M.—MITFORD, MARY RUSSEL.
"OUR village!" Do you suppose you could write a book about your village? Could you find enough matters of interest to make one book? And yet Miss Mitford wrote five with that title. She wrote about the houses and the people, the shops, the children, about life in an English country village, and delightful reading her sketches are. She wrote as no one had ever before written, and perhaps I might say that no one since has ever written such charming bits of description of rural life.
MISS MITFORD.
She wrote other books, Atherton, and Other Tales, Country Stories, and then she wrote such delightful letters to her friends. You will find some of these in her Life and Correspondence. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, who later in life became poor. So that from a life of luxury our gifted author was reduced to poverty.
The latter part of her life must have contrasted painfully with the days of her childhood, yet she kept through all her trials her sweet serenity of mind, her habit of making the best of everything. She is described as a short, stout woman, with a face shining with quiet happiness and unselfishness. The appreciation with which her sketches were received gave her much pleasure, and the fact that her writings were re-printed in America afforded her the greatest gratification, while it was a surprise to her.
She was a delightful person to meet socially, having charming ways and a soft, sweet voice. She died in a wee bit of a house, in 1855, at the age of sixty-eight.
Do you ask why I have chosen to place Miss Mitford in our list of Remarkable Women? To begin with, she was the first to discover and set before us in prose writing the beauty in every-day things. She had written poems and tried her hand at writing tragedy, but with indifferent success, and at length when poverty stared her in the face she took up the then new line of writing and tried with grand success to show to the world the beauty there is in common things. Then all through her long life with its sad changes she kept that wonderful serenity of mind, and that happy faculty of living above the vexations of life. Many a woman when forced by growing poverty to move from place to place, each time going to a poorer home, would have grown faint and weary of life, and given up in despair.
If we cultivate the habit of making the best of everything, we shall be the better prepared to meet the vicissitudes of life.
Faye Huntington.
I SHOULD suggest, dear Pansies, for this lovely month of May, a little evening festival. Winter is over with its long, delightfully cosey evenings. Spring is nearly done, with its shorter evenings, and now we are fairly launched into the flower months—when all life seems an holiday, and every moment that is possible is to be passed out of doors.
To get ready for my little proposed festival, everybody must go a-Maying. With baskets, and fern cases, let the children, papa and mamma, nursey, aunt Grace, uncle Fred, and indeed every one who will drop books and work, and go off to the woods for the wild treasures that are playing hide-and-seek there. We do not want on this lovely May festival, any flowers but wild ones that have grown silently all winter under the snow, waiting for us. Their reign is short indeed. We will give them one evening all to themselves before we turn to June with her wealth of roses, and all other sweet and glowing blossoms.
Let us gather them all—the hepaticas, the anemones, darling little forget-me-nots, violets, Solomon's seal, and—but the name is legion—and the varieties multiply as we dig and prowl in the damp moss, and explore behind rocks and in crannies. Put them all in the baskets and cases, surrounded by their own moss to keep them green, not forgetting to bring as many roots as possible, cover all with lovely vines, and come home, flowers in the baskets, and flowers in your cheeks.
Amy and Ruth have been very busy. No one exactly knew why they got up so early in the morning. No one but the cook, and she promised not to tell. But in the cake-box is a toothsome collection of sugar wafers, ready to be put on the flower-crowned table, and the two little girls have every little while that pleasant "woodsy morning," as Ruth called it, flown at each other in the secret places, when resting from their flower-digging, and something like this might have been heard, if there had been ears to hear. But there were none, only those of the squirrels, and they looked wise, and determined not to tell. "Oh, I hope they will be good."
"Our new receipt. Just think, if they shouldn't like them!"
Bob has a secret too. Why can't boys as well as girls have one, pray tell. That is, no one but papa knows it, but then papa has a fashion without ever asking, of being informed of his boy's movements.
Bob's twenty-five cents hoarded for two weeks, went into the grocer's till only yesterday, and Bob has twelve bright yellow lemons instead, waiting as patiently as lemons will, to be sacrificed to a thirsty group who stand around the same flower-crowned table. Bob's papa is to give the sugar, and moreover he has promised to tie on another apron and help the boy make the loveliest lemonade on that very same night. So Bob and his papa must of necessity go off together on this "woodsy morning" to hunt for flowers, for there is danger if they staid with the large group that they would let the whole thing out. Oh, what fun, to have papa to one's self and a secret!
Now then, after your invitations to two or three neighbors, and a little friend or two who hasn't many pleasures of her own, are given out for this evening, and your wood-treasures are ready, and you have had a good lunch and are all bathed and rested, you have nothing to do but to arrange your table with banks of moss, flowers and vines, get uncle Fred who is to give the little talk on "Plants and their Habits," to settle his microscope and specimens just where he wants them in the evening, Mary puts out the music on the piano-rack that she has promised to play, the two secrets are out, because there are the trays laden with sugar wafers, and two bright-faced, white-capped young girls, one with blue ribbons and the other with pink, to pass them around, and there's the lemonade table in the corner, with a big pail covered with green moss, a little well sweep to which is fastened the Baby's tiny pail for a bucket, and Bob stands back of it all with a beaming face ready to serve you to glassesfull from the "old oaken bucket."
Oh, it is rare fun, this dainty May festival—the best part after all being the "Plant talk," and the wonders to which the company, young and old, are brought to see through the microscope. Each small spear of green has its delicate meaning—each blossom its tender message. Nothing has been lost there so long under the snow, and the good Giver tells anew to these awakened minds, his story of creative love. Dear children, I hope you will have in each family a "May festival," and my most loving wish is that it may be a happy, bright, and joyous one.
Margaret Sidney.