Adventures in indigence, and other essays

by Laura Spencer Portor

GUESTS

I
RELATIONS OF THE SPIRIT

In his essay on "Character" Emerson points to the mutation and change of religions and theological teachings, and then thunders characteristically, "The moral sentiment alone is omnipotent." Now, Emerson never takes away anything traditional and cherished, but he puts something nobler into your hands in place of it. Hear him: "The lines of religious sects are very shifting, their platforms unstable; the whole science of theology of great uncertainty. No man can tell what religious revolutions await us in the next years." Then with thundering assurance he gives us the coveted reassurance. "But the science of ethics has no mutation. The pulpit may shake, but this platform will not. All the victories of religion belong to the moral sentiment."

I wish it were given me to speak with some such force and truth of what we are wont to call education. Theories are very shifting; the whole science of instruction is of great uncertainty. No man can tell what pedagogic revolutions await us. But the educational value of life has no uncertainty. Schools may come and go; this, the school of life, remains—the greatest of them all. The highest attainments of mankind are due to its teachings.

In still another essay, Emerson, depicting, we suppose, the ideal not the academic scholar, declares with the same tonic forcefulness that "his use of books is occasional and infinitely subordinate; that he should read a little proudly, as one who knows the original and cannot therefore very highly value the copy." Always, life is to Emerson the greater art, and learning, literature, and all other arts whatsoever, but lesser things. "You send your child to the schoolmaster," he flings out, "but it is the schoolboys who educate him."

Precisely. When shall we have taken wholly to heart the so obvious truth? It cannot be but the author of the "Greatest Show on Earth" was right. The world likes to be humbugged; else why all this elaboration of educational systems and theories, educational forms and creeds, this multiplication of modern methods and "didactic material"? These are, indeed, but things that change and fluctuate, and already are on the way to being superseded. Meanwhile the older and larger schoolroom of Life never closes its doors, makes no bid for patronage, retains its old teachers, changes its methods not at all, and still turns out the best pupils.

My own education is generally thought to be above the average. It is my belief that it would be far less considerable but for those various circumstances which in my childhood denied me much schooling, and accorded me a good deal of staying at home.

The home of those days had, it is true, a far greater educative value than can be claimed justly for the home of the present day, owing mainly—I hold it almost beyond dispute—to the fact that it was more given to the practice of hospitality and the entertainment of guests.

Of the homes of my day my own was, I believe, fairly typical. Though a full description of it and of the men and women who frequented it would make a colored recital, so would a like description of the homes of many others besides myself, who were children also at that time. I do not mean that such homes were entirely the rule; yet there were enough of them certainly to constitute a type. They were not likely to be luxurious; those of people of less position nowadays are far finer.

The old house of my childhood was a large and comfortable one, with low-ceilinged, well-proportioned rooms, and wide verandas. Its furnishings were in taste, and contributed greatly to its character. The big Holland secretary, with its bulging sides and secret drawer, was a very piece of romance; the tall clock, with its brass balls and moon face, the old clawfoot mahogany tables, the long scroll sofa, the heavy scroll mahogany sideboard, were as mellow in tone as the old Martin guitar on which men and women, beaux and belles of a past generation, had played; or the harp that stood in a corner, all gold in the afternoon sunlight; or the square Steck piano of the front room, a true grandee in its day. Several really well-painted portraits looked down from the walls, and added a certain stateliness to the warmth of every welcome.

Many people, recalling that home, have spoken to me since of a peculiarly warm and beautiful light which on sunny days was present in the three lower rooms—parlor, sitting-room, and dining-room—that opened one into another.

This light, which had first to make its way past maples and a few pear trees, entered, it seemed, with an especial graciousness, touching softly and lingeringly the old mahogany as it went; and from morning until late afternoon abode in the rooms with a kind of mellow gentleness hardly to be described. There was something well-mannered, unobtrusive, in its coming and going, as though it were conscious of being a guest there; a kind of gracious enjoyment it seemed to take in the place, noticeable in its gentle behaviors among the dark colors and the old books, and in its manner of moving about delicately from object to object, and pausing at last, as it always did, before the tall pier-glass, as though it pleased it to reflect on the three long rooms, doubled to twice their length, before it slipped away again past the western windows and departed across the hills.

I have mentioned carefully the perpetual coming and going of the sunlight because it seems to me symbolical of that coming and going of guests which perpetually lighted the old house, lent it its chief charm, and gave me my most memorable schooling. The educative value of life has no uncertainty. These men and women who came and went as guests were my first memorable lessons of life, and, as I take it, they were lessons marvelously well adapted to the understanding and needs of a little child.

I would not seem to undervalue the silent influence and worth of that material loveliness which was often found in the old houses of that day, and was evident in my own home; but I believe this alone could have done little to educate me. Such loveliness was but a means to an end. I would be loath to give great credit for my education to the furniture, old and interesting as it was. The real credit is due, first, to the customs of that time, which made hospitality one of the first virtues; and, second, to the guests who, coming there, furnished the house with its best opportunities, and incidentally—I beg you to note that word—afforded me, there can be no doubt, the better part of my education.

How far have we gone, "progressed," as we say, in a short span of years! I am still a young woman, yet guests are not indeed what they once were. There were poverty and riches in those days, too, but the "high cost of living," that phrase forever turning up nowadays, was a bad penny not yet coined, and guest-discouraging "flats" were anomalies that my old home town rejected.

Guests came and stayed then as they do not now. Visiting was still in those days one of the accomplishments of life; a gracious habit not yet broken up by ubiquitous hotels, ten, fifteen, twenty stories high; not yet rendered superfluous by trains every hour on the hour, or old-fashioned by scudding automobiles which, like Aladdin Abushamut's magic sofa, snatch up whole parties of people, and in the twinkling of an eye set them down in new lands with hardly time for greeting or farewell.

