When she mounted the hobby-horse she mounted her dream-horse as well; they were as like as Don Quixote’s helmet and the barber’s basin.
She rode him by firelight in the last half-hour before bedtime. She rode him just after breakfast in the morning. She “took” to him when she was in trouble, as older dream-riders take to their favorite “hobbies.” She rocked and she rode, from restlessness and wretchedness into peace, from unsatisfied longings into temporary content, from bad tempers into smiles and sunshine.
She rode out the winter, and she rode in the wild and windy spring. She got well of the measles pounding back and forth on that well-worn seat. She took cold afterward, before the winds grew soft, experimenting with draughts in a corner of the piazza.
Now that summer gives to her fancies and her footsteps a wider range, the hard-worked hobby gets an occasional rest. (Often he is to be seen with his wooden nose resting on the seat of a chair which is bestrewed with clover blossoms, withered wild-roses, and bits of grass; for Polly, like other worshipers of graven images, believes that her idol can eat and drink and appreciate substantial offerings.) But when the dream grows too strong, the picture too vivid,—not mamma’s picture, but the one in the child’s heart,—she takes to the saddle again, and the horsehair switch and the leather fringes float upon the wind, and her fancies mount, far above the lava bluffs that confine her vision.
Will our little girl-riders be as happy on their real horses, when they get them, as they are upon their dream-horses? Is the actual possession of “back hair” and the wearing of long petticoats more blissful than the knot, hard-twisted, of the ends of a silk handkerchief, which the child-woman binds about her brows when she walks—like Troy’s proud dames whose garments sweep the ground—in the skirt of her mother’s “cast-off gown”?
It depends upon the direction these imperious dream-horses will take with our small women. Will the rider be in bondage to the steed? Heaven forbid! for dream-horses make good servants but very bad masters. Will they bear her fast and far, and will she keep a quiet eye ahead and a constant hand upon the rein? Will they flag and flounder down in the middle-ways, where so many of us have parted with our dream-steeds and taken the footpath, consoled to find that we have plenty of company and are not altogether dismayed? The dream-horses carry their child-riders beyond the mother’s following, so that the eyes and the heart ache with straining after the fleeting vision.
It is better she should not see too much nor too far along the way they go, since “to travel joyfully is better than to arrive.”
If only they could know their own “blessedness” while the way is long before them!
AN IDAHO PICNIC
At the camp in the cañon they had a cow. It is true she sometimes broke away and went off with the herds on the range and had to be chased on horseback and caught with a lasso. They had chickens,—all that were left them from night raids by the coyotes;[1] and a garden, the products of which they shared with the jack-rabbits and the gophers. But the supply wagon brought fresh fruit from the town, ten miles away, and new butter from the valley ranches. There were no mosquitoes, no peddlers, no tramps, no book agents, no undesirable neighbor’s children, whom one cannot scare away as one may the neighbor’s dogs and chickens when they creep through the fence, but must be civil to for the sake of peace and good-will,—which are good things in a neighborhood.