Although I had had to drop the study of music in early girlhood, music continued to be an important part of our home life. Other boys and girls in our street used to gather round our organ in the winter evenings, or sit on the veranda in summer, and sing till we had to stop for hoarseness, the neighbours often calling to us for this and that favourite. “Gathering up the Sea Shells,” “Pass under the Rod,” “Jamie’s on the Stormy Sea,” “O, Fair Dove,” “We’d Better Bide a Wee,” “I’ll Be All Smiles To-night, Love,” “Then You’ll Remember Me,” “Juanita”—a heterogeneous repertoire, the list seems interminable. There were certain favourites we would get Father to sing—“Bonnie Doon,” “The Sword of Bunker Hill,” and “My Susanna”—songs inseparably linked with home and those happy days.
I used to sing Father to sleep Sunday afternoons. No matter how many other songs I introduced, I always had to sing Longfellow’s “Bridge,” and “The Day Is Done.” I was annoyed if he asked for the latter before the day was done. I liked best to sing it as the afternoon light began to fade and barely come in at the west window, just enough for me to trace the notes.
Sometimes of a Sunday evening an aunt and uncle would ask for more lively songs than those I chose, for there was a long period when I steadfastly refused to sing secular songs on the Sabbath. At their request, I would evade and substitute; but if their insistence became too pronounced to be set aside, I would refuse point blank. In my unregenerate days there had been a time when I had sung “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Nancy Lee,” “Putting on the Style,” “Father, Come Down with the Stamps,” and such worldly things, but later the little Puritan was shocked to be asked to desecrate the Sabbath with such levity. They learned to cater to my strait-laced notions. I am afraid I was a not very pleasant person to deal with when a question of what I considered the fitness of things was involved. (Perhaps I am not even now.) I strongly suspect I was a self-righteous little prig for several years. At a later period one of the schoolboys described me to a newcomer in the town as “a nice girl, only such a prim little Methodist.” Not many weeks later, that girl and I were laughing in great glee over the description which, though it had once been true, was then hardly applicable; but I was still living on the reputation of a past phase of religious emotion.
We had a song called “Fire Bells Are Ringing,” a dramatic account of a fire on a wild winter night, the chorus ringing out with repeated cries of “Fire!” One windy night in February as Sister and I were at the organ singing this with all the dramatic power we could summon, the wild night putting us in the mood, Father, who had been in the kitchen popping corn, came running in shouting “Fire!” even louder than we were. Smiling, we sang on with redoubled energy, pleased that we had put him in the spirit of acting, too. He rushed around the room frantically shouting, “Fire! I tell you! Girls! do you hear?” Louder and more dramatic grew our efforts, and louder grew his cries until, a still more desperate tone in his voice, and the words, “Girls! Get me my coat, quick!” finally made us understand he was in earnest. Mother, too, had thought him fooling and there he was, excited as he always got at the alarm of fire, almost in despair of making any of us take him seriously!
It was a house on the street above. A fierce conflagration was under way. With the high wind, the adjoining house of a neighbour was endangered, and we had an exciting time helping our friends gather together valuables and other belongings, though luckily the fire did not spread. Ah! the cruel, relentless sight of that burning home! What if it was “the meanest man in town” whose house was burning down—everyone pitied him that wild night when they saw the pitiless flames.
We never associated with the neighbours on our right, except to be civil to them (and I to borrow their novels by Mary Jane Holmes—whenever I could without the knowledge of my parents). The man was coarse and illiterate, his wife a silly, slovenly, red-haired woman who would sit on her husband’s lap on the doorstep in full view of passers-by. But our left-hand neighbours, though shiftless and lawless, were interesting and likeable. Great borrowers, always borrowing, they would keep our belongings till we had to go after them. I would feel chagrined to have to ask for our own flatirons, or tack-hammer, or chopping-knife, when we needed them, but Jean, the witty daughter, would relieve my embarrassment by her ready assurance: “Certainly, Miss Genie, you are welcome to the irons; keep them as long as you like—we’ll come after them when we need them again.”
Formerly there had been a picket fence between our yard and theirs, along which the “myrtle” grew, and a board fence farther back, between the gardens; but, little by little, first the board fence disappeared, later the picket fence—whenever they got out of kindling wood they would take a board here, a picket there (usually early in the morning, or late at night). In time both fences were down, and only the “myrtle” in front and the pie-plant bed and berry bushes in the rear marked the division between our yards.
Mother would try shaming them out of it by wondering (to them) who could be carrying off our fence boards, and the wily Jean would reply, “It’s a shame, Mrs. Arnold, such people ought to have something done to them,” when perhaps that very morning Mother had seen her slip out, knock off a picket or two, and hustle with it into the woodshed. But the whole family had a way with them that was irresistible, and they were kindness itself when any one was sick or in trouble.