II
We often cooked by our fireplace
One hundred and fifty Thanksgivings must have preceded ours in the old house, but I think out of them all you could not have picked a better one. I would not like to say a more bountiful one, for I suppose in the earlier day they had great wild turkeys and perhaps a haunch of venison, braces of partridges and other royal fare. Even so, they could hardly have eaten it all, and I think their noble turkey did not taste any better than ours. Moreover, we were glad that our deer and partridges were still running free.
We did not lack of native dishes. Our mince and pumpkin pies were home products, as well as our apple-butter and a variety of other preserves. Also, I had discovered a bed of wild cress in the brook and our brown turkey was garnished with that piquant green. Certainly there was an old-fashioned feeling about our first New England holiday—something precious and genuine, that made all effort and cost worth while.
The Pride and the Hope had come home for a week's vacation and were reveling in the house, which they now for the first time saw in order. Of course their rooms had to be personally adjusted, their own special belongings inspected and put away. Their treasures, after two months of absence, were all new and fresh to them. The Pride, reveling in her own "cozy corner," or curled up in a big chair by the log fire, reread her favorite books; the Hope and the Joy played paper-doll "ladies" on the deep couch, cutting out a whole new generation with up-to-date wardrobes from the costume pages of some marvelous new fashion magazines. Oblivious to the grosser world about them, they caused their respective families to telephone and give parties and visit back and forth, and to discuss openly their most private affairs and move into new houses and make improvements and purchases that would have wrecked Rockefeller if the bills had ever fallen due. That is the glory of make-believe—one may go as far as he likes, building his castles and his kingdoms, with never a cent to pay. It is only when one tries to realize in acres and bricks and shingles that the accounts come in. A spiritistic friend of mine told me recently that the latest communications from the shadow world indicate the life there to be purely mental, that each spirit entity creates its own environment and habitation by thought alone. In a word, it is a world, he said, where imagination is reality and all the dreams come true. Ah me! I hope he is not mistaken! What dreams of empires we have all put away, what air-castles we have seen melt and vanish because of the cost! A place where one may build and plant and renew by the processes of thought alone, unchecked by acreage boundaries or any sordid limitations of ways and means! I cannot think of a better or more reasonable hereafter than that. We get a glimpse of it here in the play of children—little children who perhaps have left the truth not so far behind.
"Fashion ladies" must relax now and then. Even in late November there were pleasant sunny days when the Hope and the Joy roamed the fields or laid a long board across a tumbled wall and teetered away vacation hours to the tune of
Seesaw, Marjory Daw,
Sold her bed and laid on straw,
which was probably first sung a good way back—by Cain and Abel, maybe, in some corner of Eden. No, it would be outside of Eden, for their parents had moved, as I remember, before their arrival. And I wonder if little Cain and Abel had a fire to gather around when the fall evenings began to close in, before the lamps were lit, and if they ever had cakes and toast and sandwiches, with hot chocolate, from an old blue china set from a corner cupboard, and were as hungry as bears, and rocked while they ate and drank and watched the firelight dance on the tea-things and table-legs. If not, I am afraid they missed something, and perhaps it is not to be wondered at that little Cain became gloomy and savage and outcast when he grew up. A fireplace with a cozy cup of chocolate and a bite of something filling will civilize children about as quickly as anything I know of, and would, I am sure, have been good for Cain.
We often cooked by our fireplace. We hung a kettle over it for tea and toasted bread on Captain Ben Meeker's long iron toasting-fork. Then at supper-time we would rake out the coals, and on one of the old gridirons brought down from the attic would broil a big steak, or some chops, and if they did not taste better than any other steak or chops we certainly imagined they did, and I am still inclined to think we were right. Then there was popcorn, and potatoes roasted in the ashes, and apples on sticks, though this was likely to be later in the evening, when the tribe was hungry again, for children in vacation are always hungry, just little savages, and the best way to civilize them is to feed them, as I have said. It was too bad they must go back to school, and sometimes we wished there were never any such things as schools; and then again, when the house was one wild riot and hurrah, just at a moment when I wanted to reflect, I could appreciate quite fully the beauties of education and certain remote places where under careful direction it could be acquired. But how silent and lonely the house seemed when the Pride and the Hope were gone! How glad we were that Christmas was only a month away!