Life may be more provident, compact, convenient nowadays. I am not prepared to dispute it. But of one thing I am certain: the modern child in this almost guestless age has no such chance to acquire a broad education out of school hours as had I, whose childhood flourished when guests were the rule and the tinkling of the doorbell was more likely than not to be a summons to a fine adventure in visitors.

Ah, there was an education! An education indeed! Its A B C was that every child of the house should be delighted to be turned out of his or her bed, to sleep four in a four-poster, or on a mattress on the floor, so that one more guest might be given welcome. Its simple mathematics were concerned mainly with the addition of guests, the eager subtraction of one's own comforts, the multiplications of welcomes, and the long divisions of all delights and pleasures, which by some kind of higher calculus miraculously increased the meaning and richness of life. Its geography, if any, was no geography at all, beyond the fact that the guest-room was the sunniest and largest and best in the house, and that exports from all the other rooms flowed into it and rendered it the most desirable and the "most important city." As to history, it consisted of people at all times and of all ages, and the traditions of men and women of many types. It concerned itself, not with the succession of kings and durations of dynasties so much as with a succession of visitors and the probable length of their stay.

I cannot say what enlightenment or learning or benefit the guests themselves derived from these visits; though, if measured by the frequent length of their sojourn, these must have been very considerable; but I do know that we, the children of that household, gained high benefits immensely educative; I know that we assimilated much knowledge, and attained to much learning of a very high order, intellectual and spiritual; and what is best of all, I know that in that old home, antedating and long anticipating Madame Montessori and her "Houses of Childhood," we learned with neither desk, blackboard, nor semblance of schooling, and never for a moment so much as dreamed that we were being taught.

This is not the place to enter on a discussion of the Montessori method. Briefly Madame Montessori's chief tenets may be stated thus: Liberty for the child; a careful education of the child's senses, resulting in an extraordinary sense-control to which the child attains without consciousness of learning.

The "didactic material" (frankly so called by the author of this distinctive system of education) is material by means of which the child's senses are trained. It consists of many parts. To name only a few—there are one hundred and twenty-eight color-tablets; thirty-six geometrical insets; three series of thirty-six cards; the "dimension material" consists of nine cylinders, each differing from the rest in height and diameter, ten quadrilateral prisms, ten four-sided striped rods, and so on. This and much more is the equipment daily used in the "Houses of Childhood."

The home of my childhood was bare, bare of such things. Neither cubes nor cylinders were there that I remember, nor thermatic tests, nor color-tablets, nor quadrilateral prisms; and yet—

What was there of especial value? There was, first of all, the household. "The household," to quote Emerson further, "is a school of power. There within the door learn the tragi-comedy of human life. Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities can teach; here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt; the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope."

Didactic material enough, if one chooses to call it that. But, besides all this, there were guests—guests who came and lingered, guests of an almost incredible variety. By recalling a few of them I can best explain somewhat of their influence on my life.

The first one I remember very clearly was a beautiful young lady,—beautiful to me,—who spent I believe about six months with us. I might have been a trifle over five years old. I remember her with great exactness. Certain sparkling characteristics that she wore as noticeably as the several heavy rings on her white hand, shine still with surprising clearness in my memory.

She was slender. She affected overskirts. She wore elbow-sleeves, and trains, though she could hardly have been over eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was plastered on her fashionably high forehead in what were then known as "water-waves."

On a collar of box-plaited lace she often wore a jet necklace, set in gold, a kind of jewelry much in fashion at that time, I believe. Also I remember that she had a pair of lemon-colored kid gloves; and on dress occasions she wore heavy gold bracelets.

But these were all as trifles to the fact that she sang. That was her crowning glory. My mother sang sweetly, too, the beautiful songs of "her day": "Flow Gently, Sweet Afton," "Lightly the Troubadour," "Ye Banks and Braes," "The Gypsy's Warning," "Roll On, Silver Moon," "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms"—and many more. When she sang them, she played on the old Steck piano or softly plucked the strings of the old Martin guitar—simple and trill-less accompaniments.

But you, Miss Lou Brooks! You, oh, you!—compounded of every creature's best,—could sing the old and simple songs, if you chose, and very graciously, for any one who asked for them; but better still if, left to your own preference, you could take your seat how languidly at the piano, how gracefully play a prelude in which the white jeweled hands followed each other up and down the keyboard over and under, in what moods and fancies, in what rippling runs and rapid arpeggios; now lighting to flutter in a twinkling trill, with jewel-flash, like whirring hummingbirds; now resting humble, two meek white doves, in the long and waited-for preliminary pause. Then, you could break forth at last into what burst of passion and fire of song!

I can close my eyes still and see her. I have not a good memory, but the words come to me almost unerring across the past (and I have to remind you that I was a little over five years old):—

"The stars shine o'er his pathway!
[Long pause, with the white hands quivering on the pressed keys!]
"The trees bend back their leaves,

[Languid softness]

"To guide him to the meadow
Among the golden sheaves;

[Trills and expectancy!]

"Where stand I, loving, longing,
And list'ning while I wait
To the nightingale's sweet singing,
Sweet singing to its mate.
Singing!—Singing! [The last, soft like an echo]
Swe-e-eet singing to-oo its mate!"

[More trills and arpeggios to send shivers of delight over you—then in a new measure.]

"Come, for my arms are empty,
Come for the day is long.
Turn the darkness into glory;—
The sorrow into song!"

[More pauses of which you were glad—then a beginning again of all delight.]

"I hear his footfall's music;
I feel his presence near,
All my soul responsive answers
And tells me he is here!
O stars, shine out your brightest!
[This with eyes cast to where the stars should have been]
"O nightingale, sing sweet;—
To guide him to me waiting
And speed his flying feet;—
To guide him to me waiting,
And speed his flying feet!"

This was what they did in a world outside the walls of my childish experience!—they sang like that!—of such things! I did not know what it meant save in some incomplete half-lunar way; but its effect drew me, and, like the seasons and tides of the moon, changed the face of the earth for me.

