“Bless you, Miss Jewett, how could I tell? You know folks don’t look at every bean or pea they shell, except there’s one that won’t open right. I was shelling away and looking at the children to see that they were all in their seats, when I felt something hard under my thumb and looked into my lap, and there were two little shining things among the beans, and another rolled out of the pod under my thumb when I took it up.”
Miss Jewett had one of the stones set in a ring that is now in the possession of William Gould of Windham. John Campbell, a relative of Polly’s, has another, and where the third is I do not know.
Whenever the children carried Ma’am Price a present, she would take the diamonds out of a cotton in which they were kept, lay them in her lap, and let the children handle them; after which she would tell how she shelled them out of the bean pod, and how surprised she was.
I suppose if I don’t try to explain this mystery, I shall have forty letters from boys inquiring how those diamonds came there. Well, my father said that a vessel came to Portland from Brazil, on board of which were several kinds of precious stones. The mate of the vessel was paying attention to Polly, and he stole them out of the cargo and put them in the bean. He dared not give them to Polly nor tell her about it because he stole them; but as they had only about a dozen bean vines, he knew she or her mother would find them after the vessel was gone, so he put them in the pod just as he was about to sail. The vessel was never heard from, and thus he never came back to claim Polly nor to tell her where the diamonds, which were not of any great value, came from, and Polly always thought they grew in the pod. This was my father’s solution of the mystery which made considerable of a stir at the time. As he knew all the parties and circumstances thoroughly, it seems the most probable explanation; for nobody ever doubted that Ma’am Price took them from the bean pod, and there were not many that believed they grew there, though some did and looked at it in the light of a special providence and provision for a worthy woman; the objections to which are that, though diamonds, they were rough diamonds, not much more valuable than quartz, and that Providence provided abundantly for the good woman in the affections of her scholars, who never suffered her to lack any comfort in her old age.
If Ma’am Price was severe in her management of scholars, she was not more so than the parents themselves, as the following anecdote will show. Captain Joseph McLellan had a thermometer, rather a rare thing in those days. His wife went to meeting one Sunday, leaving the boys, Joe and Stephen, at home. Stephen held the bulb of the thermometer to the fire to see the mercury rise, and by so doing broke it. They were well aware of the consequences. Joe told Stephen if he would give him fifty cents, he would tell his mother that he broke it and take the whipping, which he did. The next day the mother found out the true state of the case and whipped them both, Stephen for breaking the instrument, and Joe for telling a lie. These were the kind of women to handle unruly boys when the father was at sea.
THE DISCONTENTED BROOK
A DIALOGUE
In a province of Old Spain respecting which the inhabitants were wont to say that God had given them a fertile soil, a salubrious climate, brave men, and beautiful women, but He had not given them a good government lest they should not be willing to die and go to heaven, there were two lakes separated by an intervening mountain. Each had an outlet in a brook; and the two brooks, as they wound among the hills, ran near each other, so that they were enabled to converse together quite socially. They lay in the shadow of the hills among whose roots rose the river Guadalquiver. The chain sloped by degrees to a fertile plain covered with vineyards and olive trees. Fields of wheat surrounded the scattered dwellings of the peasants and the tents of shepherds whose flocks fed upon the mountains. The names of the brooks were Bono and Malo.