She kept her word. Here remain, as she left them her doll's house, the miniature counter where she sold ribbons and laces to imaginary customers, the doll's linen, marked with her own childish cross-stitch and the furniture and mementoes which cause the plain, irregular, rather homely structure to be hallowed as the shrine of Victoria. Here she saw her little set of cooking utensils, her child's scrapbook and little boxes of paints with camel's hair brushes. She lingered lovingly over these objects, which once meant so much to her, and as the vivid association and tender suggestiveness of her surroundings touched her feelings, in the presence of a group of dolls, being amid her toys, she desired the attendants who accompanied her to withdraw, expressing the desire, in that sacred place, to be alone.
The Glory of Life in its First Spring
On revisiting the earth I wanted to be alone on reaching my memory room. In that corner stood my trundle bed and about here, well say about there, is where I kneeled to say my earliest prayers. I have never felt so rich since, as I did when I came into the undisputed and sole possession of a hair-covered trunk which I could lock and bear away the key. Into this trunk I emptied the week's accumulation of all my week-day pockets as often as I put on my Sunday clothes. In this old hide-bound trunk were my sainted mother's letters, and missives with my own name in large John Hancock looking letters on the back, from my grandfather who kept store and sometimes sent me pocket pieces of money. On the outside of the pack, always in view, always to be kept, no more resembling others than an electric light resembles a tallow dip, was the first letter personally addressed to me that I ever received. Here was a child's cheap album containing photographs of Commodore Nutt and Minnie Warren, of a family of Albinos having white hair and pink eyes, and of a fat boy only 16 years old that had struck me with wonder. Here is a red morocco bag in which I kept my ill-gotten gains in marbles. Although forbidden to play "keeps" myself, the neighbor's boy, a surer shot, did not hesitate with my capital to engage in the excitement and to make a "divy" of the proceeds, while I watched the game, and as a better disciple carried the bag. I used to feel a real pride in my collection. I knew the price of each kind and computed the value of them all to a cent. That day was marked by the event when I exchanged so many of the brown, baked, clay sort, for a big taw alley (made of alabaster). Some of the big chinas were striped in varied colors and we made a sharp difference between those where the bright color was laid on and soon began to wash and wear and those where it was baked in like the pictures on cups, where it is as indestructible as the material itself. To this day I cannot see boys playing at marbles without feeling a strong desire to join them.
The Rule of the Shekel
Among playthings my specialty was marbles. I specialized on three lines, blue clays, real agates, the handsomest of all marbles, and big glass center-pieces. I knew well just what I must hold to dominate the market and just how many of the common sort a boy would give for an alley taw, or tor, as we used to pronounce it. Taw is the line or limit from which the players shoot. Others would have returned from the visit to the old time school-house to the hotel. I knew a merchant well, who being delighted with his entertainment in Lucerne did not think it worth while to go out to the leaf-embowered pool to see Thorwaldsen's Lion. Naples has such outstanding beauty that the visitor is ready to "die" and thus omits any visit to Vesuvius, the most famous elevation in the world. But I went from the school-ground to the place, where the soil was once beaten to the hardness of a floor, by the village boys, who, each of them, placed one or two marbles in a ring and in turn shot at them and he who obtained most of them by beating them out of the ring was the winner. We were happy
"To kneel and draw
The chalky ring and knuckle down at taw."
Here in this trunk were my old club skates which I used to sharpen myself and tie on with strings and leathern thongs, and here was an old ball which, I, having first ravelled the yarn, wound myself and cut the cover out of an old boot top in the good democratic days of town-ball or of "Two-old-cat," when we chose up, for the ins, and did not leave the playing to a few, and half of them from out of town, when a "foul" and "daisy-cutter" were unknown terms. While one dear, sweet, not-to-be-valued-with-the-Gold-of-Ophir object remained among them, it has been hard for me to "put away childish things." Most people are extremely like one's self, and choosing among relics would be supposed to first take one of the sandals of Empedocles, fabled to have been cast forth by Aetna. This father of rhetoric, statesman, prophet, and reformer threw himself into that volcano to disappear and leave no trace and thus establish a belief that he was so beloved of the gods that he was translated. But the volcano would not stand for this imposition and threw out one of his sandals. But I am not interested in such a relic when it is compared with a little token that tells of the deep desire there is in every heart to be remembered.
The Last Wish of Ambitious Minds
We shrink from the fate of being dropped out of sight and out of thought. It strikes a pang to a mother's heart to even hear the adage "out of sight, out of mind." Trading upon her warm feelings, she was solicited to buy, as a birthday gift for her boy, a little china cup, highly colored, inscribed with the words, "remember me." This little token proved to be the best seller on the market. The longer it is kept the greater is the desire to keep it. The child is not asked to prize the gift. The legend upon it tells rather her intensest longing. Her one deepest wish at the moment of final parting could not be better expressed.
"A place in thy memory, dearest,
Is all that I claim:
To pause and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name."