Further, it should be noted that I heard this song, not only on one occasion, not detached, isolated, as at a concert. Here was nothing paid for cold-bloodedly at a box-office; here was something all woven in with the daily chance of life. I heard the song many a time. I might come upon it unexpected when I woke from my nap. I might be drawn from my toys by it to the more desirable pleasure of standing big-eyed by the piano while such glory as this rolled around about me; or eat my bowl of bread and milk in the early evening to the accompaniment of it; or try to keep the Sandman on my pillow from throwing the last handful of sand until the final note of it was sung.

Miss Brooks was, I believe, the daughter of an army officer. She had lived in various parts of the world; common on her lips were tales of a life wholly different from that which I knew.

To my eyes, water-waves and all, she was incredibly beautiful. Moreover,—and here you see the fine discriminating points which children make,—she was engaged; already selected; chosen; set apart! I cannot tell you what glamour that lent her in my eyes. Child-psychology is not a thing that always can be reduced to measurement of reflexes and the like. I responded to all this by some unmeasured law of the soul. This knowledge and appreciation of her—or of her type, if you prefer—was as distinct and yet intangible a thing as the light of the prism. The sun fell on her and was changed to color. I could not touch or define her charm, but it was there; and the color and wonder of it seemed to fall across me too as I sat near her, and upon my sun-browned hands, if they touched her, until I could see colored jewels of rings on them too, as there might be, and as I hoped there would be some day.

I thought then that I was fond of her. Certainly her word was law to me. I know that I used to run my little legs tired to wait upon her. Her smiles and favors were precious to me as only the favors of the beautiful and the gifted can be to a little child. The tap of her fan on my cheek or my hand satisfied me altogether with life.

But I was too near her then to judge of her fairly. I know now the truth of the matter. I have never seen her since. The glamour of her presence no longer colors and impedes the white truth. She was not the most beautiful young lady in the world, as I so generously took her to be. She was not the only person in the world who could play dazzling accompaniments, and sing to melt one's soul, and make one a stranger to one's self. She was not the only one in the universe who knew the dim and lovely secret chambers of a little child's nature. She was after all, only, indeed, by courtesy, Miss Lou Brooks. For she was less and more than all this: she was a guest; a passing influence; an ineffaceable impression; a glorious experience; a far adventure in new lands; a glimpse into other worlds unknown; a new planet swum into my ken. She was a magic mirror held up to me—one in which I could for the first time clearly see myself as I might be; she was a glass of fashion, a mould of form. In her I saw moving evidences of a world more wonderful than any of my fancy; she was a passing guest in the house, yes, but a permanency in the scheme of things—a very piece of life itself; and the knowledge of her, an acquirement in learning and an acquisition in education. The educative value of life has no uncertainty.

Let Montessori children in "Houses of Childhood" feel of wooden circles and quadrangles and be taught with care the words "round," "square"; let them touch sandpaper and know thereby "this is rough," or linen and apprehend "this is smooth." I, a child of the same age, needed nothing of such information. I knew smooth and rough more nearly by the mere chance touch of my play-roughened hand on her fine satiny one; I, of a like age, wholly lacking in cubes and cylinders and color-slabs, was learning nevertheless to discriminate between short and long, heavy and light, were it but by dread of her departure, or the length of her train.

Put beside Miss Lou Brooks and all that she taught me and revealed to me any didactic material you may choose, and I wonder if it compares with her. Place beside her most of the lessons learned from books. The rule of three is useful, but I would not exchange her for it. I might do without my multiplication-tables, and indeed do get along without them fairly well, never having learned the seven, eight, and nine tables properly. But these I take to be but subordinate things—pawns, or, at the very best, but bishops and knights of the game, limited to move in certain lines without deviation, and not to be compared with a queen, who can move here or there at will, taking, disconcerting, winning, and setting the whole of life into new relations.

I have named Miss Lou Brooks first because she made the first strong impression on me; but she was only one of many not less memorable. She was indeed but one star in a certain notable constellation of guests, which shone in one quarter of my heavens.

Belonging to the same constellation, though of a different magnitude, was the young German army officer, for instance, who came all the way from Germany, where my brother in his Wanderjahr had met him. His visit was short, but the glory of it enduring. I was not yet seven. I remember how he rose out of respect for me when I entered the room; how he clicked his heels together and stood formal and attendant; how he drew out my chair for me at the table, and saw me seated with all the respect due an empress. To be allowed to come and sit in my brief piqué dress at table with him and his shoulder-straps was an essay in form and a treatise on self-respect.

As brilliant a star, but of a steely blue radiance, was the physician-scientist, Doctor Highway. He would be classified readily now as a Christian gentleman of highest honor, brilliant gifts, and scientific attainments. But the name scientist was not in those days worn so easily. Huxley and Darwin were old but yet alive, as were many who still believed them to be emissaries of the devil.

Doctor Highway loved truth, he hated falsehood, and this with so much fervor and so little compromise that he was pointed out by some as an atheist. He was perpetually inviting argument, but he, or she, had courage who accepted the invitation. Once, when he expatiated on the marvels of mechanical music-boxes, an older sister of mine, in her early teens, ventured boldly into the open with the tentative remark that, wonderful as such music might be, might it not nevertheless lack soul?

I can see him still. He jerked sharply in his chair. He flung his penetrating glance at her and at her only. He said, with a sharpness that had all the effect of anger, "What do you mean by SOUL!!"

You have seen a too bold rabbit scuttle into a hole at the near sound of a gun. My sister to outward appearances was still there; but to outward appearances only. She was indeed gone, vanished, obliterated, annihilated—disappeared as effectually as though the earth had swallowed her up. I have no record of the time when she again ventured into the open, but I would be willing to think it was not for years.

