A String of Amber Beads

by Martha Everts Holden

IF GOD MADE YOU A WILLOW DON'T TRY TO BE A PINE

I wish I could spend a fortnight in a world where folks dared to be true to themselves; where the conformist was shelved with last year's calendars, and a man studied out his own route to heaven and had the courage to walk in it. I would like to dwell with individuals and not with packs of human cards shuffled together in sets. I would like to feel my soul kindle into respect for distinct personalities, each one making his garment after his own measurement, and not trying to fit his coat after the cut of his neighbor's jacket. I would like to live for a while with men and women, rather than with human sheep blindly following a leader. Life is something better than a sheep-path aimlessly skirting the hills. It is a growth upward through the infinite blue into heaven. It is the spreading of many and various branches. If you are a willow, don't attempt to be a pine, and if the Lord made you to grow like an elm don't pattern yourself after a scrub oak. The rebuke "what will people say?" should never be applied to the waywardness of a child. Teach it rather to ask: "How will my own self-respect stand this test?" Such training will evolve something rarer in the way of development than a candle-mold or a yard-stick.

XXXVI.

TWO TYPES.

How full the streets are, to be sure! Where do all the folks come from and where do they stop? Surely there are not roofs enough to cover the steady stream of humanity that courses through the thoroughfares from dawn to night time. To one who walks much to and fro in the town there comes a rare chance to study human types. Books hold nothing within their covers so grotesque and so pathetic, so inexplicable and so queer as the folks that jostle one another on the streets! There is the precise female who nips along in a little apologetic way, as though there was an impropriety in the very act of locomotion for which she would fain atone. From the crown of her head to her boot tips she is proper, stupid and decorous, but too much of her company would prove to endurance what sultry weather proves to cream. In fact, I think if I were told I had to live with some of the women I meet on the streets, I would fall on my hat pin, as the old Romans did upon their swords, as the pleasanter alternative. There is nothing more charming than a bright woman, but she must be superior to her own environments and be able to talk and think about other things than a correct code of etiquette, her costumes and her domestic concerns.

There is a man I sometimes encounter on the street between whom and myself there looms a day of bitter reckoning. He wears rubbers if the day is at all moist, and next to ear muffs, galoshes on an able bodied man goad me to fury. If the Lord made you a man, be a man and not a molly-coddle. Soup without meat, bread without salt, pie-crust without a filling, slack-baked dough, all these are prototypes of the man without endurance or sufficient stamina to stand getting his delicate feet dashed with dew, or his shell-like ears nipped by frost.

XXXVII.

A DREAM GARDEN.

Country living is delightful, but, like all other blessings, it has its alternates of shadow. I used to sit here by my window last April and gloat over the prospects for the vegetable garden a tramp laid out and seeded for me in the early spring. What luscious peas were going to clamber over the trellis along about the middle of July! What golden squashes were going to nestle in the little hollows! What lusty corn was going to stride the hillocks! What colonies of beans and beds of lettuce should fill the spaces, like stars in the wake of a triumphant moon, and how odorous the breath of the healthful onion should be upon the midsummer air! But listen. No Assyrian ever yet came down upon the fold as my neighbor's chickens have descended upon the fair territory of my garden. As for shooing a chicken off, my dear, when its gigantic intellect is set upon scratching up a seeded bed, you might as well attempt to wave back a thunderstorm with a fan.

I have undertaken several difficult things in my life, but never one so hopeless as convincing a calm and resolute hen that she is an intruder. I spent one glad summer trying to keep a brood out of a geranium bed, and had typhoid fever all the fall just from overwork and worry. But say there had been no chickens to "wear the heart and waste the body," how about potato bugs, and caterpillars and huge and gruesome slugs? I never go out to sprinkle the sad pea vines or pick the drooping lettuce but what I resolve myself into a magnet to lure the early vegetable-devouring reptile from its lair. Large 7 by 9 caterpillars and zebra-striped ladybugs disport themselves on neck and ankle until I flee the scene.