At this moment I feel the dresser in the corner, gleaming with the cook's refulgent pride of polished tins; I am sensible of that pulpit ironing-table—alas! the flat-iron on its ring is as cold as the hand that erst so deftly guided it. I bask before the old-fashioned hospitable fireplace, capacious and embracing, and jolly with its old-fashioned hickory blaze, and the fat old-fashioned kettle hung upon the old-fashioned crane, swinging and singing of old-fashioned abundance and good cheer. I behold the Madras turban, the white neckerchief crossed over the bosom, the clumsy steel-bowed spectacles, the check apron, and the old-fashioned love that is forever new. But they never come again.
That kitchen was my hospital and my school,—as much better than the whole round of select academies and classical institutes that my father tried, and that tried me, as check aprons and love are more inculcating than canes and quarterly bills; and however it may be with my head, my heart never has forgotten the lessons I learned there. Thither, on the nipping nights of winter, brought I my small fingers and toes, numbed and aching with snow-balling and skating, to be tenderly rubbed before the fire, or fondly folded in the motherly apron. Thither brought I an extensive and various assortment of splinters and fresh cuts; thither my impervious nose, to be lubricated with goose-grease, or my swollen angry tonsils ("waxen kernels," Aunt Judy called them), to be mollified with volatile liniment.
It was here that my own free mind, uncompelled by pedagogues and unallured by prizes, first achieved a whole chapter in the Bible. Cook and laundress and chambermaid were out for the evening; the table had been cleared and covered with the fresh white cloth; and I, perched on Aunt Judy's lap at the end next the fireplace, glided featly over the short words, plunged pluckily through the long, (braced, as it were, against the superior education and the spectacles behind me,) of the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, from the Word that was in the beginning, to the Hereafter of the glorified Son of man. After which so large performance for so small a boy, we re-refreshed ourselves with that cheerful hymn, in which Dr. Watts lyrically disposes of the questions,
"And must this body die,
This mortal frame decay?
And must these active limbs of mine
Lie mouldering in the clay?"
For so infantile a heart, my darling old mammy had a wonderful lack of active imagination, even in her religion; for there all was real and actual to her. Her pleasures of memory and her pleasures of hope were alike founded upon fact. Christ was as personal to her as her own rheumatic frame, and heaven as positive as her kitchen. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed";—but for her, to believe and to see were one. So whatever imagination she may by nature have possessed seemed to have dwindled for lack of exercise: it was long since she had had any use for it. She had no folk-lore, no faculty of story-telling,—only a veracious legend or two of our family, which she invariably related with an affidavit-like scrupulousness of circumstance. I cannot recollect that she ever once beguiled me with a mere nurse's tale. So when at that kitchen-table we read "The Pilgrim's Progress" together, we presented a curious entertainment for the student of intellectual processes,—nurse and child arriving by diverse arguments of imagination at the same result of reality;—she knowing that Sin was a burden, because she had borne it; I, because I had seen it in the picture strapped to Christian's back;—she, that Despair was a giant, because he had often appalled her soul within her; I, because in a dream he had made me scream last night;—she, that Death was a river, because so many of her dear ones had gone over, and because on her clear days she could see the other shore; I, because, as I lay with my young cheek against her old heart, I could hear the beating of its waves.
Blessed indeed is the mother who is admitted to the sanctuary of her darling's secrets with the freedom with which Aunt Judy penetrated (was invited rather, with parted lips and sparkling eyes) to mine,—into whose sympathetic ear are poured, in all the dream-borne melody of the first songs of the heart, in all "the tender thought, the speechless pain" of its first violets, his earliest confessions, aspirations, loves, wrongs, troubles, triumphs. Well do I remember that day when, trembling, ghastly, faint, I fell in tears upon her neck, and poured into her bosom and basin the spasmodic story of My First Cigar! Well do I remember that night, when, bursting from the evening party in the parlor, and the thick red married lady in the thin blue tarletan, and all my raptures and my anguish, I flung myself into Aunt Judy's arms and acknowledged the soft corn of My First Love, raving at the fatal sandy-whiskered gulf that yawned between me and Mine thick blue Own One in the thin red tarletan!
Well do I remember—though I was only seven times one—the panting exultation with which I flung into her lap the cheap colored print of the Tower of Babel (showing the hurly-burly of French bricklayers and Irish hod-carriers, and the grand row generally) that I had just won at school by correctly committing to memory, and publicly reciting, the whole of
"Almighty God, thy piercing eye
Strikes through the shades of night," etc.
My first prize! The Tower of Babel fell untimely into the wash-tub, but she dried it on her warm bosom; and I have never forgotten that All our secret actions lie All open to His sight; though I have never seen the verses (they were in Comly's Spelling-Book) from that day to this.
In those days we had a youth of talent in the family,—a sort of sophomorical boil, that the soap and sugar of indiscriminate adulation had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time Sophomore missed the first volume of his Potter's "Antiquities of Greece"; and, having searched for it in vain, made up his mind that I had presented it as a keepsake, together with a lock of my hair and a cent's worth of pea-nut taffy, to the head girl of the infant class at my Sunday school. So Sophomore, being in morals a pedant and in intellect a bully, accused me of appropriating the book, and offered me a dollar if I would restore it to him. With swelling heart and quivering lip I carried the wanton insult—my first great wrong—straight to Aunt Judy, who, in her mild way, resented it as a personal outrage to her own feelings, and tried to soothe and console me by assuring me that "it would all rub out when it got dry." Three years later, as I was passing the sibyl's house one morning, her mother met me at the door and handed me an odd volume of Potter's "Antiquities of Greece," which she had just discovered in some out-of-the-way corner, where it had been mislaid, and which she desired me to hand to Sophomore with the sibyl's compliments, thanks, regrets, and several other delicacies of the season. But I handed it first to Aunt Judy, who gloried boisterously in my first triumph. Sophomore patronized me magnificently with apologies; but if the wrong never gets any drier than Aunt Judy's joyful eyes were then, it never will rub out.