WILLIAM ANDERSON'S HEART AND HAND—HIS EARLY LIFE, HOME AND SURROUNDINGS.
Two little shreds of yellow paper which would not pass current for the value of an ordinary letter stamp! And yet they are to be cherished in the family Bible as a treasure worthy of loving gaze and reverent touch.
Look at them closer. One resembles a hand and the other a heart. Even in their freshest and brightest days they would have been condemned by the artist whose standard is the ideal, and by the anatomist whose sole appreciation is for the real; for their departure from anatomical truth is not in the line of artistic license. Still they are sacred to us.
Why are the papers so yellow? you ask. Because more than half a century has elapsed since they were cut into these shapes. Why so frayed and worn? Because for years they were carried in a woman's bosom. Why so stained? Because they have been wept over; and doubtless some of the bitterest of all tears—the tears which fall from the widowed and the fatherless, have moistened them. But here is a deeper stain than any which can be made by any human tears—what is it? The blood of an honest man, a patriot; the blood which flowed from the real heart of the man whose real hand clipped these little uncouth models from the old-fashioned sheet and sent them to his lady-love.
Turn the papers over. What do you read?
"William Anderson sends this hand to his sweetheart, Emeline T. Stewart. Like myself, it is yours now and forever, if you will it so.
"NEW VINEYARD, MAINE, Christmas, 1829."
"Dear Emeline:
I offer my heart to you. Keep it if you can love me and will be my wife.
"Your true lover—and husband, as I hope to be,
WILLIAM ANDERSON."
The writing is cramped, for the hand which laboriously traced so many words within so small a space, though it belonged to the young schoolmaster of the village, was quite as well used to carrying a rifle or wielding an ax in the forest as to this scholar's work. The composition, too, is heavy: William Anderson was not a poet; he was but a plain youth whose best effort was to put his honest wish into honest words, and to send his blunt message freighted with all his hopes for the future.
Little did he know how his paper hand and heart would be hoarded to come into the loving care of his descendants! The strong man is dead—his mangled clay rests amid the decaying beauties of a city by the banks of the lordly Mississippi. The devoted woman is dead—her tortured body reposes under mighty Wasatch shadows. But the fragile papers survive; and the love which brought them into being lives. It lives eternally, if there be reward in heaven for sacrifice.
William Anderson was the son of a New Vineyard farmer—well to do with the grosser goods of this world, as well as being possessed of family pride; and the boy was taught, along with the heavy duties of the field, something of books. He was indulged, too, in the physical luxury of a yearly meeting-suit, made out of wondrous fabrics brought all the way from Boston, a city more distant and mythical in the estimation of the New Vineyard people of that day than is Benares to this age.
Large families of children were in the sturdy and healthy New England fashion of the first quarter of this century, and William's brothers and sisters numbered near a half score. So the boys were impelled to industry and self-reliance.