I remember supper-tables at which his conversations and brilliancy presided. I remember sharp revolutionary statements that fell from him as to Jonah and the whale, the flood; geological testimony as to the length of time consumed in the creation of the world; all given with his fine clear face lit up with a kind of righteous indignation, and his hand brought down at last so that the glass and silver and myself jumped suddenly.

No thunderbolt fell on the house those nights, though I watched for it with anxious waiting. Sometimes I think his was the beginning of my own courage; for whatever moral bravery was in me rose, I think, to honor this greater courage of his—a subaltern saluting a superior officer. When he was by I listened, fascinated. In these long years since he is gone, I too have loved truth; and I could wish for him now, sometimes, that the too-complacent guests and cutlery and glassware of our modern dinner-tables might be so startled and shocked by the thunder of as righteous a sincerity.

There was also—how warmly contrasted with Doctor Highway!—the young Byronic musician with the extraordinary tenor voice. He was the pride of his family, and to their dismay was resolved to go on the opera stage. He treated me as an equal and, dispensing largesse, wrote in my autograph book one day, in a fine stirring hand: "Music my only love, the only bride I'll ever claim." Later, it is true, he seemed to have repented his resolve and forgotten the album, for I believe that he claimed some two brides besides music; but this did not alter his educational value; that remained unspoiled.

There was, too, that great flashing fiery star, Mrs. Rankin, at work at the time of her visit on a drama, "Herod and Mariamne." She had a mannish face; she wore heavy rings on somewhat mannish hands, and was, no doubt,—it is now revealed to me,—an unclassified suffragette, born untimely, denied, cut off by the custom of those days from the delights of militancy, foredoomed to pass out of life with never the joy of smashing a single window.

She talked much of injustice. She had a big voice and a small opinion of men. This it is not unreasonable to suppose they reciprocated with a still more diminutive opinion of her.

One might think from all this that she should have been a pamphleteer. She was not. She was by all odds and incongruities a poetess, driven by the inexorable muse to daily sessions with Mariamne. Mariamne! Ah, what a subject for her—for her!

She must have absolute quiet. She must be undisturbed. During her stay we would romp in from our play to find my mother with a finger on her lips. Above stairs Mrs. Rankin might be pacing her room, declaiming, to the hearing of her own judicial ear only, the speeches of Mariamne, delivered in the voice of Herod, and the speeches of Herod, in a voice that should have been that of Mariamne. I can still hear the long pace and stride overhead.

Lest her type seem too strange, perhaps, it was explained to us, what Plato explained long ago, that a poet is rapt wholly out of himself and is as one possessed of the gods.

Then, too, which brought her nearer to our sympathies, my mother conveyed to us the more homely knowledge that Mrs. Rankin had had much unhappiness in her life; some Herod of her own, I believe. This secured to her our more willing respect and laid on us more than the ordinary obligation of courtesy. This virtue on our part was obliged to be its own reward, for there was no other that I can recall.

These people, you will note, were not bound to us by ties of blood. They were rather relations, rich or poor relations, of the spirit. I am bound also to tell of other guests than these: of those who by virtue of tradition and blood we more wontedly call "our own"; men and women of my mother's and father's families; aunts and uncles and "relatives," as we say.

But before I pass on to these, there is need to mention one more, at least, of the relations of the spirit—that one to me most memorable of them all; the young dramatist-poet, with his flying tie and his heavy hair, to whose romantic name—Eugene Ashton—I would how gladly have prefixed the title "Cousin" had I but been entitled to it; who was nevertheless cousin-german to the spirit of me, or closer still, a kind of brother-of-dreams. He had been into distant countries of the soul—that was clear by a far-away look in his eyes. I used to sit wordless and well-behaved in his presence, but I slipped my soul's hand in his, very friendly, the while; I wandered far with him into realms of fancy, and counted his approval and the merest glance he gave me as very nearly the most desirable thing I could attain to.

I can see him still, and those gray eyes of his, as young as the young moon and as many centuries old; I can still hear his very noble voice, reciting from time to time, as he was wont to do, some of his own verses. Or I can see him leaning forward, his gracious body bending into the firelight, to talk over with my sympathetic mother his plans for recognition and fame.

How little we guessed that his life was even then near to its setting! When one sees the morning star in the dawn, or Hesper in the twilight, hanging limpid, golden, one does not wonder will its glory be long or short; so much it holds one with its immortal loveliness, that little thought is given to the near-by day, or the night which shall quench it.

The other stars, Miss Lou Brooks, Mrs. Rankin, and the rest, shone long and high in the firmament of my childhood; but the mellow light of the gifts of Eugene Ashton, like the more splendid Hesper, hung low, already low on the horizon.

I shall not forget that morning we heard of his death. "Eugene Ashton is dead!" The news was not kept from us children. Yet I remember, too, that beyond the first sorrow and shock of such news lay a pardonable pride. He had loved our home; he had found comfort and rest of spirit there. I could still see his gray eyes looking into the firelight, and the bend of his gracious body, every inch of him a poet. There, with us, he had dared to be his best and had shared his gifts; his personality had lighted up those very rooms and his voice had sounded in them there where still my daily lot was cast. He had been our guest—to me the most memorable of them all. And now he was gone. Where? A kind of glory followed the thought. He was gone down over the rim of the horizon of life to the land of Death, as splendid there as here. We had lost him, whereas he, you see, had only lost us. It was our lives that were darkened, not his. It was on our lives, not on his, that the night fell. So he also, having been as a "morning star among the living," now, having died, was

... as Hesperus giving
New splendor to the dead.

II
KITH AND KIN

So far, in mentioning the many guests who frequented the old home of my childhood, I have named only such as were relations of the spirit. Often these seemed to me more truly my kindred than those whose kinship was based upon ties of blood. Yet, as my memory brings before me those men and women of my mother's and father's families, I find myself aware that the bonds of blood are strong, strong.

