With what thrills of hope and fear I listened for thumps on the head of my bed, or watched anxiously to see my candlestick walk out into the air!
But not a thump! Not a rap! Never a snap of the weakest proportions (not explicable by natural laws) has, from that day to this, visited my personal career. Not a candlestick ever walked an inch for me. I have never been able to induce a chair to hop after me. No turnip has consented to drop from the ceiling for me. Planchette, in her day, wrote hundreds of lines for me, but never one that was of the slightest possible significance to me, or to the universe at large. Never did a medium tell me anything that ever came to pass; though one of them once made a whole winter miserable by prophesying a death which did not occur.
Being destitute of objections to belief in the usefulness of spiritualistic mystery,—in fact, by temperament, perhaps inclining to hope that such phenomena may be tamed and yoked, and made to work for human happiness,—yet there seems to be something about me which these agencies do not find congenial. Though I have gone longing for a sign, no sign has been given me. Though I have been always ready to believe all other people's mysteries, no inexplicable facts have honored my experience.
The only personal prophecy ever strictly fulfilled in my life was—I am not certain whether I ought to feel embarrassed in alluding to it—made by a gipsy fortune-teller. She was young and pretty, the seventh child of a seventh child, and she lived in a Massachusetts shoe-town by the name of Lynn. And what was it? Oh, but you must excuse me.
The grandfather to whom these marvels happened was not, as I say, a literary man; yet even he did write a little book—a religious tale, or tract, after the manner of his day and profession; and it took to itself a circulation of two hundred thousand copies. I remember how Mr. James T. Fields laughed when he heard of it—that merry laugh peculiar to himself.
"You can't help it," the publisher said; "you come of a family of large circulations."
One day I was at school with my brother,—a little, private school, down by what were called the English dormitories in Andover.
I was eight years old. Some one came in and whispered to the teacher. Her face turned very grave, and she came up to us quietly, and called us out into the entry, and gently put on our things.
"You are to go home," she said; "your mother is dead." I took my little brother's hand without a word, and we trudged off. I do not think we spoke—I am sure we did not cry—on the way home. I remember perfectly that we were very gayly dressed. Our mother liked bright, almost barbaric colors on children. The little boy's coat was of red broadcloth, and my cape of a canary yellow, dyed at home in white-oak dye. The two colors flared before my eyes as we shuffled along and crushed the crisp, dead leaves that were tossing in the autumn wind all over Andover Hill.
When we got home they told us it was a mistake; she was not dead; and we were sent back to school. But, in a few weeks after that, one day we were told we need not go to school at all; the red and yellow coats came off, and little black ones took their places. The new baby, in his haggard father's arms, was baptized at his mother's funeral; and we looked on, and wondered what it all meant, and what became of children whose mother was obliged to go to heaven when she seemed so necessary in Andover.