problems. It took both
patience and wisdom to check me and at the same
(22:28):
time satisfy me. I have no doubt, But then I
was always fortunate in my friends. Wisdom and patience in
plenty were spent on me, and I was instructed and
inspired and comforted. Of course, my wisest teacher was not
able to tell me how the original spark of life
was kindled, nor to point out on the starry map
of Heaven my future abode, the bread of absolute knowledge.
(22:50):
I do not hope to taste in this life. But
all creation was remodeled on a grander scale by the
utterances of my teachers and my problems. Though they died
with the expansion of all nameable phenomena, where carried up
to the heights of the impersonal and ceased to torment me.
Seeing how life and death beginning and end were all
(23:11):
parts of the process of being. It mattered less in
what particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself.
If past time was a trooping of similar yesterdays back
over the unbroken millenniums to the first moment, it was
simple to think of future time as a trooping of
knowable to days on and on to infinity. Possibly also,
(23:32):
the spark of life that had persisted through the geological
ages under a million million disguises was vital enough to
continue for another Earth age in some shape as potent
as the first or last. Thinking in eons and in
races instead of in years and individuals somehow lightened the
burden of intelligence and filled me anew with a sense
of youth and well being that I had almost lost
(23:54):
in the pit of my narrow personal doubts. No one
who understands the nature of youth will be misled by
the summary of my intellectual history into thinking that I
actually arranged my newly acquired scientific knowledge into any such
orderly philosophy. As for the sake of clearness I have
outlined above, I had long passed my teens and had
(24:15):
seen something of life that is not revealed to poetizing
girls before I could give any logical account of what
I read in the Book of Cosmogony. But the high
peaks of the promised land of evolution did flash on
my vision in the earlier days, and with these to
guide me, I rebuilt the world and found it much
nobler than it had ever been before, and took great
(24:36):
comfort in it. I did not become a finished philosopher
from hearing a couple of hundred lectures on scientific subjects.
I did not even become a finished woman. If anything,
I grew rather more girlish. I remembered myself as very
merry in the midst of my serious scientific friends. And
I can think of no time when I was more
(24:56):
inclined to play the tomboy than when off for a
day in the woods in quest of botanical and zoological specimens.
The freedom of outdoors, the society of congenial friends, the
delight of my occupation all acted as a strong wine
on my mood and sent my spirits soaring to immoderate heights.
I am very much afraid I made myself a nuisance
(25:16):
at times to some of the more sedate of my
grown up companions. I wish they could know that I
have truly repented. I wish they had known at the
time that it was the exuberance of my happiness that
played tricks, and no wicked desire to annoy kind friends.
But I am sure that those who were offended have
long since forgotten or forgiven, and I need remember nothing
(25:38):
of those wonderful days other than that a new sun
rose above a new earth for me, and that my
happiness was like unto the iridescent dewes. End of Chapter eighteen.
Chapter eighteen of The Promised Land. This LibriVox recording is
in the public domain. Recording by bridget Gage, The Promised
Land by Mary Anton, Chapter eighteen, The Burning Bush. Just
when Missus hutch was most worried about the error of
my ways, I entered on a new chapter of adventures,
even more remote from the cash girl's career than Latin
(00:22):
and geometry. But I ought not to name such harsh
things as landladies. At the opening of the fairy Story
of my girlhood, I have reached what was the second
transformation of my life, as truly as my coming to
America was the first great transformation. Robert Louis Stevenson, in
one of his Delightful Essays, credits the Lover with a
(00:42):
feeling of remorse and shame at the contemplation of that
part of his life which he lived without his beloved,
content with his barren existence. It is with just such
a feeling of remorse that I look back to my bookworm,
days before I began to study the natural history outdoors,
and with a feeling of shame, akin to the Lovers,
I confess how late in my life nature took the
(01:04):
first place in my affections The subject of nature study
is better developed in the public schools to day than
it was in my time. I remember my teacher in
the Chelsea Grammar School who encouraged us to look for
different kinds of grasses and the empty lots near home,
and to bring school samples of the serials we found
in our mother's pantries. I brought the grasses and cereals,
(01:26):
as I did everything else the teacher ordered. But I
was content. When nature's study was over and the arithmetic
lesson began, I was not interested, and the teacher did
not make it interesting. In the boy's books, I was
fond of reading. I came across all sorts of heroes,
and I sympathized with them. All the boy who ran
away to see, the boy who delighted in the society
(01:48):
of ranchmen and cowboys, the stage struck boy whose ambition
was to drive a pasteboard chariot in a circus, the
boy who gave up his holidays in order to earn
money for books. The bad boy who played tricks on people,
the clever boy who invented amusing toys for his blind
little sister. All these boys I admired. I could put
myself in the place of any one of these heroes
(02:10):
and delight in their delights. But there was one sort
of hero I never could understand, and that was the
boy whose favorite reading was natural history, who kept an aquarium,
collected beadles, and knew all about a man by the
name of Agazi. This style of boy always had a
seafaring uncle or a missionary aunt who sent him all
(02:31):
sorts of queer things from China and the South Sea Islands.
