MY MOTHER PUT IT ON.
BY MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY.
IT was old Boston—Boston forty years and more ago,—and it was New Year’s morning.
We had lived in our new house in one of the lately laid-out, airy neighborhoods over on the West Hill since June. Before that, we lived in Pearl street, where all the great warehouses are now, and where the other great warehouses were burned down,—melted into strange, stone monuments of ruin,—in the terrible fire, six years ago from now. Down in Pearl street, in a large house with a garden to it, and a wonderful staircase inside that had landings with balustraded arches through to other landings, and which was a sublimity and delight to me that the splendid stairways in Roman palaces can scarcely equal now,—still lived my best and beautiful friend, Elizabeth Hunter. I thought in those days all Elizabeths were beautiful, because I knew two who had fair, delicious complexions, sweet, deep-cornered mouths, and brown hair. My hair was light and straight and fine; it looked thin and cold to me by side of theirs.
On this New Year, I was to go and spend the day with Elizabeth. My father and my brother Andrew were to come to dinner. My mother was an invalid, and could not bear the cold and the fatigue. But she had my pretty dress all ready for me, a soft, blue merino—real deep-sky blue,—with trimming to the tucks and hem and low neck-band and sleeve-bindings of dark carbuncle-colored velvet ribbon in a raised Greek pattern. You may think it looked queer; but it didn’t; it was very pretty and becoming.
Before I was to go, however, there was ever so much other New Year delight to keep the time from seeming long. Father and Andrew were going down to the whip-factory in Dock square, to choose for Andrew the longest-lashed toy-whip, with the gayest snapper and the handsomest handle, that he could pick out there. And afterward they were going to a great toy-shop, to buy me the wax doll I had been promised.
I did not care to choose my doll, as Andrew would choose his whip. I had a kind of real little-mother feeling about that. I would rather have what came to me, what my father brought me. I wanted it to be mine from the first minute I saw it, without any doubt, or any chance to choose otherwise. If I had looked and hesitated among dozens of them, and picked out one, I should always have felt as if I had left some child behind that maybe ought to have been mine, and that I had not quite whole chosen any one. So I was content to stay with my mother, and run down from her with the quarter and half dollars to the watchman and the carrier and the scavenger and the milkman, when they came with their expectation of a little present. What dear old simple days those were, when we had a family regard for our milkman, our watchman, our scavenger!