Dexter married Jessie the day before he opened his flag-shop. She had long been employed by his employer, and when she promised to be his, she drew her earnings from the bank, and invested all with him. This was not prudence, certainly, but it was love. Dexter might have failed in business the first year,—might have died, you know, in six months, or even in three, as men do sometimes. It was not prudence; but Jessie—young lady determined on settlements!—Jessie was looking for life and prosperity, as the honest and earnest and young have a right to look in a world God created and governs. And if failure and death had in fact choked the path that promised so fair, clear of regret, free of reproaches, glad even of the losses that proved how love had once blessed her, she would have buried the dead, and worked for the retrieval of fortune.
They began their housekeeping-romance back of the shop in two little rooms. Do you require the actual measurement? There have been wider walls that could contain greatly less.
"How big was Alexander, pa?
The people called him great."
They considered the sixpences of their outlay and income with a purpose and a spirit that made a miser of neither. But there was no delusion indulged about the business. Jessie never mistook the hilarity of Silas for an indication of incalculable prosperity. Silas never understood her gravity for that of discontent and envy. They never spent in any week more than they earned. They counted the cost of living, and were therefore free and rich. "She was never alone," as Sir Thomas Overbury said of that happy milkmaid, "but still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones." And Dexter loved her with a valiant constancy that spoke volumes for both.
His days were spent, according to the promise advertised, in endeavors to please the public; but, oh, if the public that traded with and liked to patronize him, if the young lads and the old boys who hung about his counters, could have seen him when he shut his shop-door behind him, and went into the back-room where Jessie and he devised the patterns, where she embroidered and lived, where she cooked and washed and ironed, where she nursed Columbia, their daughter, one glance at all this, made with the heart and the understanding, would—ah! might, have been to some of them worth more than all Dexter's pleasant stones, and all the contents of the shop, and all the profits the flag-maker would ever make by trading.
For I can hardly believe, though this story be but of "common life," when I take up the newspapers and glance along the items I am constrained to doubt, that such people as Silas and Jessie live in every house, in every alley, lane, and street, in every square and avenue, on every farm, wherever walls inclose those divine temples of which Apostles talked as belonging to God, which temples, said they, are holy! I can hardly believe that Love, void of fear and of selfishness, speaks through all our domestic policy, and devises those curious arrangements, political, theological, social, whose result has approval and praise, it may be, in the regions of outer darkness.
Dark faces, whose sleekness hides a gulf of waters more dead than those of the dreadful Dead Sea, rise between me and the honest, brave face of Silas,—dreary flats, whose wastes are not figured in utter barrenness by the awful African deserts, where ranks upon ranks of women, like Jessie at least in love and fidelity, must stand, or—"where is the promise of His coming?"
The daughter of Silas and Jessie was called Columbia in honor of some valiant enterprise, nautical or other, which charmed the patriotic spirit of the father; and as he was not a fighting man or a speaking man, he offered this modest comment on the brilliant event by way of showing his appreciation.
Columbia Dexter was a great favorite with the children of Salt Lane for various reasons, and among them this, that in all parades and processions she supplied the banners. Columbia's friend of friends was Silas, son of Andrew Swift,—and thus we come among the children of the neighbors.
They were not dependent on Salt Lane for a play-ground. They had the Long Wharf. Ships from the most distant foreign shores deposited their loads of freightage there, and the children were free to read the foreign brands, to guess the contents, and to watch the sailors,—free to all brain-puzzling calculations, and to clothes-soiling, clothes-rending feats, among the treasures of the ship-hold and the wharf: no mean privileges, with the roar of ocean in their ears, and great ships with their towering masts before their eyes. They had the wharf for bustle, confusion, excitement,—and for this they loved it; but the beach that stretched beyond they had for quiet, and there, for miles and miles, curious shells and pretty pebbles, fish-bones and crabs and sand, sea-weed fine and fair, and the old sycamores, the old dead trees, in the tops of whose white branches the halcyon built its nest. Well the children knew the winter days, so bright and mild, when the brave birds were breeding. Well they knew when the young kingfisher would begin to make his royal progress, with such safe dignity descending, branch by branch, until he could no longer resist Nature, but must dash out in a "fine frenzy" for the bounding waves!