When I was your age

by Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

For as I write, the thought comes to me of a day when Laura was found with her feet sticking out of the sugar-barrel, into which she had fallen head foremost while trying to get a lump of sugar. She has never eaten a lump of sugar, save in her tea, since that day. Also, it is recorded of Flossy and Julia, that, being one day at the Institution, they found the store-room open, and went in, against the law. There was a beautiful polished tank, which appeared to be full of rich brown syrup. Julia and Flossy liked syrup; so each filled a mug, and then they counted one, two, three, and each took a good draught,—and it was train-oil!

But in both these cases the culprits were hardly out of babyhood; so perhaps they had not yet learned about the “broad stone of honor,” on which it is good to set one’s feet.

I must not leave the garden without speaking of the cherry-trees. These must have been planted by early settlers, perhaps by the same hand that planned the crooked stairs and quaint cupboards of the old house,—enormous trees, gnarled and twisted like ancient apple-trees, and as sturdy as they. They had been grafted—whether by our father’s or some earlier hand I know not—with the finest varieties of “white-hearts” and “black-hearts,” and they bore amazing quantities of cherries. These attracted flocks of birds, which our father in vain tried to frighten away with scarecrows. Once he put the cat in a bird-cage, and hung her up in the white-heart tree; but the birds soon found that she could not get at them, and poor pussy was so miserable that she was quickly released.

I perceive that we shall not get to the summer home in this chapter; but I must say a word about the Institution for the Blind, which was within a few minutes’ walk of Green Peace.

Many of our happiest hours were spent in this pleasant place, the home of patient cheerfulness and earnest work. We often went to play with the blind children when our lessons and theirs were over, and they came trooping out into the sunny playground. I do not think it occurred to us to pity these boys and girls deprived of one of the chief sources of pleasure in life; they were so happy, so merry, that we took their blindness as a matter of course.

Our father often gave us baskets of fruit to take to them. That was a great pleasure. We loved to turn the great globe in the hall, and, shutting our eyes, pass our fingers over the raised surfaces, trying to find different places. We often “played blind,” and tried to read the great books with raised print, but never succeeded that I remember. The printing-office was a wonderful place to linger in; and one could often get pieces of marbled paper, which was valuable in the paper-doll world. Then there was the gymnasium, with its hanging rings, and its wonderful tilt, which went up so high that it took one’s breath away. Just beyond the gymnasium, were some small rooms, in which were stored worn-out pianos, disabled after years of service under practising fingers. It was very good fun to play on a worn-out piano. There were always a good many notes that really sounded, and they had quite individual sounds, not like those of common pianos; then there were some notes that buzzed, and some that growled, and some that made no noise at all; and one could poke in under the cover, and twang the strings, and play with the chamois-leather things that went flop (we have since learned that they are called hammers), and sometimes pull them out, though that seemed wicked.

Then there was the matron’s room, where we were always made welcome by the sweet and gracious woman who still makes sunshine in that place by her lovely presence. Dear Miss M—— was never out of patience with our pranks, had always a picture-book or a flower or a curiosity to show us, and often a story to tell when a spare half-hour came. For her did Flossy and Julia act their most thrilling tragedies, no other spectators being admitted. To her did Harry and Laura confide their infant joys and woes. Other friends will have a chapter to themselves, but it seems most fitting to speak of this friend here, in telling of the home she has made bright for over fifty years.

Over the way from the Institution stood the workshop, where blind men and women, many of them graduates of the Institution, made mattresses and pillows, mats and brooms. This was another favorite haunt of ours. There was a stuffy but not unpleasant smell of feathers and hemp about the place. I should know that smell if I met it in Siberia! There were coils of rope, sometimes so large that one could squat down and hide in the middle, piles of hemp, and dark mysterious bins full of curled hair, white and black. There was a dreadful mystery about the black-hair bin; the little ones ran past it, with their heads turned away. But they never told what it was, and one of them never knew.

But the crowning joy of the workshop was the feather-room,—a long room, with smooth, clean floor; along one side of it were divisions, like the stalls in a stable, and each division was half filled with feathers. Boy and girl readers will understand what a joy this must have been,—to sit down in the feathers, and let them cover you up to the neck, and be a setting hen! or to lie at full length, and be a traveller lost in the snow,—Harry making it snow feathers till you were all covered up, and then turning into the faithful hound and dragging you out! or to play the game of “Winds,” and blow the feathers about the room! But old Margaret did not allow this last game, and we could do it only when she happened to go out for a moment, which was not very often. Old Margaret was the presiding genius of the feather-room, a half-blind woman, who kept the feathers in order and helped to sew up the pillows and mattresses. She was always kind to us, and let us rake feathers with the great wooden rake as much as we would. Later, when Laura was perhaps ten years old, she used to go and read to old Margaret. Mrs. Browning’s poems were making a new world for the child at that time, and she never felt a moment’s doubt about the old woman’s enjoying them: in after years doubts did occur to her.