University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
OUR CHILD-EDEN.

My mother's talk aroused all the enthusiasm of my
nature. Here was a motive, to be sure. I went
to bed and dreamed of it. I thought over all
possible ways of growing big and strong rapidly—I had
heard the stories of Samson from the Bible. How did he
grow so strong? He was probably once a little boy like
me. “Did he go for the cows, I wonder,” thought I—“and
let down very big bars when his hands were little, and learn
to ride the old horse bare-back, when his legs were very
short?” All these things I was emulous to do; and I resolved
to lift very heavy pails full of water, and very many
of them, and to climb into the mow, and throw down great
armfulls of hay, and in every possible way to grow big and
strong.

I remember the next day after my talk with my mother
was Saturday, and I had leave to go up and spend it with
Susie.

There was a meadow just back of her mother's house,
which we used to call the mowing lot. It was white with
daisies, yellow with buttercups, with some moderate share
of timothy and herds grass intermixed. But what was specially
interesting to us was, that, down low at the roots of
the grass, and here and there in moist, rich spots, grew wild
strawberries, large and juicy, rising on nice high stalks,
with three or four on a cluster. What joy there was in the
possession of a whole sunny Saturday afternoon to be spent
with Susie in this meadow! To me the amount of happiness
in the survey was greatly in advance of what I now
have in the view of a three weeks' summer excursion.

When, after multiplied cautions and directions, and careful
adjustment of Susie's clothing, on the part of her mother,

Susie was fairly delivered up to me; when we had turned
our backs on the house and got beyond call, then our
bliss was complete. How carefully and patronizingly I
helped her up the loose, mossy, stone wall, all hedged with
a wilderness of golden-rod, ferns, raspberry bushes, and asters!
Down we went through this tangled thicket, into such
a secure world of joy, where the daisied meadow received
us to her motherly bosom, and we were sure nobody
could see us.

We could sit down and look upward, and see daisies and
grasses nodding and bobbing over our heads, hiding us as
completely as two young grass birds; and it was such fun
to think that nobody could find out where we were! Two
bob-o-links, who had a nest somewhere in that lot, used to
mount guard in an old apple tree, and sit on tall, bending
twigs, and say, “Chack! chack! chack!” and flutter their
black and white wings up and down, and burst out into
most elaborate and complicated babbles of melody. These
were our only associates and witnesses. We thought that
they knew us, and were glad to see us there, and wouldn't
tell anybody where we were for the world. There was an
exquisite pleasure to us in this sense of utter isolation—of
being hid with each other where nobody could find us.

We had worlds of nice secrets peculiar to ourselves. Nobody
but ourselves knew where the “thick spots” were,
where the ripe, scarlet strawberries grew; the big boys
never suspected them, we said to one another, nor the big
girls; it was our own secret, which we kept between our own
little selves. How we searched, and picked, and chatted, and
oh'd and ah'd to each other, as we found wonderful places,
where the strawberries passed all belief!

But profoundest of all our wonderful secrets were our discoveries
in the region of animal life. We found, in a tuft
of grass overshadowed by wild roses, a grass bird's nest.
In vain did the cunning mother creep yards from the cherished
spot, and then suddenly fly up in the wrong place; we
were not to be deceived. Our busy hands parted the lace

curtains of fern, and, with whispers of astonishment, we
counted the little speckled, bluegreen eggs. How round and
fine and exquisite, past all gems polished by art, they seemed;
and what a mystery was the little curious smooth-lined
nest in which we found them! We talked to the birds
encouragingly. “Dear little birds,” we said, “don't be afraid;
nobody but we shall know it;” and then we said to each
other, “Tom Halliday never shall find this out, nor Jim
Fellows.” They would carry off the eggs and tear up the
nest; and our hearts swelled with such a responsibility for
the tender secret, that it was all we could do that week to
avoid telling it to everybody we met. We informed all the
children at school that we knew something that they didn't
—something that we never should tell!—something so wonderful!—something
that it would be wicked to tell of—for
mother said so; for be it observed that, like good children,
we had taken our respective mothers into confidence, and
received the strictest and most conscientious charges as to
our duty to keep the birds' secret.

