The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

“The chimneys were three stories high, and the swallows built near the top, I suppose. They had the sky and the stars for a ceiling to their dark little bedrooms. In spring there was never more than a blaze of sticks on the hearth—not that, unless we had visitors to stay. Sometimes a young swallow trying to fly fell out of the nest and fluttered across the hearth into the room. That was very exciting to us children. But at house-cleaning time a great bag of straw was stuffed up the chimney’s throat to save the hearth from falling soot and dried mud and the litter from the nests. It was a brick hearth painted red, and washed always with milk to make it shine. The andirons were such as you will see in the garret of any good old house in the East,—fluted brass columns with brass cones on top.

“It was in summer, when the bird colony was liveliest, that we used to hear the beating of wings in the chimney,—a smothered sound like the throbbing of a steamer’s wheels far off in a fog, or behind a neck of land.”

Jack asked more questions; the men seemed not inclined to talk, and the mother fell to remembering aloud, speaking sometimes to Jack, but often to the others. All the simple features of her old Eastern home had gained a priceless value, as things of a past gone out of her life which she had scarcely prized at the time. She was half jealous of her children’s attachment to the West, and longed to make them know the place of the family’s nativity, through such pictures of it as her memory could supply.

But her words meant more to herself than to any that listened.

“Did we ever sleep in that bedroom with the chimney-swallows?” asked Jack. He was thinking, What a mistake to stop up the chimney and cut off communication with such jolly neighbors as the swallows!

Yes, his mother said; he had slept there, but before he could remember. It was the winter he was three years old, when his father was in Deadwood.

There used to be such beautiful frost-pictures on the eastern window panes; and when the sun rose and the fire was lighted and the pictures faded, a group of little bronze-black cedars appeared, half a mile away, topping the ridge by the river, and beyond them were the solemn blue hills. Those hills and the cedars were as much a part of a winter’s sunrise on the Hudson as the sun himself.

Jack used to lie in bed and listen for the train, a signal his mother did not care to hear, for it meant she must get up and set a match to the fire, laid overnight in the big-bellied, air-tight stove that panted and roared on its four short legs, shuddering in a transport of sudden heat.

When the air of the room grew milder, Jack would hop out in his wrapper and slippers, and run to the north window to see what new shapes the fountain had taken in the night.

The jet of water in winter was turned low, and the spray of it froze and piled above the urn, changing as the wind veered and as the sun wasted it. On some mornings it looked like a weeping white lady in a crystal veil; sometimes a Niobe group, children clinging to a white, sad mother, who clasped them and bowed her head. When the sun peeped through the fir-trees, it touched the fountain statuary with sea tints of emerald and pearl.