“There’s another of Miss Fiddlestick’s articles! She’s getting too conceited, that young woman! Just like all newly-fledged writers—mistakes a few obscure newspaper puffs for the voice of the crowd, and considers herself on the top round of the literary ladder. It will take me to take the wind out of her sails. I’ll dissect her, before I’m a day older, as sure as my name is Ezekiel Broadbrim. I don’t approve her style; never did. It’s astonishing to me that the editor of the Green Twig dare countenance it, when he knows a man of my influence could annihilate her with one stroke of my pen. She has talent of a certain inferior order, but nothing to speak of. She’s an unsafe model to follow; will lead her tribe of imitators into tremendous mistakes. It’s a religious duty for a conspicuous sentinel, like myself, on Zion’s walls, to sound the blast of alarm;—can’t answer it to my conscience to be silent any longer. It might be misconstrued, The welfare of the world in general, and her soul in particular, requires a very decided expression of my disapprobation. I’m sorry to annihilate her, but when Ezekiel Broadbrim makes up his mind what is the path of duty, a bright seraph couldn’t stop him. Perhaps I may pour a drop of the balm of consolation afterwards, but it depends altogether upon whether I succeed in bringing her into a penitential frame of mind. It is my private opinion she is an incorrigible sinner. Hand me my pen, John. Every stroke of it will tell.”
WILLY GREY.
A stern, unyielding, line-and-plummet, May-flower descendant, was old Farmer Grey, of Allantown, Connecticut. Many a crop had he planted, many a harvest had he garnered in, since he first became owner of Glen Farm. During that time, that respected individual, “the oldest inhabitant,” could not remember ever to have seen him smile. The village children crept close to the stone wall, and gave him a wide berth when he passed. Even the cats and dogs laid their ears back, and crept circumspectly by him, with one eye on his whip-lash.
Farmer Grey considered it acceptable to the God who painted the rainbow, and expanded the lily, and tinted the rose, to walk the bright earth with his head bowed like a bulrush, and his soul clad in sackcloth. No mercy fell from the lips of his imaginary Saviour; no compassion breathed in His voice; no love beamed in His eye; His sword of justice was never sheathed.
The old farmer’s wife was a gentle, dependent creature, a delicate vine, springing up in a sterile soil, reaching forth its tendrils vainly for some object to cling to. God, in his mercy, twined them lovingly around a human blossom. Little Willy partook of his mother’s sensitive, poetical nature: A yearning spirit looked out from the fathomless depths of his earnest eyes. Only eight short summers the gentle mother soothed her boy’s childish pains, and watched his childish slumbers. While he grew in strength and beauty, her eye waxed dim, and her step grew slow and feeble.
And so sweet memories were only left to little Willy,—dear, loving eyes, whose glance ever met his on waking; a fair, caressing hand, that wiped away his April tears; a low, gentle voice, sweet to his childish ear as a seraph’s hymning.
Willy’s father told him that “his mother had gone to Heaven;” John, the plough-boy, said, “she was lying in the churchyard.” Willy could not understand this. He only knew that the house had grown dark and empty, and that his heart ached when he stayed there; and so he wandered out in the little garden (his mother’s garden); but the flowers looked dreary, too; and her pretty rose-vine lay trailing its broken buds and blighted blossoms in the dust.
Then Willy crept up to his father’s side, and looked up in his face, but there was something there that made him afraid to lay his little hand upon his knee, or climb into his lap, or in any way unburden his little heart; so he turned away, more sorrowful than before, and wandered into his mother’s chamber, and climbed up in her chair, and opened her drawer, to look at her comb and hair brush; and then he went to the closet, and passed his little hand, caressingly, over her empty dresses, and leaning his little curly head against them, sobbed himself to sleep.
By and by, as years passed on, and the child grew older, he learned to wander out in the woods and fields, and unbosom his little yearning heart to Nature. Reposing on her breast, listening to the music of her thousand voices, his unquiet spirit was soothed as with a mother’s lullaby. With kindling eye, he watched the vivid lightnings play; or saw the murky east flush, like a timid bride, into rosy day; or beheld the shining folds of western clouds fade softly into twilight; or gazed at the Queen of Night, as she cut her shining path through the cloudy sky; or questioned with earnest eyes the glittering stars.