Dr. Borrow led us through the beautiful street of a New-England village, under the Gothic arches of its religious elms. He did not fear to throw open for us the willing door. He showed us the simple, heartsome interior, with its orderly ease, its unambitious hospitality, its refined enjoyments. Other travellers have drawn for us other pictures. They have told us of a pomp and state which have reconciled us to our rudeness. But Dr. Borrow sketched the New-England home, such as we know it by tradition, such as it still exists among those who are content to live as their fathers lived before them.
"Hold on, Borrow!" cried Westlake; "you don't suppose you are going to persuade me that there is neither poverty nor overwork in New England! I have heard, and I think I have seen, that there are hard lives lived there,—harder than those of our slaves, of my slaves, for example;—and that not by foreigners, who, you may say, are not up to the mark yet, but by Americans born and bred."
"There are very hard lives lived there. The human lot is checkered there as everywhere. Death sometimes arrests a man midway in his course and leads him off, leaving his wife and children to struggle along the road they never knew was rough before. It happened thus to your Cousin Reginald. His wife and children were thus left. You are right. His son, the boy I told you of, is as much a slave as any of yours: almost as poorly fed, and twice as hardly worked. He lives at a distance from his college, to have a cheaper room; his meals he prepares himself;—no great fatigue this, to be sure, for they are frugal, and he contents himself with two. In what ought to be his vacation, he delves away at his books harder than ever, and is besides a hewer of wood and a drawer of water,—all without wages. His only pay is his mother's pride in him, and the joy of sometimes calling back the old smiles to her face."
"How did he get to college? How does he stay there, if he has nothing?"
"He has less than nothing. To go to college, he has incurred debts,—debts for which he has pledged himself, body and soul. He was ten when his father died. His sister was sixteen. She assumed the rights of guardian over him, kept him up to his work at school, sent him to college when he was fourteen, and maintains him there.
"If his life is a hard one, hers is not easier. Every morning she walks nearly three miles to the school she teaches, gives her day there, and walks back in the late afternoon. The evening she passes in sewing, a book on the table before her. She catches a line as she draws out her thread, and fixes it in her memory with the setting of the next stitch. Besides Reginald, there are two other boys to make and mend for, not yet so mindful of the cost of clothes as he has learned to be; and she has her own education to carry on, as well as that of the little community among whom she must hold her place as one who has nothing left to learn.
"Her mother works at the same table, evenly, continuously, not to disturb or distract by haste or casual movement, and under a spell of silence, which only the child whose first subject she is is privileged to break. It is broken from time to time,—the study being suspended, though not the needlework. These intervals are filled with little, happy confidences,—hopes, and dreams, which the two cherish apart and together, and whose exchange, a hundred times renewed, never loses its power to refresh and reassure. If you were near enough to hear the emphatic word in these snatches of conversation, be sure you would hear 'Reginald.'"
"Do you know them so well?"
"Perhaps I may have spent a summer in the country town where they live. Perhaps it has been my chance some evening to walk by the little, old, black house they moved into after their father's death, from the nice, white, green-blinded one he built for them, and the astral lamp on the round table may have lighted for me the tableau I am showing you. Our heroine works and studies late, perhaps; but she must not the less be up early the next morning, to do the heavier portion of the house-work before her mother is stirring. If ever you hear a severe tone in her voice, be sure the mother has been encroaching upon the daughter's prerogative by rising first, or by putting her hand to some forbidden toil.—Well, is all this enough? Not for Anna Westlake. There is a music lesson to be given, before she sets off for her regular day's work."
"Is her name Anna?"—Westlake had once a sister Anna, whom he loved.—"Is she pretty?"