 | Clovernook, or, Recollections of our
neighborhood in the West |  |
THE SISTERS.
Years agone, there lived in a humble dwelling, a little way
from Clovernook, two little girls, neither beautiful nor yet
inordinately plain. They were sisters, loving each other with
a love that was more than love; but they were not, as might
be supposed, the only children of their parents. Not precisely
alike in their disposition, though perhaps the better mated on
that very account, they were never from their first years separated
for a single day. In the woods and the orchards, on the
hills, out in the meadows, and at school, they were still together.
The name of the younger was Ellie, that of the elder,
Rebecca. Ellie was gentle and sad, sad even in childhood, but
years, and the weight of sorrow that fell from them, weighed
down her heart, so that a calm but constant melancholy veiled
the sunshine of her life. The calmness arose not so much from
a clear perception of the great purposes God has about our wo,
as from that worst round which humanity ever fills—apathy,
indifference to the chill and the warmth, the flower and the
frost. But let me not anticipate. Rebecca had a less dreamy
and poetic temperament, more firmness and strength of character,
more cheerfulness and elasticity of disposition, so that
the younger wound herself about her as a vine winds round a
young and vigorous bole, or rested by her side as a daisy rests
in the shadow of a broad tree.
A thousand times have I seen them, long ago, their arms
about each other, and their dark, heavy locks blown together
by the wind. I remember a hill, half-covered with maples,
where often in the summer times they sat, one with knitting or
sewing—and this one was usually Ellie—and the other with a
and as soon as she could read at all, read well. Sometimes,
indeed, she put aside her book and related long stories to her
admiring and wondering sister, who as yet had learned to give
no utterance to her mused thought. Sometimes her dark eyes
filled with tears, as she heard these, to her, beautiful relations;
and she would say, mournfully, but half reproachfully, “I shall
never do any thing half so well as you.” Then the elder would
move away the tresses from the forehead of the younger, and,
kissing her many times, say, “Dear Ellie, you will be a poet;”
and so would coax her to read the verses she had written
yester eve, or the last Sabbath. Creditable they were, no
doubt, but love and an unschooled judgment exaggerated their
merits; still, pleased, each with herself and the other, they toward
sunset crossed the homeward meadows, as if they came
in inspiration from the holiest mount of song. The home in
which they lived was a little brown cottage, with no poetic
surroundings, save the apple tree, that in wintertime creaked
against the wall, and in summer blossomed and bore fruit
against the windows, with some rose bushes that grew by the
garden fence, and climbed through it and over it as they would.
The chamber in which the sisters slept was low, and there was
no ceiling beneath the roof, so, often they lay awake listening to
the fall of the rain—that beautiful music—they built castles in
the clouds, and peopled them with the airy beings of their
imagination. Stately chambers they built with pictured walls
and elaborate ceilings, through which the patter of the rain, the
unknown inspiration of their dreams, could not be heard. The
days came soon enough, at least for one, when the light of setting
suns was all the light she knew.
They were strange children, unlike any others I ever met,
wonderfully gifted, sensitive exceedingly, but of rustic parentage,
and almost totally uneducated. They began very early to be
dissatisfied, and to think that beyond their little world there
was one full of sunshine and pleasure. They read eagerly all
the books, of whatever nature they could seize upon; went
apart from the others in the family, for there were children
older and younger; and talked and dreamed.
True, they were required to work when they were not at the
school; but when the tasks of the morning were done, with
sewing or knitting they went to the meadows or the orchard.
Often have I seen them in a field of sweet clover sitting in
the shade of a beautiful maple, just on the slope of a hill,
washed at the base by a runnel of silvery water, along which
grew a thick hedge of willows that hung their long, green
branches almost to the stream's surface. All the valley was
full of dandelions, now brightening out of slender stems, and
now falling and drifting lightly away, as the grass perished, and
the flowers of the grass. There were also many other flowers,
little delicate wild flowers, some of them beautiful, and some
of them very plain, as are children; but their names I do not
even know, for I learned not the science, but only the beautiful
worship of Flora, and pure worship has never much to do with
names. Cattle grazed here and there, or lay in the cool umbrage
of other trees; and sheep and lambs skipped over the
hills, all making a quiet and lovely picture.
This favorite haunt looked, on one side, toward the willow
valley; beyond which, dark and thick, stretched a long line of
woods; and on the other, toward the road, on the opposite side
of which, under clusters of locust and cedar, gleamed the white
stones of the graveyard I have mentioned sometimes, and the
cottage where died Mary Wildermings.
“If you live longer than I, dear Ellie,” said Rebecca, one
day, after they had been a long time silent, “don't let them
bury me there.”