In that enchanted meadow of ours grew tall, yellow lilies,
glowing as the sunset, hanging down their bells, six or seven
in number, from high, graceful stalks, like bell towers of
fairy land. They were over our heads sometimes, as they
rose from the grass and daisies, and we looked up into their
golden hearts spotted with black, with a secret, wondering
joy.

“Oh, don't pick them, they look too pretty,” said Susie to
me once when I stretched up my hand to gather one of these.
“Let's leave them to be here when we come again! I like to
see them wave.”

And so we left the tallest of them; but I was not forbidden
to gather handfuls of the less wonderful specimens that
grew only one or two on a stalk. Our bouquets of flowers
increased with our strawberries.

Through the middle of this meadow chattered a little
brook, gurgling and tinkling over many-colored pebbles,
and here and there collecting itself into a miniature waterfall,

as it pitched over a broken bit of rock. For our height
and size, the waterfalls of this little brook were equal to
those of Trenton, or any of the medium cascades that draw
the fashionable crowd of grown-up people; and what was
the best of it was, it was our brook, and our waterfall. We
found them, and we verily believed nobody else but ourselves
knew of them.

By this waterfall, as I called it, which was certainly a
foot and a half high, we sat and arranged our strawberries
when our baskets were full, and I talked with Susie about
what my mother had told me.

I can see her now, the little crumb of womanhood, as she
sat, gaily laughing at me. “She didn't care a bit,” she
said. She had just as lief wait till I grew to be a man.
Why, we could go to school together, and have Saturday afternoons
together. “Don't you mind it, Hazzy Dazzy,” she
said, coming close up to me, and putting her little arms coaxingly
round my neck; “we love each other, and it's ever
so nice now.”

I wonder what the reason is that it is one of the first
movements of affectionate feeling to change the name of
the loved one. Give a baby a name, ever so short and ever
so musical, where is the mother that does not twist it into
some other pet name between herself and her child. So Susie,
when she was very loving, called me Hazzy, and sometimes
would play on my name, and call me Hazzy Dazzy, and sometimes
Dazzy, and we laughed at this because it was between
us; and we amused ourselves with thinking how surprised
people would be to hear her say Dazzy, and how they
would wonder who she meant. In like manner, I used to call
her Daisy when we were by ourselves, because she seemed to
me so neat and trim and pure, and wore a little flat hat on
Sundays just like a daisy.

“I'll tell you, Daisy,” said I, “just what I'm going to do
—I'm going to grow strong as Sampson did.”

“Oh, but how can you?” she suggested, doubtfully.

“Oh, I'm going to run and jump and climb, and carry ever

so much water for Mother, and I'm to ride on horseback
and go to mill, and go all round on errands, and so I shall
get to be a man fast, and when I get to be a man I'll build
a house all on purpose for you and me—I'll build it all myself;
it shall have a parlor and a dining-room and kitchen,
and bed-room, and well-room, and chambers”—

“And nice closets to put things in,” suggested the little
woman.

“Certainly, ever so many—just where you want them,
there I'll put them,” said I, with surpassing liberality. “And
then, when we live together, I'll take care of you—I'll keep
off all the lions and bears and panthers. If a bear should
come at you, Daisy, I should tear him right in two, just
as Sampson did.”

At this vivid picture, Daisy nestled close to my shoulder,
and her eyes grew large and reflective. “We shouldn't
leave poor Mother alone,” said she.

“Oh, no; she shall come and live with us,” said I, with an
exalted generosity. “I will make her a nice chamber on
purpose, and my mother shall come, too.”

“But she can't leave your father, you know.”

“Oh, father shall come, too—when he gets old and can't
preach any more. I shall take care of them all.”

