THE MEETING IN THE SCHOOL-HOUSE.
"Don't you think, Mrs. Cradlebow," I said nervously; "that young people are never content until they find out the world for themselves?" It was an interrogation, but it was sagely uttered.
"I know, I know," she said. "Perhaps it's best he should go." She spoke very quietly and with uncommon composure of demeanor. She withdrew her eyes from my face, but the smile trembled on her lips, and I knew that her heart was breaking over the words, for Luther was her darling.
I wished, almost impatiently, for my own part, that it might all have happened differently; that I might leave everything in Wallencamp just as I had found it, so delightfully happy and peaceful it had seemed to me. I could not bear, in looking back, to think of one face as wearing upon it any unaccustomed grief. At all events, I felt that my thoughts had been helplessly turned from their prescribed channel, and the fisherman's letter remained from day to day still unanswered.
Meanwhile, winter was vanishing at the Cape. As salient points in its quaint and cherished memory, I recall the frequent clamming excursions, when we rattled own to the beach, at low-tide, in a cart whose groaning members lacked every element of elasticity. Often there were as many as sixteen persons in one cart, and the same number of hoes and baskets—the baskets being filled with small children as a means of keeping both them and the children stationary.
Grandma was always present on these occasions, and the hilarity of the Wallencampers, as they were jounced and joggled over the stones, in a manner which to some might have been productive of great bodily agony, concealed, with them, no undercurrent of nervous dread or pain. They were kind enough to regard the presence of the "teacher" as indispensable to their complete enjoyment, while I was ready to congratulate myself that my society alone was the object desired, for though I brought my near-sighted vision to bear faithfully upon the sands, I never succeeded in capturing a clam.
I heard that Bachelor Lot had confided aside to Captain Sartell that "Teacher'd ought to bring a hook and line. The clams 'ud go for it in a minute if she'd only bring a hook and line;" and, stung by the unsheathed sarcasm of this remark, I was accustomed afterwards to wander off towards "Steeple Rock." The rock was accessible at low-tide, and from thence I could watch the ocean on one side, and the clam-diggers on the other; could see Grandma on her hands and knees, a dot of broad good nature in the distance, always remaining apparently in the one place, and always, somehow, getting her basket full of clams as she gradually sank deeper and deeper into the briny soil; but no true Wallencamper ever caught cold by soaking in the brine.
I could distinguish Madeline wandering lightly about among the rocks, scraping off mussels with her hoe; and the Modoc, the champion clam-digger of all, spreading her tentacles here and there, and never failing to come up with a bivalve. It was a picturesque scene, viewed from the great rock; and when the tide began to sweep in again, George Olver sent a piercing whistle along shore, to call the stragglers together; clams, children, and all were loaded into the cart, and jostled gayly homeward erased by the fresh sea breezes.
For the chowder, which in due course of events arose to take its place among the viands on the Ark board, I would leave it to that sacred and tenfold mystery with which, to my mind, it was ever enshrouded.