LINES TO MYSELF
Oh! she was a lovely girl,
So pretty and so fair,
With gentle, love-lit eyes,
And wavy, dark brown hair.
I loved the gentle girl,
But, oh! I heaved a sigh
When first she told me she could see
Out of only one eye.
But soon I thought within myself
I'd better save my tear and sigh
To bestow upon an older person I know
Who has more than one eye.
She is brave and intelligent
Too. She is witty and wise.
She'll accomplish more now than another person I know
Who has two eyes.
Ah, you need not pity her!
She needs not your tear and sigh.
She'll make good use, I tell you,
Of her one remaining eye.
In the home where we are hastening,
In our eternal Home on High,
See that you be not rivalled
By the girl with only one eye.[*]
[*]Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote that she had "composed" this poem. It is known to be the work of another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and produced a version of her own. J. L. A.
Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age—a boy, enormously fat—whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her mother had been decoyed by the general. Further to satirize the similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of yellow ribbon.
Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby's daughter. There is a real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy's true place in nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated with thick tissues of blubber. If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in deep.
Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open letter in her hand.
"Oh, read it!" she cried, her face kindling with glory.
It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the
Louisville Journal accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and
assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of
Kentucky poetesses. The title of the poem was, "My Lover Kneels to
None but God."
"I infer from this," I said, gravely, "that your lover is a Kentuckian."
"He is," cried Sylvia. "Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!"
"Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia," I continued, mildly, "upon having such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion."
"Never!" cried Sylvia. "I would spurn him as chaff!"
"Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia," I continued, further, "you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something new to parse."
Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.
"Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice's say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in Virgil and Homer. And if he could do that then, think what he must he able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!"
I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr. Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was based upon the fact that he could not parse it.
There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.
This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the collar over his head and was gone. Whither and how long no one knew; but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs. Walters's house—poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head. Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney. Glancing down this, he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and friendly a passage. His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but in Mrs. Walters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could white it, and he dripping with soot. Here the ground beneath him was of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter. In the course of his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.
It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom. She threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted outward.
"Why, what on earth is the matter?" she exclaimed, peering in, blank with bewilderment. Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been her bed. Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes blazing green with defiance.
She slammed and locked the door.
"Run for the sheriff!" she cried, in terror, to the boy who had brought her market basket; and she followed him as he fled.
"What is it, Mrs. Walters?" asked the sheriff, sternly, meeting her and bringing the handcuffs.
"There's somebody in my bed!" she cried, wringing her hands. "I believe it's the devil."
"It's my 'coon," said the carpenter, laughing; for by this time we were all gathered together.
"What a dear 'coon!" said the sewing-girl.
"Oh, Mrs. Walters! You are like Little Red Riding-hood!" said Sylvia.
"I can't arrest a 'coon, madam!" exclaimed the sheriff, red in the neck at being made ridiculous.
"Then arrest the carpenter!" cried poor, unhappy, excited Mrs. Walters, bursting into tears and hiding her face on Georgiana's shoulder.
And among us all Georgiana was the only comforter. She laid aside her own work for that day, spent the rest of it as Samaritan to her desperately wounded neighbor, and at nightfall, over the bed, now peaceful and snowy once more, she spread a marvellous priceless quilt that she had long been making to exhibit at the approaching World's Fair in New York.
"Georgiana," I said, as I walked home with her at bedtime, "it seems to me that things happen in order to show you off."
"Only think!" Georgiana replied; "she will never get into bed again without a shiver and a glance at the chimney. I begrudge her the quilt for one reason: it has a piece of one of your old satin waistcoats in it."
"Did she tell you that she had had those bedclothes ever since her marriage?"
"Yes; but I have always felt that she couldn't have been married very long."
"How long should you think?"
"Oh, well—about a minute."
"And yet she certainly has the clearest possible idea of Mr. Walters. I imagine that very few women ever come to know their husbands as perfectly as Mrs. Walters knew hers."
"Or perhaps wish to."