And my little Daisy looked at me with eyes of approving
credulity, and said I was a brave boy; and the bobolinks
chittered and chattered applause as they sung and skirmished
and whirled up over the meadow grasses; and by and by,
when the sun fell low, and looked like a great golden ball,
with our hands full of lilies, and our baskets full of strawberries,
we climbed over the old wall, and toddled home.

After that, I remember many gay and joyous passages
in that happiest summer of my life. How, when autumn
came, we roved through the woods together, and gathered
such stores of glossy brown chestnuts. What joy it was to
us to scuff through the painted fallen leaves and send them
flying like showers of jewels before us! How I reconnoitered
and marked available chestnut trees, and how I gloried in

being able to climb like a cat, and get astride high limbs
and shake and beat them, and hear the glossy brown nuts
fall with a rich, heavy thud below, while Susie was busily
picking up at the foot of the tree. How she did flatter me
with my success and prowess! Tom Halliday might be a
bigger boy, but he could never go up a tree as I could; and
as for that great clumsy Jim Fellows, she laughed to
think what a figure he would make, going out on the end
of the small limbs, which would be sure to break and send
him bundling down. The picture which Susie drew of the
awkwardness of the big boys often made us laugh till the
tears rolled down our cheeks. To this day I observe it as a
weakness of my sex that we all take it in extremely good
part when the pretty girl of our heart laughs at other fellows
in a snug, quiet way, just between one's dear self and
herself alone. We encourage our own dear little cat to
scratch and claw the sacred memories of Jim or Tom, and
think that she does it in an extremely cunning and diverting
way—it being understood between us that there is no
malice in it—that “Jim and Tom are nice fellows enough,
you know—only that somebody else is so superior to them,”
etc.

Susie and I considered ourselves as an extremely forehanded,
well-to-do partnership, in the matter of gathering in our
autumn stores. No pair of chipmonks in the neighborhood
conducted business with more ability. We had a famous
cellar that I dug and stoned, where we stored away our
spoils. We had chestnuts and walnuts and butternuts, as
we said, to last us all winter, and many an earnest consultation
and many a busy hour did the gathering and arranging
of these spoils cost us.

Then, oh, the golden times we had when father's barrels of
new cider came home from the press! How I cut and gathered
and selected bunches of choice straws, which I took to
school and showed to Susie, surreptitiously, at intervals, during
school exercises, that she might see what a provision of
bliss I was making for Saturday afternoons. How Susie was

sent to visit us on these occasions, in leather shoes and
checked apron, so that we might go in the cellar; and how,
mounted up on logs on either side of a barrel of cider,
we plunged our straws through the foamy mass at the bunghole,
and drew out long draughts of sweet cider! I was sure
to get myself dirty in my zeal, which she never did; and
then she would laugh at me and patronize me, and wipe me
up in a motherly sort of way. “How do you always get so
dirty, Harry?” she would say, in a truly maternal tone of reproof.
“How do you keep so clean?” I would say, in wonder;
and she would laugh, and call me her dear, dirty boy.
She would often laugh at me, the little elf, and make herself
distractingly merry at my expense, but the moment she saw
that the blood was getting too high in my cheeks, she would
stroke me down with praises, as became a wise young daughter
of Eve.

Besides all this, she had her little airs of moral superiority,
and used occasionally to lecture me in the nicest manner.
Being an only darling, she herself was brought up in the
strictest ways in which little feet could go; and the nicety
of her conscience was as unsullied as that of her dress. I
was hot tempered and heady, and under stress of great provocation
would come as near swearing as a minister's son
could possibly do. When the big boys ravaged our house
under the tree, or threw sticks at us, I used to stretch every
permitted limit, and scream, “Darn you!” and “Confound
you!” with a vigor and emphasis that made it almost equal
to something a good deal stronger.

On such occasions Susie would listen pale and frightened,
and, when reason came back to me, gravely lecture me,
and bring me into the paths of virtue. She used to rehearse
to me the teachings of her mother about all manner of good
things.

