Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Then those barrels of sermons and old pamphlets! Dolly had turned and turned them, upsetting them on the floor, and pawing helplessly with her little pink hands and reading their titles with amazed eyes. It seemed to her that there were some thousands of the most unintelligible things. "An Appeal on the Unlawfulness of a Man's Marrying his Wife's Sister" turned up in every barrel she investigated, by twos or threes or dozens, till her soul despaired of finding an end. Then there were Thanksgiving sermons; Fast-day sermons; sermons that discoursed on the battle of Culloden; on the character of Frederick the Great; a sermon on the death of George the Second, beginning, "George! George! George is no more." This somewhat dramatic opening caused Dolly to put that one discourse into her private library. But oh, joy and triumph! one rainy day she found at the bottom of an old barrel a volume of the "Arabian Nights," and henceforth her fortune was made. Dolly had no idea of reading like that of our modern days—to read and to dismiss a book. No; to read was with her a passion, and a book once read was read daily; always becoming dearer and dearer, as an old friend. The "Arabian Nights" transported her to foreign lands, gave her a new life of her own; and when things went astray with her, when the boys went to play higher than she dared to climb in the barn, or started on fishing excursions, where they considered her an incumbrance, then she found a snug corner, where, curled up in a little, quiet lair, she could at once sail forth on her bit of enchanted carpet into fairy land.

One of these resorts was furnished by the third garret of the house, which had been finished off into an arched room and occupied by her father as a study. High above all the noise of the house, with a window commanding a view of Poganuc Lake and its girdle of steel-blue pines, this room had to her the air of a refuge and sanctuary. Its walls were set round from floor to ceiling with the friendly, quiet faces of books, and there stood her father's great writing-chair, on one arm of which lay open always his "Cruden's Concordance" and his Bible. Here Dolly loved to retreat and niche herself down in a quiet corner, with her favorite books around her. She had a kind of sheltered, satisfied feeling as she thus sat and watched her father writing, turning his books, and speaking from time to time to himself in a loud, earnest whisper. She vaguely felt that he was about some holy and mysterious work above her little comprehension, and she was careful never to disturb him by question or remark.

The books ranged around filled her, too, with a solemn awe. There on the lower shelves were great enormous folios, on whose backs she spelled in black letters, "Lightfooti Opera," a title whereat she marveled, considering the bulk of the volumes. And overhead, grouped along in friendly and sociable rows, were books of all sorts and sizes and bindings, the titles to which she had read so often that she knew them by heart. "Bell's Sermons," "Bonnett's Inquiries," "Bogue's Essays," "Toplady on Predestination," "Boston's Fourfold State," "Law's Serious Call," and other works of that kind she had looked over wistfully, day after day, without getting even a hope of something interesting out of them. The thought that her father could read and could understand things like these filled her with a vague awe, and she wondered if ever she should be old enough to know what it was all about. But there was one of her father's books which proved a mine of wealth to her. It was a happy hour when he brought home and set up in his book-case Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," in a new edition of two volumes. What wonderful stories these! and stories, too, about her own country, stories that made her feel that the very ground she trod on was consecrated by some special dealing of God's providence.

When the good Doctor related how a plague that had wasted the Indian tribes had prepared the room for the Pilgrim Fathers to settle undisturbed, she felt nowise doubtful of his application of the text, "He drave out the heathen and planted them."

But who shall describe the large-eyed, breathless wonder with which she read stories of witchcraft, with its weird marvels of mysterious voices heard in lonely places, of awful visitations that had overtaken sinners, and immediate deliverances that had come in answer to the prayers of God's saints? Then, too, the stories of Indian wars and captivities, when the war-whoop had sounded at midnight, and little children like her had awakened to find the house beset with legions of devils, who set fire to the dwellings and carried the people off through dreary snow and ice to Canada. No Jewish maiden ever grew up with a more earnest faith that she belonged to a consecrated race, a people especially called and chosen of God for some great work on earth. Her faith in every word of the marvels related in this book was full as great as the dear old credulous Dr. Cotton Mather could have desired.

But the mysterious areas of the parsonage were not exhausted with its three garrets. Under the whole house in all its divisions spread a great cavernous cellar, where were murky rooms and dark passages explored only by the light of candles. There were rows of bins, in which were stored the apples of every name and race harvested in autumn from the family orchard: Pearmains, Greenings, Seek-no-furthers, Bristers, Pippins, Golden Sweets, and other forgotten kinds, had each its separate bin, to which the children at all times had free access. There, too, was a long row of cider barrels, from whence, in the hour of their early sweetness, Dolly had delighted to suck the cider through straws for that purpose carefully selected and provided.

Not without a certain awe was her descent into this shadowy Avernus, generally under the protecting wing of Nabby or one of the older boys. Sometimes, with the perverse spirit which moves the male nature to tyrannize over the weaker members, they would agonize her by running beyond her into the darker chambers of the cellar, and sending thence Indian war-whoops and yells which struck terror to her soul, and even mingled their horrors with her dreams.

But there was one class of tenants whose influence and presence in the house must not be omitted—and that was the rats.

They had taken formal possession of the parsonage, grown, bred, and multiplied, and become ancient there, in spite of traps or cats or anything that could be devised against them.

The family cat in Dolly's day, having taken a dispassionate survey of the situation, had given up the matter in despair, and set herself quietly to attending to her own family concerns, as a sensible cat should. She selected the Doctor's pamphlet closet as her special domestic retreat. Here she made her lair in a heap of old sermons, whence, from time to time, she led forth coveys of well-educated, theological kittens, who, like their mother, gazed on the rats with respectful curiosity, and ran no imprudent risks. Consequently, the rats had a glorious time in the old parsonage. Dolly, going up the kitchen stairs into the back garret, as she did on her way bedward, would see them sitting easy and dégagés on the corners of boxes and bins, with their tails hanging gracefully down, engaged in making meals on the corn or oats. They ramped all night on the floor of the highest garret over her sleeping room, apparently busy in hopping with ears of corn across the garret and then rolling them down between the beams to their nests below. Sometimes Dolly heard them gnawing and sawing behind the very wainscot of her bed as if they had set up a carpenter's shop there, and she shrunk apprehensively for fear they were coming through into her bed. Then there were battles and skirmishes and squealings and fightings, and at times it would appear as if whole detachments of rats rolled in an avalanche down the walls with the corn they had been stealing. And when the mighty winter winds of Poganuc Mountain were out, and rumbled and thundered, roaring and tumbling down this chimney, rattling all the windows and creaking all the doors, while the beams of the house wrenched and groaned like a ship at sea, and the house seemed to shake on its very foundations,—then the uproar among the rats grew higher and jollier, and, with all put together, it is not surprising that sometimes Dolly put the bed-clothes over her head in fear, or ran and jumped into Nabby's warm arms for protection.