We had the artistic diversion of "pin-a-sights." These were one of the shop-furnishings of pin stores, whose curious lore, and the oddly shaped and named articles made for them, should be recorded ere they are forgotten. A "pin-a-sight" was made of a piece of glass, on which were stuck flowers in various designs. Over these flowers was pasted a covering of paper, in which a movable flap could be lifted, to display, on payment of a pin, the concealed treasures. We used to chant, to entice sight-seers, "A pin, a pin, a poppy-show." This being our rendering of the word "puppet-show." I recall as our "sights" chiefly the tiny larkspur wreaths before named, and miniature trees carefully manufactured of grass-spires. A noted "pin-a-sight," glorious still in childish history and tradition, was made for my pin-store by a grown-up girl of fourteen. She cut in twain tiny baskets, which she pasted on glass, and filled with wonderful artificial flowers manufactured out of the petals of real blossoms. I well remember her "gilding refined gold" by making a gorgeous blue rose out of the petals of a flower-de-luce.
I cannot recall playing much with roses; we fashioned a bird out of the buds. The old English rhyme describing the variation of the sepals was unknown to us:—
"On a summer's day in sultry weather
Five brethren were born together:
Two had beards, and two had none,
And the other had but half a one."
Still, with the rose is connected one of my most tender child memories,—somewhat of a gastronomic cast, yet suffused with an element of grace,—the making of "rosy-cakes." These dainty fairy cakes were made of layers of rose-leaves sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinnamon, and then carefully enfolded in slips of white paper. Sometimes they were placed in the garden over night, pressed between two flat stones. As a morsel for the epicure they were not altogether alluring, although inoffensive, but decidedly preferable to pumpkin or sunflower seeds, and they were englamoured with sentiment; for these rosy-cakes were not destined to be greedily eaten by the concocter, but were to be given with much secrecy as a mark of affection, a true love token, to another child or some beloved older person, and were to be eaten also in secret. I recall to this day the thrill of happiness which the gift of one of these little paper-inclosed rosy-cakes brought to me, in the days of my childhood, when it was slipped into my hand by a beautiful and gentle child, who died the following evening, during a thunder-storm, of fright. The tragedy of her death, the memory of the startling glimpses given by the vivid lightning, of agitated running to and fro in the heavy rain and lowering darkness, and the terrified summons of kindly neighbors,—all have fixed more firmly in my mind the happy recollection of her last gift.
Another custom of my youth was watching at dusk the opening of the twisted buds of the garden primrose into wan, yellow stars, "pallid flowers, by dew and moonlight fed," which filled the early evening with a faint, ineffable fragrance that drew a host of encircling night moths. Keats said they "leaped from buds into ripe flowers," a habit thus told by Margaret Deland:—
"Here, in warm darkness of a night in June,
* * * * * children came
To watch the primrose blow.
Silent they stood,
Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around,
And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood
And blossom—with a silken burst of sound!"
In our home garden stood a clump of tall primroses, whose beautiful flowers, when opened, were four inches in diameter. When riding, one summer evening, along a seaside road on Cape Ann, we first saw one of these queens of the night in an humble dooryard. In the dark its seeds were gathered and given by an unknown hand and a flower-loving heart to my mother, to form under her "fair tendance" the luminous evening glory of her garden. And on summer nights this stately primrose still blooms in moonlight and starlight, though the gentle hand that planted it is no longer there:—
"Yon rising Moon that looks for us again
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane
How oft hereafter look for us
Through this same Garden—and for one in vain."