Tears came to the eyes of the young girl, and putting her
arms around the neck of her sister, she said, “What makes you
talk so? You will never die.”
“Why not I?”
“Because I love you,” said Ellie, “and no one I ever loved
is dead.”
It was a sad smile which came over the face of Rebecca and
lighted up her dark eyes, as she answered, “You will part away
the thick boughs in yonder burial ground before long, Ellie, for
I am sure they will lay me there, and you will read on a plain
little headstone,—Rebecca Hadly, fifteen years—and a few
shall die before I am sixteen. It will not be long,” she continued,
as if thinking aloud, “I shall be fifteen in a few months.”
“Do not talk so any more,” said Ellie, half crying, “let us
go home, and I will give you my new apron that mother made
for me.” Rebecca did not rise, but with her hands folded
together in her lap, and her eyes east down, continued to sit on
the grass in silence; while Ellie, picking the wild flowers
around her, made wreaths which she hung about her neck, and
twined among her hair, prattling of a thousand things in order
to make her sister forget that there was such a thing in the
world as death. But the effort to forget kept the evil in
remembrance, and like a dark cloud, it lay before her whichever
way she turned.
That day passed, and another, and another, and though the
sisters never talked of death any more, there lay thereafter on
the hearts of both an oppression—the consciousness of thinking
often of what the lips must not speak.
In going to and returning from school, they always passed
the little graveyard, when Ellie never failed to hurry by her
sister, and to talk with more life and energy than was her custom.
The cheek of Rebecca was the fullest and reddest, her
step the most elastic, and her spirit the most buoyant generally,
yet, at times, there came over her an impenetrable gloom—
haply the prophetic assurance of ultimate destiny. Under the
subdued and more habitually melancholy temperament of Ellie,
lay a substratum of energy that no one ever suspected—that,
for years, she never suspected herself.
One evening as they were returning from school—their long
shadows stretching clear across the road—returning slowly,
and talking of the schoolmaster, they were unexpectedly interrupted.
Troop after troop of noisy little urchins passed them by,
tossing dinner baskets in the air, shuffling up the dust and getting
each other's “tag,” for they were in high glee—school had been
dismissed an hour later than usual, and each one felt himself
the bearer of a most important dispatch. Flushed and excited
were they as they hurried past each other, eager to communicate
master.
“A pretty teacher,” said Bill Martin, a rough, bullying boy,
“I'd just like to have him keep us in this late again, and I'd
show him!” With this exclamation he shook his stout fist in the
air, as though in the face of a mortal enemy, and on bringing it
down, turned it suddenly at a sharp angle, knocking off the hat
of a quiet little boy of half his years—which feat being performed,
he ran forward, raising, as he did so, a cloud of dust
that prevented the frightened child from seeing in what direction
the hat was gone. He began to cry, on which Bill stopped
and called out, “That's a good fellow! cry on, and go home
without your hat if you are a mind to, and when you get there
your father will whip you for losing it, and then you will have
something to cry for.” This speech failing to produce the
soothing effect he seemed to have expected, he ran to one side
of the road, and climbing to the topmost rail of the fence, raised
himself on tip-toe, and appearing to look far across the fields,
said, “Yes, I told you so, your father has heard you already,
and I see him cutting a switch from the peach tree; now he is
looking to see if it's a strong one; now he has put up his jackknife,
and now he is coming this way as fast as he can come—
you had better be still, cry-baby, or he will beat you to death.”
Having finished this salutary admonition, he jumped from the
fence completely over the head of a little girl, who stood listening
near, and called out, “Boys, it's pitch dark in the woods!
who is with me to go back and give the old master a fight: I
wish he would just dare to keep us in this way again!”
Now the schoolmaster was not an old one by any means, but,
on the contrary, quite young—certainly not more than five and
twenty. Poor fellow! the children of his charge were, though
sensible enough, rude and undisciplined, scarce half civilized, as
it were, and little inclined to be studious. Their slow advances
were all, by them, and too often by their parents, attributed to
the inefficiency of the master. The general feeling against him
had, on the evening referred to, broken out with uncommon
vehemence, and promised, as most of the pupils hoped, his
speedy ejectment.
“Let us walk slow,” said one, “and make it late as we can,
for it's as late as it can be any how.”
“I had cyphered away beyond where I am now long ago,”
said another; “I don't believe he knows how to cypher himself,
and that's the reason he puts me back all the time.”
Thus the majority talked—outraged that the school had been
dismissed a little later than usual—a result, in part, of their
own neglected lessons—but they expected wisdom to flow into
their understandings without any effort of their own, and if it
did not, the teacher was of course a blockhead.
