As I look back I see that Miss Ross, the artist who brought me my pink parasol from Paris, sowed the first seeds in me of ambition to do something special. Her life seemed so beautiful and so easy to a child. I had not been to school then, or read George Macdonald, so I did not know that “Ease is the lovely result of forgotten toil.”
Miss Ross sat out of doors and painted lovely things, and everybody said how wonderful they were, and bought them straight away; and she took care of a blind father and two brothers, and traveled wherever she wished. It comes back to me now, that summer when I was ten and Miss Ross painted me sitting by the mill-wheel while she talked to me of foreign countries!
The other day Miss Maxwell read something from Browning's poems to the girls of her literature class. It was about David the shepherd boy who used to lie in his hollow watching one eagle “wheeling slow as in sleep.” He used to wonder about the wide world that the eagle beheld, the eagle that was stretching his wings so far up in the blue, while he, the poor shepherd boy, could see only the “strip twixt the hill and the sky;” for he lay in a hollow.
I told Mr. Baxter about it the next day, which was the Saturday before I joined the church. I asked him if it was wicked to long to see as much as the eagle saw?
There was never anybody quite like Mr. Baxter. “Rebecca dear,” he said, “it may be that you need not always lie in a hollow, as the shepherd boy did; but wherever you lie, that little strip you see 'twixt the hill and the sky' is able to hold all of earth and all of heaven, if only you have the right sort of vision.”
I was a long, long time about “experiencing religion.” I remember Sunday afternoons at the brick house the first winter after I went there; when I used to sit in the middle of the dining-room as I was bid, silent and still, with the big family Bible on my knees. Aunt Miranda had Baxter's “Saints' Rest,” but her seat was by the window, and she at least could give a glance into the street now and then without being positively wicked.
Aunt Jane used to read the “Pilgrim's Progress.” The fire burned low; the tall clock ticked, ticked, so slowly and steadily, that the pictures swam before my eyes and I almost fell asleep.
They thought by shutting everything else out that I should see God; but I didn't, not once. I was so homesick for Sunnybrook and John that I could hardly learn my weekly hymns, especially the sad, long one beginning:
“My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead.”
It was brother John for whom I was chiefly homesick on Sunday afternoons, because at Sunnybrook Farm father was dead and mother was always busy, and Hannah never liked to talk.