 | This, that and the other |  |
“THERE, NELL, THE HAY 'S IN.”
So it is! Ten thousand blessings on you, little, darling, rosy
cousin Hal! You rode on the cart, did n't you, and helped, of
course! What an achievement! I doubt greatly whether, if
you should sit in the Presidential chair, some day, you 'd be half
as elevated; — you would n't be so high up in the air, would you?
Brave, nice little rider, the old-time memories sweep over my
heart like a gale, when I look at you; for I am older than you
are, and have ridden on many things, beside hay-carts!
What a beautiful simplicity there is about childhood, especially
the childhood of such children as grow up among buds, and
blossoms, and fresh air! Blessed be Heaven that I was a child
once! That, even that, is something now, — to look back and
remember that there was a time when I dared to be transparent;
when my eyes mirrored my heart like wells; when I spoke as
I felt, and feared nothing short of God and heaven!
Blessed be childhood, for its unworldliness, its living in the
present, which is the nearest thing to living unto God! No questions
then about fashion; no schemes or troubles; no brief, fitful
dreams of fame-fires, which burn, for their fuel, the very heart
whence they sprung.
It is joy enough then to take a breezy walk over the downs,
to have a pocket-full of nuts or apples, or a ride on a hay-cart.
Why, O, why cannot this freshness be preserved, to make green
our after life? It is a question that has haunted me for many
a week, and I cannot answer it. It cannot be, surely, that our
God-created hearts pass, of their own accord, out of these quiet,
sunny fields of the child-life, into the world-paths, choked with
sand and thorns, and oftentimes steep with hills!
It must be a kind of hereditary madness, so common that it
has ceased to be fearful. We walk, ourselves, in a land of shadows;
we stretch out our hands, and grasp unreal phantoms, calling
themselves wealth, and pleasure, and fame; and we say their
names over to our children, and teach them, too, to turn away
from the tree of the true life, and stretch their dimpled fingers
after these apples of Sodom.
The pain, the disappointment, the loss and anguish, are theirs;
but the curse, alas for it! will it not fall on us? I have been forth
into the world, and come back again weary; and now my heart is
aching sore for the sunnier days, when I made parasols of hollyhocks,
and tea-pots of poppy-pods, and, after the fashion of ladies
on Fifth Avenue, kept my own carriage, which was — a hay-cart!
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