These came bearing valid claim of right and title; these were not to be gainsaid or denied; these were accompanied by silent, but how indisputable, witnesses of feature and form. Whether I liked them or not, these were "my own."

But their chief power over me lay in this—that they linked my life openly to all that of the past which I could call mine. The older of them, who sometimes laid their hands on my head, touched with the other hand, as it were, the generation already gone. They still carried vivid memories of the dead in their hearts; spoke familiar words of them; or, perhaps, wore delicate pictures of them still in lockets at their throats. The invisible past was theirs visibly.

The Greeks, that people of sound ideals and of incomparable taste for living, did not consent to or admit of the departure of the older generation. To the invisible hands of the lares and penates was delivered the sacredness of the house itself. The spirits of the "departed" commemorated its lintels, kept clean and bright the fires of the hearth, guarded the home from evil if so might be, and gathered into a sweet influence those traits and characteristics and deeds long gone in the flesh and surviving in the spirit in some fine aroma of living.

It was, I believe, somewhat in the manner of the lares familiares that the clan of our older "blood-kin," both those of a past and those of a very nearly past generation, added meaning to that old home of my childhood.

My great-aunts and great-uncles brought with them the spirits of ancestors, were, in a sense, abodes of ancestors themselves. An older generation looked out of their eyes; the spirits of men and women long gone still lingered with them. It lent a dignity to life.

We children stood aside while they passed by in front of us. We saw them served at table and elsewhere to the best of everything. To them, too, as to the lares, were given the first and best portions of viands. We listened to them as though to oracles speaking. It was for us to allow the rivers of their broader wisdom to flow undisturbed by that kind of stone-throwing, pebble-skipping curiosity so noticeable in the average liberated child of to-day. Into their fine flowing streams of narrative we flung no big or little stones of our questions or our egotism. Their talk rippled on or flowed stately.

"We were under full canvas,"—I can see the fine-featured old gentleman yet,—"we were in a zone of tempests, sailing round the Horn"—a wave of the hand here, and a pause.

What is "full canvas"? What is a "zone"? What is "Horn"? Indeed, we did not know. Be sure we did not interrupt the narrator to ask—not more than the audience arrests the ghost in "Hamlet" for exact definitions when it mouths out the sorrowful hollow words, "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled."

The words defined themselves well enough for all practical and spiritual purposes. The mere sound of them was much, and the manner of saying them was much more. We got no definitions of "full canvas," "zone," or "Horn," for future reference; but what we did get was a present sense of some of the great allied human experiences—the unpitying power of the sea, the dread of a soul brought face to face with shipwreck and death, the quick awful moving of the "imminent hand of God," the cry of a coward, the fierce bravery of a brave man ready to fling life away for the sake of his fellows; then, the sense of a great deliverance and what we take to be the mercy of God. And beyond all these, for good measure, pressed down and running over, we had added unto us additional respect for those older and more experienced than ourselves, and the sense of a fine tale told tellingly.

But I would not have you suppose that I found all the old ladies and all the old gentlemen delightful. Some of them I disliked and wished gone. A sense of justice compels me to believe, however,—putting aside all question as to whether they charmed or disappointed us, and considering them only as purely educative mediums,—that these visitors of an older generation are not surpassed, indeed, are rarely equaled, by any theory or practice of modern pedagogy.

If Miss Lou Brooks and Eugene Ashton and Dr. Highway taught us much of foreign lands and strange worlds and spiritual astronomies; if they instructed me besides in the poetry and romance of life, these others gave me a knowledge and love and understanding of other times, other manners; they were a kind of incarnate treatises in history and ethics, philosophy, and comparative philology.

What a lesson in history and manners was my great-aunt Sarah for instance!

She was tall and stately, a kind of reproof to the shallowness of later days. There was about her the refinement and delicacy of a rare old vase. She had been young once; this my reason told me, for, in her home, a large stone house called "Scarlet Oaks," hung a very beautiful portrait of her, a delicate, very young, translucent face, rising above the shimmering satin of a low-cut wedding gown. But for this I should have taken her to have been always old, in the sense, I mean, in which the piping forms of youth, the "brede of marble men and maidens," on Keats's Grecian urn are "forever young, forever fair." There was such a finality and finish about her, like something arrested in its perfection; such achievement, such delicate completeness, it seemed, as could not change! It appeared that, when old age should waste our own generation, that delicate loveliness of her would remain untouched. She seemed already to live above, to survive, what was perishable and trivial in her own day and ours.

She affected cashmere shawls and cameos, and wore long and very elaborate mitts, and was always spoken of as "delicate." "Aunt Sarah is very delicate." That, indeed, she was!

We all waited upon my aunt Sarah, from the greatest to the least. She was very fond of my father, and to hear her address him as "William," and treat him with the condescension one gives to a child,—he who had iron-gray hair,—and to see his eager and affectionate and wholly respectful response, was to see time flow back.

My great-aunt had two brothers, my uncle Hays and my uncle William, who still wore great pointed collars, and black stocks that wound around the throat several times, and broadcloth coats. But my great-uncles, unlike my great-aunt, seemed passing by. There was in their somewhat careful, sometimes feeble step a suggestion of treaty and capitulation, and from time to time, in their glance or actions, the pathos of childlikeness so much more frequent in the old of that sex than of the other.

Such types were rare, even in my day. There were only a few, a very few such men and women left then, guests of a twice older generation, visiting still, with a kind of retained graciousness, in the house of life from which they were soon finally to depart. By an enviable fate some six or eight of these men and women belonged to me. An air of grandeur came to the house with them as with the coming of the gods and goddesses in the old days; the human dwellings expanded, and the lintels grew tall.

You can guess, perhaps, whether we children ventured a word! Glory enough to be permitted to come as silent as mice to supper, while they were there!