And the conversation between this boy and the seafaring uncle
home on a visit I was perfectly willing to skip.
The impossible hero usually kept snakes in a box in
the barn where his little sister was fond of playing
with her little friends. The snakes escaped at least once
before the end of the story, and the things the
(02:52):
boy said to the frightened little girls about the harmless
and fascinating qualities of snakes was something I had no
patience to read. No, I did not care for natural history.
I would read about travels, about deserts and nameless islands
and strange peoples. But snakes and birds and minerals and
butterflies did not interest me. In the least. I visited
(03:13):
the Natural History Museum once or twice, because it was
my way to enter every open door so as to
miss nothing that was free to the public. But the
curious monsters that filled the glass cases and adorned the
walls and ceilings failed to stir my imagination, and the
slimy things that floated in glass vessels were too horrid
for a second glance. Of all the horrid things that
(03:35):
ever passed under my eyes when I lifted my nose
from my book, spiders were the worst. Mice were bad enough,
and so were flies and worms and june bugs. But
spiders were absolutely the most loathsome creatures I knew. And
yet it was the spider that opened my eyes to
the wonders of nature and touched my girlish happiness with
the hues of the infinite. And it happened at Hell House.
(03:59):
It was not darc Hale, though it might have been,
who showed me the way to the settlement house on
Garland Street which bears his name. Hale House is situated
in the midst of a labyrinth of narrow streets and
alleys that constitutes the slum of which Harrison Avenue is
the backbone, and of which Dover Street is a member.
Bearing in mind the fact that there are almost no
(04:19):
playgrounds in all this congested district, you will understand that
Hale House has plenty of work on its hands to
carry a little sunshine into the grimy tenement homes. The
beautiful story of how that is done cannot be told here.
But what Hale House did for me I may not
omit to mention. It was my brother Joseph who discovered
Hale House. He started a debating club and invited his
(04:42):
chums to help him settle the problems of the republic.
On Sunday afternoon, the club held its first session in
our empty parlor on Dover Street, and the United States
Government was in a fair way to be put on
a sound basis at last, when the numerous babies belonging
to our establishment broke up the meeting, leave the administration
in suspense as to its future course. The next meeting
(05:05):
was held in Isaac Malnsky's parlor, and the orators were
beginning to jump to their feet and shake their fists
at each other in excellent parliamentary form, when Missus Milnsky
sallied in to smile at the boy's excitement. But at
the sight of seven pairs of boy's boots scuffling on
her cherished parlor carpet, the fringed cover of the center
table hanging by one corner, and the plush photograph album
(05:27):
unceremoniously laid aside, indignation took the place of good humor
in missus Malinsky's ample bosom, and she ordered the boys
to clear out, threatening Ike with dire vengeance if ever
again he ventured to enter the parlor with ungentle purpose.
On the following Sunday, Harry Rubinstein offered the club the
hospitality of his parlor, and the meeting began satisfactorily. The
(05:50):
subject on the table was the tariff, and the pros
and aunties were about evenly divided. Congress might safely have
taken a nap with the hub Debating Club to handle
its affairs if Harry Rubinstein's big brother, Jake had not interfered.
