"Peace on earth and good will toward men."
MY COMFORTER.
I got up and hung a shawl over the canary's cage to keep him quiet. He had been singing all day, till it seemed to me I could not bear it any longer. That morning the doctor had told me that my mother would never be any better. She was liable, he said, to die at any time. At the longest, it was only a question of days or weeks. And my mother was all I had in the world.
My father had been dead a year. In his lifetime we had lived in a pleasant country home. He had been employed in the county bank, and we had lived most comfortably, and even with some pretensions to elegance. I had been sent to school, and learned a little French, a little music, and something of art. I had, too, a great deal of skill in fancy work, and had been used to find in that and my painting my amusements. Indeed, we all had what are called elegant tastes,—tastes which suited a much larger income than ours, and we indulged them. This was unwise, perhaps. People said so, at any rate, when my father died suddenly, and left us with no property and no dependence save our home.
It was to escape alike their censure and their pity, as much as because I fancied I could find more openings for employment, that I persuaded mother to join me in selling our little place, and remove to New York. She was willing enough to do this. I think that it was a relief to her to go away from all the familiar sights and sounds which kept so constantly before her the memory of the dead husband who had made her life among them so blessed. She fancied, perhaps, that when she was among unfamiliar things the first bitterness of her grief would wear away. But with her, as it proved, change of place was only change of pain. She was not made of the stuff to which forgetfulness is possible.
Our home and furniture brought us a little over three thousand dollars, and with this sum we went to New York. In spite of my mourning for my father I had the elasticity of youth, and I did not make this removal, enter into this wide, strange, new life, without my share of the high hopes and brilliant anticipations of youth.
We went first to a hotel, and then looked up a boarding-place in a quiet, unpretentious street, suited to our means. We expected to use two or three hundred dollars before we got well established; and then I hoped to earn enough to keep us, with the help of the interest of the three thousand we should still have remaining, without encroaching upon the principal. I might have succeeded, perhaps,—for I was not long in procuring fancy work from two fashionable trimming stores,—if, when we had been there a little while, my mother's health had not begun seriously to decline. I think she made an effort to live on, after all the joy of her life was dead, for my sake; but she failed, and by and by she grew weary and gave up the struggle.