Mrs. Stewart was really a good woman who was compelled by frequent attacks of illness to pay some attention to personal comfort, and who had never thought of triumphing over her esteemed friend Joy with a glance of pity. Mrs. Anderson was also a good woman; but she unwittingly taught her children to hold envy and dislike for neighbors. Probably she was not the first woman, as she was certainly not the last to pursue this foolish, unchristianlike course.
Little William was often an attentive listener to this wail of his mother; and from it he tried to conceive a deep and bitter hatred for the rival aristocratic family at the other end of the village.
Very strangely, this effort of the boy, begun and religiously pursued under a sense of family loyalty, was utterly unavailing. There was something in the soft eyes and patient face of Mrs. Stewart which consumed all his bitter thoughts and made him feel more like kissing the lady's hand than hating her, even for his injured mother's sake.
Often and often when she was assisting the children from the carriage, while Hugh—something too careless in this respect, was taking his horse from the thills or hailing neighbors in a hearty voice, little Will Anderson felt a barely resistible inclination to rush forward and offer his help. Was he restrained by a fear of punishment from his mother, or the dread of a refusal from Mrs. Stewart, or anticipation of ridicule from the assembled villagers? Not one of these fears influenced him in the least: he was simply afraid that there was one of the children that he could not lift. It was not tall Dan, nor fat March; for he felt that he could toss them both over the meeting house if such conduct would have been advantageous to the Stewart family; though either of the boys was as large as two such chaps as Will. And of course it was not little Carrie, for she was only a baby, three years old, "lighter than goose down," as Will thought, but did not say aloud. But it was Emeline.
Will had looked this girl in the face, from a distance, two or three times—she had brown eyes, deep and true; and brown hair, in heavy, rich coils. Her face was as full of unsullied beauty as a lily blossom. It had always a thoughtful expression as if the little brain were solving some grave problem of more than human interest. At least, all this is what Will saw and felt in an indistinct sort of fashion. I doubt if she were quite so ethereally beautiful as Will imagined; for girls born and reared on New England farms are not as fragile as a hot-house flower, and I dare say that she laughed as often as other girls; I know from personal knowledge that in later life she was not too prim to play practical jokes.
But Will felt that he could not, for his very life, offer to lift this girl from the carriage step. He was stout and heavy twelve years old; and Emeline was light and slender nine; yet the exertion, especially if she should happen to look at him from her wonderful eyes, would be fatal.
[CHAPTER II.]
BOYHOOD SPORTS—AN AMATEUR MILITIA—A CAMPAIGN INCIDENT—WILL ANDERSON'S GALLANTRY—CHRISTMAS MORNING GREETING—THE AFTERNOON SERVICE—A COMBAT AMONG THE BOYS.
Will was more than five years old when peace was declared after the second war with Great Britain; and the subject, in that time of slow-moving news, was still a matter for frequent talk when he completed his tenth year. He was then admitted into the ranks of the "Continental Veterans," an organization of the patriotic youths who trained along the roads and in the woods adjoining the village, and told to each other, with passionate interest, all the tales of adventure and heroism which they could glean from their elders. The youngsters kept up really an accurate show of a military organization; including this important feature (which they had learned from the example of their elders), that all were officers of some rank or other. In the day-time they built fires in the woods on the banks of the Penobscot; and pretended that they were surrounded by night, dark as a stack of black cats. Occasionally they captured a calf and tried it as a spy by court-martial; usually allowing it to escape, at the last moment, its sentence of hanging, and then putting the guards on trial for aiding in the escape.
Four years of this training made Will a major, all the elder boys ranking from lieutenant colonel upward.