CHAPTER III.
OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.
"I find the marks of my shortest steps beside those of my beloved mother, which were measured by my own," says Dumas, and so conjures up one of the sweetest images in the world. He was revisiting the home of his infancy; he was retracing the little paths around it in which he had once walked; and strange flowers could not efface, and rank grass could not conceal, and cruel ploughs could not obliterate, his "shortest footsteps," and his mother's beside them, measured by his own.
And who needs to be told whose footsteps they were that thus kept time with the feeble pattering of childhood's little feet? It was no mother beside whom Ascanius walked "with equal steps" in Virgil's line, but a strong, stern man, who could have borne him and not been burdened; folded him in his arms from all danger and not been wearied; everything, indeed, he could have done for him, but just what he needed most—could not sympathize with him—he could not be a child again. Ah, a rare art is that,—for, indeed, it is an art, to set back the great old clock of time and be a boy once more! Man's imagination can easily see the child a man; but how hard it is for it to see the man a child; and he who had learned to glide back into that rosy time when he did not know that thorns were under the roses, or that clouds would ever return after the rain; when he thought a tear could stain a cheek no more than a drop of rain a flower; when he fancied that life had no disguise, and hope no blight at all—has come as near as anybody can to discovering the North-west passage to Paradise.
And it is, perhaps, for this reason that it is so much easier for a mother to enter the kingdom of Heaven than it is for the rest of the world. She fancies she is leading the children, when, after all, the children are leading her, and they keep her, indeed, where the river is narrowest, and the air is clearest; and the beckoning of the radiant band is so plainly seen from the other side, that it is no wonder she so often lets go her clasp upon the little finger she is holding, and goes over to the neighbor's, and the children follow like lambs to the fold; for we think it ought somewhere to be written: "Where the mother is, there will the children be also."
But it was not of the mother, but of the dear old-fashioned grandmother, whose thread of love spun "by hand" on life's little wheel, and longer and stronger than they make it now, was wound around and about the children she saw playing in the children's arms, in a true love-knot that nothing but the shears of Atropos could sever; for do we not recognize the lambs sometimes, when summer days are over and autumn winds are blowing, as they come bleating from the yellow fields, by the crimson thread we wound about their necks in April or May, and so undo the gate and let the wanderers in?
Blessed be the children who have an old-fashioned grandmother. As they hope for length of days let them love and honor her, for we can tell them they will never find another.
There is a large old kitchen somewhere in the past, and an old-fashioned fireplace therein, with its smooth old jambs of stone—smooth with many knives that have been sharpened there—smooth with many little fingers that have clung there. There are andirons, too—the old andirons, with rings in the top, whereon many temples of flame have been builded, with spires and turrets of crimson. There is a broad, worn hearth, worn by feet that have been torn and bleeding by the way, or been made "beautiful," and walked upon floors of tesselated gold. There are tongs in the corner, wherewith we grasped a coal, and "blowing for a little life," lighted our first candle; there is a shovel, wherewith were drawn forth the glowing embers in which we saw our first fancies and dreamed our first dreams—the shovel with which we stirred the sleepy logs till the sparks rushed up the chimney as if a forge were in blast below, and wished we had so many lambs, so many marbles, or so many somethings that we coveted; and so it was we wished our first wishes.
There is a chair—a low, rush-bottom chair; there is a little wheel in the corner, a big wheel in the garret, a loom in the chamber. There are chests full of linen and yarn, and quilts of rare pattern, and samples in frames.
And everywhere and always the dear old wrinkled face of her whose firm, elastic step mocks the feeble saunter of her children's children—the old-fashioned grandmother of twenty years ago. She, the very Providence of the old homestead—she who loved us all, and said she wished there were more of us to love, and took all the school in the Hollow for grand-children besides. A very expansive heart was hers, beneath that woolen gown, or that more stately bombazine, or that sole heir-loom of silken texture.
We can see her to-day, those mild blue eyes, with more of beauty in them than time could touch or death do more than hide—those eyes that held both smiles and tears within the faintest call of every one of us, and soft reproof, that seemed not passion but regret. A white tress has escaped from beneath her snowy cap; she has just restored a wandering lamb to its mother; she lengthened the tether of a vine that was straying over a window, as she came in, and plucked a four-leaved clover for Ellen. She sits down by the little wheel—a tress is running through her fingers from the distaff's disheveled head, when a small voice cries "Grandma!" from the old red cradle, and "Grandma!" Tommy shouts from the top of the stairs. Gently she lets go the thread, for her patience is almost as beautiful as her charity, and she touches the little bark in a moment, till the young voyager is in a dream again, and then directs Tommy's unavailing attempts to harness the cat. The tick of the clock runs faint and low, and she opens the mysterious door and proceeds to wind it up. We are all on tip-toe, and we beg in a breath to be lifted up one by one, and look in the hundredth time upon the tin cases of the weights, and the poor lonely pendulum, which goes to and fro by its little dim window, and never comes out in the world, and our petitions are all granted, and we are lifted up, and we all touch with a finger the wonderful weights, and the music of the little wheel is resumed.