第5章 UP AND DOWN THE LANE(3)

She was chatty and social,rosy-cheeked and dimpled,with bright blue eyes and soft,dark,curling hair,which she kept pinned up under her white lace cap-border.Not even the eldest child remembered her without her cap,and when some of us asked her why she never let her pretty curls be visible,she said,--"Your father liked to see me in a cap.I put it on soon after we were married,to please him;I always have worn it,and I always shall wear it,for the same reason."My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to shadow,like the atmosphere of an April day.Cheerfulness held sway with her,except occasionally,when her domestic cares grew too overwhelming;but her spirits rebounded quickly from discouragement.

Her father was the only one of our grandparents who had survived to my time,--of French descent,piquant,merry,exceedingly polite,and very fond of us children,whom be was always treating to raisins and peppermints and rules for good behavior.He had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War,--the greatest distinction we could imagine.And he was also the sexton of the oldest church in town,--the Old South,--and had charge of the winding-up of the town clock,and the ringing of the bell on week-days and Sundays,and the tolling for funerals,--into which mysteries he sometimes allowed us youngsters a furtive glimpse.

I did not believe that there was another grandfather so delightful as ours in all the world.

Uncles,aunts,and cousins were plentiful in the family,but they did not live near enough for us to see them very often,excepting one aunt,my father's sister,for whom I was named.She was fair,with large,clear eyes that seemed to look far into one's heart,with an expression at once penetrating and benignant.To my childish imagination she was an embodiment of serene and lofty goodness.I wished and hoped that by bearing her baptismal name Imight become like her;and when I found out its signification (Ilearned that "Lucy"means "with light"),I wished it more earnestly still.For her beautiful character was just such an illumination to my young life as I should most desire mine to be to the lives of others.

My aunt,like my father,was always studying something.Some map or book always lay open before her,when I went to visit her,in her picturesque old house,with its sloping roof and tall well-sweep.And she always brought out some book or picture for me from her quaint old-fashioned chest of drawers.I still possess the "Children in the Wood,"which she gave me,as a keepsake,when I was about ten years old.

Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood.We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.

Those larger planets held our little one to its orbit,and lent it their brightness.Happy indeed is the infancy which is surrounded only by the loving and the good!

Besides those who were of my kindred,I had several aunts by courtesy,or rather by the privilege of neighborhood,who seemed to belong to my babyhood.Indeed,the family hearthstone came near being the scene of a tragedy to me,through the blind fondness of one of these.

The adjective is literal.This dear old lady,almost sightless,sitting in a low chair far in the chimney corner,where she had been placed on her first call to see the new baby,took me upon her lap,and--so they say--unconsciously let me slip off into the coals.I was rescued unsinged,however,and it was one of the earliest accomplishments of my infancy to thread my poor,half-blind Aunt Stanley's needles for her.We were close neighbors and gossips until my fourth year.Many an hour I sat by her side drawing a needle and thread through a bit of calico,under the delusion that I was sewing,while she repeated all sorts of juvenile singsongs of which her memory seemed full,for my entertainment.There used to be a legend current among my brothers and sisters that this aunt unwittingly taught me to use a reprehensible word.One of her ditties began with the lines:--"Miss Lucy was a charming child;She never said,'I won't.'"After bearing this once or twice,the willful negative was continually upon my lips;doubtless a symptom of what was dormant within--a will perhaps not quite so aggressive as it was obstinate.But she meant only to praise me and please me;and dearly I loved to stay with her in her cozy up-stairs room across the lane,that the sun looked into nearly all day.

Another adopted aunt lived down-stairs in the same house.This one was a sober woman;life meant business to her,and she taught me to sew in earnest,with a knot in the end of my thread,although it was only upon clothing for my ragchildren -absurd creatures of my own invention,limbless and destitute of features,except as now and then one of my older sisters would,upon my earnest petition,outline a face for one of them,with pen and ink.I loved them,nevertheless,far better than I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at home,--the fine lady that did not wish to be played with,but only to be looked at and admired.

This latter aunt I regarded as a woman of great possessions.She owned the land beside us and opposite us.Her well was close to our door,a well of the coldest and clearest water I ever drank,and it abundantly supplied the whole neighborhood.

The hill behind her house was our general playground;and Isupposed she owned that,too,since through her dooryard,and over her stone wall,was our permitted thoroughfare thither.Iimagined that those were her buttercups that we gathered when we got over the wall,and held under each other's chin,to see,by the reflection,who was fond of butter;and surely the yellow toadflax (we called it "lady's slipper")that grew in the rock-crevices was hers,for we found it nowhere else.