Far behind the rest walked Rebecca and Ellie, talking of the
master, too, but in a different vein. They seemed to loiter, for
they had gone aside to recover the little boy's hat, blown by
the wind into the middle of a stubble field. Then, too, they
were conversing more earnestly than usual, and so quite forgot
that it was late.
“I am sure he is sick,” said Ellie, “and not to blame for
keeping us a little late; he could not attend to the lessons, I
know, he looked so pale, and kept coughing all the time.”
“The first day I came, I thought he was so ugly,” she continued;
“didn't you, Rebecca?”
“Ugly! no, to my thinking, he was always handsome, and
his voice is music.”
Ellie laughed outright, and Rebecca, blushing at her own enthusiasm,
said, half angrily, “what do you laugh at? because
I don't think the schoolmaster as ugly as you do?”
“Oh, don't be vexed; I didn't laugh at anything, and sometimes
in afternoons, when his cheeks grow red, I think him almost
beautiful. To-day, when he was reading in the Bible before
dismissing school, he looked so, and, Rebecca, he thinks
you pretty, too.”
“No, Ellie, you are mistaken; no one thinks me pretty, nor
am I.”
Mournfully as this was said, a smile came over her face
which did make her really beautiful, as Ellie continued, “I saw
him writing poetry to-day, and under pretence of asking some
question, I went close to the desk to see what it was, and
“There are a great many Rebeccas in the world,” said the
elder sister, “and his poem, if he were really writing a poem,
was probably to some friend.”
“Probably it was, for you are his friend.”
“Well, Ellie, if you will have it so, I shall make him the
hero of a story, such as I tell you, and read it on the last day,
but what did he say to you after he spoke of putting you in
French, to-day?”
“Nothing, I guess; let me see—Oh, he asked me how old I
was, and then he said, `Rebecca is two years older, yes, you
must study French'—that was all he said.”
“I wish, Ellie,” said Rebecca, after they had walked a little
way in silence, “I wish we had shoes to wear to school.”
“Oh, what a beautiful dog!” exclaimed Ellie, as one of the
finest of his tribe passed her; “I wish he were mine.”
“Do you really think him beautiful?” asked a voice close
at hand—not rudely, but with singular affability and sweetness.
It was one of those voices which one instinctively recognises as
belonging to a person of cultivated mind and manner; for in
the voice there is, to my thinking, as much indication of character
as in the countenance.
The face of the young girl blushed crimson—she had never
before found herself in such immediate contact with one so evidently
her superior, in position and education, and it was not
without hesitation and almost painful embarrassment that she
replied, “Yes, sir, I think him very pretty.”
Probably seeing her confusion, the gentleman did his best to
make amends, continuing to converse in an easy way of such
things as he naturally supposed her to be most familiar with
—the neighborhood, the characters of the people, the productive
qualities of the land, and so on. Poor Ellie, she felt that she
stammered—appeared awkward—and this consciousness only
heightened her native rusticity. She could not say what she
knew half so well as to any one in whose eyes the effect she
produced was indifferent to her. She wished, much as she
wanted him to perceive that she knew more than she seemed
in short, but walk slowly and talk to her.
The elder sister had taken no part in the conversation; no
question had been especially addressed to her, and her thoughts
not being such as she could give expression to, she did not care
to talk at all.
When, however, the stranger said, “Your teacher—what is
his name? for you have been to school, as I guess,” she looked
up with interest, and as Ellie hesitated, as though that were
a question demanding a reply from her, she did reply, and the
stranger continued interrogatively,
That one small head could carry all he knew!”
Rebecca made no answer. The gentleman had made no favorable
impression on her mind, and it was all in vain that he
added, “I shall be happy to make his acquaintance.”
There was perhaps a little sarcasm in the tone, as Rebecca
said, “And he cannot be otherwise than happy.” Whether there
was or not, the stranger evidently thought so, for he turned to
Ellie, and reverting to their previous conversation, said, “I am
glad, my little friend, to hear so good an account of the people
and the country hereabout, inasmuch as I think of pitching my
tent under some of these hills, and an acquaintance so informally
begun, on my part, will, I hope, result in our friendship.
We shall be amiable neighbors, I am sure,” he added, rather to
Ellie, who, unaccustomed to such civilities, could think of nothing
to say in reply, but looking across the field, as though suddenly
absorbed in the beauties of the landscape, she scarcely
saw the polite inclination, or heard the “Good evening, young
ladies,” with which, the gentleman, mending his pace, was soon
too far away to hear them.
“I wonder,” said Rebecca, at last, for neither of the sisters
spoke for some time, “I wonder if tea will be ready?”
“I don't know,” answered Ellie, adding presently, “how
much I wish we had shoes.”
| Clovernook, or, Recollections of our
neighborhood in the West | |