He came out of the kitchen where he had been
stuffing the baby with peanuts, and stood in the doorway
of the parlor and winked at the dignified chairman. The
(06:12):
chairman turned his back on him, whereupon Jake pelted him
with peanut shells. He mocked the speakers and called them kids,
and wanted to know how they could tell the tariff
from a sunstroke. Anyhow, We've got to have free trade,
he mocked. PA listened to the kids in the interests
of the American laborer. Hooray, listen to the kids. Pa.
Flesh and blood could not bear this. The political reformers
(06:35):
adjourned indefinitely, and the club was in danger of extinction
for want of a sheltering roof, when one of the
members discovered that Hale House on Garland Street was waiting
to welcome the club. How the debating club prospered in
the genial atmosphere of the settlement house. How from a
little club it grew to be a big club as
the little boys became young men. How Joseph and Isaac
(06:57):
and Harry and the rest won prizes in public deay debates.
How they came to be a part of the multiple
influence for good that issues from Garland Street. All this
is a piece of the history of Hale House, whose
business in the slums is to mold the restless children
on the street corners into noble men and women. I
brought the debating Club into my story just to show
how naturally the children of the slums strift toward their
(07:19):
salvation if only some island of safety lies in the
course of their innocent activities. Not a child in the
slum is born to be lost. They are all born
to be saved. And the raft that carries them unharmed
through the perilous torrent of tenement life is the child's
unconscious aspiration for the best. But there must be lighthouses
(07:39):
to guide him midstream. Dora followed Joseph to Hale House,
joining a club for little girls which has since become
famous in the Hale House district. The leader of this club,
under pretense of teaching the little girls the proper way
to sweep and make beds artfully teaches them how to
beautify a tenement home by means of noble living. Joseph
(08:01):
and Dora were so enthusiastic about Hell House that I
had to go over and see what it was all about,
and I found the Natural History Club. I do not
know how Miss Black, who was then the resident, persuaded
me to try the Natural History Club in spite of
my aversion for bugs. I suppose she tried me in
various girls clubs and found that I did not fit
(08:22):
any more than I fitted in the dancing club that
I attempted years before, I dare say. She decided that
I was an old maid and urged me to come
to the meetings of the Natural History Club, which was
composed of adults. The members of this club were not
people from the neighborhood, I understood, but workers at Hell
House and their friends, and they often had eminent naturalists, travelers,
(08:43):
and other notables lecture before them. My curiosity to see
a real, live naturalist probably induced me to accept Missus
Black's invitation in the end, for up to that time
I had never met any one who enjoyed the creepy
society of snakes and worms, except in books. The Natural
History Club sat in a ring around the reception room,
(09:03):
facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Missus Black
introduced me, and I said glad to meet you all
around the circle and sat down in a kindergarten chair
beside the piano. It was Friday evening, and I had
the sense of leisure which pervades this school girl's consciousness
when there is to be no school on the morrow.
I liked the pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home.
(09:25):
I liked the faces of the company I was in.
I was prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if
I was a little boared. The tall, lean gentleman with
the frank blue eyes got up to read the minutes
of the last meeting. I did not understand what he read,
but I noticed that it gave him great satisfaction. This
man had greeted me as if he had been waiting
(09:46):
for my coming all his life. What did missus Black
call him? He looked and spoke as if he was
happy to be alive. I liked him. Oh, yes, this
was mister Winthrop. I let my thoughts wander with my
eyes all around the circle, trying to read the characters
of my new friends in their faces. But suddenly my
attention was arrested by a word. Mister Winthrop had finished
(10:07):
reading the minutes and was introducing the speaker of the evening.
We are fortunate in having with us mister Emerson, whom
we all know as an authority on spider's Spiders? What
hard luck? Mister Winthrop pronounced the words Spider's with unmistakable relish,
as if he doated on the horrid creatures, but I
(10:27):
my nerves contracted into a tight knot. I gripped the
arms of my little chair, determined not to run. With
all those strangers looking on, I watched mister Emerson to
see when he would open a box of spiders. I
recalled a hideous experience of long ago when putting on
a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks.
I felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down
(10:48):
my bare arm and shook a spider out of my sleeve.
I watched the lecturer, but I was not going to run.
