The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

What a number of queer things it kept hidden away under the eaves that spread wide, a broad-winged cloak of shadows! What a strange eye it had, its one half-moon window peering at you from the high, peaked forehead of the gable.

The garret door was at the far end of the long upper hall; from it the stairs (and how they did creak!) led up directly out of the cheerful daylight into that uncarpeted wilderness where it was always twilight.

It was the younger children’s business to trot on errands, and they were not consulted as to where or when they should go. Grown people seem to forget how early it gets dark up garret in winter, and how far away the house noises sound with all the doors shut between.

When the children were sent up garret for nuts,—for Sunday dessert with mince pie and apples, or to pass around with cider in the evening,—they were careful to leave the stair door open behind them; but there was little comfort in that, for all the people were two flights down and busy with their own concerns.

Downstairs in the bright western chambers nobody thought of its being late, but up garret, under the eaves, it was already night. Thick ice incrusted the half-moon window, curtaining its cold ray that sadly touched an object here and there, and deepened the neighboring gloom.

The autumn nut harvest was spread first upon sheets on the garret floor to dry, and then it was garnered in the big, green bathtub which had stood, since the children could remember, over against the chimney, to the right of the gable window. This tub was for size and weight the father of all bathtubs. It was used for almost anything but the purpose for which it was intended.

In summer, when it was empty, the children played “shipwreck” in it; it was their life-boat, and they were cast away on the high seas. Some rowed for dear life, with umbrellas and walking-sticks, and some made believe to cry and call for help,—for that was their idea of the behavior of a shipwrecked company; and some tramped on the bulging tin bottom of the tub, which yielded and sprang back with a loud thump, like the clank of oars. It was very exciting.

In winter it was the granary. It held bushels and bushels of nuts, and its smooth, out-sloping sides defeated the clever little mice who were always raiding and rummaging among the garret stores.

Well, it seemed a long distance to the timid little errand girl, from the stairs, across the garret floor to that bathtub. “Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,” she stepped. Then, what a shock it was, when the first loud handfuls of nuts bumped upon the bottom of the pail! The nuts were pointed and cold as lumps of ice; they hurt the small hands that shoveled them up in haste, and a great many handfuls it took to fill the pail.

Hanging from the beams that divided the main garret from the eaves, dangled a perfectly useless row of old garments that seemed to be there for no purpose but to look dreadful. How they might have appeared in a different light cannot be said; there seemed to be nothing wrong with them when the women took them down at house-cleaning time and shook and beat them about; they were as empty as sacks, every one. But in that dim, furtive light, seen by over-shoulder glimpses they had the semblance of dismal malefactors suffering the penalty of their crimes. Some were hooded and seemed to hang their heads upon their sunken breasts; all were high-shouldered wretches with dangling arms and a shapeless, dreary suggestiveness worse than human. The most objectionable one of the lot was a long, dark weather-cloak, worn “about the twenties,” as old people say. It was of the fashion of that “long red cloak, well brushed and neat,” which we read of in John Gilpin’s famous ride.