Yet I would not be misleading. Even those of a twice older generation were by no means inevitably stately and imposing. History is not given over entirely to kings and queens. There was, for instance, my great-aunt Henrietta, of the "other side of the house." She was a wholly different type. She was little. She wore three puffs at either side of her face. These were held in place by little gray combs. She knew everybody's affairs, and her chief delight was in recounting them. She was a living chronicle, an accurate, if inglorious, historian; an intimate and personal account, with a mind for little happenings and a prodigious memory for events; a sort of Pepys in petticoats and neckerchief.

She was the oldest survivor of my mother's people. The family tree was in her keeping. But she cared little enough to dig about its deep roots. She took no delight, apparently in the dignity of its stem, or pride in the wide spread of its branches. Her entire pleasure, rather, was in the twittering and whispering of its leaves. There was something bird-like and flitting in her character, and she gossiped like a chaffinch.

In her flowed together the great strains on my mother's side, Spencer and Halsted, names to conjure with. She had, certainly, not less to be stately about than my great-aunt Sarah. She had plenty of ancestors to be proud of, and for a touch of romance, had danced the minuet with Lafayette, when she was a slip of a girl and he a guest in her grandfather's house; but she never appeared in the least proud of her people, only unfailingly entertained by them.

It was at an early age that I resolved to model my life after my aunt Sarah rather than after my aunt Henrietta; yet recalling my aunt Henrietta's memorable characteristics, and that about Lafayette, and the delightful side-puffs, and her searching comments on humanity, I am willing to admit that she was perhaps the more vivid lesson of the two. And if one counts the lasting distaste for gossip which I acquired by being obliged to listen respectfully, hours at a time, it seemed, while she continued to profess her little astonishments and "you-don't-say-so's!" to my mother, with the best end of her sentences always finished, inaudible to me, behind her fan, I am even prone to believe her to have been the more influential and educative of the two.

In those days, those days when visits were long and frequent, the bond of kinship was firmly established, and family characteristics were strong and vivid. These were Halsteds, Spencers, Hamiltons, Ogdens, Portors, and not to be mistaken, any more than you mistake now your reader for your speller, your history for your geography.

It seemed, it is true, that they were there but to visit; but how much were they there, though how little were they aware of it, to teach, to enlighten, to admonish! With them came the Halsted or Spencer or Portor imperiousness or graciousness or brains; the Halsted eyes, which were beautiful, and the Halsted tempers, which were not; with them came those obstinate egotisms, those devotions and ideals, those headstrong weaknesses, those gentle fortitudes which, strong in themselves, survived vividly from generation to generation.

My aunt Henrietta, my aunt Sarah and the rest, it was plain to be seen, were the earthly abodes of strong antecedent family spirits; and now, these bodily abodes doomed to decay, had not those spirits, strong and nimble, already begun to frequent the available lives of the younger generation, resolved on living yet in the day-lighted world, and visiting still the glimpses of the moon; hopeful, perhaps, in the younger generation, to correct some old folly; or willful, and determined, it might be, to pursue in some younger life the old fatality and mistakes?

This was what it meant, this and not less, when, often a little wistfully, the passing generation remarked certain likenesses. "Mary, how much she is getting to be like William!" or, "Do you know, she reminds me of her great-grandmother Ferguson"; or, "She has the Portor eyes"; and sometimes, cryptically, so that I might not guess too clearly what it meant, "Very like the Halsteds."

All those things were, I believe, far more influential and educative than the unthinking will admit. They gave me much food for thought. They roused in me commendable emotions, or salutary dismays. Might I some day be like my aunt Sarah? Was I really like my father? Could I worthily be classed with these others? And traits not to be proud of—was I in danger from these? So cautions and hopes and worthinesses grew up in me under the fine influence of what might be called a study in "Comparative Characteristics." There is not alone a dignity, but a tenderness as well, lent to life by such a study of former and passing generations. The results of living much of my childhood in the presence of the past, serving tea to it, offering it the required courtesies, putting footstools under its feet, were, I believe, a certain abiding reverence for human nobility, and a pity for human faults and weaknesses, and more, a desire and hope for nobility in myself, and a haunting dread that some family weakness might reappear in me; and these, as valuable assets to education, I would not rank below the dates of the battles of Crécy and Poitiers, and the siege of Paris—none of which dates, though I once learned them carefully, have remained with me.

There is not space to tell of that nearer constellation of warm and bright stars, guests who were my mother's and father's intimate friends and contemporaries. Even if there were nothing else to recommend them, these were men and women who had lived through the Civil War in their prime. To sit on the knee of my ex-soldier uncle, and know that where my head leaned he carried in his breast-pocket a little Testament, with a bullet-hole in it but not quite through it—the Testament having saved his life and stopped the bullet from reaching his heart; and to sit on the knee of another uncle, who actually carried a bullet from Antietam about in his body, yes, and for all that, was the very gayest of the gay—these experiences were spelling-books of a higher order and readings in life not to be looked down on.

There were other uncles, who visited the house only in tradition, but were entertained there how warmly of my eager fancy,—their adventurous lives having ended before mine began,—who were memorable lessons in daring, in courtesy, and in spirit!

There was my uncle Robert, for instance, who, to escape, for his part, from my Chancellor grandfather's stern requirement that all of his seven sons should study law, ran away and went before the mast at eighteen, and at twenty-one came sailing home again, master of his own vessel.

She was called the Griffin. Ah, the Griffin! the Griffin! Though I never set foot upon her deck, how well I knew her, masts, spars, canvas, tar, and timber! How often I had stood in dreams, a little figure at the prow, my skirts and hair blown back by the wind, while we sailed the seas, she and I and her gallant crew, under the wise direction of my sailor uncle! How often had we sought and found, across the pathless ways, those places, vague, vague and far away, but known and endeared to me by the wonder and the romance of their names—China and Celebes, Madagascar and Gibraltar, the Azores and Canaries and Shetlands, Hebrides, Bermudas and the Spice Islands, Ceylon and the Andamans, Marseilles and Archangel and Valparaiso! How possible all of them were, how sure of access, without regard to limiting geography! Let but the Griffin weigh her anchor, and her sails be set! How far! how far!