It was too bad that missus Black had not warned me.
After a while, I realized that the lecturer had no
menagerie in his pockets. He talked in a familiar way
about different kinds of spiders and their ways, And as
(11:09):
he talked, he wove across the doorway, where he stood
a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in
his hand and looping various lengths on invisible tax he
had ready in the door frame. I was fascinated by
the progress of the web. I forgot my terrors. I
began to follow mister Emerson's discourse. I was surprised to
hear how much there was to know about a dusty
(11:31):
little spider. Besides that he could spin his webs as
fast as my brum could sweep them away. The drama
of the spider's daily life became very real to me
as the lecturer went on his struggle for existence, his
wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors,
the intricate safeguards of his simple existence, the fitness of
(11:52):
his body for his surroundings, of his instincts, for his
vital needs. The whole picture of the spider's pursuit of
life under the direction of dafa At Laws filled me
with a great wonder and left no room in my
mind for repugnance or fear. It was the first time
the natural history of a living creature had been presented
to me under such circumstances that I could not avoid
hearing and seeing, And I was surprised at my dullness
(12:15):
in the past, when I had rejected books on natural history.
I did not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once.
I did not at once begin to collect worms and bugs,
but on the next sweeping day, I stood on a chair,
craning my neck to study the spider webs I discovered
in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two
webs of more than ordinary perfection. I suffered to remain
(12:38):
undisturbed for weeks. Although it was my duty as a
house cleaner to sweep the ceiling clean. I began to
watch for the mice that were wont to scurry across
the floor when the house slept and I alone waked.
I even placed a crust for them on the threshold
of my room, and cultivated a breathless intimacy with them.
When the little gray beast acknowledged my hospitality by nibbling
(12:59):
my c in full sight and so by degrees, I
came to a better understanding of my animal neighbors on
all sides, and I began to look forward to the
meetings of the Natural History Club. The club had frequent
field excursions in addition to the regular meetings at the seashore,
in the woods. In the fields at high tide and
low tide in summer and winter, by sunlight and by moonlight,
(13:22):
the marvelous story of orderly nature was revealed to me
in fragments that allured the imagination and made me beg
for more. Some of the members of the club were
school teachers, accustomed to answering questions. All of them were patient,
some of them took special pains with me, but nobody
took me seriously as a member of the club. They
(13:42):
called me the club mascot, and appointed me curator of
the club museum, which was not in existence, at a
salary of ten cents a year, which was never paid.
And I was well pleased with my unique position in
the club, delighted with my new friends, and raptured with
my new study. More and more as the seasons rolled by,
(14:03):
and page after page of the Book of Nature was
turned before my eager eyes, did I feel the wonder
and thrill of the revelations of science, till all my
thoughts became colored with the tints of infinite truths. My
days arranged themselves around the meetings of the club as
a center. The whole structure of my life was transfigured
by my novel experiences outdoors. I realized, with a shock
(14:25):
at first, but afterwards with complacency, that books were taking
a secondary place in my life. My irregular studies in
natural history holding the first place I began to enjoy
the natural history rooms, and I was obliged to admit
to myself that my heart hung with a more thrilling
suspense over the fate of some beans I had planted
in a window box than over the fortunes of the
(14:48):
classic hero about whom we were reading at school. But
for all my enthusiasm about animals, plants and rocks, for
all my devotion to the Natural History Club, I did
not become a thorough nextists. My scientific friends were right
not to take me seriously. Mister Winthrop, in his delightfully
frank way, called me a fraud, and I did not
(15:09):
resent it. I dipped into zoology, botany, geology, ornithology, and
an infinite number of other ologies, as the activities of
the club or of particular members of it gave me opportunity.
But I made no systematic study of any branch of science,
at least not until I went to college. For what
enthralled my imagination in the whole subject of natural history
(15:32):
was not the orderly array of facts, but the glimpse
I caught through this or that fragment of science of
the grand principles underlying the facts. By asking questions by listening,
when my wise friends talked, by reading, by pondering and dreaming,
I slowly gathered toward the kaleidoscopic bits of the stupendous
panorama which is painted in the literature of Darwinism. Everything
(15:55):
I had ever learned at school was illumined by this
new knowledge. The worlds lay new, made under my eyes,
vastly as my mind had stretched to embrace the idea
of a great country when I exchanged Polotzk for America.
