Over by the wind-mill was a boggy bed of mint, and many a brew of afternoon tea it afforded us,—mint tea in the summer house, with Ying’s scalloped cookies, sparkling with sugar crystals, and our mothers for guests.
Garden Side Rancho Los Cerritos
CHAPTER VIII
THE RANCH STORY CONTINUED
Cookies were not the only things in which Ying excelled. There were cakes fearfully and wonderfully decorated with frosting curly-cues, and custard pies so good that grandfather always included one with the doughnuts and cheese that little David carried in his lunch basket when he went up to visit his brother on the famous occasion when he slew Goliath with his sling shot.
Grandfather had left his Maine home and now sat on the sunny California porch and charmed his child audience with versions of the Hebrew stories that I judge he did not use in the pulpit of the dignified village church where he had ministered for so many years. But these adaptations existed even then, for I know now that they were not made for us but had served, a generation earlier, to delight our mothers. We learned how Samson’s strength returned when, in the temple of the Philistines, the hooting mob threw eggs at him. Grandfather was not unaware of the characteristics of mobs, for he was an avowed abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights when they were unpopular causes, although he himself was never favored with eggs. He used to agree with an old Quaker of a nearby town who said, “If a hen wants to crow, thee’d better let her crow.”
To return to his stories: there was the legend of David. When the lion attacked his sheep he ran so fast to their rescue that his little coat-tails stuck out straight behind him; when the lion opened his mouth to roar David reached down his throat and caught him by the roots of his tongue and held him, while, with his free hand he pulled his jackknife out of his trousers pocket, opened it with his teeth, and promptly killed the beast. Then he sat down upon a great white stone and played on his jews-harp and sang, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”
I once gave this form of the story in a Sunday School class as an object lesson in earnestness in the pursuit of duty, and when my teacher kindly asked me where it was to be found, assured her that it must be in one of the intervening Bible chapters that had been skipped in our course. Imagine my chagrin as I vainly sought the text. I must have been fourteen years old at the time.
Grandfather not only told us stories, but he opened Sunday to me for secular reading. On my eighth birthday he had given me a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and I was revelling in them when a Sunday came, and, as we were settling ourselves on a blanket out on the grass under the big eucalyptus tree for an afternoon with books, mother questioned the wisdom of my reading such a book on that day. She said we would let grandfather decide. I see him yet, looking over the tops of his spectacles at the eager little girl who had interrupted his reading; “I think,” he said, “that a book fit to read any day is fit to read on Sunday.” I bless the memory of grandfather, willing to give a child his honest judgment, and that that judgment was of a liberal mind.
I remember that about this time there was a governess in the family who was a member of the Universalist denomination and who sometimes pined for her own church; to comfort her, grandfather told her that he would prepare and preach for her a Universalist sermon, which he did the following Sunday. It may be that this small service on the old ranch porch was the first of this faith in Southern California. Grandfather’s catholic sympathy for various religious faiths is also illustrated by his friendship with Rabbi Edelman and his frequent attendance upon the services in the old synagogue on Broadway near Second in Los Angeles.