Never mind that the Griffin's master was dead and buried in the sea he loved, before I was born! I contrived to live above these facts, as I did above geography. Could it be possible, do you think, that this my best-loved uncle did not know me when I knew him so well? Was I not, somehow and notwithstanding, one of his close kith and kin, on whom he looked fondly? His favorite niece, perhaps with a spirit of adventure to match his own?

There were other uncles besides, with lives full as romantic. I mention only this one, because I loved him best.

There was, further, my mother's youngest sister, who was better than any legend. I would rather have inherited, as I did then, that love-story of hers, than very considerable worldly riches.

Another of my mother's sisters was mistress of a home on Fifth Avenue and of a very lovely country place on the Hudson. She had maids at every hand to wait upon her, and footmen whose eyes looked straight ahead of them, and who wore cockades in their hats. I liked her for herself: her beauty and her spirit and commandingness always stirred me, and she liked and approved of me, besides. Moreover,—let me be frank,—I liked her too, in those days, for the footmen as well. One of my sisters had visited her for nine months, and had, on her return, entirely revolutionized all my ideas of the world.

But that, rather, which confirmed and stablished me and my ideals as on a rock, was the love-story of my youngest aunt.

She and her husband had only the most moderate means. They lived in what I like now to believe must have been a rose-covered cottage. But oh, the love of them! She had a mass of wonderful hair which it seems he loved to unpin at night, to see it fall at either side of her lovely face, down to her knees and beyond; and a tiny foot, whose slipper he would allow no one but himself to put on. All reports of every member of the family agreed: these were a pair of perfect lovers; like "Rose in Bloom" and "Ansal Wajoud"; no harsh word was ever spoken between them; they lived wholly for each other, in a blissful world apart, rich in their own manner; where neither poverty, nor distress, nor discord could find them; and where no hand could ever fall upon the latch to bring them sorrow—save only one.

That hand fell—the hand of him gently termed by Scheherazade and other tale-tellers of the East, "The Terminator of Delights, and Separator of Companions."

She came to be with us the winter that she was widowed. It was thought the change of air, and perhaps the brightness of our household, might be of some little help. We children were admonished to be very gentle—not to be noisy. Superfluous precaution! She was to me sacred!

She used to walk up and down the upper veranda, taking the air slenderly, a light shawl about her shoulders, her tiny foot pausing now and then for greater steadiness, when the wind swayed her frail body too rudely. I have known many faces since then; I never knew one with a lovelier look. Heartbroken though she was, the depth of her love was daily attested, for there never came complaint or bitter word across her lips; and you went to her, without question, for quiet and comfort, as to a sanctuary.

At first, it seems, she had been pitifully rebellious, had longed and prayed to die (we children knew these facts); but, having been denied so much as this, she rose delicately, and lived on worthy of him, binding and unbinding her hair, fastening her little slippers anew for the daily road and routine of life. Sometimes, with tactful or tactless devotion (I do not know to this day which), I would offer to fasten them for her; and she would smile and let me do it, and usually kissed me afterward.

There were years and years when I never saw her. She grew more frail, I am told, and her cheek withered; but to me she was always incomparable, and always "Rose-in-Bloom"; and like Rose-in-Bloom, looking always to one thing only—reunion with her beloved.

"Will fortune, after separation and distance, grant me union with my beloved?" sighs the lover of Rose-in-Bloom. "Close the book of estrangement and efface my trouble? Shall my beloved be my cup-companion once more? Where is Rose-in-Bloom, O King of the Age?"

It might have been her lover who so questioned a mightier king, while she waited far from him, there even in our very house. And the reply of the king in the story would still have been fitting: "By Allah, ye are two sincere lovers; and in the heaven of beauty two shining stars, and your case is wonderful and your affair extraordinary."

---

It were indeed impossible to explain all that these, the vivid lives of my own, meant to me, and what effect they had on what I like to call my education—how much indeed they were my education.

It is usually assumed that, the sooner we get at books, the sooner we shall become educated. I think it a pale assumption. The order might more happily be reversed. I am convinced that it was mainly by my reading of these men and women, with whom the world of my childhood was peopled and whom the gracious habit of visiting brought within my ken, that I came later to recognize and enjoy the best authors and the best literature. I had known Lear and Othello and Hamlet in my own circle, though without Shakespearean dramatization or language. I have already told you how well I knew "Rose-in-Bloom," so much better than the "Arabian Nights" could ever tell me of her. "The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling" was familiar enough to me. I had had it rolled on me by the author of "Herod and Mariamne." I was continually recognizing in books fragments of life, but glorified by the art of phrase or symbol. When I came one day upon the incomparable scene in Capulet's orchard, and those lines,—

"By yonder blessed moon I swear,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops,"

was I, do you think, a stranger to it? Had I not in real life heard Miss Lou Brooks sing with a full heart and a quivering voice,—

"The stars shine o'er his pathway!"

It will, without doubt, be objected that my childhood was an exceptional one, even for my day; that the average child of the present would certainly have no such characters and types from which to draw knowledge. But this is, I am sure, a false premise. Humanity is a very ancient stuff, and human beings are to be found to-day quite as interesting and vivid as ever human beings were. But there lacks to the modern child the quiet opportunity for knowing and studying humanity at first-hand. In place of long and comfortable and constant visits, we have a kind of motion-picture hospitality soon over, a film on a roll soon spun out; and instead of life with its slower actions and reactions, a startling mere picture of life flashing by.

A short time ago I watched a party of married people and children receive an automobileful of guests at a country house. The guests remained something over twelve hours, which is a long visit in these days.

