"Cream, too, no doubt!" added Tetchy himself, in a tone so insulting that I thought it unworthy of one calling himself a man.
These provoking taunts continued until the spiteful family appeared to have either relieved themselves or grown tired of having the cold shoulder of a profound contempt all the time turned toward them. It was a very hard thing for me to bear this malicious insolence. I could have retorted keenly on them by some plain insinuation touching their iron-tailed cow, of which they probably thought that no one but themselves had any knowledge. But we preserved our self-respect by maintaining silence.
These little private vexations were about all that we encountered during the whole progress of our strawberry-planting. The neighbors, with the exception of the Tetchys, having no particular interest as to how we got along or whether we got along at all, very soon ceased to take any notice of what we were doing. The novelty of the new enterprise died away as speedily, for the season at least, as if we had been sowing turnips. Under the fine October weather, the plants quickly took root, and went on growing so vigorously that some of them even put out an occasional runner. But these were immediately clipped off, as sure to impair the vigor of the plant, which could now support no extraneous offshoots. There were some plants, however, that apparently stood still, refusing to grow, while others died out entirely. But casualties of this sort are always to be expected. They occur with old hands at strawberry-planting, and beginners must not think to escape them.
I felt inexpressibly proud of my achievement. I watched this work of my own hands so closely, being up and in the garden long before breakfast, that I think the very shape and position of every plant came to be imprinted on my memory. I know that I could detect the changes that took place in the look of each particular pet. I thought of them when operating the treadle of my sewing-machine at the factory, and I hurried home more expeditiously than aforetime, to enjoy even the brief autumn twilight among my strawberries. I sometimes even dreamed of them on my pillow. Now my agricultural library became far more interesting and useful than before. I had had a touch of real, actual practice, and could already understand and appreciate many suggestions which had heretofore been of doubtful significancy. Thus the long winter came gradually in, closing up the great volume of vegetable life, but affording me abundant time for studying that other volume which had so singularly fallen in my way.
A PAPER OF CANDLE-ENDS.
Who made all the old saws?—not the rusty steel affairs that Patrick and John ply upon Down-East fire-wood at our back doors,—but those sharp-pointed, trenchant ones that philosophers love to draw across the hearts of men, cutting, tearing, grinding away, till the fibre of their being quivers under the remorseless teeth. Many were forged, we all know, in the celebrated workshop of W. Shakspeare; other particularly fine-toothed ones were pointed by a French artisan named Rochefoucauld; and many more, bright and lucent, are borrowed—reverently be it spoken!—from that grand arsenal of truth and power built by the hands of the great holy men of holy times. But who made the many tough old blades which have a temper that outlives time,—whose rugged points have never lost a whit of their keenness, after having torn their way through human bosoms, been hung up and taken down again for centuries, and never a maker's name upon them?
Going by a little squalid old house, some nights ago, I saw a light in a ground-floor window; and peeping in,—my name is not Tom, nor was it any Godiva I was espying, but I could not help a sort of curiosity to see what that eleven-o'clock light might exhibit,—I saw a pale face, and a thin, bent form. Soft hair was parted from a white brow, and fell in ringlets upon a shabby dress. Eyes, that might have shone with bewitching brilliancy in certain parlors I know of, were sadly and intently fixed upon the quick-drawn needle which the thin fingers were assiduously and wearily plying. The light came from a half-burnt candle.—No, Mrs. Grundy, your friend Asmodeus did not knock nor go in; but he thought of you, although you were at that moment virtuously bestowed, with matronly grace, in curtained slumbers. Asmodeus looked, and beheld, through a hole in the curtain, an old, rusty saw crunching away across that poor, desolate, weary heart, Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle.—"Stop, stop, father!" cries Asmodeus, Jr. "What does that mean?"—Why, my dear boy, that is the saw which was tearing the poor woman's heart. The words mean, in plain English, "The play is not worth the candle." In ancient days folks did not have big glass chandeliers, all sparkling with gas. The Asmodei of old did not turn up, or down, or out, the luminaries which bathed them in midnight brilliancy. They snuffed them. When the old French kings danced minuets with their most virtuous and respected maids of honor on private stages, they were enlivened by tallow flames. They had no quarterly bills for so many feet of light; for they bought it by the pound. When Monsieur Deuse-Ace rattled the dice or shuffled the cards with Signor Double-Six, he looked for luck, not at a patent safety-burner, but at the stranger in the flickering candle-flame. Now sometimes M. Deuse-Ace came out of that rattling and shuffling with an empty purse, and, when called on to pay for the tallow, he swore, like a bad man as he was, that the play was not worth the candle. So I think that famous old saw must have been made by some unhappy Murad who was unlucky in turning up small numbers or having dealt to him cards considerably below kings,—though knaves were his constant companions. But this elegant English, figlio mio, may be more idiomatically rendered, perhaps, in the language of the day, thus:—It doesn't pay! Paying is the touchstone nowadays to which everything is brought, from the stock of the great Beaugous Bootjack Company to the great Rebellion of 1861.
Well, there sat the poor woman,—you see, Mrs. Grundy, that she was no Godiva, nor I a peeping Tom. My eyesight is good yet,—and I could see that old saw deep in her sad, trembling bosom. No! that jeu was a bad one. She had lost her youth, her happiness, her all, on the tapis vert of human life. It had turned up noir when it should have come rouge, and the candle was to pay for. Do you know what strain of music came sadly on my ear, and how I felt when I saw that the horrible old saw was keeping time to it? It was a little song of Hood's. You know it. Many know it. She knew it, ah, too well! She knew it by heart.