I have her image now in my mind, looking so crisp and
composed and neat in her sobriety, repeating, for my edification,
the hymn which contained the good child's ideal in
those days:

I can hear now the delicious lisp of my little saint, and
see the gracious gravity of her manner. To my mind, she
was unaccountably well established in the ways of virtue,
and I listened to her little lectures with a secret reverence.

Susie was especially careful in the observation of Sunday,
and as that is a point where children are apt to be
particularly weak, she would exhort me to rigorous exactitude.

I kept it, first, by thinking that I should see her at church,
and by growing very precise about my Sunday clothes,
whereat my sisters winked at each other and laughed slyly.
Then at church we sat in great square pews adjoining to
each other. It was my pleasure to peep through the slats at
Susie. She was wonderful to behold then, all in white, with
a profusion of blue ribbons and her little flat hat over her
curls—and a pair of dainty blue shoes peeping out from her
dress.

She informed me that little girls never must think about
their clothes in meeting, and so I supposed she was trying to
be entirely absorbed from earthly vanities, unconscious of
the fixed and earnest stare with which I followed every
movement.

Human nature is but partially sanctified, however, in little
saints as well as grown up ones, and I noticed that occasionally,
probably by accident, the great blue eyes met mine,
and a smile, almost amounting to a sinful giggle, was with
difficulty choked down. She was, however, a most conscientious

little puss and recovered herself in a moment, and
looked gravely upward at the minister, not one word of
whose sermon could she by any possibility understand,
severely devoting herself to her religious duties, till exhausted
nature gave way. The little lids would close over
the eyes like blue pimpernel before a shower,—the head
would drop and nod, till finally the mother would dispense
the little christian from further labors, by laying her head
on her lap and drawing her feet up comfortably upon the
seat, to sleep out to the end of the sermon.

When winter came on I beset my older brother to make
me a sled. Sleds, such as every boy in Boston or New York
now rejoices in, were blessings in our parts unknown; our
sled was of rough, domestic manufacture.

My brother, laughing, asked if my sled was intended to
draw Susie on, and on my earnest response in the affirmative
he amused himself with painting it in colors, red and blue,
most glorious to behold.

My soul was magnified within me when I first started
with this stylish establishment to wait on Susie.

What young fellow does not exult in a smart team when
he has a girl whom he wants to dazzle? Great was my joy
and pride when I first stopped at Susie's and told her to
hurry on her things, for I had come to draw her to school!

What a pretty picture she made in her little blue knit
hood and mittens, her bright curls flying and cheeks glowing
with the keen winter air! There was a long hill on the
way to school, and seated on the sled behind her, I careered
gloriously down with exultation in my breast, while a
stream of laughter floated on the breeze behind us. That
was a winter of much coasting down hill, of red cheeks and
red noses, of cold toes, which we never minded, and of abundant
jollity. Susie, under her mother's careful showing,
knit me a pair of red mittens, warming to the heart and
delightful to the eyes; and I piled up wood and carried
water for Mother, and by vigorous economy earned money
enough to buy Susie a great candy heart as big as my two

hands, that had the picture of two doves tied together by a
blue ribbon on one side, and on the other two very red
hearts skewered together by an arrow.

No work of art ever gave greater and more unmingled
delight. Susie gave it a prominent place in her baby-house,
—and though it was undeniably sweet, as certain little nibbling
trials on its edges had proved, yet the artistic sense
was stronger than the palate, and the candy heart was kept
to be looked at and rejoiced in.

Susie's mother was an intimate and confidential friend of
my mother, and a most docile and confiding sheep of my
father's flock. She regarded her minister's family, and all
that belonged to it, as something set apart and sacred. My
mother had imparted to her the little joke of my matrimonial
wishes, and the two matrons had laughed over it together,
and then sighed, and said, “Ah! well, stranger
things have happened.” Susie's mother told how she used
to know her husband when he was a little boy, and what if
it should be! and then they strayed on to the general truth
that this was a world of uncertainty, and we never can tell
what a day may bring forth.