When they came, it was explained by them how many miles they had come that day and over what roads. An hour was now devoted to getting the dust off and to a change of clothes. After this there was much chatter among host and guests, talk of mutual friends, and much detail as to journeying; what roads had been found good, what ones uncomfortable for speeding, with a comparing of road-maps among the men. Then there was luncheon; after that, siestas; after these, a spin to the polo grounds in the host's "auto"; after this, tea on the country-club veranda, and another spin home. Another half-hour was now again given to the removal of dust, then an hour to an exceptionally well-served supper; more chatter, with rather high laughter; then the summoning of the original "auto"; good-byes, some waving of hands, a little preliminary chugging of the machine; then a speeding away, a vanished thing. Gone in a flash! A clean sheet once more! The moving-picture visit was over; the host and hostess returned to the chairs on their own veranda; the handsome, long-legged bronzed children looked bored; and the lares and penates inside, if there were any, shivered, I am sure, with what "freezings" in the midst of "old December's bareness everywhere."

"And yet this time removed was summer's time." There were in that flashing speeding automobile six people: there was an old gentleman (very trig and alert) who had hunted tigers in India and had buried three wives; there was a woman who was one of the most proud and vain women in the world, as well as one of the most beautiful; there was a man who had carried through a great panic in Wall Street, and who wore an invisible halo of prayers of widows and orphans; there was a middle-aged woman with a broken heart, whose lover had been buried at sea; there was a fresh-looking young girl chained to the rock of modern conventions, and a square-jawed handsome young Perseus, who was in love with her and determined to rescue her and carry her away to dwell with poverty and himself on a claim in eastern Idaho.

Flash, flash! They are moving pictures, they are gone! What might they not have been, what might they not have contributed, very especially to the host's children, in the way of lessons and knowledge and education, had they remained long enough to be guests! What? Education? But the children all go to school, and to the best to be had; and the little one there is just starting in under the Montessori method. You should see how amazingly, from fifty-seven varieties, she can select and grade the different shades and colors.

Madame Montessori recommends that children be under the care of a "directress" (note the name) in the "Houses of Childhood," each day, the day to begin at eight and to last until six, in a schoolroom where the Montessori "method" is practised by means, mainly, of the "didactic material"! The thing revolts me. I do not say, "What time for arithmetic and geography, and the sterner realities of schooling?" No, nor do I complain as does Sir Walter Scott when he touches on Waverley's education, you remember, that "the history of England is now reduced to a game at cards." I say to myself more solemnly, "But what time is left for life? What time for guests?"

They have a great care of children's education nowadays. We were neglected to a higher learning and abandoned to a larger fate. There were guests coming! We made off to don our best dresses and behaviors. We hoped to be worthy the gracious occasion. We meant to try. Life was at the door.

It was not mere shrewdness in St. Paul, surely, when he recommended the Romans so earnestly to be "given to hospitality"; but a wistfulness as well, and a certain longing for a high education to be given unto them; and it was his correspondents' welfare he had in mind, you remember, rather than the welfare of their guests, when he bade the Hebrews that they "be not forgetful to entertain strangers"; for—now note carefully the sequel—"for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

I have an old friend who is on his way, I am told by those in authority, to be one of our great modern psychologists. He gives anxious thought to the education of his children. Lately, he approached me seriously in the matter of his boy's educational needs. Would I talk them over with him? He wished to consult me. I looked for a careful discussion of "methods," and was ready with all my arguments concerning the Montessori teachings. Instead, he inquired, "Now when will you come and visit us? a real visit, I mean? That is what I wanted to ask you. It is with that that I am most concerned. That is exactly what Jack needs."

I am needed as a guest in their house, for the sake of the children! My heart rises at the thought! Cheered, I seem to see ahead, clearly, a time when, if we do not provide them with guests, we shall think that we have shamefully neglected our children's education; when we will no more deny them visitors, than we would now neglect to have them taught to read.

To love life for ourselves and others; to be forever interested in it; to be loyal to it, and that down to the grave; to dwell helpfully and appreciatively with one's kind; to understand others as generously as is possible to faulty human nature, and to make ourselves understood as much as is consistent with courtesy; these are, I take it, the fine flower of culture; here is all that I would dare call education, or presume to think of permanent importance.

And by no means, I feel sure, can youth be led to all this so readily, so happily, so effectually, as by means of the age-old virtue of hospitality. These things are things which guests bring with them, knowing it not, and bestow on those who are not aware of the bestowal.

And our most advanced ideal, that of "universal brotherhood" and a "federation of the world"—what is this, I ask you, but a glad sharing of life in a society to which all will be welcome, with bread and wine and greeting denied to none, and guest and host fulfilling an equal obligation?

This is the old manner of entertaining, and—I ask your patience—it is God's manner, not less. The gentle sympathy, the unfailing hospitality of my mother,—how gentle and understanding she was of all types which frequented the old house!—her patience and hospitality had in them, I like to think, some resemblance to that larger patience of Him in whose House of Life we do but for a time visit, some of us how gayly, how romantically, some how fretfully and inconsiderately, lingering past our time; some contributing but idle gossip; some lending to the hearth-fires the glow of poetic dreams; some adding truth or dignity of our own; some possessed of foibles and accomplished in failures; some shining with hopes of final successes that shall never be ours. Yet all of us, by the grace of God, and God be thanked, even so, adding somewhat to the meaning of life, edifying when we least know it, teaching when we are wholly unaware; helpful, instructive, even in our blunders, profiting others by the often profitless lessons and fables of our lives; enlightening when we are most ignorant of so doing, and even when our own lives are darkened. In a word, guests; and what is of even sweeter import, all of us understood, condoned, valued, pitied, loved, by the Master of the House; welcomed by his world that has long looked for our coming; served by his servants; waited upon by wind and wave and those others who do his bidding; afforded the bread of life to eat, given the wine of life to drink; warmed by the shining, welcoming sun; lighted by no less candles than the stars; and with rest and peace, and a bed at last for every one.