My husband brought home with him my youngest sister, Myrtle.
One of the incongruities that strike oddly across our moments of intensest emotion was, that, in the excitement of welcome and surprise (for I had had no intimation of her coming), I bethought myself that I had never known, until I heard her call my name, that girls’ voices change as boys’ do, in passing from childhood into youth. I left her a little girl in short dresses. In four years she had passed the delta
“Where the brook and river meet.”
Girls and boys matured fast under the influences that had ripened her character.
It was a rare and lovely product which linked itself into the chain of my life, for the score of years beyond our reunion. To say that her companionship was a comfort and joy unspeakable, that summer, would be to describe feebly what her coming brought into my existence. The burden of solicitudes and suspense, of actual bereavement and dreads of the morrow’s happenings, slid from my shoulders, as Christian’s pack from him at the Cross. I grew young again.
My third baby-girl, Virginia Belle, was ten days old when my liberated brother was added, like a beautiful clasp, to the golden circle of our reunited family. He came directly to us, and lingered longer than I had dared expect, for recuperation, and for enjoyment of the society from which he had been so long exiled.
A pretty love-story, the initial chapters of which had been rudely broken into by the war, was resumed and continued at this visit. That the girl-friend who had grown into a sister’s place in our home and affections, should marry my dearest brother, was a dream too fair of complexion and too symmetrical in proportions, to be indulged under conditions that had prevailed since his visit to Newark, almost five years ago. Yet this was the vision that began to define itself into a blessed reality, by the time the soldier-returned-from-the-war packed the outfit of civilized and civilian clothing—the getting-together of which had been one ostensible excuse for extending the visit—and took his way southward.
It was a divine breathing-spell for us and for the country—that summer of peace and plenty.
For three years past, we had spent each July and August in a roomy farm-house among the Jersey hills. For the first season, we were the only boarders. Then, perhaps because we boasted somewhat too freely of the healthfulness of the region, and the excellent country fare set before us by good Mrs. Blauvelt, the retreat from malaria and mosquitoes became too popular for our comfort. When there were three babies, a nurse, a visiting sister, our two selves, and a horse, to be accommodated, we found the once ample quarters too strait for us.
For baby Belle’s sake we migrated late in June of this year. We were discussing the seriousness of the problem consequent upon a growing family, as we drove up a long hill, one July day, Alice on a cricket between us in the foot of the buggy, when an exclamation from my husband stopped a sentence in the middle. He drew the horse to a sudden halt.