Quiet and shy, I was, as I have said, dominated by my sister till perhaps a year or two before I went away from home. More of a leader, more practical, in those days more executive, my sister had withal more common sense and far more initiative than I. She mothered me as a child, and “bossed” me as a little girl, and for a long time I was content to have it so. In truth, so established was that order of things that she has never, I think, quite accepted my emancipation.
I was more shy in Father’s presence than elsewhere, even in my late ’teens. I don’t know why, but involuntarily I became more reserved. I myself could see a difference in voice and manner. I was not afraid of him (though that was the way Sister put it), for I had no reason to be, he was kindness itself, and more gentle with me than with Kate, she being so full of pranks he often had to rebuke her. I don’t know just what the shyness was, but I was two different beings when with and away from my father. As nearly as I can explain it now, it was my exaggerated love of approbation making me so anxious for his approval that I over-exerted myself when near him, the result being a shy awkwardness. Yet he always seemed to understand me, and to make it easy for me. I never would ask him for favours; Kate always had to do such things for both herself and me. “You do it,” I would plead, and she would “sputter” and say I ought to do it for myself, but would give in. Sometimes she made me go with her, occasionally taking revenge by saying, “Genie wants to ask you for a penny.” Then I felt like running away. He seldom refused us; I don’t see why I was so bashful with him. It irritated Sister. Straightforward herself, she thought me two-sided. I don’t know when this shyness came, or when it wore away, but before it developed I have one memory that is significant—one of my earliest recollections. Years later I marvelled that I ever dared do it: I remember sitting on Father’s lap (he in a little black rocker) and “teasing” him to tell me where I came from. It must have been when I first began to wonder about such things. I recall how I kept pulling his face around by putting my hands in his long brown beard; how he would laugh and turn away, trying to avoid me; and I can remember just how he looked at Mother as they exchanged glances. I can’t recall how they answered me, but think they told me I would know when I was older. (I never remember being told about storks bringing babies, though I do remember someone saying the Doctor brought them, and that God sent them.) But that scene is very vivid to me; and afterward, when I began to know, though imperfectly, the answer to my question, I thought of how I had sat and coaxed Father to tell me. I would like to know just how old I was when this question first seemed so important to me. I recall when still very small, though later than this, being in the yard and digging in the ground when Brother and some older boys, going by, asked what we were doing. “Digging for babies,” we said, and it seems as though I can remember the smile that passed between Brother and the boys as they ran off shouting derisively, “Digging for babies!” That must have been in the days when we used earnestly to try to dig down to China.
Although asking my father this question is one of my earliest recollections, I think the very earliest is that of my first day in school. I can remember just how I trotted along by my brother’s side; how my starched skirts stood out proudly, and how my heart swelled with excitement when, at the sound of the “first bell,” I started off to school. Arthur was very nice to me, and granted permission (!) to two of the bigger girls to let me sit between them. I recall the delicious feeling of being the object of interest in the little flock, and how they petted and entertained me. But the most wonderful thing was a little wire frame which the teacher let me take to amuse myself with—a frame with coloured balls big as cranberries, which could be moved back and forth on the wires. Not long after I began going to school regularly, and that little frame (years later I learned it was called an abacus) was given out as a reward of merit. I can see now the look of blushing pride mantling the cheeks of the favoured pupils as they marched from the teacher’s desk back to their seats bearing the coveted trophy.
One evening shortly after my first day in school, we were startled by the alarm of fire, and saw the flames coming from the direction of the Academy. “Goody, Goody!” shouted some boys in the street, “We won’t have to go to school any more!” But I cried as though my heart would break, until a neighbour came down the hill and told us it was some unimportant building farther away.
A few years ago the Academy did burn, and the news came to me with a far keener pang than that felt in childhood at the false alarm. The present was momentarily blotted out. My thoughts flew back to the old building where the most tender and beautiful memories centred. Of that place so rich in associations only ashes remained; only in memory could I see again the old brick walls—the walls my grandfather had helped to build—only in memory hear the school bell ring! Curious, but more than all the furnishings—the books, the globes, the maps and charts, the chemical apparatus—more than all the things really of value in the building, my thoughts kept going back perversely to that dear little wire frame with coloured balls which I had so cherished since my first day at school!—that was gone past recall!—that and the old bell! At those earlier home-comings after graduation, one of my keenest pleasures had been to be awakened in the morning by the sound of the school bell; it brought back so much: I was a girl again; the past was bridged over; it stirred a host of chaotic feelings of mingled sweetness and sadness—longing for my lost girlhood, and exultation at the successes and achievements of to-day—the Spell of the Past was in that bell.
A fine high-school building, well equipped, now stands where the old Academy stood. To the younger generation it will doubtless mean all that the old school meant to us, but how like an interloper it is! Only the ground and the old trees are left—the old linden trees under which we played, where we used to gather the tiny round nuts and eat the sweet brown kernels that ripen in September!
Once when Sister was a little thing, perhaps four or five years old, and an aunt, in telling her Bible stories, started to make some explanation about God, Kate interrupted her in a superior way with, “Oh, yes, I know God—he lives over there,” pointing to a meadow opposite our house. Astonished, Aunt Kate inquired further, when the child added:
“He’s got white hair and wears a long coat; he walks around there when it’s getting dark.” She meant an old man with a white beard and flowing locks who, like Old Grimes, wore a “long gray coat all buttoned down before.” His unusual appearance as he came and went in the hay-meadows had appealed to the child’s imagination, and she had settled to her own satisfaction that he was God!
An experience of my own, some years later however, illustrates the marked difference in our minds and temperaments—the one given to definite, concrete ways of thinking, and to settled convictions which satisfy her, however inadequate they may seem to others; the other, at that time, to vague, even mystical interpretations. And a similar tendency exists to-day in our attitudes where temperament and personal bent are concerned: One spring, going to a sheltered strip in our yard where we had previously transplanted wild flowers from the woods, I found a pale blue hepatica in bloom. I remember the directness with which the flower spoke to me. Something in its gem-like beauty and its completeness touched me peculiarly; my eyes filled with tears. I hesitate to write it, but it seemed almost as though the flower whispered to me, “God.” It was an exquisite moment. The beauty and purity of that flower spoke to my soul, and for a brief while I had a conception of Divinity that made the day and hour memorable.
To my mother I am primarily indebted for my love of nature. She used to take us to the cowslip woods every spring, and later to the Wintergreen woods. We would begin coaxing to go weeks beforehand. Something sweet and tender stirs at the thought of our excursions to those distant moist woods in the early spring days. With what eagerness we started off, Mother as eager as any of us! How we ran across lots, climbed rail fences and a stone wall, peeped into deserted barns, traversed meadow after meadow, till we came to the swampy woods where the gay flowers grew! It was dark and wet and mysterious in those woods; we knew them only as the cowslip woods; other woods we frequented at other times of the year, these only in the cowslip days. I liked the crackle as we gathered the plant for “greens.” We even ate the bitter buds raw. Often we would slip from the mossy, decaying logs into the brown pools; we always returned home with squeaking shoes, wet feet, full baskets, and happy hearts.