Our little idyl, too, was rather encouraged by my brothers
and sisters, who made a pet and plaything of Susie, and
diverted themselves by the gravity and honesty with which
we devoted ourselves to each other. Oh! dear ignorant
days—sweet little child-Eden—why could it not last?

But it could not. It was fleeting as the bobolink's song,
as the spotted yellow lilies, as the grass and daisies. My
little Daisy was too dear to the angels to be spared to grow
up in our coarse world.

The winter passed and spring came, and Susie and I
rejoiced in the first bluebird, and found blue and white violets
together, and went to school together, till the heats of
summer came on. Then a sad epidemic began to linger
around in our mountains, and to be heard of in neighboring
villages, and my poor Daisy was scorched by its breath.

I remember well our last afternoon together in the

meadow, where, the year before, we had gathered strawberries.
We went down into it in high spirits; the strawberries
were abundant, and we chatted and picked together
gaily, till Daisy began to complain that her head ached
and her throat was sore. I sat her down by the brook, and
wet her curls with the water, and told her to rest there, and
let me pick for her. But pretty soon she called me. She
was crying with pain. “Oh! Hazzy, dear, I must go home,”
she said. “Take me to Mother.” I hurried to help her, for
she cried and moaned so that I was frightened. I began to
cry, too, and we came up the steps of her mother's house
sobbing together.

When her mother came out the little one suppressed her
tears and distress for a moment, and turning, threw her
arms around my neck and kissed me. “Do n't cry any more,
Hazzy,” she said; “we'll see each other again.”

Her mother took her up in her arms and carried her in,
and I never saw my little baby-wife again on this earth!
Not where the daisies and buttercups grew; nor where the
golden lilies shook their bells, and the bobolinks trilled;
not in the school-room, with its many child-voices; not in
the old square pew in church—never, never more that trim
little maiden form, those violet blue eyes, those golden curls
of hair, were to be seen on earth!

My Daisy's last kisses, with the fever throbbing in her
veins, very nearly took me with her. From that time I have
only indistinct remembrances of going home crying, of turning
with a strange loathing from my supper, of creeping up
and getting into bed, shivering and burning, with a thumping
and beating pain in my head.

The next morning the family doctor pronounced me a case
of the epidemic (scarlet fever) which he said was all about
among children in the neighborhood.

I have dim, hot, hazy recollections of burning, thirsty,
head-achey days, when I longed for cold water, and could
not get a drop, according to the good old rules of medical
practice in those times. I dimly observed different people

sitting up with me every night, and putting different medicines
in my unresisting mouth; and day crept slowly after
day, and I lay idly watching the rays of sunlight and flutter
of leaves on the opposite wall.

One afternoon, I remember, as I lay thus listless, I heard
the village bell strike slowly—six times. The sound wavered
and trembled with long and solemn intervals of shivering
vibration between. It was the numbering of my
Daisy's little years on earth,—the announcement that she
had gone to the land where time is no more measured by
day and night, for there shall be no night there.

When I was well again I remember my mother told me
that my little Daisy was in heaven, and I heard it with a
dull, cold chill about my heart, and wondered that I could
not cry.

I look back now into my little heart as it was then, and
remember the paroxysms of silent pain I used to have at
times, deep within, while yet I seemed to be like any other
boy.

I heard my sisters one day discussing whether I cared
much for Daisy's death.

“He don't seem to, much,” said one.

“Oh, children are little animals, they forget what's out
of sight,” said another.

But I did not forget,—I could not bear to go to the
meadow where we gathered strawberries,—to the chestnut
trees where we had gathered nuts,—and oftentimes, suddenly,
in work or play, that smothering sense of a past,
forever gone, came over me like a physical sickness.

When children grow up among older people and are
pushed and jostled, and set aside in the more engrossing
interests of their elders, there is an almost incredible amount
of timidity and dumbness of nature, with regard to the
expression of inward feeling,—and yet, often at this time the
instinctive sense of pleasure and pain is fearfully acute.
But the child has imperfectly learned language. His stock
of words, as yet, consists only in names and attributes of

outward and physical objects, and he has no phraseology
with which to embody a mere emotional experience.

