The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches

by Benjamin F. Taylor

Was Mary to be married, or Jane to be wrapped in a shroud? So meekly did she fold the white hands of the one upon her still bosom, that there seemed to be a prayer in them there; and so sweetly did she wreathe the white rose in the hair of the other, that one would not have wondered had more roses budded for company.

How she stood between us and apprehended harm; how the rudest of us softened beneath the gentle pressure of her faded and tremulous hand! From her capacious pocket that hand was ever withdrawn closed, only to be opened in our own, with the nuts she had gathered, the cherries she had plucked, the little egg she had found, the "turn-over" she had baked, the trinket she had purchased for us as the product of her spinning, the blessing she had stored for us—the offspring of her heart.

What treasures of story fell from those old lips; of good fairies and evil, of the old times when she was a girl; and we wondered if ever—but then she couldn't be handsomer or dearer—but that she ever was "little." And then, when we begged her to sing! "Sing us one of the old songs you used to sing mother, grandma."

"Children, I can't sing," she always said; and mother used to lay her knitting softly down, and the kitten stopped playing with the yarn upon the floor, and the clock ticked lower in the corner, and the fire died down to a glow, like an old heart that is neither chilled nor dead, and grandmother sang. To be sure it wouldn't do for the parlor and the concert-room now-a-days; but then it was the old kitchen and the old-fashioned grandmother, and the old ballad, in the dear old times, and we can hardly see to write for the memory of them, though it is a hand's breadth to the sunset.

Well, she sang. Her voice was feeble and wavering, like a fountain just ready to fail, but then how sweet-toned it was; and it became deeper and stronger, but it couldn't grow sweeter. What "joy of grief" it was to sit there around the fire, all of us, except Jane, that clasped a prayer to her bosom, and her we thought we saw, when the hall-door was opened a moment by the wind; but then we were not afraid, for wasn't it her old smile she wore?—to sit there around the fire, and weep over the woes of the "Babes in the Wood," who lay down side by side in the great solemn shadows; and how strangely glad we felt when the robin-red-breast covered them with leaves, and last of all when the angels took them out of the night into Day Everlasting.

We may think what we will of it now, but the song and the story heard around the kitchen fire have colored the thoughts and lives of most of us; have given us the germs of whatever poetry blesses our hearts; whatever memory blooms in our yesterdays. Attribute whatever we may to the school and the school-master, the rays which make that little day we call life, radiate from the God-swept circle of the hearthstone.

Then she sings an old lullaby she sang to mother—her mother sang to her; but she does not sing it through, and falters ere 'tis done. She rests her head upon her hands, and it is silent in the old kitchen. Something glitters down between her fingers and the firelight, and it looks like rain in the soft sunshine. The old grandmother is thinking when she first heard the song, and of the voice that sang it, when a light-haired and light-hearted girl she hung around that mother's chair, nor saw the shadows of the years to come. O! the days that are no more! What spell can we weave to bring them back again? What words can we unsay, what deeds undo, to set back, just this once, the ancient clock of time?

So all our little hands were forever clinging to her garments, and staying her as if from dying, for long ago she had done living for herself, and lived alone in us. But the old kitchen wants a presence to-day, and the rush-bottomed chair is tenantless.

How she used to welcome us when we were grown, and came back once more to the homestead.

We thought we were men and women, but we were children there. The old-fashioned grandmother was blind in the eyes, but she saw with her heart, as she always did. We threw our long shadows through the open door, and she felt them as they fell over her form, and she looked dimly up and saw tall shapes in the door-way, and she says, "Edward I know, and Lucy's voice I can hear, but whose is that other? It must be Jane's," for she had almost forgotten the folded hands. "Oh, no, not Jane, for she—let me see—she is waiting for me, isn't she?" and the old grandmother wandered and wept.