"My text, brethren," said the little minister, "is, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me.'
"My subject is, God; Joseph; and Moses in the bulrushes!"
Discouraged by the alarming breadth of the little preacher's topic, I fled up-stairs again. There an inspiration did, indeed, strike me; for I remembered an old fur cape, or pelisse, of my mother's, out of fashion, but the warmer for that; and straightway I got me into it, and curled up, with my papers, on the chilly bed in the cold room, and went to work.
It seems to me that a good part of "The Gates Ajar" was written in that old fur cape. Often I stole up into the attic, or into some unfrequented closet, to escape the noise of the house, while at work. I remember, too, writing sometimes in the barn, on the haymow. The book extended over a wide domestic topography.
I hasten to say that no person was to blame for inconveniences of whose existence I had never complained. Doubtless something would have been done to relieve them had I asked for it; or if the idea that my work could ever be of any consequence had occurred to any of us. Why should it? The girl who is never "domestic" is trial enough at her best. She cannot cook; she will not sew. She washes dishes Mondays and Tuesdays under protest, while the nurse and parlor maid are called off from their natural avocations, and dusts the drawing-room with obedient resentment. She sits cutting out underclothes in the March vacations, when all the schools are closed, and when the heavy wagons from the distant farming region stick in the bottomless Andover mud in front of the professor's house. The big front door is opened, and the dismal, creaking sounds come in.
The kind and conscientious new mother, to whom I owe many other gentle lessons more valuable than this, teaches how necessary to a lady's education is a neat needle. The girl does not deny this elemental fact; but her eyes wander away to the cold sky above the Andover mud, with passionate entreaty. To this day I cannot hear the thick chu-chunk! of heavy wheels on March mud without a sudden mechanical echo of that wild, young outcry: "Must I cut out underclothes forever? Must I go on tucking the broken end of the thread into the nick in the spool? Is this LIFE?"
I am more than conscious that I could not have been an easy girl to "bring up," and am sure that for whatever little difficulties beset the earlier time of my ventures as a writer, no person was in any fault. They were doubtless good for me, in their way. We all know that some of the greatest of brain-workers have selected the poorest and barest of spots in which to study. Luxury and bric-a-brac come to easy natures or in easy years. The energy that very early learns to conquer difficulty is always worth its price.
I used, later, to hear in Boston the story of the gentleman who once took a friend to see the room of his son at Harvard College. The friend was a man of plain life, but of rich mental achievement. He glanced at the Persian rugs and costly draperies of the boy's quarters in silence.
"Well," cried the fond father, "don't you think my son has a pretty room?"
"Sir," said the visitor, with gentle candor, "you'll never raise a scholar on that carpet."