What I felt when I thought of my little playfellow, was a
dizzying, choking rush of bitter pain and anguish. Children
can feel this acutely as men and women,—but even in mature
life this experience has no gift of expression.

My mother alone, with the divining power of mothers,
kept an eye on me. “Who knows,” she said to my father,
“but this death may be a heavenly call to him.”

She sat down gently by my bed one night and talked with
me of heaven, and the brightness and beauty there, and told
me that little Susie was now a fair white angel.

I remember shaking with a tempest of sobs.

“But I want her here,” I said. “I want to see her.”

My mother went over all the explanations in the premises,
—all that can ever be said in such cases, but I only sobbed
the more.

“I can't see her! Oh mother, mother!”

That night I sobbed myself to sleep and dreamed a blessed
dream.

It seemed to me that I was again in our meadow, and that
it was fairer than ever before; the sun shone gaily, the sky
was blue, and our great, golden lily stocks seemed mysteriously
bright and fair, but I was wandering lonesome and
solitary. Then suddenly my little Daisy came running to
meet me in her pink dress and white apron, with her golden
curls hanging down her neck. “Oh Daisy, Daisy!” said I
running up to her. “Are you alive?—they told me that you
were dead,”

“No, Hazzy, dear, I am not dead,—never you believe that,”
she said, and I felt the clasp of her soft little arms round
my neck. “Didn't I tell you we'd see each other again?”

“But they told me you were dead,” I said in wonder—and
I thought I held her off and looked at her,—she laughed
gently at me as she often used to, but her lovely eyes had a
mysterious power that seemed to thrill all through me.

“I am not dead, dear Hazzy,” she said. “We never die

where I am—I shall love you always,” and with that my
dream wavered and grew misty as when clear water breaks
an image into a thousand glassy rings and fragments.

I thought I heard lovely music, and felt soft, clasping
arms, and I awoke with a sense of being loved and pitied,
and comforted.

I cannot describe the vivid, penetrating sense of reality
which this dream left behind it. It seemed to warm my
whole life, and to give back to my poor little heart something
that had been rudely torn away from it. Perhaps
there is no reader that has not had experiences of the
wonderful power which a dream often exercises over the
waking hours for weeks after—and it will not appear incredible
that after that, instead of shunning the meadow
where we used to play, it was my delight to wander there
alone, to gather the strawberries—tend the birds' nests, and
lie down on my back in the grass and look up into the blue
sky through an overarching roof of daisies, with a strange
sort of feeling of society, as if my little Daisy were with me.

And is it not perhaps so? Right along side of this
troublous life, that is seen and temporal, may lie the green
pastures and the still waters of the unseen and eternal, and
they who know us better than we know them, can at any
time step across that little rill that we call Death, to minister
to our comfort.

For what are these child-angels made, that are sent down
to this world to bring so much love and rapture, and go
from us in such bitterness and mourning? If we believe
in Almighty Love we must believe that they have a merciful
and tender mission to our wayward souls. The love
wherewith we love them is something the most utterly pure
and unwordly of which human experience is capable, and
we must hope that every one who goes from us to the world
of light, goes holding an invisible chain of love by which to
draw us there.

Sometimes I think I would never have had my little
Daisy grow older on our earth. The little child dies in

growing into womanhood, and often the woman is far less
lovely than the little child. It seems to me that lovely and
loving childhood, with its truthfulness, its frank sincerity,
its pure, simple love, is so sweet and holy an estate that it
would be a beautiful thing in heaven to have a band of
heavenly children, guileless, gay and forever joyous—tender
Spring blossoms of the Kingdom of Light. Was it of such
whom he had left in his heavenly home our Saviour was
thinking, when he took little children up in his arms and
blessed them, and said, “Of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven?”