It was no such enlargement as I now experienced, when
in place of the measurable Earth, with its paltry tail
of historic sentries, I was given the illimitable universe to
(16:18):
contemplate with the numberless ands of infinite time. As the
meaning of nature was deepened for me, so was its
aspect beautified. Hitherto I had loved in nature the spectacular,
the blazing sunset, the whirling tempest, the flush of summer,
the snow wonder of winter. Now, for the first time
(16:38):
my heart was satisfied with the microscopic perfection of a
solitary blossom. The harmonious murmur of autumn woods broke up
into a hundred separate melodies, as the pelting acorn, the
scurrying squirrel, the infrequent chirp of the lingering cricket, and
the soft speed of ripe pine cones through dense grown branches.
Each struck its discriminate core word. In the scented air.
(17:02):
The outdoor world was magnified in every dimension. Inanimate things
were vivified, living things were dignified. No two persons at
the same value on any given thing. And so it
may very well be that I am boasting of the
enrichment of my life through the study of natural history.
To ears that hear not, I need only recall my
own obtuseness to the subject before the story of the
(17:24):
spider sharpened my senses to realize that these confessions of
a nature lover may bore every other person who reads them.
But I do not pretend to be concerned about the
reader at this point. I never hope to explain to
my neighbor the exact value of a winter sunrise in
my spiritual economy. But I know that my life has
grown better since I learned to distinguish between a butterfly
(17:46):
and a moth. That my faith in Man is the
greater because I have watched for the coming of the
song sparrow in the spring, and my thoughts of immortality
are the less wavering, because I have cherished the winter
duckweed on my lawn. Those who find their greatest intellectual
and emotional satisfaction in the study of nature are apt
to refer their spiritual problems also to science. That is
(18:09):
how it went with me. Long before my introduction to
natural history, I had realized, with an uneasy sense of
the breaking of peace, that the questions which I thought
to have been settled years before, were beginning to tease
me anew. In Russia, I had practiced a prescribed religion,
with little faith in what I professed, and a restless
questioning of the universe. When I came to America, I
(18:33):
lightly dropped the religious forms that I had half mocked before,
and contented myself with a few novel phrases employed by
my father in his attempt to explain the riddle of existence.
The busy years flew by when from morning till night
I was preoccupied with the process of becoming an American,
and no question arose in my mind that my books
(18:53):
or my teachers could not fully answer. Then came a
time when the ordinary business of my girl's life discharged
itself automatically, and I had leisure once more to look
over and around things. This period, coinciding with my moody adolescence,
I rapidly entangled myself in a net of doubts and
questions after the well known manner of a growing girl.
(19:15):
I asked once more how did I come to be?
And I found that I was no whit wiser than
poor reb Leba, whom I had despised for his ignorance
for all my years of America and schooling, I could
give no better answer to my clamoring questions than the
teacher of my childhood. Whence came the fair world. Was
there a God after all? And if so, what did
(19:37):
he intend when he made me? It was always my
way if I wanted anything, to turn my daily life
into a pursuit of that thing. Have you seen the
treasure I seek? I asked of every man I met,
And if it was God that I desired, I made
all my friends search their hearts for evidence of his being.
I asked all the wise people I knew what they
(19:58):
were going to do with themselves after death? And if
the wise failed to satisfy me. I questioned the simple
and listened to the babies talking in their sleep. Still
the imperative clamor of my mind remained unallayed. Was all
my life to be a hunger and a questioning I
complained of my teachers, who stuffed my heads with facts
(20:19):
and gave my soul no crumbed feet on. I blamed
the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding
over the emptiness of knowledge and praying for revelations. Sometimes
I lived for days in a chimuera of doubts, feeling
that it was hardly worth while living at all if
I was never to know why I was born and
why I could not live forever. It was in one
(20:39):
of these prolonged moods that I heard that a friend
of mine, a distinguished man of letters whom I greatly admired,
was coming to Boston for a short visit. A terrific
New England blizzard arrived some hours in advance of my
friend's train, But so intent was I on questioning him
that I disregarded the weather and struggled through towering snowdrifts
in the teeth of the wild wind to the railroad station.
