One day we two were allowed to take a walk together;I,as the older,being supposed to take care of her.Although we were going towards the Cove,over a secluded road,she insisted upon wearing a brand-new pair of red morocco boots.All went well until we came to a bog by the roadside,where sweet-flag and cat-tails grew.Out in the middle of the bog,where no venturesome boy had ever attempted their seizure,there were many tall,fine-looking brown cat-tails growing.She caught sight of them,and before Isaw what she was doing,she had shot from my side like an arrow from the bow,and was far out on the black,quaking surface,that at first upheld her light weight.I stood petrified with horror.
I knew all about that dangerous place.I had been told that nobody had ever found out how deep that mud was.I was uttered just one imploring "Come back!"when she turned to me with a shriek,throwing up her arms towards me.She was sinking!There was nobody in sight,and there was no time to think.I ran,or rather flew,across the bog,with just one thought in my mind,"Ihave got to get her out!"Some angel must have prevented me from making a misstep,and sinking with her.Ifelt the power of a giant suddenly taking possession of my small frame.Quicker than I could tell of it,I had given one tremendous pull (she had already sunk above her boot-tops),and had dragged her back to the road.It is a marvel to me now how I--a child of scarcely six years--succeeded in rescuing her.It did not seem to me as if I were doing it myself,but as if some unseen Power had taken possession of me for a moment,and made me do it.And I suppose that when we act from a sudden impulse to help another out of trouble,it never is ourself that does the good deed.The Highest Strength just takes us and uses us.Icertainly felt equal to going straight through the earth to China after my little sister,if she had stink out of sight.
We were two miserable looking children when we reached home,the sticky ooze having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps of mud,with which my own clothes also were soiled.I had to drag or carry her all the way,for she could not or would not walk a step.And alas for the morocco boots!They were never again red.
I also received a scolding for not taking better care of my little sister,and I was not very soon allowed again to have her company in my rambles.
We usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out-of-door amusement near home.And our sports,as well as our books,had a spice of Merry Old England.They were full of kings and queens,and made sharp contrasts,as well as odd mixtures,with the homeliness of our everyday life.
One of them,a sort of rhymed dialogue,began with the couplet:--"Queen Anne,Queen Anne,she sits in the sun,As fair as a lady,as white as a nun."If "Queen Anne"did not give a right guess as to which hand of the messenger held the king's letter to her,she was contempt-uously informed that she was "as brown as a bun."In another name,four little girls joined hands across,in couples,chanting:--"I wish my father were a king,I wish my mother were a queen,And I a little companion!"concluding with a close embrace in a dizzying whirl,breathlessly shouting all together,--"A bundle of fagots!A bundle of fagots!"In a third,which may have begun with a juvenile reacting of the Colonial struggle for liberty,we ranged ourselves under two leaders,who made an archway over our heads of their lifted hands and arms,saying,as we passed beneath,--"Lift up the gates as high as the sky,And let King George and his army pass by!"We were told to whisper "Oranges"or "Lemons"for a pass-word;and "Oranges"always won the larger enlistment,whether British or American.
And then there was "Grandmother Gray,"and the "Old woman from Newfoundland,With all her children in her hand;"and the "Knight from Spain Inquiring for your daughter Jane,"and numberless others,nearly all of them bearing a distinct Old World flavor.One of our play-places was an unoccupied end of the burying-ground,overhung by the Colonel's apple-trees and close under his wall,so that we should not be too near the grave-stones.
I do not think that death was at all a real thing to me or to my brothers and sisters at this time.We lived so near the grave-yard that it seemed merely the extension of our garden.We wandered there at will,trying to decipher the moss-grown inscriptions,and wondering at the homely carvings of cross-bones and cherubs and willow-trees on the gray slate-stones.I did not associate those long green mounds with people who had once lived,though we were careful,having been so instructed,not to step on the graves.To ramble about there and puzzle ourselves with the names and dates,was like turning over the pages of a curious old book.We had not the least feeling of irreverence in taking the edge of the grave-yard for our playground.It was known as "the old burying-ground";and we children regarded it with a sort of affectionate freedom,as we would a grandmother,because it was old.
That,indeed,was one peculiar attraction of the town itself;it was old,and it seemed old,much older than it does now.There was only one main street,said to have been the first settlers'cowpath to Wenham,which might account for its zigzag picturesqueness.All the rest were courts or lanes.
The town used to wear a delightful air of drowsiness,as if she had stretched herself out for an afternoon nap,with her head towards her old mother,Salem,and her whole length reclining towards the sea,till she felt at her feet,through her green robes,the clip of the deep water at the Farms.All her elder children recognized in her quiet steady-going ways a maternal unity and strength of character,as of a town that understood her own plans,and had settled down to peaceful,permanent habits.Her spirit was that of most of our Massachusetts coast-towns.They were transplanted shoots of Old England.And it was the voice of a mother-country more ancient than their own,that little children heard crooning across the sea in their cradle-hymns and nursery-songs.
