"In the drawer? No, it is not in the drawer. You don't know anything about it."
Not quite so fast. Jamie knows the "Atlantic Monthly" as well as you; and if you will open the drawer for him, he will rapidly scatter its contents till he comes to the missing "Monthly," safe under the shawls where he deposited it.
If you are hanging your room with ground-pine, he lays hold of every stray twig, and tucks it into every crack he can reach. Will you have some corn out of the barrel? It is Jamie for balancing himself on the edge, and reaching down into the depths after it, till little more than his heels are visible. If, in a sudden exuberance, you make a "cheese,"—not culinary, but whirligig—round go his little bobtail petticoats in fatuous imitation. You walk the floor awhile, lost in day dreaming, to find this little monkey trotting behind you with droll gravity, his hands clasped behind his head, like yours; and he breaks in upon your most serious meditations with, "Baddy get down on floor, want wide on Baddy back," as nonchalantly as if he were asking you to pass the salt. All that he says, all that he does, has its peculiar charm. Not that he is in the least a remarkable child.
"I trust we have within our realme
Five [thousand] as good as hee."
Otherwise what will befall this sketch?
I do not expect anything will ever come of him. In a few years he will be just like everybody else; but now he is the peculiar gift of Heaven. Men and women walk and talk all day long, and nobody minds them; while this little ignoramus seldom opens his lips but you think nothing was ever so winsomely spoken. I suspect it is only his complete simplicity and sincerity. What he says and what he does are the direct, unmistakable effusions of his nature. All comes straight from the secret place where his soul abideth. Even his subterfuges are open as the day. You know that you are looking upon virgin Nature. Just as it flashed from its source, you see the unadulterated spirit. If grown-up persons would or could be as frank as he,—if they had no more misgivings, concealments, self-distrust, self-thought than he,—they would doubtless be as interesting. Every separate human being is a separate phenomenon and mystery; and if he could only be unthinkingly himself, as Jamie is, that self would be as much more captivating as it is become great and subtle by growth and experience. But we—fashion, habit, society, training, all the culture of life, mix a sort of paste, and we gradually become coated with it, and it hardens upon us; so it comes to pass by-and-by that we see our associates no longer, but only the casing in which they walk about; and as one is a good deal like another, we are not deeply fascinated. Sometimes a Thor's hammer breaks this flinty rock in pieces. Sometimes a fervid sun melts it, and you are let in to where the vigilant soul keeps watch and ward. Sometimes, alas! the hardening process seems to have struck in, and you find nothing but petrifaction all the way through.
Perhaps, after all, it is just as well; for, if our neighbors won upon us unawares as Jamie does, when should we ever find time to do anything? On the whole, it is a great deal better as it is, until the world has learned to love its neighbor as itself. For the present, it would not be safe to go abroad with the soul exposed. You fetch me a blow with your bludgeon, and I mind it not at all through my coat-of-mail; but if it had fallen on my heart, it would have wounded me to death. Nay, if you did but know where the sutures are, how you would stab and stab, dear fellow-man and brother, not to say Christian! No, we are not to be trusted with each other yet,—I with you, nor you with me; so we will keep our armor on awhile, please Heaven.
And as I think of Jamie frisking through the happy, merry days, I see how sad, unnatural, and wicked a thing it is, that mothers must so often miss the sunshine that ought to come to them through their little ones. We speak of losing children, when they die; but many a mother loses her children, though they play upon her threshold every day. She loses them, because she has no leisure to bask, and loiter, and live in them. She is so occupied in providing for their wants, that she has no time to sun herself in their grace. She snatches from them sweetness enough to keep herself alive, but she does not expand and mellow and ripen in their warmth for all the world. And the hours go by, and the days go by, evening and morning, seed-time and harvest, and the little frocks are outgrown, and the little socks outworn, and the little baby—oh! there is no little baby any more, but a boy with the crust formed already on his soul.
I marvel what becomes of these small people in heaven. They cannot stay as they are, for then heaven would be a poorer place than earth, where all but idiots increase in wisdom and stature. And if they keep growing,—why, it seems but a sorry exchange, to give up your tender, tiny, clinging infant, that is still almost a part of your own life, and receive in return a full-grown angel a great deal wiser and stronger than you. Perhaps it is only a just punishment for our guilty ignorance and selfishness in treating the little things so harshly, that they die away from us in sheer self-defence. And how good is the All-Father thus to declare for His little ones, when the strife waxes too hot, and the odds too heavy against them! We can maltreat them, but only to a certain limit. Beyond that, the lovely, stern angel of Death steps in, and bears them softly away to perpetual peace. I read our vital statistics,—so many thousands under five years of age dying each year; and I rejoice in every one. If their chances were fair for purity and happiness, the earth is too beautiful to slip so quickly from their hold; but, with sin and suffering, twin beasts of prey, lying in wait to devour, oh! thrice and four times happy are they who escape swiftly from the struggle in which they are all too sure to fail. So many, at least, are safe within the fold.
And thus, too, it seems providential, that the sin of pagan nations should take the form of infanticide. It is Satanic work, but God overrules it for good. Evil defeats itself, and hatred crowds the lists of love. From misery and wickedness, from stifled cities, over-full, from pagan lands, steeped centuries long in vice and crime, from East and West and North and South, over all the world, the innocent souls go up,—little lily-buds, swelling white and pure from earthly slime to bloom in heavenly splendor.