(21:03):
There I nearly perished of weariness while waiting for the train,
which was delayed by the storm. But when my friend
emerged from one of the snow crusted cars, I was rewarded.
For the blizzard had kept the reporters away, and the
great Man could give me his undivided attention. No doubt
he understood the pressing importance of the matter to me
(21:23):
from the trouble I had taken to secure an early
interview with him. He heard me out very soberly and
answered my questions as honestly as a thinking man could. Not.
A word of what he said remains in my mind,
but I remembered going away with the impression that it
was possible to live without knowing everything after all, and
that I might even try to be happy in a
(21:43):
world full of riddles. In such ways as this, I
sought peace of mind, but I never achieved more than
a brief truce. I was coming to believe that only
the stupid could be happy, and that life was pretty
hard on the philosophical when the great new interest of
science came into my life and scattered my blue devils
as the sun scatters the night damps. Some of my
(22:06):
friends in the Natural History Club were deeply versed in
the principles of evolutionary science and were able to guide
me in my impetuous rush to learn everything in a day.
I was in a hurry to deduce from the conglomeration
of isolated facts that I picked up in the lectures
the final solution of all my problems. It took both
patience and wisdom to check me and at the same
(22:28):
time satisfy me. I have no doubt, But then I
was always fortunate in my friends. Wisdom and patience in
plenty were spent on me, and I was instructed and
inspired and comforted. Of course, my wisest teacher was not
able to tell me how the original spark of life
was kindled, nor to point out on the starry map
of Heaven my future abode, the bread of absolute knowledge.
(22:50):
I do not hope to taste in this life. But
all creation was remodeled on a grander scale by the
utterances of my teachers and my problems. Though they died
with the expansion of all nameable phenomena, where carried up
to the heights of the impersonal and ceased to torment me.
Seeing how life and death beginning and end were all
(23:11):
parts of the process of being. It mattered less in
what particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself.
If past time was a trooping of similar yesterdays back
over the unbroken millenniums to the first moment, it was
simple to think of future time as a trooping of
knowable to days on and on to infinity. Possibly also,
(23:32):
the spark of life that had persisted through the geological
ages under a million million disguises was vital enough to
continue for another Earth age in some shape as potent
as the first or last. Thinking in eons and in
races instead of in years and individuals somehow lightened the
burden of intelligence and filled me anew with a sense
of youth and well being that I had almost lost
(23:54):
in the pit of my narrow personal doubts. No one
who understands the nature of youth will be misled by
the summary of my intellectual history into thinking that I
actually arranged my newly acquired scientific knowledge into any such
orderly philosophy. As for the sake of clearness I have
outlined above, I had long passed my teens and had
(24:15):
seen something of life that is not revealed to poetizing
girls before I could give any logical account of what
I read in the Book of Cosmogony. But the high
peaks of the promised land of evolution did flash on
my vision in the earlier days, and with these to
guide me, I rebuilt the world and found it much
nobler than it had ever been before, and took great
(24:36):
comfort in it. I did not become a finished philosopher
from hearing a couple of hundred lectures on scientific subjects.
I did not even become a finished woman. If anything,
I grew rather more girlish. I remembered myself as very
merry in the midst of my serious scientific friends. And
I can think of no time when I was more
(24:56):
inclined to play the tomboy than when off for a
day in the woods in quest of botanical and zoological specimens.
The freedom of outdoors, the society of congenial friends, the
delight of my occupation all acted as a strong wine
on my mood and sent my spirits soaring to immoderate heights.
I am very much afraid I made myself a nuisance
(25:16):
at times to some of the more sedate of my
grown up companions. I wish they could know that I
have truly repented. I wish they had known at the
time that it was the exuberance of my happiness that
played tricks, and no wicked desire to annoy kind friends.
But I am sure that those who were offended have
long since forgotten or forgiven, and I need remember nothing
(25:38):
of those wonderful days other than that a new sun
rose above a new earth for me, and that my
happiness was like unto the iridescent dewes. End of Chapter eighteen.
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com