CHAPTER X
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
ONCE Kate Douglas Wiggin, at a fair held in the grounds of Lord Darnley, in County Meath, Ireland, visited a crystal gazer “imported from Dublin for the occasion.”
“You have many children,” said the seer.
“I have no children,” Mrs. Wiggin replied.
“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones; they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman declared, her eyes on the ball. “They are children of a relative? No?... I cannot understand. I see them.”
They left her puzzled and frowning. Perhaps she never will know how wonderfully right was her vision.
“Little, lame Patsy and the angelic Carol; the mirth-provoking tribe of the Ruggleses; brave Timothy and bewitching Lady Gay; pathetic Marm Lisa and the incorrigible twins, Atlantic and Pacific Simonson; blithe Polly Oliver, with her genius for story-telling; Winsome Rebecca and the faithful Emma Jane,—all these figures crowd about us, and claim their places as everybody’s children.”
It is impossible to read Kate Douglas Wiggin, think of her or write about her without emotion, the kind of emotion that it is good to feel. The world is a brighter world because she has lived in it, a better world because she has written for it. Does this sound horribly trite? Nothing is trite which is deeply felt and words, though they may indicate the channel, can with difficulty measure the depth or gauge the emotional flow. You who have lost your enthusiasm with your illusions, you whose channels of feeling have trickled dry, you who live in a desert whose aridity responds only to intellectual dry farming—keep off this chapter! But all of you millions who love children, who like simple and durable humor, who are not too far from laughter or tears, who are not ashamed of tenderness, do you, one and all (there are countless millions of you!) stay with us for a half hour!
Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith, came of New England stock that bred teachers and preachers and law-givers and developed those humane traits which make charitable effort and philanthropism a matter of course, like prayer or the pie which Emerson preferred for breakfast. She happens to have been born in Philadelphia, September 28, 1859, the daughter of Robert N. Smith, and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, but all her youth was spent east of the New York line. A rural childhood; then the fine old school for girls, called Abbott Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. At eighteen her step-father’s health made imperative a removal to California. After her graduation at Andover Kate Smith joined the family in Santa Barbara. She had been trained to teach children; she was a mere girl when she was called to direct the famous Silver Street kindergartens of San Francisco. Through her efforts it was that the first free kindergartens for poor children were organized in California. She knew the methods of Froebel and has done as much as any one in this country to secure their spread and adoption. First as a kindergartner and then as a training teacher her enthusiasm, her gift for leadership, her personal charm made others, young and old, her devoted friends. For the babies of Tar Flat and the Barbary Coast and for the young women of cultivation who sought to become teachers she had the same fascination. She is irresistible; if she were not she could not be liked and loved in New England as she is at this day. Who else could gather the neighbors in Old Buxton Meeting-House to hear, read aloud to them by the author from the manuscript, stories of themselves and their apparently unremarkable doings? With any one but Mrs. Wiggin the audience would be self-conscious, detestably uncomfortable. But she is so soft-voiced, so agreeable; she has so much sympathy and humor, is so pleasant to look upon, is, in short, so “nice” and so neighborly that self-consciousness is out of the question. Besides, you can be proud of her.... And you are.
Old Buxton Meeting-House is in Maine, and it is in Maine, in the village of Hollis, that the people of whom Mrs. Wiggin writes grow into being. Her home is called Quillcote and from a cool green study where she works she can hear the song of the Saco River and look through latticed windows by her desk to where the shining weather-vane, a golden quill, swings on the roof of the old barn. It is a quaint and ancient dwelling of colonial date and colonial style set among arching elms. The village is not a summer resort but a dreaming settlement on the banks of the Saco. As it flows past the Quillcote elms the river widens into a lake. A few rods below the house it has a fall. Below the fall for a mile or so there is “foaming, curving, prancing white water.” It is the Saco, placid and turbulent, which runs through Timothy’s Quest and Rebecca and Rose o’ the River.